Category Archives: science

Empiricism vs. rationalism

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I learned one important thing a few years ago.

It doesn’t matter if something sounds convincing, or if it makes sense.

It doesn’t matter whether something sounds weird, improbable or tenuous.

It doesn’t matter whether something dovetails nicely with the currently held beliefs.

It doesn’t matter whether there is sufficient reasoning behind something.

The only thing that matters is whether it’s actually true.

Let’s take an example of a platypus and a unicorn. Platypus is a monotremate mammal that lays eggs like a snake and has a duck-like beak. However unlikely or improbable it sounds, it’s real because it actually exists. Unicorn, however, sounds quite reasonable and plausible – a horse with one horn. There’s no reason why it couldn’t exist, but it doesn’t. It’s completely fictional. A platypus exists because it exists, and unicorn doesn’t exist because it doesn’t exist. There’s nothing else to it, no Platonic or Aristotelian issues, and reason doesn’t even play a role. The only thing that plays a role is existence of an actual being and evidence of that existence.

I don’t believe in things because they are reasonable or they make sense. I believe in things because I am presented with evidence of their existence. Reason and sense are something I use in order to arrange evidence of things that exist in some order that doesn’t drive me crazy, but the part where I use reason in order to make sense of things is actually most likely to be false and revised. That’s because reason is mostly glue that fills the parts of the puzzle of reality from which the actual parts of the puzzle are missing, and I need something to hold it all together and present it in a meaningful way.

That’s the main problem of rationalism vs. empiricism; rationalism assumes that things that are true will make more sense than the things that are false, but empiricism is primarily interested in evidence, and only when the evidence is there can it afford to ask about meaning.

It makes sense for me to speculate why a platypus exists, because it exists. I don’t give a single fuck about unicorns. Yes, weird and apparently improbable things sometimes exist, and sensible and probable things sometimes don’t. That tells you more about poor applicability of mind for establishing reality, than anything else.

War as a thermodynamic phenomenon

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When people think about hurricanes, they think of them in context of bad weather. I, however, think of them as a thermodynamic phenomenon of cooling the ocean, which accumulated too much energy from the Sun and, in context of seasonal change, releases the excess via entropy into the atmosphere until thermodynamic equilibrium is established.

People also think of war in terms of bloodshed and conflict of nations and ideologies and interests, but the more I think of it, I think of war in terms of a sociological hurricane – a thermodynamic phenomenon of equalizing energy potential (wealth and control of resources) of different groups of people in a situation when current distribution of resources doesn’t match the balance of power between the groups.

Let’s test my hypothesis on the example of two world wars. I am yet to see the satisfactory explanation of the First World War. Nobody seems to be able to tell the root cause. They can tell you the unimportant stuff, they can tell you how the events themselves unfolded, but none of it explains why the great colonial powers felt such a strong itch to go into war, jumping on the first casus belli that presented itself as if war promised more than peace. None of it makes sense – the Austro-Hungarian empire, for instance, was seriously itching to go into war, for which it was the least well prepared of all great powers. Germany was better prepared, and it too itched to go into battle against Russia before it grew unstoppably powerful due to its ongoing industrialization, and yet the end result of the war was a near-destruction and humiliation of Germany. Austro-Hungary didn’t survive the war – it broke apart and its constituents started their independent lives as unstable, immature states, whose erratic behavior seems to have boiled over into the second world war, and the process doesn’t seem finished even now. What are we seeing here, since it doesn’t seem to be motivated by obvious self-interest? We have a war that transformed the society and yet none of the parties involved seems to have benefited from it; all seem to have been disrupted and brought out of balance as a result.

As an alternative explanation, I came up with modernity. You see, the most significant aspect of modernity is change of the entire energy-structure of society. Prior to the explosion of science and technology, the entire society was solar-powered, in a sense that you had land on which you could grow plants, and domesticated animals which fed on those plants, and the amount of resources available to the society was more-less constant and determined by the amount of people who worked on the available land with primitive agricultural technology. Those people were treated as a basic resource that came with the land, and were divided among the warrior class which used force to conquer and dominate. Political power was measurable through the amount of agricultural land populated by serfs, that a nobleman controlled. Each nobleman could directly control only as much land, and the pyramid of power was established, with lower-tier noblemen who directly controlled the serfs who in turn controlled the land, and higher-tier noblemen who had lower-tier noblemen as underlings. The higher-tier noblemen were subjects to a king, who in turn was subject to the highest entity of civilizational cohesion, for instance the Pope. As long as the basic energy source of the civilization remained constant, this was a stable system.

However, with the ascent of technology, industry and free market, the energy structure of society changed, and it became possible to acquire wealth by means other than top-down distribution of force-acquired solar-powered resources. Inventors, industrialists and bankers acquired wealth that rivaled and soon greatly surpassed that of feudal solar-powered structures; the social leverage, essentially wealth, that was created with the invention of the steam engine or the mass-production of high quality steel, or fractional distillation of petroleum, or electricity, or artificial fertilizers, changed the entire energy structure of the society, while the entire social system relied upon an obsolete hierarchy that was established in the pre-industrial age and was ill-suited to handle the needs and challenges of modernity. This is why the entire society boiled over in order to establish a new thermodynamic equilibrium, a political and economic structure that was better suited for the open-ended energy model. One example of that is the abandonment of the gold standard of currency and adoption of the fractional reserve fiat currency, which is able to create new money based on GDP in order not to artificially constrict the economy of the state. This is absolutely necessary when you have a situation where a Rockefeller or a Tesla can invent an entirely new open-ended energy model which creates an extreme amount of new wealth that is not covered by the gold reserves. Unless you want to artificially appreciate gold and thus give the owners of gold reserves an unfair and undeserved amount of wealth, you need to grow the monetary supply by the amount that at least equals the growth of the real economy, and in fact anticipates further growth. Furthermore, you need to acknowledge that nobility no longer controls significant enough portion of the economy to warrant their special status, and political control of the country must take the new balance of power into account.

I see the two world wars as hurricane 1 and hurricane 2 of the same season, where the second one continued where the first one failed to finish the process of achieving thermodynamic balance. Whenever a group of people controls too much resources for the amount of actual power their wield in the current state of affairs, there will be a violent conflict that will establish the real state of affairs. An example of this is the conflict between the Europeans and the native Americans, who controlled too much land for their state of technological and military power, and were therefore wiped out in order to establish a thermodynamic equilibrium.

The Second World War and its aftermath allowed modernity to run its course and try to fulfill its promise, and when it mostly failed, it resulted in profound soul-searching and often destructive self-criticism within the Western civilization, which is now trying to figure out its fundamental guiding principles and its reason for being; essentially, it is trying to figure out whether it has a mandate, and has for the most part relinquished its dominant role, with inferior savages such as Muslims trying to fill the vacuum created by the Euro-American civilization’s unwillingness to assert itself in ways it previously did. Establishing “life”, without any further elaboration, as the supreme value, is indicative of this abdication of mandate.

To me, all the elements of a social thermodynamic storm are ready to produce an outward phenomenon that will redistribute energy across the system according to the new realities that are yet to fully establish themselves.

The long-term prospects

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret about a doomsday device that threatens with mass extinction of the vast majority of all species on Earth, including mankind. This device has been created 41 million years ago and has been steadily working on cooling the planet down, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, increasing the temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. It has cooled the planet down so much that the existence of permanent ice sheets on the poles has become the norm for the last few millions of years. Lately, it rendered the climate so fatally unstable, that the Milankovitch cycles, the small variations in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession, have become sufficient to plunge the planet into ice ages – or, considering that we are in an ongoing ice age, we should call those the “glacial maximums”. Inevitably, as the process of global cooling progresses, those small variations will at one point cease to be sufficient for bringing the planet out from a glacial maximum, and further on, it will cause a global glaciation, also known as “snowball Earth”.

This doomsday device is known in geography as the Drake Passage.

drake_passage

To quote Wikipedia, “There is no significant land anywhere around the world at the latitudes of Drake Passage, which is important to the unimpeded flow of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current which carries a huge volume of water (about 600 times the flow of the Amazon River) through the Passage and around Antarctica.”

Some 65 MY ago, due to plate tectonics things started taking place, that gradually rearranged the flow of sea currents around the continents. The Drake Passage was opened 41 MY ago, separating South America from Antarctica. This created a steady Antarctic circumpolar current which is basically a Coriolis-effect-driven heat pump, and you can understand how that works if you imagine a rotating cold vessel filled with liquid, where rotation of the vessel helps the exchange of heat between the two, only in this case the liquid flows outside the “vessel”. The liquid spins inside the vessel due to inertia. It essentially cools warm seawater by exchanging its heat with the edges of the polar continent where it dissipates into space. The effectiveness of this circumpolar current in dissipating the energy from Earth is such that it creates a net-negative energy balance, although a slight one, and creates a long-term trend.

This long-term cooling trend is what drove the evolutionary forces that created our kind of mammalian life, and it’s the trend that will eventually result in a complete global freeze that will produce the final extinction of our kind of mammalian life. This is the reason why there are no longer any large ectothermic creatures around, such as the Titanoboa, why the birds needed to evolve the ability to migrate seasonally in order to avoid the freezing cold of the north hemisphere winter, and why the mammals needed to evolve in order to hibernate. Closer to our time, the formation of the isthmus of Panama some 5 MY ago impeded the equatorial sea currents, forcing them to circumnavigate the continents and thus bring more equatorial heat into the southern circumpolar current. This had the “immediate” effect of throwing us into a Pleistocene ice age, since the global temperature and the amount of CO2 buffering plummeted to the point where Milankovitch cycles could actually have a significant effect on the climate.

long-term temperature trend

The temperature graph of the last 65 MY has a long-term downward trend, and everything else is merely a blip.

The formation of the Antarctic circumpolar current started the long process of climate change that produced us, the creatures of the Ice Age, and it will also produce the end-result of freezing Earth so completely, that it will stay there for hundreds of millions of years, until plate tectonics eventually rearrange the continents in such a way as to produce a net-positive global energy balance and cause a gradual thaw, at which point every form of life we know and are will be long extinct.

It happened already, several times, and every time the continental masses were arranged in such a way as to enable free circulation of sea water around at least one pole. The only time such circulation was inhibited we had the Cambrian explosion of life, and when it was re-established 41 MY ago we had the acceleration of the process of global cooling that started 65 MY ago when the continents rearranged themselves in a way that creates a net-negative long-term global energy balance.

One of the problems with global cooling is that CO2 is more readily absorbed in cold water, and this long-term global trend sinks our atmospheric CO2 into the oceans and thus removes the buffer that would otherwise reduce the thermal gradient between the equator and the poles and also moderate the slight effects that Milankovitch cycles have on global climate. That’s why Milankovitch cycles are of consequence only in the Pleistocene, which is what got me interested in the first place, leading to very interesting findings that I’m describing here.

This short-term increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration that we managed to produce with our high-energy civilization might have bought us some time, by temporarily increasing the climate buffers and reducing the impact of the orbital and axial variations on the climate, but since Earth is a very complex thermodynamic system, where circulation of 3 mediums (magma in the mantle, water and air) and entropy within and between them, solid impediments to circulation, plus solar input and albedo, plus thermal buffers (methane, CO2, water vapour) and accumulators (ice, methane hydrate), produce effects that are impossible predict without a very demanding computer simulation, we currently don’t know what exactly to expect, and as far as I’m concerned, the CO2 input could influence some mechanism in such a way that it actually causes a sudden ice age, for instance by introducing too much fresh water from ice melt into the oceans and thus disrupting the thermohaline circulation. When I watched the movie “Day after tomorrow”, the events described seemed implausible, but after I did some research I actually think it’s one of the most likely scenarios I’ve seen described. The thing is, we don’t know, because it isn’t about logic, it’s about thermodynamics, and you need to know all the variables in order to be able to predict, and one single thing can decide between radically different outcomes.

But this is all short term. Long term, the sentence is death by cold. How long term? In Pleistocene, the climate became unstable. These are in fact the death throes of climate that precede the global glaciation, where Milankovitch cycles are no longer sufficient to produce a glacial minimum, and you get a runaway glaciation. What exactly are the conditions in which this takes place, in respect to oceanic and atmospheric temperature, albedo and CO2 concentration, I don’t know, because that would require a computer simulation. What I do know is what the long-term temperature graph looks like, I understand the underlying mechanism, and I can predict that within a few million years we will have frozen oceans on the equator. But for all I know, there’s another interesting trend, which shows that the dominant Homo species goes extinct in the glacial maximum – Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis and others. I don’t see great odds of our industrial civilization surviving an event as disruptive as a glacial maximum, and without industry, and having killed off all the Pleistocene megafauna that would allow at least a moderate number of humans to live off the land if the industrial agriculture fails, I’m not giving us the odds of survival greater than 1% in the timeframe of 50 KY. But of course, for a species to which 1 KY is “eternity” and which no longer has any kind of historical recollection of the last glacial maximum, even those prospects are incredibly long-term.

References:

Impact of Antarctic Circumpolar Current Development on Late Paleogene Ocean Structure, Miriam E. Katz, Benjamin S. Cramer, J. R. Toggweiler, Gar Esmay, Chengjie Liu, Kenneth G. Miller, Yair Rosenthal, Bridget S. Wade, James D. Wright
Science 27 May 2011:
Vol. 332, Issue 6033, pp. 1076-1079
DOI: 10.1126/science.1202122

Role of the isthmus of Panama in global cooling by Gerald H. Haug, Geoforschungszentrum Potsdam (GFZ), Germany; Ralf Tiedemann, Forschungszentrum fur Marine Geowissenschaften, Germany; and Lloyd D. Keigwin, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

65 MY trend of cooling, David Lappi

The Physics of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, Worth D. Nowlin, Jr., and John M. Klinck, REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 24, NO. 3, PAGES 469-491, AUGUST 1986, Department of Oceanooraphy, Texas A&M University, College Station

Rationality of faith

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So, what I really wanted to accomplish with the last series of articles is to point out how religion really isn’t as silly as atheists like to portray it, and that it actually contains a great deal of sophisticated rational thought, combined with a quite reasonable amount of faith, which essentially amounts to trusting the credible witnesses and, very often, your own experience.

What I will now do is show how science isn’t nearly as rational and reliable as some see it, and also requires quite a large bit of faith.

You see, in late 1992 I was studying physics at the University of Zagreb, and I was having a very troubling spiritual crisis. I had very strong reasons to believe in the existence of things that other physicists were clueless of. I knew about the NDE testimonies, but that wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was that I actually had significant spiritual powers, of the kind where someone felt pain, I focused on the painful spot and the pain would go away, at least temporarily. I could see the pranic shadow around the astral bodies of animals that died, with something between physical and inner sight, and I could actually spiritually communicate with the souls of those animals. I actually saw a human do astral projection and he confirmed that I followed his astral body with my eyes despite him deliberately “jumping around” in order to try to confuse me. I was speaking out people’s thoughts all my life, and everybody who had those experiences had them only with me. Essentially, I had as much reason to believe in the reality of those things as people usually have in their physical senses, and yet my problem was the interpretation. It’s true, but how can it be true? There must be some kind of physics behind it, some deeper law of nature that encompasses both ordinary physics and this stuff. That’s why I chose to study physics, because I hoped I will eventually discover some explanation. I did have two models that explained it all, but I didn’t have enough support for either.

According to one model, the physical Universe is the fundamental reality, but physics hasn’t yet discovered its most fundamental level. Somewhere beneath the standard model and its quarks and leptons there must be a deeper layer which might explain everything, both physics and the weird shit that I could do and see. I could, for instance, see that a photon can be intellectually broken down into more fundamental elements, into “alpha” and “beta”, where “alpha” is the vector consisting of direction and lightspeed, and “beta” is a scalar descriptor of wavelength. If there are more such “fundamentals”, and they can be combined in weird ways, who knows what shit is possible, and maybe somewhere in there I could find some satisfying explanation for my experience. But according to this model, the Universe is the “hardware”, and spirituality, including God, is “software”.

According to the other model, the reality experienced by the NDE witnesses is the actual reality – and they say that God is the basis of all reality, that everything is actually made of His light. In this explanation this physical reality is merely a persistent illusion, some kind of software that is run on the spiritual hardware, and spiritual experiences are merely glimpses of the other, non-material realities that are also simultaneously run on that same hardware, without there actually being any reason for things to make sense in a physical way because the “mechanics” of it all are quite arbitrary. This was before most people had any thought about virtual reality, and the computer I had at the time was a 80386 with 4MB of RAM, but I was a programmer and I thought in those terms. The concept of different virtual universes with consistent laws that existed within different pieces of computer software was quite ordinary to me, because I could actually write some of that.

Both models provided an equally good explanation for everything I experienced, and I couldn’t dismiss either of them based on evidence alone. However, the people who had too much faith in the materialistic paradigm were getting on my nerves, because they obviously didn’t know as much about the weird part of the world as I did, and consequently there was nothing to disturb their faith. They didn’t live lives where “how did you know?” or “that’s exactly what I was thinking right now” happened daily. They weren’t the ones who were trying to figure out a deeper layer of physics which explains how mind transcends a corporeal shell, and how this keeps working after death. Basically, I saw them as idiots who either don’t see or deny half of reality and are therefore happy with their half-assed explanations of the world.

At one point, during a lecture (I think it was mathematical analysis but it might have also been a linear algebra practicum, I no longer remember correctly) it clicked. I don’t know what happened but something in the inner workings of my mind made a decision that the second model is the real one. The physical universe is merely a specific case of software, and all its laws are as arbitrary as those within a video game. Studying them will not reveal anything really fundamental about reality, because reality is not contained within those laws, those laws are contained within a higher reality, reality which I had no hope of understanding by any means known to me.

So, basically, since I didn’t need physics to make a living since I was in the process of making a career as a programmer, and I didn’t have any hope of figuring out the deeper layer of reality on this course, I abandoned my study, and, having no better ideas, I got piss drunk. Other than a bad hangover, this didn’t do anything for me, so I started thinking about how I might find answers, and since I didn’t take religion very seriously because of its total non-overlap with my understanding of spirituality and reality in general, I simply read everything and counted on eventually getting lucky enough to find some clue. I found a book of upanishads and they gave me a whole new spectrum of ideas, and so I combined what I learned there about yoga with what I already knew from my practice of autogenic training and more-less involuntary applications of spiritual sight and influence and started experimenting. Obviously, it worked.

So, essentially, what I want to say is that materialistic people misunderstand the concept of “faith”, at least in my meaning of the word. Faith doesn’t mean that you accept things without evidence, it means choosing one valid interpretation of the evidence over the other, and seeing where it takes you. You never actually go against the evidence, but evidence is not a universal datum valid for all people indiscriminately. We all have our inner algorithm for weighing evidence and arranging it into a sensible, working universe in which we function. Materialism might be a viable explanation for someone who was more willing to dismiss inconvenient facts than I was, and therefore I was sufficiently troubled with the stuff I couldn’t dismiss that I couldn’t find the materialistic explanations satisfying. Does that mean that I stopped using my intellect? Not exactly; in fact, I think I used it more. Faith does not consist of suspension of critical and evidence-based thinking. Faith consists of choosing one interpretation of evidence over another, and testing this interpretation to see where it leads, until it is either confirmed or disproved.

Leave verifying to smart people

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The worst thing you can do to a stupid person is tell them they should not take things on faith, but that they should personally verify things, because that’s what science and independent thinking are all about.

This is an incredible load of bullshit, because science is not at all about verifying everything yourself. Science is about organizing human knowledge in such a way that everything you deal with in the sphere of science has been verified by multiple people, and most people only verify one or two things personally, while having faith that the rest of the scientific community has been doing their job with the same diligence in the sphere of their personal competence. Essentially, a particle physicist can only verify statistical data obtained from an accelerator, he doesn’t verify that the Earth is round or that there’s a black hole in the center of the galaxy. A geologist only verifies things regarding tectonic plates and their movements, and the nature of the minerals recovered by deep drilling, he doesn’t verify things in the sphere of influence of meteorology. You only specialize in that one thing, and the rest you take on faith. So, basically, if you organize a system in such a way that in every sphere of scientific interest you have multiple scientists peer-reviewing and fact-checking each other, you create what is known in cryptography as the web of trust. You don’t need to personally verify everybody’s PGP key. What you need to do is personally verify PGP keys of the people you personally know. The groups of people overlap, and if you have people A, B and C, and if A can verify B, and B can verify C, A can trust C without being able to personally verify. There’s also the criterion of results, which is probably the most important thing of all because that’s the main difference between hard science and a circlejerk. The criterion of results is when you can produce technology based on your science. It’s when you can use what you know about photography, lithography, chemistry and quantum physics and produce a microprocessor. The fact that it works proves that you know what you’re talking about; without that, it could all be bullshit. One religious fanatic told me, more than a decade ago, that science is unreliable, it’s never the complete truth and certainty (that he, presumably, gets from some bronze age scripture). I told him that science and technology indeed contain a certain degree of unreliability, but I put it this way: you have a screen in front of you, that reliably produces the same picture refreshed some 60 times per second. This picture is not garbled. There might be a dead pixel somewhere on the screen. There might be a difference in backlight illumination in the corners. The computer itself performs millions operations every second in order to display the picture. It is able to connect to the network, get data, process it, display it in client software, you then read it, understand it, reply to it and send it back through the server, and I download it on my side and see the exact same message that you sent. Not a single bit was corrupted, despite all of the supposed unreliability of it all. You don’t see people complaining on forums that they can’t understand the text because it’s garbled, because those computers, they make mistakes every now and then. Actually, it’s all incredibly reliable, it’s so reliable you have air traffic control which uses radars and computers to reliably detect position and speed of multiple aircraft simultaneously, they use the data to predict future and issue specific orders to pilots, and this happens all over the world every day, and every other decade you have an accident due to an air traffic control error. This stuff is so reliable you can use it to make bricks. Yes, there’s some possibility for error, there’s an innate degree of unreliability in there, but you need to understand what it is. My computer is so reliable it works for years on end without any issues, and if there’s an issue, it’s not with the computer, it’s with some program that’s not the greatest, or with the operating system which can be configured to just reboot in order to install updates while I’m in the middle of something. The unreliability is not of the degree where you can’t tell what the red color is supposed to be or where you can’t read the letters because they came out garbled, and the random pixels are just flaring up on the screen like white noise on the old analogue TV sets when the reception is bad. The unreliability is that you don’t always have good base station coverage for your GSM phones, the unreliability is that you sometimes have no mobile data connection because you’re in a canyon and there are no base stations nearby. The unreliability is that out of thousands of planes that fly every day, every year you’ll have several bad accidents. It’s not that it sometimes works and sometimes not. It almost always works perfectly. I’d trust air traffic control more than I’d trust my eyesight, and that’s not because I have poor eyesight or because I’m a gullible person, it’s because they are so incredibly good at what they do, and because they are tested all the time and they reliably deliver the goods. They are not tested by me, but they are, and I believe it all because I’m not a fucking idiot, like those people who would say that the Earth is flat and that you’d believe that too if you actually tested it like they do, and it never crossed their small shallow minds to just go from northern to southern hemisphere and look at the night sky, because the constellations are different, which is an absolute proof that you’re on a sphere. So be wary of those who tell you to go verify things for yourself, because they are usually either stupid or evil or both. Testing things yourself is something that’s so sensitive to sample bias, ignorance and manipulation it’s usually the worst thing you can do. Your best option is actually the PGP system, the web of trust. You need to figure out who is it that reliably knows something, and if you want to learn something, learn it from a person in a web of trust, because that person has been peer reviewed. Maybe you can’t verify him because he’s above your pay grade, but there are people on and above his pay grade who can and do verify him, and if he tells you how something works, this information is of better quality than anything you could come up with using your senses and “common sense”, because let’s face it, if common sense of most people was worth a damn, it wouldn’t take us most of history to figure out formulas for inertia and gravity and to figure that light can be broken into separate wavelength components, and it was mostly done by one guy, because common sense of everyone else wasn’t worth shit.

There are certain things one can and should personally test. I personally test cameras and lenses and see how they behave, because I’m a photographer and I can. I know what to look for when I test them and I know how the equipment works well enough that I can figure out the way lens designers set up the spherical aberration by the way the out-of-focus areas look. That’s because photography is within my sphere of competence and I know what I’m doing. I can also find flaws in other people’s reasoning, because that, too, is within my area of expertise: I’m actually very good at thinking. There are many things I can personally verify, but even more important is that I know the difference between what I can check an what I can trust. I can trust that people at Intel know a thing or two about quantum physics, because if they didn’t, their shit would fail much before the 14nm level of integration and I wouldn’t be able to overclock my CPU to 4.6 GHz. I can trust that people at NASA know calculus and that the Newtonian physics work, because without them we wouldn’t have the communication satellites. I can trust that the Earth is round because if it were flat I’d see the Magellanic Clouds and the Southern Cross from Europe, which I don’t.

What I can’t trust is that people are smart enough to use that mythical “common sense” in order to verify complicated things personally. For instance, it’s quite easy to figure out that there are communication satellites in the sky, which basically proves the entire modern physics if you’re a competent enough thinker to do the necessary reasoning. You buy a satellite dish, point it at a random part of the sky, see what you get on your TV. Then point the dish at the satellite, good reception. Voila, proof that you have a radio transmitter in the sky at a very precise location. Now, think about how it can be there, who put it there and how, and how can one transmit images from a station on Earth, relay them through a satellite in the sky, so that you can pick the signal up and amplify it, and then reproduce it on your TV. But if you don’t know how a TV converts radio waves into RGB pixel intensities and how PAL encoding works, fuck off with that “I’m not a sheep, I’ll verify things” shit. You’re a stupid sheep alright, go back to eating your grass and bleat. Leave verifying to people with functioning brains, and you stick to blind following because that’s actually the safest thing for you to do, because finding someone smarter and following him is the only way for you not to fuck up everything.