Things that Hurt my Soul

Any version of “Scientists say XYZ, but science is changing all the time and they keep coming out with things they thought they knew that turned out to be wrong, so you never know!” just makes me want to scream. In this case, it was interjected into an explanation to a small child that you use your brain to think and control your bodily movements. Yes, yes, tell me some more about how someday we are totally going to discover that this whole “brain” thing was incorrect and we actually think with some other organ! Go on! No wait please don’t; it hurts my soul.

I wish people could tell the difference between “quantum entanglement implies that Einstein’s opinion on the EPR paradox might have been wrong,” and “we know nothing because scientists are dumbshits.”

BTW, every article ever written that starts out “Einstein wrong!” or “Scientists question Einstein’s legacy: legendary scientists might have been wrong!” is fucking shit and should be ashamed of itself. It’s like being all “LoL Newton was dumb and didn’t figure out relativity, so Newtonian dynamics is wrong and we shouldn’t teach it. Also, Evilution is fake!”

Terrifying Things

This morning I found a strange, worm-like creature wiggling around in the garden. It was about 5 inches long and thinner than a pin–completely wrong proportions for an earthworm, and further, it was waving its upper end in the air in a manner that earthworms can’t.

I am not worm expert, but my assumption is that there’s only one good reason to be that thin and that long: to make burrowing into someone else’s body easier.

Being a stupid hippie, I wear sandals everywhere (except in snow; I have found it more comfortable to be barefoot in snow than in sandals, and I do not find it comfortable to be barefoot in the snow.)

Forget that shit. I now have nice, sturdy boots for the garden.

 

 

Is the Internet Making us Worse at Spotting Scams?

For a long time, I’ve believed that the internet was significantly decreasing peoples’ vulnerability to scams, mostly through the power of search engines + sites like Snopes and Wikipedia. So if your uncle says, “Hey, I heard about this rock in New Mexico with ancient Hebrew writing on it from the time of Moses,” you can look it up in Wikipedia and confirm that it’s most likely a fraud.

But maybe we’re just changing from believing one set of dumb ideas to another set of dumb ideas.

For example, my [relative] has mentioned a plan to colonize Mars a couple of times now. Apparently they’ve been talking about it on “The Big Bang Theory,” which “just goes to show (relative’s words, not mine,) how up-to-date the show’s creators keep their science.” I’ve heard nothing about this from anyone but them, which makes me rather skeptical. Yesterday they were complaining, “Why are we going all the way to Mars, when we haven’t even colonized the moon?”

IDK, why go to the moon when we haven’t finished settling Nebraska?

Anyway, today I happened across this article: Mars One Finalist: It’s All a Scam

Now, I know nothing about this; I don’t know whether it’s all a scam or not. But a private organization is not a “we”; it’s just people claiming they’re going to do stuff.

My relative gets their news these days largely from Yahoo, which isn’t terrible but probably isn’t the greatest. Not that yahoo necessarily intends to deceive, but a lot of their information is just as inaccurate as its ever been. (Yes, Bush won by the biggest margin ever, you keep repeating that.)

Of course, if you are misinformed about something, it’s rather hard to tell. So how could we figure it out?

(The perspective of an older-than-me person who has been observant long enough to have a good idea of how prone people were to being taken in by scams in, say, the ’80s as opposed to today would be valuable.)

Vaccines

I’ll cut to the very predictable chase and say that I am pro-vaccines. Quite pro-vaccines. My dad had fucking Polio as a kid, and it gave him permanent nerve damage. Heck, I know people in wheelchairs from Polio. And people who’ve had other lovely diseases we now vaccinate against.

Did you know the mumps can make you infertile?

Needless to say, my kids are vaccinated.

But I also understand the anti-vax perspective. I mean, I think it’s wrong, but I understand where these folks are coming from: it is difficult to trust a medical establishment that has treated you crappily in the past.

Doctors get plenty of stuff wrong. Doctors are human, and humans make mistakes. But when your doctor makes a mistake, it can have rather severe consequences.

And somewhere around the 50s, despite some wonderful, astoundingly great advances in medicine –actually, perhaps because of those astounding advances–doctors started doing some really dumb stuff to pregnant women. Thalidomide comes immediately to mind, but we can throw in unnecessary c-sections and encouraging them to use baby formula. Maybe this all started before the 50s. Behavioralists in the 20s were writing best-selling baby care books that advised parents to never kiss their children, keep their babies on a feeding schedule, and other such crap. (We here at EvolutionistX would especially like to point out that this advice is very evolutionarily unsound.)

Well, guess what. Having an unnecessary c-section is really fucking shitty. Taking a medication that gives you a deformed kid is really fucking shitty. Baby formula is not shitty, (unless you are in the third world, and then mixing it with the local water supply is may be a really bad idea,) but it is kind of pricy.

So I understand how people can come away from all of that and say, “my god, the medical establishment is completely full of horrible, unethical, hideously painful and unnecessary interventions!” and then might look at vaccines and say, “No fucking way.” When you lose peoples’ trust, you lose their trust.

Before we go any further, I would also like to note that, IMO, epidurals are awesome. EvolutionistX does not have it out for any currently practicing doctors. A lot of the bad stuff, as I noted, was going on in the fifties. Hospital practices related to maternity and childbirth have changed a lot since then. Please, do not make any kind of medical decisions based on “well, I heard some horror stories from the 70s.”

For that matter, don’t make your vaccine decisions based on horror stories from the 70s. And for the love of god, don’t read a bunch of junk science. That shit makes my head hurt. Find a doctor or medical information you really trust, and ask them.

But please, people, let’s not have a return of Polio. Polio fucking sucks.

Convert Me (Open Thread)

Despite my cold, unfeeling, atheist heart, I’ve always had a soft spot for religions.

And since many religions encourage their followers to convert as many people as possible, the point of this thread is to give you a chance to try.

Here are the rules: You post the best argument you can for why I should follow your religion, preferably in under a billion words. I will attempt to make a thorough and polite response.

You may recommend your favorite book on the subject, but please understand that I probably won’t have time to read it. Oh! Also, my computer is old and Youtube makes it crash, so no videos.

Also, please understand that my most likely answer is, “Sorry, I remain unconvinced.”

You guys are also free to try to convert each other, so long as everyone remains civil.🙂

(I’m gonna figure out how to put a link to this thread on the sidebar, so it doesn’t get lost.)

Now go!

The problem with seeing patterns is that sometimes patterns don’t exist

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

If you spend enough time, well, virtually anywhere, you’re bound to come across a seemingly rational, intelligent person who sees different patterns than you do.

 

I suppose that’s what falsifiability is for.

Chomsky on Foucault

“In Foucault’s 1971 televised debate with Noam Chomsky, Foucault argued against the possibility of any fixed human nature, as posited by Chomsky’s concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argued that concepts of justice were rooted in human reason, whereas Foucault rejected the universal basis for a concept of justice. Following the debate, Chomsky was stricken with Foucault’s total rejection of the possibility of a universal morality, stating “He struck my as completely amoral, I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral” … “I mean, I liked him personally, it’s just that I couldn’t make sense of him. It’s as if he was from a different species, or something”” (from the Wikipedia page on Foucault)

 

Morality is an evolved sense; different societies have evolved different moral structures. In this sense Chomsky and Foucault are each half-right.

The point, though, is less about what morality is, as about how humans think of morality in other humans; Foucalt is particularly distant from anything most people (especially most Americans) would recognize as moral.

Are Useless things actually Useful?

One of the things I found striking in the previous article (the one on evangelicals) was the claim that people involved in anti-abortion groups don’t see their activities as political, and claim that most of what they do is religious, like praying about abortion or Bible-reading. That reminded me rather strongly of the depiction of abolitionists in a book (historical fiction) I just read. Most of what abolitionists did probably amounted to little more than talking, praying, singing, and Bible-studying about the evils of slavery. Useless? Or consciousness-raising? Does it require a large army of people who say they agree with you to inspire a small % of people to actually get stuff done? Or does stuff get done by people just gradually changing what they believe, even without anyone doing big, “effective” things?

I recently encountered a petition to Honor the Children of Pakistan (Note: this was written immediately after the massacre of a hundred Pakistani children by the Taliban.)

On its face, the petition seems utterly useless (and possibly slightly insulting to Pakistan.) Signing a petition about how children deserve educations does nothing about the security situation in Pakistan. It’s not like the problem here is that Pakistan just hasn’t bothered to build schools, or cranky parents won’t let their girls go to school, or the kids are too busy sewing soccer balls to go to class, or any other practical impediment to which we can imagine fairly easy solutions, like Americans donating money to build schools or laws that fine parents for not sending their kids to school. The problem is that there’s a war going on, and one side is massacring the other side’s children. And I can’t think of any easy solutions to that, other than building a wall around the Taliban and shooting anyone who comes over, which may not be feasible.

(Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t blame Pakistani parents if they all started homeschoolong.)

Anyway, me signing a petition or not is clearly useless–but in the long run, can it actually be useful?

Bertlemann’s Socks

I always wear mismatched socks in honor of Bertlemann’s Socks.

Also, laziness.