Dream Well!!!!!

I have spent the last couple weeks looking a the alternative social media sites Gab and Bitchute---which are functionally copies of Facebook and Youtube, respectively. The only real difference is that they don't censor content if it's out-and-out lies or designed to foster hatred against groups of people. As such, they are where most of the people banned off the mainstream social media end up. It's been a bit of an eye-opener.  

It's a bit of a fire hose, so I won't attempt to describe everything I saw. Instead, I'll try to focus on a couple posts that I think will give my readers a feel for what I saw. I'm going to be a bit sparing about what I post because I've had problems in the past with Google yanking images that they deemed "unacceptable". There's supposed to be an exception for educational purposes, but my experience is that the artificial intelligence cannot tell the difference and if you appeal the odds are that I will never be able to get in touch with a real human being that I can explain things to.  

One of several odd posts I saw contained the following.

This purports to be a photo of a living, metallic wire that a "doctor" removed from a soldier who'd been injected with one of the COVID-19 vaccines. 

Here's a diagnosis from the same doctor about the soldier.

And, a prescription

The thing to understand about the above is what "detox" means in the "alternative medicine" community. It generally isn't the orthodox medicine treatment known as "chelation therapy", which is a rarely used, potentially dangerous treatment for various types of metal poisoning. Instead, it's usually a vague, new-age regime that generally involves a patient spending a lot of money on expensive products that don't do much at all. Quackwatch identifies several common types of "detox" that range from "colonic irrigation" (what our grandparents called an "enema"), through treatments that promote sweating, to some form of pseudo-chelation therapy. 

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There are a lot of people who publish opinion pieces on the Web and in legacy media. Unfortunately, a lot of them just pull nonsense out of their butts and rant. I like to think that I'm different in that I put a lot of time and effort into researching everything I write. But that takes a lot of time and effort. If you like what I write---and you can afford it---why not buy a subscription or toss something in the tip jar? (Thanks Anthony for being so awesome!) Paypal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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There's a second video from Stew Peters that builds on this theme and takes it into X Files territory. I tried to put up an excerpt that showed the insanity, but Youtube's artificial intelligence is incapable of making a distinction between someone who is putting something up to trick people versus using it educate people so they are less likely to get tricked. As a result, you are just going to have to believe me when I describe what they are talking about. (I know, but we live in an imperfect world---get used to it. I have.)

Peters is interviewing a woman by the name of Carrie Madej. (She says she's a doctor, but I'm reticent to call her that given what says in this interview.) In the video he shows some black and white, slightly out-of-focus pictures that look remarkably just like the sort of fuzzy images that I used to see with a cheap compound microscope when I was a kid.

Just for comparison's sake, here's an image I found from an American Public Broadcasting System article on microfiber plastic pollution that looks remarkably similar.

Image from This New York River Dumps Millions of Fabric Microfibers into the Ocean Daily.

The next image is something that Ms Madej became very concerned about. That's because she said it had tentacles, was lifting itself off the slide----"it appeared to be self-aware" and "it knows we were watching it". (How she could infer any of this from a blurred image on a compound microscope is beyond me.)

Here's an example of the sort of weird stuff you can find in just a drop of pond water and see under a microscope. It's a water hydra, recorded from a much better microscope than the one that was used to take the pictures on this dumb show. It's something that elementary school teachers routinely show children to get them to realize how complex the world is and how little our "common sense" prepares us to understand it. 

Image from Larval Behavioral, Morphological Changes, and Nematocyte Dynamics During Settlement of Actinulae of Tubularia mesembryanthemum, Allman 1871 (Hydrozoa: Tubulariidae).

Using the above two pictures plus some others of equally dubious value, she describes them as being evidence of:

• "an injectable computing system"
• "super conducting material"
• "self-assembly, things were growing"
  
• "metallic fragments"
• "tentacles"
• "graphene-like structures"
• "sticky glue-like substance that would be considered a hydro-gel"
• "nano-lipids"

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Of course this is all nonsense. But it raises the important question "what are these people thinking?" The first thing to remember is that "Dr." Madej is using "technobabble" to confound the viewer. The term comes from Star Trek where writers would inject some sort of baffle-gab into the conversation between characters that would suggest some sort of pseudo-scientific reason for the magic that the plot needs to explain the crisis or save the day.
 

In the case of The Stew Peters Show, the guest---Carrie Madej---is using the con-man's version of the "Gish gallop" to dump a load of bullshit on the viewer so it will over-load whatever doubts she might have about any one particular part of it. (That's the same sort of maneuvor that a confidence trickster used separate me from $60 a couple weeks ago.)

Is she a "wiseguy" doing this on purpose to separate "suckers" from their money? Perhaps. (Quacks charge good money for all those detox treatments.) But that doesn't necessarily mean that she is aware of what she is doing. As I explained in my article a while back titled Human Parasites, natural selection can create different types of populations within a given species. It might be that evolution has created a specific type of human personality---should we call them "homo flakyensus"?---that instinctively spew this sort of nonsense. In that case Carrie Madej really does believe in this stuff and makes a living off it in just the same way a real doctor makes a living off what he does.   

Whatever is going on the heads of people who create this stuff, we also have to account for those who eat it up. I think that this is where the Trekkie idea of "techno-babble" may offer a suggestion. Writers insert this stuff into scripts not to annoy scientists, but rather to create a simulation of reality in a situation that is totally unreal. It's part of telling a convincing story.

And link together enough convincing stories and you end up with what writers call a "mythos". Star Trek has an extremely well-developed mythos that includes heroes (Zephran Cochran), villains (the Borg), political organizations (the Federation), an economic system (as near as I can tell, utopian Communism), and so forth. The Star Trek mythos is so appealing to people that television studios have repeatedly created new shows about it and fans have devoted a great deal of energy into making it a "hobby" through cosplay.

People organize their lives around different mythical systems. In my case, I've constructed a rationalist system that merges parts of Daoism with the scientific Enlightenment of Europe. Many others live in a world that brings together Christianity and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. There are a lot of others. In the case of anti-vaxxers, I think that they have created a mythos that draws from a great many different sources. 

One of them is a profound fear of modern technology fueled by a profound ignorance about how things actually work. You can see this in Madej's belief that scientists are able to inject something into a person's arm that would be able to create metallic filaments and a microscopic yet somehow sentient creature. This doesn't require an evil government conspiracy, but rather an X-Files alien alliance. Only someone who has no understanding of what modern technology can and cannot do would come up with this fantasy.

Another part of this worldview is fear that the government will take away people's "freedom". Again and again Stew Peters ranted about the government "forcing vaccines into people's arms". 

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Why are these mythos I'm talking about so important? I recently watched a video by Rebecca Watson where the issue of motivated reasoning came up. This is the idea that a large part of what people call "rational decision-making" is actually human consciousness creating excuses for decisions that have already been made emotionally. As she explained it, she used the metaphor of a monkey riding a tiger. 

I found this image being used by a Thai Restaurant, so I assumed they wouldn't mind if I copied it.

The main point is that the tiger goes where the tiger wants to go. (It is a cat, after all.) The monkey is not about to argue with it, but she has a certain pride---so she makes up a story about why she wanted to go to wherever they both end up. The tiger represents the older parts of the brain that often make decisions for us and the monkey represents the more modern bits that govern things like conscious decision-making.

So far I'm well within the realm of orthodox psychology. But I'm going to take it one step further---simply because I think that this point seems obvious to me from self-reflection. (Philosophers are allowed to do this sort of thing as long as they freely admit that it is just speculation and are willing to be disabused of their idea if a good experiment proves it wrong.) I think that the tigers we ride aren't just artifacts of brain evolution. I also think that they are probably influenced by culture too. And what I call a person's "mythos" would be a key part of building a person's individual "tiger". 

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If we accept that a person uses motivated reasoning based upon their own inherited or personally-constructed mythological understanding of the world, then trying to reason them out of their crackpot behaviour is a waste of time. Instead, we need to stop the adoption of their nutty mythos in the first place. The problem with this idea is that it flies in the face of one of modern democracy's most cherished ideals: that everyone is entitled to their own personal belief system. 

I'm not suggesting that the state step in and force all people to accept the same worldview. That would be a totalitarian solution. But it might be possible to educate children so they understand the implications for life of the worldview they begin to see everything through. This would perhaps allow them the chance that they might "choose wisely" instead of just stumbling into something without understanding any of the implications.
 

I don't know much about Grey Owl, other than he was an Englishman who became so enamoured with an idealized myth about the First Nations of Canada that he moved to Northern Ontario and tried to totally adopt their lifestyle. I don't even know if it's true that he was accepted by members of the real First Nations, as the above video implies. But I do think that trying to live in harmony with nature was a damn sight better mythos than the British Imperialism and white superiority which a great many of his fellow citizens would have believed. 

In short---true or not---as the line from the "Heritage Minute" above says, people become what they dream. And it's important that we dream well. I would suggest that the people who refuse to wear masks and won't get vaccinated are people who have "dreamed poorly".

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That's enough for this week. Be nice to each other and don't get ahead of the health authorities as we slowly wake up out of this pandemic fever dream.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

 

Are People Computers?, or, Do People All Think the Same Way?

Last week I wrote about the difference between arithmetic and geometric progressions, and the problem that some people have understanding how quickly things get out of control when they are expanding geometrically. Consider that article as an introduction which will get the average reader to the point where I can start discussing the point of this one.

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Dr. Epstein, from his website

I recently read an article by Robert Epstein titled The Empty Brain that pretty much changed how I think about other people. I'm going a bit out on a limb here, because I'm not an expert on this subject. But I think it's so important that I want to get people thinking along these lines. So consider the following as "speculation aimed at spurring people to look more deeply into the subject". 

Epstein starts off his short essay by suggesting that people have become far too reliant on describing the human brain as being analogous to a computer. To illustrate the difference, he says that computers come with a fully-formed operating system that tells the machine how it is supposed to interact with users. In contrast, young children have a very small number of built-in behaviours and they use those to interact with and develop the way they think based on their interactions with the environment. That's how children are able to learn different languages and customs depending on what part of the world they find themselves born into. In contrast, computers loaded with Windows or Linux all start off speaking the same language and following the same rules from the first time they get fired up.

In other words, when you buy a computer, you have to learn how to conform to the way it works. But when a baby gets born, it has to learn how to conform to the physical and social environment it finds itself in. The difference is enormous.

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He also talks about an experiment that he often performs with undergraduates. It involves asking a student to draw a picture of a dollar bill without being able to look at it. The result is generally a very basic, schematic drawing. Then he gives them a dollar and asks them to draw it again using it as a model. Here are the examples from his article:

From memory

From an example

The thing to understand about the above is that the reproduction is created in a totally different way from how a computer saves and reproduces something. Look at these two pairs of images. The one drawn from memory was recreated by using a symbolic "recipe". The student remembered the following:

1. there is a picture of George Washington in the middle
2. the phrase "One Dollar" is displayed
3. the number "1" is in each corner
4. the phrase "In God we trust" is also shown

The second example is "copied" from an example. But please notice that even this one isn't a photo-copy or a an exact rendering. Instead, it's still created by using a list of symbolic issues---but the difference is that the list of ideas is more accurate because the student isn't relying on her memory.

1. George Washington is now facing the right way
2. "One Dollar" is now under the picture instead of split by it
3. the "1's" in the corners are now surrounded by borders
   
4. "In God We Trust" is now removed, as that occurs on the back
   

 Now lets discuss how computers "remember" something.

Here's how a computer remembers a dollar bill.

 

Here's how a degraded computer memory remembers a dollar bill. (I used a "photo-copy" filter on GIMP to modify the image.)

Computers don't record visual info by creating a list of important concepts, instead they record a bunch of Cartesian co-ordinates on a grid and position pixels based on that grid reference. When memory degrades in a computer it can do it several different ways, but one of the ways can be by having "noise" destroy information uniformly across the entire image. In the case I've supplied above, the GIMP filter has changed the composition of pixels per square unit of area to mimic the degradation that occurs when you photocopy a copy of a copy. The result is a degraded image due a problem with the commands that the computer uses to render every part of the image.

As you can see, the memory of a human being is really, really, really different from a computer. This is hardly surprising, as the animal brain is made of organic tissue and it was created using natural selection. In contrast, computers are assembled out of electronics and are the result of conscious planning.

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If you enjoy reading these articles, and you can afford it, why not subscribe? You get to choose how much you pay, and Pay Pal and Patreon make it easy to do.

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From an evolutionary point of view, it's important to understand that human brains actually eat up an awful lot of our daily caloric intake. Believe it or not, the human brain burns about 20% of the food we eat. What that means is there is going to be constant evolutionary pressure on human beings to use their brains in the most economical way possible. And that means human beings will develop "work-arounds" that will help them make decisions with the least mental effort possible. 

Moreover, one of the advantages that humanity has in the evolutionary arms race is the ability to use that expensive-to-fuel brain. Our ancestors used it to manipulate information in ways that allowed them to recognize potential threats and opportunities faster than others. And one of the ways to speed up the process was to pare down the information that was analyzed. 

I suspect that these two factors are why we "remember" a dollar bill differently from a computer. The computer uses the energy to created a piece-by-piece rendering of the dollar bill. The human brain, on the other hand, just creates a list of the "bare bones" of what makes up a dollar bill---and nothing else. This saves the energy and time it uses whenever it needs to differentiate between a one and a fifty. That's why a bank teller can count money so fast without having to stop for a snack when counting out cash for you. If she had to analyze each individual dot and ridge on each individual banknote it would take a very, very long time for that teller to cash your cheque and she'd probably have to eat like a professional athlete!   

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Epstein goes on in his essay to suggest that if it is the case that the human brain isn't a digital processor, the way it does work is by changing itself based upon the positive and negative feedback it's received during a person's life. That means if someone has been rewarded in life for following the math instead of their "gut instinct", they will tend to be able to understand the difference between arithmetic progressions and geometric ones. Similarly, if the opposite has been true, a person will simply ignore the nonsense that the "pointy-head types" spew and go with what his instincts say has to be true.

Much the same thing can be said about people who make the major decisions in their lives based on their emotions. If they get positive reinforcement for being hyper-emotional, they get more and more prone to excessive displays. If, on the other hand, they get rewarded for being stoic and showing a "stiff upper lip" people will become more and more calm under pressure.

On reflection, the above might seem to be a trivial insight. But Dr. Epstein believes that it leads to serious consequences. If people aren't computers that operate according to a standardized operating code, and instead are adapted to the specific conditions of their lives, then every person's brain will operate differently. That implication may well be that no matter how much his scientific advisors try to explain the nature of the pandemic to our Premier, he simply cannot understand what they are talking about. That could well explain why he is having such a tremendously hard time coming up with a coherent plan for the province.    

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My significant other recently turned me onto a YouTube creator by the name of Johnny Harris who does medium-length, very high quality videos explaining a variety of topics. I recently saw one that dealt with people who believe that the earth is flat. I was surprised by the issues he pointed out---mainly that it is a relatively recent phenomenon that has only existed for about 100 years, and, that it appears to exist primarily as an emotional rejection of what I would call "big science".  For those of you who have the time, here's the entire video.

If for one reason or another you don't want to go through the entire episode, here's the "key take-away".

 

And, if you just won't watch YouTube, here's the issue in a "nutshell". There are people in the population who find it extremely difficult to accept the consensus of the scientific community based on trust. Unless they can be shown simple, tangible, and, easily-understood evidence for a particular assertion, they tend to dismiss what they are told as being a conspiracy by a scary "cabal" of strangers.

As Harris points out, people who feel this way are in a decided minority. Moreover, they will probably have zero impact on science as a cultural and economic phenomenon. But unfortunately, they are visible and there are times---like during a pandemic---when the actions of the few can have an over-sized influence on the many. If enough of them reject vaccination and public health orders, they can create a lot of damage for everyone else. 

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My key takeaway is to remember that people are different from one another. Not just in terms of their background, class, religion, etc; but in a deeply profound way that colours the way they react to the world around them. In my own case I've learned that I have a really, really hard time acting instinctively. I "over-think" just about everything I do, which---among other things---made me a terribly driver. I could never forget that when I was behind the wheel of a car that I was just a brief second's distraction away from killing or maiming either myself or someone else. 

I've had to learn from other people that this is a very, very strange point of view. For most folks, driving is done pretty much unconsciously and without any appreciation of how inherently dangerous an activity it really is. (It's probably the most dangerous thing that most Canadians do.) In contrast, getting vaccinated by the Oxford-AstraZenaca Covid-19 is remarkably safe (if it wasn't, we'd have seen lots of problems in Britain already). And yet, hordes of people who are afraid of the shot think nothing of hopping into their car to get some aspirin at the pharmacy.

I suspect part of the reason why I don't have a problem trusting the scientific establishment is because I spent so much time at University both as a student and an employee, and know a lot of scientists, researchers, and, professors. They aren't mysterious to me. I know that they are bye-and-large extremely idealistic people who didn't get into their positions because they wanted money or power. Instead, the vast majority are motivated by genuine curiosity. Incidentally, the ones I got to know well were generally very decent people who wanted the best for everyone else in society. Knowing that, it seems absolutely absurd to think of them as being people who would support any type of conspiracy. But after researching this article, I now suspect that given a different life-history I might have become a "happy-motoring" person afraid of "big science" too. When I remember this, it helps me be a little more tolerant of the people in my circle who have gone at least some distance down Alice's rabbit hole. 

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Having said the above, society still has a right to defend itself. And there are "loons" out there who are fully capable of spreading disease left, right, and, centre in furtherance of their screw-ball beliefs. I don't hate lions or bears---but I sure as heck don't want to get mauled by one. It might be that there are people you simply cannot reason with and in those cases all you can do is fine them into compliance or if that doesn't work either, lock them up in jail. Over the long haul, this probably won't be necessary. We just need to create and follow rules that say you cannot work at a variety of jobs, go to school, or, travel out of country without proof of vaccination. This is nothing new, as regulations like this for other diseases have existed as long as I've been alive. There may be some squawking, but I suspect that the overwhelming majority of Canadians will gladly comply with this sort of regime.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!