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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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!

What is Democracy? What is a Politician?

Like a lot of people who have been looking at the news lately, I've spent a lot of the last month thinking about both democracy and the role that politicians play in it. Unlike most casual observers, however, I have had a fair amount of experience in political organizations which has given me something of a particular perspective on the subject. In lieu of writing anything else this week, I thought I'd put out a few somewhat random ideas on the subject to share with my readers. Make of them what you will.

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Over the short years of my life, my political orientation has wandered pretty much all over the map. But I can remember one particular time when a text produced a revolution in the way I think about such things. The book in question was Hitler's Pope. What struck me was a short passage where the author argued that Pope Pius XII sold the pre-war German Christian Democratic party "down the river" in order to secure protection of Church property and personnel from the NAZI party. 

This really stuck with me because like most people who've read much about politics, I'd never really thought very much about democracy as an ideal. I don't think that this is because of my own idiosyncrasy so much as our society-as-a-whole.

To start with, the two courses at university that I took on the subject promoted two ideas. The first one was that politics is ultimately a mechanism for allocating scarce resources between groups with different ideologies by using the minimum use of violence. The second one built on this idea by suggesting that liberal democracies can only exist if a ruling elite exists that is willing to manipulate the masses (through things like propaganda and lying) into voting for things that are in their objective best interests, but which they don't consciously want. 

Consider the above as two "book ends" that cover the same worldview. That is, the idea that political decision-making all comes down to groups of people with interests who use politics instead of naked force to get what they want.

Most of what I would call "radical progressives" believe much the same thing. The only difference I find is when I talk to them they tend to oscillate between venting outrage with the state of world and snide, and, exasperated, cynical comments to the effect of "what else do you expect from a capitalist system?"

I've come to the conclusion that the reason why politic discourse often ends up like this is because our society has lost the ability to have cogent conversations about ethical issues. This is a very big deal, in my humble opinion, because democracy didn't come about because people could use it to gain power but because lots of people over generations believed that it was the only really moral way to govern a society.  

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Previous generations of people spent a lot of time writing and talking about the concepts of "right" and "wrong". Highfalutin philosophers talked about things like Kant's deontological theory, Mill's utilitarianism, Sartre's existentialism, and others. The masses, however, usually based all their moral beliefs on what the priests told them.

The problem with this is that the priests are usually in the same boat because they don't know how to reason through their ethical teaching either. In other words, it is a case of the blind leading the blind. That's why, for example, even in the face of dramatically rising inequality, racism, sexism, ecological collapse, potential nuclear war, etc, many religious leaders still routinely say that the most important ethical issues people should be concerned about are keeping women from having access to safe abortions and gay spouses from their partner's dental plan. If you doubt this, take a look at the following excerpt from the speech "Mother" Teresa gave when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In it she opines that the gravest "threat" to world peace is women's access to safe, therapeutic abortions. 

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The old churches used to have institutional leadership that were able to keep the wilder flights of fancy among parishioners from taking hold of the congregation. As religious freedom expanded through generation after generation, however, more and more independent congregations came into existence---and each of them was free to embrace their own set of ideas. Next came cults that were led by charismatic leaders. The last iteration of this splintering process are groups like Q-anon and others that are based upon an on-line "group-think" process. These conspiracy theory messages mutate based upon the promptings of "clicks" that individuals can read through social media analytics. The result is akin to what game designers call "Live Action Role Playing" (or "LARP"). 

A LARP is like a big game of Dungeons and Dragons where each individual piece is a real human being making their own personal choices, and the Dungeon Master has to interactively play with them to keep them in the game. It's a bit like the fake news that was coming out of Macedonia when teenagers found out that they could make a lot of money by printing stories about things like the Pope endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency. If a story had "legs" and made a lot of money, they wrote more like it. If one dropped like an anvil, then they didn't do another like it. It's much the same thing with regard to writing stuff about Q-Anon and other conspiracies---whatever gets clicked is reinforced and whatever doesn't gets dropped. 

Donald Trump was a star from a "reality tv" show, and these too are a type of LARP. The show-runners and producers' job is to interact with the people in front of the camera and create new stresses and situations as the audience learns more about the cast. That's why Trump is so fluid about policy and truth---he's not stating facts that he believes in, he's just constantly throwing dust in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing.  

This is an insane way to make decisions---far, far worse than simply doing whatever the priests tell you to do. That's because the priests at least had to go to a seminary and not get too far from what the Bishop wants. It's hardly surprising that given this type of ethical reasoning we ended up with a horde of wack-a-doodles storming the Capital Building---in defence of "democracy" as the social media AIs have defined it.

Image from the L. A. Times, used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

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There have always been arguments between cynics who see politics as being exclusively a game of power, and, idealists who really do believe that democratic decision-making is a type of ethical paradigm. If you read Plato and Machiavelli, you can see the same arguments and types of personalities that are on display today. I do think, however, that there is one significant difference. All past societies above hunter/gatherer seem to have been dominated by elites: all types of politics were politics by aristocrats. 

The people who founded the US democratic system, for example, were mostly wealthy landowners. There were many problems with such a system, but one thing that probably was good was the fact that most of them had benefited from a good education. And this included the people who were religious. That's because even if they were pious, they had been taught by very well-educated priests. This is why the writings of various leaders from the past often contain some very fine ethical reasoning. 

Now, however, we are to a large extent at the mercy of the "unwashed mob". And it simply doesn't have much experience thinking through the choices it makes. That allows them to embrace idiotic ideas like Q-Anon, antisemitism based on the idea that Jews are Lizards from outer space, etc. 

This lack of understanding also allows the mob to fall for the patent venality of opportunists like Mitch McConnell. Taking a look at the following clip, you might be excused for thinking that McConnell voted for conviction of Donald Trump---but he didn't. If you pay only slightly more attention, you might be fooled into thinking that he wanted to vote for conviction, but that he felt that he couldn't because doing so would go against the rules of the Senate---which is false. There is a precedent that says it can. Moreover, there was a vote by the Senate that also said that you can---and the tradition is that once an issue is settled this way, everyone taking part should abide by the decision made. You might also have the idea that McConnell would have voted for impeachment if the trial had happened when Trump was still in office. But you'd be wrong, because he was the man who decided to delay the process so the vote would happen after Biden was sworn into office. McConnell may not be an illiterate boob---but he is certainly a Machiavellian who doesn't believe in democracy as a moral imperative.    

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Personally, I think that we are currently going through what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called an "Axial Age". This is a period of time when human society dramatically changes for one reason or another. In the first one, Jaspers said that the major religions of the world came into existence. This second one that we are currently living through is based on the profound changes to society that modern technology is imposing upon us. The Web has created the problem of weird conspiracy theories because of a variety of factors. It has also triggered the rise of populist authoritarians---like Donald Trump. It has also created the pandemic that we are facing now because of the universal fast transport through jet airplanes. And, of course, there's also climate change. One big problem after another is roaring down the historical highway and humanity is going to have to rejig just about everything we do if we are going to survive the potential pile-up. Democracy is perhaps not the most important item on this list---but it's one of the big ones.

The first step of fixing anything is to understand it. I hope that the above will get at least some of my readers thinking about it.

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

Overdrawn at the Bank of Trust

Like lots of other people, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why so many people are willing to believe the craziest of notions. This isn't just an artifact of the global pandemic---things were well on the way to crazy-town long before everyone started getting used to plague doctor memes. 

Where I used to work---at a university library, no less---I had co-workers who believed in things like chem trails, Masonic conspiracies, Nikola Tesla had invented a time machine that the US government used to control the world (!!!), vaccines are poisonous, etc. Now, of course, we have things like Q-Anon. Where is this coming from? 

I have a tendency to believe that most problems don't have one single cause, but rather several different ones that work together. To that end, I'd like to posit one more potential cause of this plague of idiocy that is afflicting us at the same time as Covid-19: a chronic social deficit in trust.  

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Rene Descartes, a little paranoid?

Trust is an interesting thing. Philosophers have pointed out that if a person is really honest with herself, she really doesn't know an awful lot. Descartes pushed this idea to the point where he said that he didn't even know if there are other human beings in the world---it could be that he was surrounded by robots that perfectly mimic his conception of human behaviour. Indeed, modern thinkers have similarly posited that there is no real way of proving that we aren't all living in a computer simulation that was created by some intelligent race of super beings. 

We have to take a great many things in life simply "on trust". It's true that we have laws governing contracts and thievery, but the fact is that we are at the mercy of the companies that supply goods and services, our neighbours, the government, etc. That's because our court system would be completely overwhelmed if it was expected to police 100% of all human interactions---or even slightly more than it does right now.

This need to trust each other has grown dramatically in recent years as we have become more and more interconnected. I sometimes order parts, tools, or, other things from people running small companies in other countries---some of them with quite sketchy reputations. That has included things like a specialty bolt I needed to fix a chair but which I had to purchase from Hong Kong (because the only North American supplier I could find sold them exclusively in 1,000 piece lots), a box of old-fashioned safety razor blades from Turkey (you can get them here---but they are outrageously expensive), and so on. I've never gotten stiffed and I generally get a good price. If this wasn't people's general experience purchasing goods online, the entire industry would come crashing down---so companies like Ebay and Pay Pal go to great lengths to keep their customers happy. 

Because trust is important to business, there is a polling company that keeps track of how much the global population trusts it and other social institutions. In the words of the Edelman Trust website: 

"We have studied trust for 20 years and believe that it is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions—companies and brands, governments, NGOs and media—build with their stakeholders. Trust defines an organization’s license to operate, lead and succeed. Trust is the foundation that allows an organization to take responsible risk, and, if it make mistakes, to rebound from them.

For a business, especially, lasting trust is the strongest insurance against competitive disruption, the antidote to consumer indifference, and the best path to continued growth. Without trust, credibility is lost and reputation can be threatened."

To this end, Edelman has been polling levels of trust for several years and publishes an annual report. The latest one is worth looking at because it shows a very steady and significant decline in people's trust in several key authorities.

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(Before I get any further, I want to warn readers about the information I'm getting from the Edelman Trust Barometer. 

• This is a private company, which means that by definition, it serves the interests of stockholders, not the public interest. Looking at the report, it appears obvious to me that the people creating it are supporters of the neo-liberal consensus. 
• The "report" consists exclusively of graphs without any attempt to interpret the information or place it into a context.
• Most of the graphs specifically refer to business "brands" and how willing citizens are to believe corporate "spin".   
  
• It gets its information through polling a relatively small number of people: 30,050 for the entire planet. Modern polling is a science, which means there is an attempt to limit different demographics so they aren't over-represented---but just remember that this is a very small percentage of the world population!
• Their data comes from on-line surveys. That means that only people with access to the Web could physically fill it out---and that no one was holding a gun to these people's heads forcing them to answer truthfully. So only relatively well-off people with nothing better to do filled out the form---that's hardly a representative sample of the world population!
• The parent company Edelman has been caught recommending unethical practices in support of things like the Keystone and Energy East pipeline proposals.
  

Having said all of the above, I believe that some of the information we get from these reports is useful---especially insofar as it shows trends from year to year. That's because one can assume that using the same sample year to year will cancel out the self-selection bias.)

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Let's look at what the Trust Barometer has to say about what and who the world population does and doesn't trust over the past few years.

It's important to parse out a poll's context if we are going to understand what it means. For example, what does the survey mean by a "search engine"? I suspect that they just mean "Google". But it isn't the only one---I use Duckduckgo, for example. That's because I don't trust Google to not sell my browsing history to nefarious actors. I do trust Duckduckgo on that score. But I do trust both to objectively present links according to a mechanism that uses both popularity and respectability as part of the criteria. Where do I fit on the graph? Do I trust search engines or do I not? 

There's another element to this. It appears that the Republican party in the USA simply does not believe that it is possible that some of their policies are objectively harmful to large sectors of the population or that because of this they are very unpopular. When the search engines reflect this unpopularity, they assume that there is a conspiracy against "conservatives". In this sort of context, what exactly does it mean to say that you lack trust in "search engines". Is it simply because they agree with the lies of a major political party? If so, then perhaps the problem isn't a lack of trust in search engines, but rather too much trust in the Republican leadership?

Even more to the point; Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, etc, all use search engines and artificial intelligence to decide what shows up on my feed. What I expect (but certainly do not want) them to do is quickly create a "filter bubble" based on past choices that will feed me more and more content that is designed to make me upset about the world around me. They do this to encourage me to watch even more content from their social media feed because this will make me a more useful commodity to sell to advertisers. This feeds my "distrust" insofar as I know it will act like Grima Wormtongue (from The Lord of the Rings)---whispering poisonous half-truths and out-and-out falsehoods into my ears in order to poison my mind.

Facebook's employee of the year

So, do I "trust" search engines? Or don't I? 

(I rarely finish filling out a survey because I generally end up raising quibbles like the above. If there is a human being trying to get me to answer their questions, they usually look like deer in the headlights of a car and mumble that I should "just tick something".)

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I suspect that part of the reason why there has been such a decline in trust is because we have had it betrayed so many times. This is especially important with regard to government. Just off the top of my head, I'll list some things that have eroded my trust in politicians.

• the fake "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" that resulted in Congress giving president Lyndon Johnson the authority to get the US military mired in Vietnam
• the fake "Weapons of Mass Destruction" propaganda that George W. Bush and Tony Blair used to justify the invasion of Iraq

These are really "stand out" incidents because a lot of people died as a result of each. 

But there are other, smaller, "drip, drip, drip" scandals that routinely happen and slowly erode any belief that the government can be trusted. These include:

• the "ME to WE" charity that seems to have not been much of a real charity and involved several members of the Trudeau family in a conflict of interest
  
• the "Panama Papers" scandal where a whistle-blower at a large legal firm gave evidence that an entire industry exists that allows hordes of wealthy people to avoid paying taxes
• the "Me Too" scandals that seemed to show that wealthy, powerful men like Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Peter Nygard, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Jian Ghomeshi, etc, can get away for decades with serially abusing women
• the SNC-Lavalin case where an international engineering firm got caught bribing foreign governments to gain contracts---and it looked like the Prime Minister's office was willing to lean on the Minister of Justice in order to let it off the hook 
  

Another problem seems to be that the institutions that are supposed to protect us seem to be not much more than "paper tigers". 

• Elections Canada seemed totally uninterested in punishing the federal Conservative party even though it had clearly involved itself in voter suppression through the "robocall" scandal
• when Liberal leader Stephan Dion wanted to form a coalition government after the 2008 election, Governor General Michaelle Jean allowed Stephen Harper to instead prorogue Parliament
• Revenue Canada seems to have given up chasing tax cheats---if they have enough money to make things difficult
  

Beyond the above, there are other types of "drip, drip, drip" that kills people's trust in government.  

• constituency offices that increasingly seem like the entrance to prisons because of excessive security
• badly-designed and poorly-maintained web-based government application systems that threaten dire consequences if you fill out the forms wrong---but which can be impossible to use
  
• phone messaging systems that force people to wait on line for hours while inane recorded messages spit out the obvious lie that "your call is important to us"  

My "gut feeling" is that every time a politician goes into "mealy-mouth mode" and refuses to express themselves in a forthright manner, a little more basic trust in the democratic process gets eroded. Every time a bureaucrat refuses to speak honestly to a citizen and refuses to admit that there is something wrong with the system they serve, a little more trust in the government chips off. Every time the government gets caught doing something they shouldn't and takes refuge in the statement "no laws were broken", people's faith in government declines. And every time a government oversight body says something to the effect that "they didn't find enough evidence for charges" the respect for regulators declines.

In effect, what I'm saying is that several of the pillars of society---such as government---depend on a certain amount of trust by the citizenry. All the actions I mentioned above are like withdrawals from a bank account. If more comes out than goes in, eventually there's nothing left and a person becomes insolvent. I would posit that many of the old authorities in our society are perilously close to bankruptcy and that's why so many people are willing to seek out alternative authorities to rely upon.

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One of my "bête noires" are people who don't take into account the opportunity cost of their actions. In this case, the trade-off is that every time a person in authority refuses to "fess up" and speak "punk and plain" they seem less trustworthy. The public relations profession has done such a good job of "keeping on the message" and "controlling the spin" that a significant fraction of the public have pretty much lost every scrap of trust they might have once had in our authority figures. The result is that these folks have started casting about for new points of reference. 

Unfortunately, many of these people have fallen into the hands of social media Wormtongue clones who take advantage of this naive cynicism. And that's why we have people falling prey to ridiculous conspiracy theories about reptilian overlords, blood-drinking Hollywood stars, etc. Let's hope this is just a passing fad---. 

Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you can, and, hopefully this idiotic epidemic will be over soon.

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