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Why Bad Ideas Spread

May 2, 2020 by tornado Leave a Comment

Why would anybody take seriously an offhanded, poorly worded statement from Donald Trump (who makes offhanded, poorly worded statements by the hundreds per month…you should know this by now!) about ingesting bleach? I doubt the statement was malicious, or even serious, but it was badly phrased by a bumbling buffoon, and some people have been stupid enough to take it literally. Others have blown it out of proportion as validation for their own deep partisan biases.

Medicine doesn’t have many answers yet about the Wuhan coronavirus. Meteorology can’t tell you why the tornado hit this neighborhood and not the one across the road, nor which neighborhood could be flattened next week. Yet incredibly, people demand such answers, utterly ignorant of the limits of science, and of uncertainty.

When scientists cannot fill a knowledge gap, charlatans rush in to fill it for them, to provide counterfeit certainty. It’s how disgraced, false-teaching “Christian” televangelist Jim Bakker can allow a snake-oil hack to peddle some silver solution as a coronavirus cure. It’s how a weather company can offer specific 40-day temperature forecasts, when there is no demonstrated skill in that whatsoever. I’ve heard this said first-hand to another meteorologist, seriously: “You can’t tell me if it will rain at my sister’s wedding next month? Lame! What kind of idiot weather man are you anyway?”

A fundamental problem exists in common between this bleach-ingestion situation and making insanely unreasonable demands on meteorologists. That problem is failure to understand uncertainty, and it’s rooted in a deeper one in education. Much of the populace has little concept of, nor tolerance for, uncertainty. Too many people think everything is certain, black and white. That’s preposterous rubbish. Medicine is not as simple as that, or the coronavirus already would be exterminated. And if meteorology were that easy, we already could tell you where the tornadoes will track on May 22nd, to within mere feet.

Yet the opposite people, who declare from their high horse of “nuance” that “everything is shades of gray”, have it terribly wrong going the other way, too. They attach a damned error bar to situations that have straightforward answers, and mile-wide error bars to others that are far less complicated in reality. They declare that there are no absolutes. That is equally preposterous garbage. [Next time you see someone write, “There are no absolutes,” or “Everything is shades of gray,” please call them out on that obviously and literally self-contradictory nonsense!]

Black and white, unambiguous factual answers really do exist to a lot of things. The sun rises in the eastern sky. 2+2=4. I love Dr Pepper. Direct contact with bleach outside the body will kill this virus (and maim your insides, maybe fatally, if you drink or inhale it). Tornadoes are made of air. Male or female you were made, dear reader, by genetics, before birth, by biological fact of a chromosome pair still found in all your cells. Simple answers to complex questions and problems really do exist in some cases. Ministers of the “nuance” pulpit fail to see this, and as such, will stay mired in gray ideological mud, missing out on a lot of clarity and vivid insight that absolutes can offer.

“The best answers are found in the middle.” Preposterous rubbish too! I’m not advocating the middle ground is always right, either. Sometimes, indeed I dare say often, alternative and out-of-mainstream solutions end up working amazingly well, saving lives, bettering society. Sometimes, just sometimes, even the ideological extremes are onto something (despite that, more often than not, they’re shrill, annoying parasites sucking intellect out of an issue). If you’re always straddling the middle, trying to stay comfortable in rigid “balance”, avoiding all extremes, taking no risk, and not seeing the benefits that can arise from the unconventional thinking, you’ll miss out on so much accomplishment, discovery and innovation. Your life will be boring as hell, too. If nothing else, pay attention to the extremes, so you can understand how to combat the 90% or more of their crap that is…crap.

The key is knowing when the middle is right, when the conventional wisdom and tradition yield optimal results, when an alternative way is best, when even the extremes are right, when an issue is clear-cut, when it is gray. How? Reasoned, critical thinking — to determine when, how, and why each approach is appropriate, situationally. Situationally!

Much as the science of medicine has lots of uncertainties regarding this coronavirus — how to reverse its severe rampages in some people, how much immunity to mutations you have after you’ve had it, when there will be a vaccine and how effective it will be…so does my science. We get questions like this astoundingly often: “Will it rain on my sister’s outdoor wedding next September 10th at 4 p.m. in Aurora?” Or, “I’m driving my RV from Chicago to Miami on November 3rd. Where will I hit bad weather?” [No way to know, too much uncertainty!] Or, “Can you control tornadoes with hyper-voltage electromagnetic beams?” [No, but the questioner won’t take anything but his own pet theory for an answer.]

What insanely asinine questions those are for anyone who understands uncertainty or has half a microgram of critical-thinking skills! Yet we get them. It’s not necessarily tied to educational level, either. Some of the worst weather-control lunacy I’ve seen has come from engineers and physicists, and even one physician (not any who are personal friends of mine!). Some of the most outlandish conspiracy theories I’ve heard have been proposed by people with advanced degrees. Ph.D. can stand for Phenomenally Dumb, when outside one’s own area of expertise. There are people who are so specialized, as an old instructor of mine once stated, that they, “Learn more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.“

So why do far too many people, whether well-educated on paper or high-school dropouts, either blindly accept seeming authority without question, or reflexively reject it outright, or fail to grasp uncertainty, or think “alternative” must be bad, or think “alternative” must be best, or accept outlandish and thoroughly unreasonable crackpot ideas? Where is the ability in people to evaluate, to dissociate from emotion and other irrationalities, and to use facts, logic and reason to assess ideas and ideals independently and thoroughly?

I strongly believe it’s because critical, independent thinking skills have not been rigorously taught by both public schools and parents, as a whole, for at least 3 or 4 generations. My generation (X) is part of the problem, both on the receiving and teaching end. Parents and schools alike have failed here, miserably. Of course there are exceptions. I’m talking not about the exceptions, but the rule.

Critical thinking doesn’t lead to sucking down bleach, nor eating Tide Pods, nor snorting cocaine, nor partying with dozens of friends amidst a highly contagious pandemic, nor refusing vaccinations because some airheaded celebrity says it causes autism, nor taking essential oils to “cure” cancer, nor being a sucker to unscientific anti-GMO hysteria, nor thinking 5G makes coronavirus worse, nor HAARPing about “chemtrails”, nor sending money to that Nigerian prince who works for the IRS and Citibank and wants your credit-card number so you can pay what you owe and get rich quick.

Anybody with even the most basic critical-thinking skills would not take a verbally handicapped President’s offhanded bleach comment literally, nor a host of other dumb things said by celebrities and politicians of all stripes. Yet here we are.

Unfortunately the solution is hard: massively reform education away from the rote and toward understanding. Stop teaching to test. Don’t make students memorize; teach them how to think conceptually and critically. Stop teaching to feelings, “identity” and “self-esteem” — teach instead to logic and reason. Return to rigorous fundamentals of math, science, reading comprehension, history, and writing in education, including deep immersion in critical-thinking concepts in each of these basics. The results won’t bear fruit for another generation or two. But this is what’s needed. Until then, our society as as much at peril from a profusion of gullible suckers as from any disease.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: coronavirus, critical thinking, Donald Trump, education, forecast uncertainty, forecasting, independent thinking, logic, medicine, reason

Governmental Dependency as a Toxic Relationship

April 8, 2020 by tornado Leave a Comment

When it comes to logistics and preparedness, the mode of thinking needs to be logic and reason — not emotion. Pretend you’re an interstellar alien, we’ll call him Spock (or her Spockette, if you want to be equal opportunity), evaluating our relationship with central Federal bureaucracy from outer space.

Two pertinent points: First, when an entity has failed, over and over and over, to accomplish goals timely and accurately, is it logical to keep depending upon it, or to demand from it what it has repeatedly foot-dragged and failed to deliver? Spock(ette) says: No. Highly illogical.

What is that entity? Distant, detached, massive, red-tape-ridden, impersonal, faceless Federal bureaucracy. I’m speaking of the whole entity, as a large, bloated mass, not individual right-minded people inside it who are trying to improve things, mostly in futility.

Epidemiologists have been warning of a pandemic like the one ongoing, for over a quarter of a century. Yet through multiple D and R presidencies, multiple D, R and split Congresses, this is the result. Blaming only the current people (while they deserve just the latest few years’ share of it) is purely partisan, shortsighted, ignorant of history, and emotional — not logical, not reasoned.

This scenario has been warned about for DECADES, with only token, window-dressing action. Such longstanding foot-dragging in preparation for what has been an inevitable pandemic is just one example of such lack of foresight and attention to low-probability (in any one year), high-impact events that will happen some year. This is such a year.

Those who expertly predicted it for the last few decades have every right to say, “I told you so, why didn’t you listen to me and prepare?” And they are entirely reasoned and logical in asking such a question. Spock(ette) would approve.

This is why foreseers and visionaries get disillusioned: government bureaucracy — too debt-ridden and bloated from generations of exceeding its literal Constitutional authority in many areas — is too focused on the here and now and the pork-barrel pandering that doesn’t lend itself to accommodating accurate expert farsightedness. This is objectively demonstrable in the lack of preparedness in numerous crises — not just this coronavirus. And when it comes to logic and reason, objective evaluation is what matters.

Is it logical to expect quick deployments and resolutions when, as only a mild exaggeration, it takes 37 layers of approvals and nine months to unlock a door latch? Spock(ette) says: no. Highly illogical. We see it over, and over, and over, from slow hurricane response, to days/weeks wait for Federal deployment on wildfires, to the CDC bungling of this virus disaster, to weekly politicization of nonpartisan issues.

Yet I see so many people demanding more involvement of the very same thing that keeps failing, over and over and over: Federal “help”! That’s not only illogical, but irrational, unhealthy, toxic! And also: Sisyphean.

Second: Disasters really are local. This is because individuals are affected.

States (especially for their resource/economically poor rural areas) and major cities need to learn to prepare as if they essentially will get zero help from above in a timely way. Quite often, after all, that’s the brutally honest truth. This way, if help does arrive, it’s a bonus, a relief.

Dependency on big, inefficient, untimely, unreliable Washington is really a form of unhealthy codependency — akin to a neglectful, often gaslighting, sometimes abusive personal relationship, but wrought on a broad scale.

Think about this, please. Relate to it. Would you tell your friend in such a relationship to stay the course, stick it out, trust the abuser/neglector will somehow, someday reform? If you have been in such a relationship personally, you will get what I’m saying. Why encourage such relationships of cities, counties and states with Washington, who has and will let them down, gaslight, neglect, attach strings, token-“help”, or even trample them as often as fully assist?

Abusive relationships don’t just arise from individuals, but also…see encircled. The question isn’t which of these federal government has done at some point or another, but which it hasn’t! It’s not hard to find historic examples of every pie piece above.

If you still don’t understand the concept of betrayal by centralized DC bureaucracy, and how systemically destructive that can be, ask our native American Indian tribes.

Exactly as we correctly advise friends in toxic relationships, states and cities need to learn to get out of that bad relationship with Washington and go it on their own, with years to decades of advanced planning for every sort of disaster that could befall them. Spock(ette) would see this through the lens of history and say, “That’s imminently logical.”

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: betrayal, big government, bureaucracy, coronavirus, federal government, government, government waste, logic, pandemic, reason

Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement

August 10, 2019 by tornado Leave a Comment

Before the blood dried in the El Paso mass murder by a white supremacist, and both before and after the left-wing mass killer’s evil deeds in Ohio, I saw several social-media posts to the effect that “good people must not be silent”, or that “silence is complicity”. Such rhetoric commonly appears on other hot-button, emotionally charged weekly issues du jour.

Rubbish! Absolute garbage. Do not fall for such psychologically manipulative tactics (through which I see clearly as glass), nor feel compelled to speak out if you’d rather be quiet. Your reasons are yours alone and nobody else’s business, whether you’re still gathering facts, you’ve already spoken on the topic and wish not to be redundant, need more time to think, are taking quiet action of your own, prefer not to virtue signal (as so many are!), or you just have other/better things to do.

I want to assure you silence is OK, and you are absolutely, positively NOT “complicit” in any of the world’s millions and millions of problems just because you aren’t speaking out on any or all of them. I say this as someone who is outspoken on many issues, and has been for decades, including on Second Amendment, racial-supremacy and mental-health issues. Your silence is your concern and yours only, and others should just mind their own damn business.

Freedom of speech includes the freedom to not talk. [“Miranda rights” affirm this inherently Constitutional truth.] It also includes the right to wait until later (as I’m choosing to do), instead of being a virtue-signaling insta-pundit for the sake of clicks, likes, retweets, fawning attention, and platitudes from like-minded sycophants. It’s OK to wait days, weeks or more to speak out, or to never do so at all.

In fact, I have more respect for those who do wait awhile, cool down, and respond in thought-out, measured, rational ways, using facts, logic, and reason instead of emotion. I want to empower you to think and act independently, on your terms and yours alone, not because peers or culture demand it. Stand strong outside the herd mentality!

It’s perfectly fine to stay silent, whether for a few days, weeks, months, or however long you want. Silence is NOT complicity, nor it is agreement. It’s simply…silence.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: cancel culture, facts, free thought, freedom, freedom of choice, freedom of speech, herd mentality, logic, reason

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