A leap into the dark

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural enough to want life in some fashion to continue.  My own view is that I simply don't know what comes after death.  I'm inclined to agree with the comedian who quipped, "Lots of things happen after you die.  They just don't involve you."  On the other hand, I suppose it's possible there might be some kind of survival of consciousness, even if my rational/scientific side finds it hard to imagine how that could possibly work.

In any case, I'll find out eventually one way or the other.  I hope not too soon.

So it's unsurprising that most cultures and religions have beliefs in an afterlife.  What I find strange, though, is how specific many of those beliefs are, and I'm not just talking about religion, here.  The reason this rather macabre topic comes up is a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a paper by folklorist and anthropologist Stuart Dunn of Grisham College entitled, "Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology," which looks at the peculiar British tradition of designating certain pathways "corpse roads" because they were used to bring dead bodies from villages with no consecrated churchyard to one that had a burial ground.  (Many of these roads, it turns out, are still called "Such-and-Such Corpse Road," or less grimly, "Lych Road" -- líc was the Old English word for "body.")

These corpse roads were often considered liminal spaces, passageways not just of the obvious spatial sort.  So all kinds of traditions arose around them, including the rather terrifying idea that if you didn't conduct the body to its final resting place in exactly the right way, the dead person's spirit might travel back up the path and return to haunt the spot where (s)he died.  In order to obviate that possibility, you had to make sure to carry the corpse feet-first down the road, and never let it touch the soil until it reached the burial site.  Some of these pathways still have "coffin stones" alongside them -- places the pallbearers could set the coffin down and take a rest without it touching the dirt.

Another weird belief I learned about from Dunn's paper was the association between death and yew trees.  He speculates that it's because yew trees can be extremely long-lived, so they're associated with immortality.  He mentions a rather scary idea from Wales that is definitely one of the less comforting afterlife beliefs:

[I]n R. V. W. Elliott’s classic 1957 study, “Runes, Yews and Magic”... he describes the Brittonic belief that the root of a churchyard yew grows out of the mouth of each corpse buried therein, thus sustaining the former and ensuring its continued survival.

Then there's the idea of the totenpass -- German for "passport for the dead" -- the name given to a Greek and Egyptian tradition of burying an inscribed piece of metal with the deceased, either hung around their neck or put inside their mouth.  The inscription was a set of instructions for the dead person's spirit, so they wouldn't get lost in the next world.

Google Maps for the Afterlife, is the way I think of it.

These instructions were often amazingly detailed.  One totenpass from Crete had the following inscription:

You will find on the right in Hades's halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.  Do not even draw nigh this spring.  Farther on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians.  They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades.  They will ask you for what reason you have come.  Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves.  I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.'  Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.  After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

One has to wonder how the person who wrote the inscription, who was presumably still alive at the time, figured all this out.  But maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

A fourth century B.C.E. totenpass from Thessaly [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orphic Gold Tablet (Thessaly-The Getty Villa, Malibu), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's an Aztec belief -- also incredibly detailed -- about the use of a special type of paper called amatl or amate, made from the fibrous bark of fig trees, which was intended to give the dead person's spirit protection during the initial phases of the afterlife.  This process makes "going to your Eternal Rest" not sound so restful.  You needed six pieces of paper, each with the right designs drawn on it, or you were in some serious shit.  Here's how one source describes it:

The first piece of amatl paper was used to pass safely through two contending mountains.  The second piece helped the deceased to travel without any danger on the road guarded by the Great Serpent.  The third piece allowed a safe crossing over the Great Crocodile’s domain.  The fourth piece was a passport, which allowed the deceased to cross the Seven Deserts.  The fifth piece was used for a safe passage through the Eight Hills.  Finally and perhaps most importantly, the sixth piece was used for defense against the north wind.  In addition, for this latter challenge, the Aztecs burned the clothes and arms of the deceased so that the warmth coming from the burning body might protect the soul from the cold northern wind.

Seems like a lot of work to me.  One has to hope that after all that, there'd be something pleasant to look forward to.

The neighboring Mayans weren't much better.  Their concept of the underworld -- Xibalba, meaning "place of fright" -- makes the Judaeo-Christian hell sound like the French Riviera.   Just one of the special offers in Xibalba is a set of demons whose very names are enough to make going there a big old nope (not, I suppose, that you had any choice in the matter).  There's Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab"), Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood"), Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon"), Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon"), Chamiabac ("Bone Staff"), Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff"), Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon"), and  Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon"), just to name a few.  And if you think "Sweepings Demon" doesn't sound so bad, I should mention that Ahalmez teamed up with Ahaltocob to torture the souls of bad housekeepers.  Ahalmez hid in the dust of unswept parts of your house and lured your spirit over, then Ahaltocob jumped out and stabbed you.

This would be problematic for me and my wife, because our approach to housekeeping can be summed up as "there seems to have been a struggle."  It's likely that one of these days we'll both go missing, and when the police investigate, they'll find us both trapped inside giant dust bunnies.  So I guess it's a good thing we're not Mayan.

Anyhow, I find this all very curious, because it falls squarely into the "How exactly do you know any of this?" department.  But it's hardly the only devoutly-held belief I could say that about.

In any case, I'm okay with not knowing what'll happen after I die.  Death is the ultimate leap into the dark -- either into something new and different, or into nothing.  I'd just as soon if it is something new and different, that it not involve having to keep bunches of pieces of paper straight, because most days I have a hard enough time keeping track of simple paperwork like paying the electric bill.

But I guess the incentive for getting it right is pretty strong.  I for sure will remember not to draw nigh to any ghostly cypress-trees.  That sounds scary.

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A handful of fragments

I've written here before about the tragedy of lost books -- and that prior to the invention of the printing press, the great likelihood is that most of the books ever written no longer exist.

It's not the overall loss of information, per se, that bothers me.  We certainly have access now to far more extensive information about the universe in which we live than at any time in history.  It's two things that are the real source of grief for me; the loss of knowledge of our own history, and the loss of seeing how the universe looked as filtered through other minds.  Each book is not only a record, it's a glimpse into the soul of the author.

When all of an author's books are gone, in a very real way, (s)he has been erased completely.

The extent to which ancient literature has been lost was driven home to me by the discovery that there are a bunch of instances of writing -- books, letters, poetry, codes of law, and so forth -- that are referenced in the Bible, but for which the originals have been lost.  Despite having read the Bible rather carefully (more than once), I honestly didn't know this.  Perhaps the fact that the references are generally made in passing, and (obviously, now that I know all this) alluding to no-longer-extant works I'd never heard of, the passages slipped by without my noticing.

Don't you have to wonder what was in those works that were referenced by the writers of the canonical books of the Bible, but which seem to have vanished forever?

Here are a few of the more interesting examples:

The Book of Jasher (Sefer HaYashar) is referenced twice -- in Joshua 10:13 ("And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies.  Is this not written in Sefer HaYashar?") and in in 2 Samuel 1:18 ("To teach the sons of Judah the use of the bow.  Behold, it is written in the Book of Jasher.").  It's even more mysterious than it might seem; the translation of קָ֑שֶׁת, qāšeṯ, here rendered as "bow," may not have meant a bow as in a bow and arrow, but a name for a stylized form of lamentation.  There have been a number of instances of people "finding" the Book of Jasher that have been quickly identified as forgeries; what the original said is anyone's guess.

The Book of Shemaiah the Prophet and Story of the Prophet Iddo are both mentioned in the Second Book of Chronicles -- but the only thing we know about them are their titles.

The Book of the Acts of Solomon comes up in 1 Kings 11:41 -- "And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?"  Well, it might well have been, but we'll never know, because the original is lost to history.

1 Chronicles 29:29 mentioned two lost books, and perhaps a third, in a single sentence: "Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the Book of Samuel the Seer, and in the Book of Nathan the Prophet, and in the Book of Gad the Seer."  The first, the Book of Samuel the Seer, may refer to 1 and 2 Samuel, canonical books of the Old Testament; biblical scholars are divided on the point.  What's certain that the Book of Nathan and the Book of Gad are both lost.

Also mentioned in Chronicles -- 2 Chronicles 26:22, to be specific -- is the Book of the Acts of Uzziah.  All we know of it is its title.

There's even an example from the New Testament.  In Colossians 4:16, Paul writes, "And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea."  There is no Epistle to the Laodiceans -- at least, there isn't now.

I bring this up to highlight how much of the written word we've lost over time.  If a work considered by many to be sacred, which has been carefully preserved and copied and treasured and hidden away when times were bad, still has pieces that have been lost forever, consider how much more of the world's literature is simply... gone.  Plays, stories, histories, scientific texts, maps, poems.  The majority of the creative output of the human race no longer exists.

Sorry to get all maudlin.  But it's why the end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose gets me every damn time.

I know it's the way of all things; nothing lasts forever.  But the magnitude of the loss is just staggering.  Like Brother William and Brother Adso at the end of Eco's book, we are left with only a handful of fragments.  It's that sense that gives the book its name, and it seems a fitting way to end this rather elegiac piece: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." 

"The rose of old remains only in its name; all we are left with in the end are naked names."

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Retracting the backfire

In general, I always cringe a little when I see that a scientific study has been called into question.

These days, especially in the United States (where being anti-science is considered a prerequisite for working in the federal government), the last thing the scientific endeavor needs is another black eye.  It's bad enough when the scientists were trying their hardest to do things right, and simply misinterpreted the data at hand -- such as the recent study that might have invalidated the Nobel-Prize-winning research that demonstrated the accelerating expansion of the universe, and the existence of dark energy.

It's worse still when the researchers themselves apparently knew their work was bogus, and published it anyhow.  It seems to validate everything Trump and his cronies are saying; the experts are all lying to you.  The data is inaccurate or being misrepresented.  Listen to us instead, we'd never lie.

Today, though, I came across an allegation that a very famous piece of research was based on what amounts to the researchers lying outright about what had happened in their study -- and if this debunking bears out, it will be about the best news we could have right now.

You ready?

You've probably all heard of the devastating paper called "When Prophecy Fails," published in 1956 by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.  If you're a long-time follower of Skeptophilia, you might well have read about it here, because I've cited it more than once.  The gist is that there was a UFO cult run by a woman named Dorothy Martin and a couple named Charles and Lillian Laughead.  Martin claimed she was receiving telepathic communications from extraterrestrials, and attracted a group of people who were into her weird mix of UFOlogy and Christian End Times stuff.  Well, after running this group for a time, she claimed she'd received word that there was going to be a catastrophic and deadly flood, but that the faithful were going to be picked up by spacecrafts and rescued -- on December 21, 1954.

The 1950 McMinnville (Oregon) UFO [Image is in the Public Domain]

Festinger, Riecken, and Schacter and several other paid observers infiltrated the cult, pretending to be true believers, and reported that when the 21st came and went, and -- surprise! -- no devastating flood and no flying saucers appeared, her followers' beliefs in her abilities were actually strengthened.  She told them their faithfulness had persuaded God not to flood the place, so the failure of the prophecy was a point in her favor, not against.

The three psychologists came up with terms describing this apparent bass-ackwards response to what should have been a terrible blow to belief, terms which will be familiar to you all: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect.  Both refer to people's abilities to maintain their belief even in the face of evidence to the contrary -- and their tendency to double down when that edifice of faith is threatened.

Well, apparently that wasn't the actual way events played out.

A psychological researcher named Thomas Kelly has written a paper that basically debunks the entire study.  Kelly became suspicious when he found that subsequent studies were unable to replicate the one done by Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter (whom Kelly calls "FRS"):

Inspired by FRS, several other scholars would later observe other religious groups that had predicted apocalypses.  Generally, they failed to replicate the findings of FRS.  Shortly after the publication of "When Prophecy Fails," Hardyck and Braden (1962) investigated an apocalyptic sect of Pentecostals to see if the failed apocalypse would result in enduring conviction and proselytization, but it did not.  Balch, Farnsworth, and Wilkins (1983) investigated a Baha'i group that inaccurately predicted an apocalypse and found that the failed prediction undermined the size, conviction, and enthusiasm of the group.  Zygmunt (1970) reviewed the proselytization efforts of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a group which has predicted the apocalypse multiple times, and found that failed prediction led to reduced proselytization.  Singelenberg (1989) also found that failed prophecies harmed proselytization efforts among the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Kelly got access to Leon Festinger's files, including reams of notes that were unpublished, and found that not only did the Martin/Laughead cult not come together with strengthened faith in the way he and his co-authors had described, within six months the entire thing had collapsed and disbanded.  In other words; the researchers seem to have lied about the facts of the case, not just their interpretation.  Here's what Kelly has to say:

The authors of "When Prophecy Fails" had a theory that when faced with the utter disconfirmation of their religious beliefs, believers would soldier on, double down, and ramp up the proselytization.  And the authors had ample resources to shape the cult’s behavior and beliefs.  Brother Henry [Riecken's alias while he was a cult member] steered Martin and the others at pivotal meetings.  The serendipitous, almost supernatural, arrival of Liz, Frank, and other paid observers buttressed the faith of the cultists.  The sheer quantity of research observers in the small group gave them substantial influence.  After the prophecy failed, Henry was able to prod Martin into writing the Christmas message and inspire belief in the supernatural by posing as the “earthly verifier,” an emissary of the "Space Brothers."

But even with all this influence, the study didn’t go as planned.  The group collapsed; belief died.  It did not persevere.  What did persevere was FRS’s determination to publish their work and Festinger’s determination to use it to launch the theory of cognitive dissonance.  Did any of Festinger, Riecken, or Schachter still believe at that point?  History is silent.

The full scope and variety of the misrepresentations and misconduct of the researchers needed the unsealed archives of Festinger to emerge; the full story could not be written until now.  But the reputation of "When Prophecy Fails" should not even have survived its first decade.

Now, Kelly's work is new enough that I'm fully expecting it to be challenged; Festinger et al.'s theory of cognitive dissonance is so much a part of modern psychological understanding that I doubt it'll be discarded without a fight.  But if even a fraction of what Kelly claims is vindicated, the FRS backfire effect study will have to be completely reconsidered -- just as we've had to reconsider a number of other famous psychological studies that have been partially or completely called into question, such as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the "Little Albert" Experiment, and the Milgram Experiment. 

My reason for being jubilant when I read this is not because I wish any kind of stain on the reputations of three famous psychological researchers.  It's that if the FRS study in fact didn't demonstrate a backfire effect -- if even being infiltrated by fake cult members who pretended to be enthusiastic true believers, and who encouraged the (real) members into keeping the faith, still didn't buoy up their damaged beliefs -- well, it means that humans can learn from experience, doesn't it?  That faced with evidence, even people in faith-based belief systems can change their minds.

And I, for one, find this tremendously encouraging.

It means, for example, that maybe -- just maybe -- there's a chance that the MAGA cult could be reached.  The recent release of hundreds, maybe thousands, of horrifying emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his cronies, in which Donald Trump's name figures prominently, may finally wake people up to the monstrous reality of who Trump is, and always has been.  (Even the few of these messages that have been made public are horrific enough to make my skin crawl.)  

The FRS study has always seemed to me to promote despondency; why argue against people when all it's going to do is make them more certain they're right?  But I had no reason to question their results.

Until now.

I'm sure there'll be more papers written on this topic, so I'll have to wait till the dust settles to find out what the final word is.  But until then -- keep arguing for what is right, what is decent and honest, and what is supported by the evidence.  Maybe it's not as futile as we'd been told.

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The incomplete algorithm

A paper this week in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics left me scratching my head.

To get why it's so puzzling -- and why not only I (an admitted layperson), but some actual physicists, are inclined to doubt its rather earth-shattering conclusion -- a little background first.

A few months ago I wrote here at Skeptophilia about Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.  This astonishing piece of work, published in 1931, dashed the hopes of people like David Hilbert that it could be proved that a purely algorithmic system like mathematics was both complete (all true statements that can be expressed within it are provable) and consistent (all provable statements that can be expressed within it are true).  Gödel proved, beyond any doubt, that mathematics cannot be both; if it is consistent, it is incomplete (some true statements are unprovable); if it is complete, it is inconsistent (some provable statements are untrue).

It was a devastating result.  We think of math as being cut-and-dried, a system where there's no fuzzy ambiguity.  Turns out there's a built-in flaw (although some might object to my calling it that); and not just mathematics, but any sufficiently powerful algorithmic system you could invent, would fall to the same death blow.

The other piece of background is also something I've dealt with here before; the possibility that we might live in a simulation.  The claim has been seriously considered by people like Nick Bostrom (of the University of Oxford) and David Kipping (of Columbia University); they looked at the questions of (1) if we were in a simulation, how we could tell, and (2) if simulation is possible, what our chances are of inhabiting the real, original universe (turns out, a fairly persuasive argument concludes that it's near zero).  Of course, that doesn't settle the truth of the major premises; (1) are we in a simulation? and (2) are simulations possible?, respectively.  And as anyone who's taken a course in logic knows, if the first part of a syllogism is false, you can conclude any damnfool thing you want from it.  (More accurately, if the major premise is false, the conclusion could be true or false, and there's no way to tell for sure.)

Okay.  So what this week's paper did is to look at the possibility of our being in a simulation, from a Gödelian perspective.  And their conclusion was that if the universe is a simulation, then it is by definition an algorithmic system, because anything that is runnable on a computer (even a super-powerful one) would have to be, at its basis, a set of algorithms.  Therefore, by Gödel's Theorem, there would have to be true statements that are unreachable from within the system, meaning there is more to the universe than can be reached from inside the simulation.  Conclusion: we can't be in a simulation, because it would be inherently incomplete.

My first thought on reading this was that I must be misinterpreting them, because the conclusion seemed like an enormous overreach.  But here is a quote from one of the authors, Mir Faizal of the University of British Columbia - Okanagan:

Drawing on mathematical theorems related to incompleteness and indefinability, we demonstrate that a fully consistent and complete description of reality cannot be achieved through computation alone.  It requires non-algorithmic understanding, which by definition is beyond algorithmic computation and therefore cannot be simulated.  Hence, this universe cannot be a simulation.

And another, by study co-author Lawrence Krauss, of Australian National University:

The fundamental laws of physics cannot be contained within space and time, because they generate them.  It has long been hoped, however, that a truly fundamental theory of everything could eventually describe all physical phenomena through computations grounded in these laws.  Yet we have demonstrated that this is not possible.  A complete and consistent description of reality requires something deeper -- a form of understanding known as non-algorithmic understanding.

So I don't think I'm misunderstanding their logic -- although I will certainly defer to wiser heads if there are any physicists in the studio audience.

The problem for me is that it is yet to be shown that the universe is non-algorithmic.  I'll buy that if it is algorithmic, there will be truths we can't reach by mathematical logic; so if this were a simulation, there'd be parts of it we couldn't get at.  But... so what?  I have no problem imagining a sufficiently complex simulation that gave such a convincing appearance of reality that any unreachable truths would be remote enough we might not have found them.

I think Faizal et al. may have too high an opinion of the capacity of the human brain for elucidating the workings of the universe.

Turns out I'm not the only one who has issues with this paper.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder did a brilliant take-down of the Faizal et al. study, and in fact gave it a nine out of ten on her infamous Bullshit Meter.  She said:

Unfortunately, [the paper] assumes its major premise.  We have never measured any quantity that is provably uncomputable.  To assume we can do this is logically equivalent to assuming we don't live in a simulation.  To see what I mean, let me turn their argument around.  Maybe the fact that we have never measured any quantity we can't also compute is proof that we are part of an algorithm that simulates the universe...  

We don't know any counterexamples.  The cases which I've mentioned that have been discussed in the literature always take some limit to infinity.  For example, they might use infinitely many atoms.  Or a lattice with an infinitely small spacing...  In these mathematical idealizations, yes, there are quantities that provably can't be computed in a finite time.  But we don't know any real-world examples.  Not a single one.  Isn't that weird?  It's like we actually can't measure anything that an algorithm could not also compute.  So maybe... we are algorithms.

In conclusion, the headlines I've seen, along the lines of, "Physicists Prove We're Not In A Simulation," strike me as a bit premature.  We haven't escaped from Bostrom and Kipping's matryoshka universe quite that easily.  Me, I'm going to stay in the "I don't know" column.  The Simulation Hypothesis certainly hasn't been proven, but despite Faizal et al., I don't think it's going to be easy to disprove, either.

So I guess we haven't settled whether the insane *gestures around vaguely at everything* we've been dealing with is real, or is (as I've suggested before) the result of stoned aliens twiddling the knobs just to fuck with us.  I'm honestly not sure which would be worse, frankly.

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Opinions, experts, and ignorance

I may have many faults, but one thing I try my damnedest not to do is to spout off on topics about which I am clearly ignorant.

That determination to limit my own pontificating to subjects upon which I have earned some right to pontificate is, unfortunately, not shared by a lot of people.  How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, I'm no expert, but...", followed by some ridiculous claim that appears to have been pulled directly from the person's nether orifice?

Well, if you're no expert, maybe a good strategy would be to keep your damn mouth shut.  Or, better still, to learn something about the topic at hand before you try to make a cogent statement about it.  If I know nothing about a subject, my opinions about it are very nearly worthless -- and personally, I don't have any need to pretend they aren't.

Sadly, "I have a right to my own opinion" seems, for a lot of people, to trump everything and everyone else, including people who have spent their entire lives studying the subject.

Which, unsurprisingly, brings us to Joe Rogan.

Rogan has turned this kind of thing into performance art.  He went to the University of Massachusetts for a while, but dropped out because he thought it was "pointless."  His two main accomplishments since then are fighting for (and later being a commentator for) the UFC, and being a stand-up comedian and podcaster.  His show The Joe Rogan Experience is one long litany of pride-in-ignorance.  He's an on-again, off-again antivaxxer, and was one of the principal distributors of misinformation during the first months of the COVID-19 epidemic.  He hates former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with a passion, calling him "a fucking dictator" -- but in the next breath admitted he has "zero understanding of Canada's political system."  He called Israel's actions in Gaza "genocide," but ten days later had policy specialist Coleman Hughes as a guest, and when Hughes took Rogan to task about his assessment, Rogan shrugged it off with, "well, you know a lot more about it than I do."

Well, if you have "zero understanding" of something, maybe you shouldn't be talking about it on your radio show, mmmm?  As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "If you don't know, then that's where the conversation should stop."

The reason Rogan's name comes up is because (ignorance notwithstanding) he is still way near the front of the pack in media popularity, despite two instances just in the last couple of weeks demonstrating that he apparently spends his spare time doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

In the first, he went on a long, rambling diatribe about how the 1969 Moon landing was definitely faked.  Probably by director Stanley Kubrick, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, because "That guy could fake it one hundred percent."

"People keep secrets," Rogan said.  "This idea that people can’t keep secrets because some people can’t keep secrets—high level military guys keep secrets all the fucking time.  They go to the grave with those secrets."

Oh, and there's no way astronauts could pass through the Van Allen radiation belts alive, he says.  "They never even flew a chicken through those fucking things and had it come back alive."

Well, at least he's right about that much.  NASA has sent exactly zero chickens into space.

So righty-o.  Back to reality.  We've known about the Van Allen belts since 1958, and sent probes up there repeatedly to measure radiation flux, and the astronomers (i.e. the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about) found that with proper shielding, both delicate technology and human beings could safely pass through them.  Me, I'm inclined to trust that over the rantings of a kickboxer-turned-podcaster.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait, there's more!"  Rogan also weighed in on cosmology last week -- because of course he did -- and said that in his opinion, Jesus makes more sense than the Big Bang:

People would be incredulous about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but yet they’re convinced that the entire universe was smaller than the head of a pin.  And for no reason than anybody’s adequately explained to me, that makes sense… instantaneously became everything.  Yeah.  Okay. I can’t buy that.  I’m sticking with Jesus on that one.  Like, Jesus makes more sense.

Now, I'm not going to get into the resurrection of Jesus -- Cf. my earlier comment about my not broadcasting my opinion in domains where I am manifestly unqualified -- but I do know a bit about cosmology, and what is clear from Rogan's statement is that he is apparently incapable even of comprehending the damn Wikipedia page on the Big Bang, wherein he (or anyone else) could have the topic "adequately explained" to them in five minutes or so.  

Or maybe he just can't be bothered.

Or both.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, Steven Crowder, February 2017]

But to return to my earlier point; why does anyone think this man's opinions, on topics where he himself demonstrates (and occasionally admits) complete ignorance, have any relevance?  If I were completely ignorant of geology, I might have the "opinion" that the interior of the Earth was filled with vanilla butter frosting with sprinkles, but that wouldn't affect the science at all -- it would just demonstrate that I was in no position to have my views taken seriously.

So why, why do people still listen to this guy?  Is it because his routine is mildly entertaining?  Is it because he might eventually say something correct, and the listeners are breathlessly waiting for that moment?

Or is it, heaven forfend, that people actually believe him?

I dunno.  It's probably not worth fighting someone who does what he does in the name of "entertainment."  But the news in the last few days has been pretty dismal, and this just kinda pushed me over the edge.

I so want to get back to a world where we trust experts.  Not blindly; experts can be mistaken just like anyone else (in fact, a recent discovery in physics seems to have invalidated some earlier research -- for which the researchers had won the Nobel Prize).  But the fact is that people who are trained in science, and spent their entire lives studying the field, are far less likely to be mistaken within their area of study than us laypersons.  Not only do they know the facts and understand the models, they get how evidence and data work -- and when a particular claim is supported and when it is not.  The current "don't trust the experts" thing, promulgated by loudmouths all the way up to and including Donald Trump, is deeply mystifying to me.

Anyhow, this is likely to earn me hate mail from people who love Joe Rogan.  I'm okay with that.  If you think everything he says makes sense, or that his claims should somehow be on the same plane as actual scientists, you and I don't have much common ground anyhow.  

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eMinister

If you needed further evidence that the aliens who are running the simulation we're all trapped in have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us, today we have: an AI system named "Diella" has been formally appointed as the "Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence" in Albania.

What "Diella" looks like, except for the slight problem that she's not real

I wish I could follow this up with, "Ha-ha, I just made that up," but sadly, I didn't.  Prime Minister Edi Rama was tasked with creating a department to oversee regulation and development of AI systems in the country, and he seems to have misinterpreted the brief to mean that the department should be run by an AI system.  His idea, apparently, is that an AI system would be less easy to corrupt.  In an interview, a spokes(real)person said, "The ambition behind Diella is not misplaced.  Standardized criteria and digital trails could reduce discretion, improve trust, and strengthen oversight in public procurement."

Diella, for her part, agrees, and is excited about her new job.  "I'm not here to replace people," she said, "but to help them."

My second response to this is, "Don't these people understand the problems with AI systems?"  (My first was, "What the actual fuck?")  There is an inherent flaw in how large language models work, something that has been euphemistically called "hallucination."  When you ask a question, AI/LLM don't look for the right answer; they look for the most common answer that occurs in their training data, or at least the most common thing that seems close and hits the main keywords.  So when it's asked a question that is weird, unfamiliar, or about a topic that was not part of its training, it will put together bits and pieces and come up with an answer anyhow.  Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a video where she discusses why AI systems (as they currently exist) have intractable problems, and that the AI bubble is on its way to bursting, cites someone who asked ChatGPT, "How many strawberries are there in the word R?" and the bot bounced cheerfully back with the answer, "The letter R has three strawberries."

The one thing current AI/LLM will never do is say, "I don't know," or "Are you sure you phrased that correctly?" or "That makes no sense" or even "Did you mean 'how many Rs are in the word strawberry?'"  They'll just answer back with what seems like complete confidence, even if what they're saying is ridiculous.  Other examples include suggesting adding 1/8 of a cup of nontoxic glue to thicken pizza sauce, a "recommendation from geologists at UC Berkeley" to eat a serving of gravel, geodes, and pebbles with each meal, that you can make a "spicy spaghetti dish" by adding gasoline, and that there are five fruit names that end in -um (applum, bananum, strawberrum, tomatum, and coconut).

Forgive me if I don't think that AI is quite ready to run a branch of government.

The problem is, we're strongly predisposed to think that someone (in this case, something, but it's being personified, so we'll just go with it) who looks good and sounds reasonable is probably trustworthy.  We attribute intentionality, and more than that, good intentions, to it.  It's no surprise the creators of Diella made her look like a beautiful woman, just as it was not accidental that the ads I've been getting for an "AI boyfriend" (and about which I wrote here a few months ago) are fronted with video images of gorgeous, scantily-clad guys who say they'll "do anything I want, any time I want."  The developers of AI systems know exactly how to tap into human biases and urges, and make their offers attractive.

You can criticize the techbros for a lot of reasons, but one thing's for certain: stupid, they aren't.

And as AI gets better -- and some of the most obvious hallucinatory glitches are fixed -- the problem is only going to get worse.  Okay, we'll no longer have AI telling us to eat rocks for breakfast or that deadly poisonous mushrooms are "delicious, and here's how to cook them."  But that won't mean that it'll be error-free; it'll just mean that what errors are in there will be harder to detect.  It still won't be self-correcting, and very likely still won't just say "I don't know" if there's insufficient data.  It'll continue to cheerfully sling out slop -- and to judge by current events, we'll continue to fall for it.

To end with something I've said many times here; the only solution, for now, is to stop using AI.  Completely.  Shut off all AI options on search engines, stop using chatbots, stop patronizing "creators" who make what passes for art, fiction, and music using AI, and please stop posting and forwarding AI videos and images.  We may not be able to stop the techbros from making it bigger and better, but we can try to strangle it at the consumer level.

Otherwise, it's going to infiltrate our lives more and more -- and judging by what just happened in Albania, perhaps even at the government level.

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Time lapse

Some days, being a skeptic is a losing proposition.

Only days after I posted a desperate plea for people to please check sources before posting/reposting/sharing/forwarding/whatever, I start seeing this popping up all over the place:

My first question was, "If they didn't detect it, how the fuck did they know it happened?"  But the image was followed by the following text, which should be accompanied with atmospheric, scary-sounding music:

What if, for a second, reality itself took a breath?

Somewhere between seconds, something strange happened.  Instruments across multiple observatories briefly froze—exactly 1.3 seconds of missing data, gone without error, glitch, or interference.  The world kept moving.  Clocks ticked.  But deep-space monitors, atomic timers, and gravitational wave sensors all recorded the same silence.  For a moment, time itself may have stopped.

Scientists are calling it a temporal anomaly, a mysterious blip that doesn’t fit any known pattern.  There was no solar flare, no magnetic disturbance, no hardware fault.  Everything just paused, then resumed as if nothing had happened.

While skeptics label it a data artifact, others suspect something deeper—perhaps a micro disruption in spacetime, or a ripple caused by massive gravitational shifts somewhere far across the cosmos.  If true, it means time isn’t as constant as we believe—it can tremble, stutter, or even halt briefly before stitching itself back together.

No one felt it.  No one saw it.  But machines built to measure eternity noticed—and that’s what makes it haunting.

If time can stop for 1.3 seconds… how many times has it already done so without us ever knowing?

Well, of all the things that never happened, this is the one that never happened the most.

We're told that this was reported as a huge mystery in Scientific American (it wasn't), and that physicists at MIT are hard at work trying to figure out what caused it (they aren't).  But the thing is, it doesn't take a Ph.D. in physics to see that there's something very off with this claim.

The problem here is that we always have to measure time relative to something (Cf. Einstein), so if every time-measuring device stopped simultaneously, there'd be no way to tell -- especially if (their words) "No one felt it... no one saw it."  If your watch is wrong, the only way you find out is by comparing it to an accurate clock, right?  If there was no accurate clock available, you'd continue thinking your own time measurement was the correct one, and show up to your doctor's appointment an hour late.

Even Star Trek: The Next Generation, which kind of made a name for itself playing fast and loose with the laws of physics, got that much right.  In "Timescape," Captain Picard, Deanna Troi, Geordi LaForge, and Data are on a shuttlecraft, and it passes through patches of distorted spacetime, in each of which time runs at a different speed; they figure it out because the patches are small, so they can actually see the effects of time passing at different rates in different parts of the shuttlecraft's interior (in one scene, Deanna sees everyone else seem to freeze in place, while she herself is still moving).  Likewise, in the extremely creepy episode "Schisms," Data figures out he was abducted from the ship (and from ordinary spacetime) for ninety minutes and seventeen seconds, but only because his internal chronometer is out of sync by that amount, by comparison to the ship's clocks.

That's not the only problen, though.  If time itself stopped, how would you measure how long it stopped?  Once "time stops" (whatever that actually means), there's no time passing by which to measure how long it stopped for.  "1.3 seconds" ceases to have any meaning at all.

But none of these objections seemed to occur to the people who posted this, nor (especially) to the vast majority of the people who responded to it.  Here's a sampler of the comments from just one instance of this showing up on Facebook.  Spelling and grammar are as written, because you can only write [sic] so many times:

• Time is determined by “light years” we are legitimately less than 1 second of life in the overall existence of what “time” truly is.
• Fuck yeah we did it, enough people are accessing the eternal now it’s starting to bring the rest of us over.
• It is possible that what happened in 1991 is beginning to come true.  I not only saw a UFO, but also met with Aliens on their spaceship.
• Time didn’t stop because time is made up by humans, everything exists all at once
• Its why my microwave keeps shifting backwards each week!!!!  I swear I set it to the right time, and within days, its back to being off by minutes.
• i actually experienced this but found it challenging to explain to others without sounding crazy or even dylusuonal so thank you for this post
• Probably due to the "asteriod" 3i/Atlas.
• Time is a human creation.  Ofcourse it has a flaw
• The moon is 1.3 light-seconds away.  Coincidence?

*brief pause to stop crying softly and banging my head on my desk*

I was somewhat heartened to run across a few comments stating that this is bullshit, and even one brave soul who waded in, guns blazing, making many of the same objections that I've made.  But the people who thought this all made sense far outnumbered the ones who recognized that it couldn't be true.

Look, on one level, I get it.  The world is kind of an awful place right now, and worse, it's so... banal.  Here we are in 2025, when we were told we'd have a sleek, shiny, high-tech world like The Jetsons, and instead we're still surrounded by the same old tawdry shoddiness as always, where the billionaires are trying to become trillionaires and the president of the United States spends millions of dollars tearing down half of the White House and turning the rest into what looks like a branch office of Cheesecake Factory, while the rest of us are trying to figure out how we can afford to buy groceries and pay for our health insurance.  I understand why anything that is enigmatic or exciting would be attractive.

Hell, at this point if the aliens did try to abduct me, I'll look upon it as a rescue mission.

But let's not let our attraction toward mysteries switch our brains off, okay?  In short: there was no temporal anomaly.  As described, if it did happen it would be at best undetectable, and at worst completely meaningless.  Time is not measured in light years, your microwave clock running slow is not an indication of a glitch in spacetime, we haven't "accessed the eternal," and none of this has anything to do with "asteriods."

Thank you. 

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