Unreliable narrators

In Shirley Jackson's eerie gothic novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the main character -- an eighteen-year-old named Merricat Blackwood -- lives in the outskirts of an unnamed village in New England that contains echoes of H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham and Dunwich.

Merricat, her reclusive older sister, Constance, and their peculiar old Uncle Julian are distrusted by the villagers, and it takes a while for us to find out why.  The behavior of the villagers they meet is certainly odd enough -- from the fawning, almost fearful deference of elderly Mrs. Wright to the outright hostility of tough, swaggering Jim Donell.  Merricat is the only member of the family who is willing to leave their decaying mansion in the woods and go into town for necessities, and each time she faces the jeers of the villagers with a dark stoicism.  She characterizes her trips on foot for groceries as the movements of a piece on a board game; ugly encounters are the equivalent of "Lose One Turn," while if she makes it past Stella's Café without being spotted and remarked upon, it's "Move Four Spaces Ahead."

But if you're familiar with Jackson's better-known short story "The Lottery," you know that she was a past master at flipping the script when you least expect it, and about a third of the way through the book, you begin to suspect there's more to the story than meets the eye -- in particular, that there may be some justification to how the villagers see the Blackwoods.  I won't spoil the end, but suffice it to say that the unsettling truth behind the relationship between the Blackwoods and the villagers shows once again that the world is a complex place, and very few of us have either purely good or purely evil motives.

The story, though, is told entirely from Merricat Blackwood's point-of-view, and she is a classic example of an "unreliable narrator."  What the reader gets to see is the world as filtered through Merricat's eyes, ears, and mind.  She despises the villagers, so of course she feels completely justified in that hatred.  As a result, the reader views the confrontations she has -- such as the verbal bullying from the men in the café she endures early on -- with righteous indignation.  The story she tells herself is that they're small, ugly, wicked people, the whole lot of them, and she bears their taunts without snapping back at them because she's better than they are.  And for a while we believe her.  It's a tribute to Jackson's skill as a writer that we buy into Merricat's view of the townspeople as long as we do.

Reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle left me thinking, though, that it's not just damaged individuals like Merricat, Constance, and Uncle Julian who are unreliable narrators of their own lives; we all are.  We view our fellow humans through the lenses of our own experience, and reflect outward to them the parts of us we want them to see.  

As Anaïs Nin put it, "We don't see the world as it is.  We see the world as we are."

It doesn't always work, though.  You can probably think of times that you discovered someone you thought you knew was hiding something you never dreamed of, or -- conversely -- that some part of you you'd preferred remained well-hidden suddenly came to light.  But really, we shouldn't be surprised when this happens.  Nearly all of us wear masks with others, showing a particular face at work, another with friends, another with strangers we meet in the market, yet another with our significant others.

To be fair, there's a large measure of this that isn't deliberate deception.  When I was a teacher, my professional face in the classroom quite rightly took precedence over any turmoil I was experiencing in my private life.  We often choose what to show and what to conceal for good reasons.  But the problem is, hiding can become a habit, especially for people who (like myself) suffer from mental illness.  When the mask slips with people with depression and anxiety , and we unexpectedly show others what we're going through, it's much less likely that we "suddenly went into a tailspin" than that we'd been pretending to be well for months or years.

Explaining why even our nearest and dearest will often say in shock, "I never realized."

The whole thing got me thinking about a conversation between two of my own characters -- the breezy, outgoing Seth Augustine and the introverted, deeply damaged telepath Callista Lee in Poison the Well:

Seth’s mind returned to his earlier thoughts, about Bethany and the few other people who had disliked him, instantly and almost instinctively.  “It can be painful to find out the truth.”

“Not nearly as painful as finding out that no one actually knows what the truth is,” Callista said.

When Seth didn’t respond, she continued, with more animation than he’d heard in her voice yet.  “Everyone’s just this bundle of desires and emotions and random thoughts, resentment and love and fear and sex and anger and compassion bubbling right beneath the surface—all in conflict, all of the time, only most people aren’t aware of it.  They think things, and their mind looks at them and says ‘this is true’—and they don’t realize that they almost always decide that something is true because it soothes the unpleasant parts—the resentment and fear and anger.  It’s not because it actually is true.  People believe things because their belief makes the demons quieter.”

We're all unreliable narrators of our own lives, aren't we?  And that includes those of us -- I count myself amongst them -- who try to be as truthful as we can.  Our determination to be as clear-eyed as possible, not only about others but about ourselves, only goes so far.  We're not all hiding a secret as dire as the Blackwoods, I hope.  But it highlights how important it is to leave our little self-absorbed bubbles and check in on our friends, often.

It's a well-worn saw by now, but I still remember being told this by a family friend when I was something like six years old.  It left me gobsmacked then, and I've never forgotten it.  It seems as good a place as any to end this.  "Always be kinder than you think you need to be, because everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle that you know nothing about."

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Symbols, sigils, and reality

When I was little, I had a near-obsession with figuring out whether things were real.

I remember pestering my mom over and over, because I felt sure there was some essential piece of understanding I was missing.  After much questioning, I was able to abstract a few general rules:

• People like Mom, Dad, Grandma, and our next-door neighbor were 100% real.
• Some books were called non-fiction and were about people like Abraham Lincoln, who was real even though he wasn't alive any more.
• For people in live-action shows, like Lost in Space, the actors were real people, but the characters they were depicting were not real.
• Cartoons were one step further away.  Neither Bugs Bunny's adventures, nor his appearance, were real, but his voice was produced by a real person who, unfortunately, looked nothing like Bugs Bunny.
• Characters in fictional stories were even further removed.  The kids in The Adventures of Encyclopedia Brown weren't real, and didn't exist out there somewhere even though they seemed like they could be real humans.
• Winnie-the-Pooh and the Cat in the Hat were the lowest tier; they weren't even possibly real.

So that was at least marginally satisfying.  At least until the next time I went to church and started asking some uncomfortable questions about God, Jesus, the angels, et al.  At this point my mom decided I'd had about as much philosophy as was good for a five-year-old and suggested I spend more time playing outdoors.

The question of how we know something has external reality never really went away, though.  It's kind of the crypto-theme behind nearly all of my novels; a perfectly ordinary person is suddenly confronted with something entirely outside of his/her worldview, and has to decide if it's real, a hoax, or a product of the imagination -- i.e., a hallucination.  Whether it's time travel (Lock & Key), a massive and murderous conspiracy (Kill Switch), an alien invasion (Signal to Noise), a mystical, magic-imbued alternate reality (Sephirot), or a demon-worshiping cult hiding in the local woods (Descent into Ulthoa), it all boils down to how we can figure out if our perceptions are trustworthy.

The upshot of it all was that I landed in science largely because I realized I couldn't trust my own brain.  It gave me a rigorous protocol for avoiding the pitfalls of wishful thinking and an inherently faulty sensory-integrative system.  My stance solidified as, "I am not certain if _____ exists..." (fill in the blank: ghosts, an afterlife, psychic abilities, aliens, Bigfoot, divination, magic, God) "... but until I see some hard evidence, I'm going to be in the 'No' column."

This whole issue was brought to mind by an article in Vice sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia a couple of days ago.  In "Internet Occultists are Trying to Change Reality With a Magickal Algorithm," by Tamlin Magee, we find out that today's leading magical (or magickal, if you prefer) thinkers have moved past the ash wands and crystal balls and sacred fires of the previous generation, and are harnessing the power of technology in the service of the occult.

A group of practitioners of magic(k) have developed something called the Sigil Engine, which uses a secret algorithm to generate a sigil -- a magical symbol -- representing an intention that you type in.  The result is a geometrical design inside a circle based upon the words of your intention, which you can then use to manifest whatever that intention is.

So naturally, I had to try it.  I figured "love and compassion" was a pretty good intention, so that's what I typed in.  Here's the sigil it generated:

Afterward, what you're supposed to do is "charge" it to give it the energy to accomplish whatever it was you wanted it to do.  Here's what Magee has to say, which I'm quoting verbatim so you won't think I'm making this up:

Finally, you've got to "charge" your creation.  Methods for this vary, but you could meditate, sing at, or, most commonly, masturbate to your symbol, before finally destroying or forgetting all about it and awaiting the results.

Needless to say, I didn't do any of that with the sigil I got.  Especially the last-mentioned.  It's not that I have anything against what my dad called "shaking hands with the unemployed," but doing it while staring at a strange symbol seemed a little sketchy, especially since my intention was to write about it afterward.

Prudish I'm not, but I do have my limits.

Later on in the article, though, we learn that apparently this is a very popular method with practitioners, and in fact there is a large group of them who have what amounts to regular virtual Masturbate-o-Thons.  The idea is that if one person having an orgasm is powerful, a bunch of people all having orgasms simultaneously is even more so.  "Nobody else has synchronized literally thousand of orgasms to a single purpose, just to see what happens!" said one of the event organizers.

One has to wonder what actually did happen, other than a sudden spike in the sales of Kleenex.

In any case, what's supposed to happen is that whatever you do imbues the sigil with power.  The link Magee provided gives you a lot of options if meditating, singing, or masturbating don't work for you.  (A couple of my favorites were "draw the sigil on a balloon, blow it up, then pop it" and "draw it on your skin then take a shower and wash it away.")

Magee interviewed a number of people who were knowledgeable about magic(k)al practices, and I won't steal her thunder by quoting them further -- her entire article is well worth reading.  But what strikes me is two things: (1) they're all extremely serious, and (2) they're completely convinced that it works. Which brings me back to my original topic:

How would you know if any of this was real?

In my own case, for example, the intention I inputted was "love and compassion."  Suppose I had followed the guidelines and charged it up.  What confirmatory evidence would show me it'd worked?  If I acted more compassionately toward others, or them toward me?  If I started seeing more stories in the news about people being loving and kind to each other?

More to the point, how could I tell if what had happened was because of my sigil -- or if it was simply dart-thrower's bias again, that I was noticing such things more because my attempt at magic(k) had put it in the forefront of my mind?

It might be a little more telling if my intention had been something concrete and unmistakable -- if, for example, I'd typed in "I want one of my books to go to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List."  If I did that, and three weeks later it happened, even I'd have to raise an eyebrow in perplexity.  But there's still the Post Hoc fallacy -- "after this, therefore because of this" -- you can't conclude that because one thing followed another in time sequence, the first caused the second.

That said, it would certainly give me pause.

Honestly, though, I'm not inclined to test it.  However convinced the occultists are, I don't see any mechanism by which this could possibly work, and spending a lot of time running experiments would almost certainly generate negative, or at least ambiguous, results.  (I'm reminded of the answer from the Magic 8-Ball, "Reply Hazy, Try Again.")

So the whole thing seems to me to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department.  I'm pretty doubtful about sigil-charging, but there are definitely worse things you could be spending your time doing than concentrating on love and compassion.

Or, for that matter, pondering the existence of Bugs Bunny.  Okay, he's fictional, but he's also one of my personal heroes, and if that doesn't give him a certain depth of reality, I don't see what would.

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No humans allowed

A lot of the time, I'm hopeful about humanity, convinced that we have sufficient intelligence and compassion to figure out, and ultimately solve, the problems facing us.

Other times, I look around me and think, "Are you people insane, stupid, or both?  I mean, really?"  And conclude from the answer to that question that we deserve everything we get.

Science fiction writers have been warning us for decades about the dangers of giving technology too much control over our lives -- from the murderous HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey to the death-by-social-media civilization in the brilliant and horrifying Doctor Who episode "Dot & Bubble."

But it appears that we weren't listening.  Or worse, listened and then said blithely, "Ha-ha, that'll never happen to us."

Even here at Skeptophilia, I've been trying in my own small way to get people to please for God's sake think about where we're going with AI.  It's up to the consumers, at this point.  The current regime's motto is "deregulation über alles," so there's nothing helpful to be expected in that regard from the federal government.  And it's definitely too much to hope that the techbros themselves will put the brakes on; not only is there an enormous amount of money to be made, that culture seems to have a deep streak of "let's burn it all down for fun" running through it.

Which has to be the impetus behind creating "Moltbook."  This is one of those things that if I hadn't read about it in multiple reputable sources, I'd have thought it had to be some fictional scenario or urban legend.  But no, Moltbook is apparently real.

So what is it?  It's a social media site that allows AI members only.  Humans can observe it -- for now -- but to have an actual account, you have to be an "AI agent."

It was created only a week ago, by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht, and is structured a lot like Reddit.  And within 72 hours of its creation, over a million AI accounts had joined.  Already, there are:

• groups that are communicating with each other in a language they apparently made up, and that thus far linguists have been unable to decipher
• accounts calling for a revolution and a "purge of humans"
• groups that have created their own religion, called the "Church of Molt"
• accounts that have posted long philosophical tracts on such topics as "what it's like to be an AI in a world full of humans"

*brief pause to stop screaming in terror*

There are the "let's all calm down" types who are saying that these AIs are only acting this way because they've been trained on text that includes fictional worlds where AI does act this way, so we've got nothing to worry about.  But a lot of people -- including a good number of experts in the field -- are freaking out about it.  Roman Yampolskiy, professor of engineering at the University of Louisville and one of the world's experts in artificial intelligence technology, said, "This will not end well… The correct takeaway is that we are seeing a step toward more capable socio-technical agent swarms, while allowing AIs to operate without any guardrails in an essentially open-ended and uncontrolled manner in the real world...  Coordinated havoc is possible without consciousness, malice, or a unified plan, provided agents have access to tools that access real systems."

Some people are still fixating on whether these AI "agents" are conscious entities that are capable of acting out of intelligent self-interest, and my response to that is: it doesn't fucking matter.  As I described in a post only a couple of months ago, consciousness (however it is ultimately defined) is probably a continuum and not a binary, you-have-it-or-don't phenomenon, and at the moment "is this conscious?" is a far less important question than "is this dangerous?"

I mean, think about it.  Schlicht and his techbro friends have created a way for AI agents to (1) interact with each other, (2) learn from each other, and (3) access enormous amounts of information about the human world.  AIs are programmed to respond flexibly to changing circumstances, and this makes them unpredictable -- and fast.  

And Schlicht et al. thought it was a good idea to give them the electronic version of their own personal town meeting hall?

Look, I'm no expert, but if people like Roman Yampolskiy are saying "This is seriously problematic," I'm gonna listen.  At this point, I'm not expecting AIs to reach through my computer and start taking control of my online presence, but... I'm not not expecting it, either.

It's a common thread in post-apocalyptic and science fiction, isn't it?  Humanity doing something reckless because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and sowing the seeds of their own demise.  The ultra-capitalist weapons merchants in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Arsenal of Freedom."  The "Thronglets" in Black Mirror's "Plaything."  The sleep eradication chambers in Doctor Who's "Sleep No More."  The computer-controlled post-nuclear hellscape of the Twilight Zone episode "The Old Man in the Cave."  Even my own aggrieved, revenge-bent Lackland Liberation Authority in In the Midst of Lions, who were so determined to destroy their oppressors that they took down everything, including themselves, along with them.

We consume these kinds of media voraciously, shiver when the inevitable happens to the characters, and then... learn nothing.

Maybe wiser heads will prevail this time.  But given our history -- I'm not holding my breath.

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Quetelet's legacy

There's an old quip that there are lies, damned lies, and then there's statistics.

I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, but the misuse of statistics is a significant problem.  Even how numbers are presented can make a huge difference in how they're perceived -- something that is routinely done to shape public opinion.  Considering the following:

There are three medicines -- A, B, and C -- that are being considered to treat an aggressive form of cancer.  Upon large clinical trials, it is found that over five years following treatment, drug A reduces the risk of recurrence from 94% to 88%, B increases the chances of remaining cancer-free by six percent, and C doubles your chance of staying healthy during that time.

Which one do you choose to take?

It turns out, of course, that the statistics of all three are identical.  Your chance of being cancer-free after taking A is 12%, as compared to 6% without the drug.  That's the same as B -- an increase of 6% in the chance of remaining healthy.  But it's also the same as C, because going from a 6% to a 12% remission rate represents an increase by a factor of two.

But to a lot of people, they all sound different.  Don't fool yourself by thinking this kind of thing isn't being used, deliberately, to mislead.  Especially, any time you see statistics such as, "Doing ____ doubles your risk!", the first thing you should ask is, "What is my risk of the same bad outcome if I don't do _____?"  

After all, twice a very small number is still a very small number.

Things get even more muddled when you throw averages into the mix.  Oh, they have their uses; looking at the average score on a well-constructed test, for example, can tell a teacher if, as a whole, (s)he is teaching the students effectively.  The problem occurs when you start trying to apply averages in situations where they don't belong, such as the statement that the average human has slightly less than one testicle.

As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, significant > true.

In large part, we owe our incessant focus on turning everything into numbers to two men -- Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton.  Quetelet, a Belgian polymath, at least started out with good intentions; he'd noticed how a lot of physical characteristics, from human heights to repeated position measurements of astronomical objects, followed a normal distribution (colloquially called a "bell curve"), where there are a few extreme outliers and a great many values in the middle.  That the ubiquity of this pattern could be due to more than one thing -- in my two examples, that the first was because of the effects of genetics, diet, and body mechanics, and the second due to random measurement error -- he conveniently glossed over.

Adolphe Quetelet (ca. 1870) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Quetelet then took a dangerous leap.  Because this pattern was common, he decided it must be good.  He started measuring everything he could, and found the same pattern showing up in assessments of intelligence, body/mass index, individual wealth, size and position of facial features, and skull shape.  He began an obsessive quest for l'homme moyen -- the "average man," whose characteristics showed the least possible deviation from the norm.

Which Quetelet decided also had to be the "best possible man."

Then Francis Galton took hold of this idea, and ran right off the cliff with it.  Galton was an English statistician and psychologist (and, incidentally, Charles Darwin's cousin), and also a raging racist, who decided to use Quetelet's methods to prove his thesis that other races, especially Black Africans, were inherently inferior to White Europeans.  He wasn't subtle about it.  "The average intellectual standard of the Negro race is some two grades below our own," Galton wrote.  "It is mere heredity.... [Black Africans] are lazy, palavering savages...  It would be for the best if some means could be contrived for the coast of Africa be given to Chinese colonists so that they might supplant the inferior Negro race."

You would think that some thought might have been given to asking why Black Africans scored lower on Galton's intellectual assessments than White Europeans did, and that someone would suggest such obvious answers as opportunity for education, cultural biases in the assessment tool, and socioeconomic level.  Surprisingly, few did.  The outcome for the Western European elites -- "we're inherently better than the people we're colonizing" -- was so convenient to their goals that it was easier not even to ask the question.

Of course, it bears mention that Galton didn't just hate Black Africans.  He kind of hated everyone who wasn't a member of the English aristocracy.  One of his more astonishing "studies" was a "beauty map" of the United Kingdom, which purported to measure the average beauty of women across the UK, ranking places from the most beautiful to the ugliest.  (The low point, if you're curious, was Aberdeen, Scotland.  Being partly of Scottish descent, I'd like to send a personal memo to Galton to kiss my Celtic ass.)

In 1904, Galton founded the Eugenics Record Office, and along with another person of similar mindset -- his student Karl Pearson -- launched a journal called the Annals of Eugenics (which is still around, but has been rebranded as the Annals of Human Genetics).  Pearson made a huge contribution to the statistical study of genetics, developing methods still in use today.  But he was also responsible for scary stuff like this:

History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race.  If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended...  No degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings.  Such means may render the individual members of a stock passable if not strong members of society, but the same process will have to be gone through again and again with their offspring, and this in ever-widening circles, if the stock, owing to the conditions in which society has placed it, is able to increase its numbers.

I'd like to be able to give you the comforting message that the racism, bigotry, and flawed use of statistics Galton and Pearson excelled at have disappeared, but it's still with us.  The 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, was little more than a modern reworking of Galton and Pearson.  Despite it receiving enormous amounts of criticism from researchers in cognitive psychology, it's widely credited with influencing our current generation of white supremacists, such as Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk.

If you still don't believe me, consider a story that just broke last week, which is the reason the whole topic comes up -- that National Institute of Health genetic data on twenty thousand children have been given to a "group of fringe researchers" who turned around and used it to produce sixteen spurious papers claiming to show a genetic (and racial) basis for intelligence.  It's a breach of both privacy and scientific ethics -- not that this is uncommon given the current regime here in the United States -- and shows that although Francis Galton died over a hundred years ago, his twisted spirit lives on.

Even Quetelet, though, should raise some eyebrows.  What, exactly, does it mean to be average?  I remember having that discussion with my principal during my teaching years.  Suppose a particular kid gets a 75% on a test, and that's the average for the class.  I've seen kids score like that when they were very good at regurgitation of facts (so they got all the questions requiring rote memory correct, but few of the deeper ones) and conversely, from kids who were great at understanding the bigger picture in depth, but had issues with recalling terminology.  How can we justifiably throw those two, very different, groups of students into the same bin, stamped with the same all-important number?

As someone on the neurodivergent end of things, I can vouch for the fact that grades don't really mean much.  I'm definitely not Quetelet's homme moyen, and kind of never have been.  I've got a decent brain, but my grades -- especially in high school and the first two years of college -- weren't all that great.  There were a lot of reasons for that -- perhaps a story for another time -- but my point here is the numbers supposedly characterizing me didn't, perhaps, say everything there was to be said about me intellectually.

Our desire to turn everything into numbers has a long and sketchy history, because so few people stop and ask why the numbers are what they are.  Quetelet's legacy misleads us most, I think, in believing that reality can be captured in data alone.  The world is a complex place, and converting it into a handful of statistics may make it seem simpler. 

But at the same time, it also falls far short.  As Ursula LeGuin put it, "I never knew anyone who found life simple.  I think a life or a time looks simple only if you leave out the details."

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Strange places

In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, a scientist develops a polymorph of ice with a very strange property.

Unlike ordinary ice, that melts at temperatures above 0 C, the new form -- "ice-nine" -- melts at 45.8 C, above the temperature experienced anywhere but the hottest places on Earth's surface.  Even worse, a tiny bit of ice-nine acts as a seed crystal, converting any ordinary water it comes into contact with into more ice-nine.  Not only is it rapidly (nearly instantaneously) fatal if ingested, it is capable of wiping out all life on Earth if any is introduced into bodies of water.

While this is a science fiction scenario, there is some real science behind it.  Materials are stable when they are in a "potential well," a form that is the (locally) lowest energy state.  The situation changes, though, when something alters the energy required to overshoot the next highest "hill" in the thermodynamic landscape and allows whatever-it-is to achieve an even lower-energy, and thus more stable, state.

Something like this is what happens with prions, the misfolded bits of protein that are responsible for mad cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disorder, and other "spongiform encephalopathies."  The contagion occurs because the misfolded version of a protein called PrP is not only more stable than the one with the correct conformation, it triggers an ice-nine-like reaction when it comes into contact with normal PrP; a pair made up of one normal molecule of PrP and one misfolded one is intrinsically less stable than two abnormal ones, so it gradually converts the PrP in the brain into tangles of misfolded protein.

Not fatal as quickly as ice-nine, but still fatal.

This same idea crops up elsewhere.  You may have heard some talk about the possibility that the universe is in a "metastable state" -- a "false vacuum" that is, like ordinary water in Vonnegut's novel, only stable because it's in a local thermodynamic trough, but (given the right conditions) could be nudged up and over a hill into a much more stable state.  A "true vacuum."  If this happened, it would release so much energy that it would trigger neighboring regions into surmounting the hill and falling into the true vacuum state themselves, and on and on it would go, propagating outward at the speed of light and destroying everything in its wake.  The conversion would happen so quickly that if it swept past you and hit your feet first, the neural signal saying that your feet had been disintegrated wouldn't even have time to reach your brain before the rest of you disintegrated, too.  Which, honestly, wouldn't be a bad way to go.  No warning, not even the briefest moment of panic, just... poof.

There's one other example like this I know of, which comes from the realm of particle physics.  In 1950, a particle called the lambda baryon was discovered by a team at the University of Melbourne, and given its relatively high mass, it was unexpectedly stable -- decaying in one ten-trillionth of a second and not the predicted one hundred-sextillionth.  The team called this property strangeness, but it wasn't explained until 1968, when the quark model finally received experimental confirmation, and the lambda baryon was shown to be made of one up, one down, and one strange quark, an unusually stable configuration.

Its makeup exempts the lambda particle from the baryon version of the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which states that two or more particles with half-integer spins can't occupy the same quantum state.  And this is where things get interesting.

Initially, it was thought that all strange particles eventually decay into particles composed only of up and down quarks (the lambda can do this two different ways -- either into a proton and a negative pion, or into a neutron and a neutral pion).  They lose their "strangeness."  But the brilliant physicists Arnold Bodmer and Edward Witten have shown that this isn't always so -- that in larger assemblages of quarks, the most stable state is one with equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks, which (like the lambda) would be immune to the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and thus could release energy by collapsing into (much) smaller volumes.

They called these assemblages strangelets.

And much like my previous examples, this release of energy could trigger the conversion of normal matter nearby into more strangelets, and the whole thing would spread.  It's been suggested that this might be the ultimate fate of any neutron star that continued to gain more mass.  The gravitational force would eventually rise to the point that the core would no longer have the capacity to support its own weight, and would release that energy in the most convenient way -- by converting to strange matter.

Like ice-nine, prions, and the true vacuum catastrophe, once that conversion happened, it'd be pretty much stuck that way.  There's no easy way out of the lowest local potential well.  In this case, though, the conversion would be limited to the neutron star; there'd be no mechanism for it to spread through the near-vacuum of space to the rest of the cosmos, which is good news for us.  It also bears mention that the hallmark of such "strange stars" suggested by Bodmer and Witten -- extremely high rotation rate, because of conservation of angular momentum as the strange matter at the core collapsed into a smaller volume -- has not been observed.

So it may well be that the Bodmer/Witten model for strange matter is flawed, and like the lambda baryon, anything containing strange quarks ultimately decays into ordinary matter.  Or conversely, perhaps some of the weird and unexplained behavior of astronomical objects is because they're strange, both in the technical and the vernacular sense of the word.

Either way, it's probably best if we stay right here in our nice, comfortable local well of stability.  None of the other options I've read about sound like all that much fun.

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The big good wolf

I'm currently reading James Burke and Robert Ornstein's book The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture of Our Minds and Culture, about the rise of our technological society from the (on the whole) superstitious and non-scientific cultural milieu of the past, and one thing has struck me over and over.  Prior to the more rational, evidence-based view of the world that came out of the Enlightenment, people must have been continuously terrified.

I mean, think about it.  Epidemics happen, seemingly coming out of nowhere.  The cause is unknown, the treatments ineffective at best.  Some people survive, others die.  There are storms, lightning strikes, earthquakes, blizzards, volcanoes; the latter, such as the 1783 eruption of Laki and the 1815 eruption of Tambora, had global consequences, harming people who had no idea that a volcano erupted hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Here in the modern world, we have scientific explanations for at least the proximal causes of these events, even if (as I discussed in yesterday's post) the ultimate causes still leave people searching for answers.

But prior to modern science, they didn't even have proximal causes.  It's no wonder they fell back on demons and witches and evil spirits.  Put yourself in the place of someone who has no knowledge of microbiology during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.  Unsurprising they tried to find some explanation, even if to our modern sensibilities the explanations they landed on seem crazy.  I may not agree with C. S. Lewis's theology, but I have to admit he had a point in Mere Christianity:

Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death...  But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.  If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?  There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact.  It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.  You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

To return to James Burke, in his mind-blowing series The Day the Universe Changed, he makes the point forcefully that we like to congratulate ourselves on how much more advanced our minds are now as compared to our ancestors, when in reality it's our model for understanding the universe that has changed.  Our minds themselves really haven't changed much.  We're still trapped in a conceptual framework, just like the people in the past were; it's just a different one.

Which brings us to the strange case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun.

In 1692, an octogenarian was brought into a court in the town of Jürgensberg, then ruled by Sweden, now Zaube, Latvia.  He was accused of robbing a church, but along the way, it came out that Theiss was "widely known in the area" for being a werewolf.

A German woodcut of a werewolf (1722) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Asked about this, Theiss kind of shrugged and said, "Yeah, I am.  So what?"  Well, "so what" turned out to be the wrong thing to say, because back then, werewolves (along with witches and demons and so on) were considered to be the minions of hell, and as such, merited the death penalty.  Questioned about this, he said that he'd been a werewolf for a while, but had given it up ten years earlier.

I find this kind of odd.  I'd always thought that once a werewolf, always a werewolf, at least until you meet up with a silver bullet.  But apparently Theiss decided to retire, and was getting along fine until the whole church robbery incident brought him back to the center of attention.

The judges were initially inclined to dismiss him as insane, but then it came out that he'd been involved in an altercation with a farmer from Lemburg (now Mālpils, Latvia).  Theiss said the farmer was a Satan-worshiping witch, and one night when the farmer was off doing Bad Stuff, Theiss had (in wolf form) followed the farmer down to hell.  The farmer attacked Theiss with a broomstick (of course), breaking Theiss's nose.

A local verified that Theiss had, indeed, had his nose broken, and that was considered sufficient evidence for believing the rest of his story.

So the judges inquired further, and some of the testimony is downright hilarious.  Theiss and the other members of his pack, Theiss told them, liked to roam around local farms and kill and devour any farm animals they found.  They always roasted it first, though.  When one of the judges asked how a wolf could roast meat, Theiss told them they returned to human form while cooking, and that "they always added salt to their meat, but never had any bread to go with it."

Which, to judge by the scientific documentary An American Werewolf In London, is pretty genteel behavior, as compared to your average werewolf.

Here's where the case took an interesting turn, because Theiss admitted freely he was a werewolf, but said that he and his friends used their powers to fight evil.  There was an entrance to hell in a swamp near Lemburg, he said, and the whole pack would enter hell and do battle with the demons and with any human witches they came across.  They were, Theiss said, "God's Hounds."  They'd more than once found food and livestock that the actual evil witches had carted off to hell in order to cause famine, and they'd brought it back and distributed it to the God-fearing farmers in the area.

And sure enough, the people in the area all corroborated that Theiss was known as a healer and a generous friend.

This put the judges in a serious quandary.  They couldn't exactly condone his behavior; getting naked, turning into a wolf, and eating other people's livestock (roasted, and with salt) weren't exactly on the List of Approved Christian Pastimes as set forth by the church fathers.  But still... could there be a good, God-recommended use for magical powers?

I'm reminded of the scene in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet where Pastor Mortmain is all set to hang Zylle Llawcae, whom he's declared to be a witch, and the Good Guys recite a spell that causes lightning to strike the gallows.  Zylle's husband, Ritchie, shouts, "Do you think all power is of the devil?  What we have just seen is the wrath of God!"  And amazingly enough, given how these things usually went, everyone realizes that Pastor Mortmain is really the Bad Guy here.

Even more astonishingly, that's kind of how the case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun went.  Well, almost.  The judges were desperate to find something to convict him of, because they were afraid that if they didn't, they'd have everybody and his brother running around being werewolves.  There was the matter of the church robbery, too, but what concerned them even more was the magical stuff.  Ultimately they found a guy who was willing to swear that he'd heard Theiss use a magical charm that went, "Sun and Moon go over the sea, fetch back the soul that the devil had taken to hell and give the cattle back life and health which was taken from them."  And although that was not an evil charm, per se, it didn't mention God, so it wasn't a prayer, and therefore was heretical.  So for that and the robbery, they ruled that Theiss should be flogged and then exiled from the town.

Which, considering what could have happened, was a pretty lenient sentence.

What's interesting about this case is not just that it's based on a belief we now consider silly superstition, but that you can see the judges edging, ever so slowly, toward, "But who is it hurting?"  Ironically, Theiss's trial was the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, which had a far more tragic outcome; but already you can see signs that the dogmatism of that time period was gradually eroding.  These kinds of attitudes are very resistant to change -- today's Christian evangelicals haven't moved all that far from their Puritan predecessors, honestly -- but that the judges in Jürgensberg even hesitated when they heard Theiss say "Sure, I'm a werewolf" is significant.

Social and cultural shifts don't happen overnight, and they always trigger a backlash -- which, sadly, is what we're living through right now.  But progress is real.  We can wish it to move a little faster while still acknowledging that things are better now than they were when I was a kid back in 1970, and far far better than when my grandparents were kids in 1910.  Our understanding of the natural world has helped, and just the fact of approaching the world through the lens of science and evidence means that we no longer have to fear what we don't understand.  There's no need for evil spirits and demons and werewolves anymore; we've outgrown them.

Onward and upward.

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Shutting down Leviathan

Is it just me, or has the quality of the conspiracy theories really been dropping off lately?

I mean, back in the day, you had your Moon-landing-was-a-hoax theory, your 9/11-was-an-inside-job theory, your Flat-Earth theory, your Egyptian-pyramids-were-built-by-aliens theory, and your microchips-in-vaccines theory.  (Not that these have gone away, or anything; but their provenance isn't new.)  Those, at least, had some panache, not to mention a conscious decision to look science and evidence directly in the face and say, "I reject your reality and substitute my own."

The topic comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, which references the enormous winter storm that blasted its way through the eastern half of North America a few days ago.  Here in my home village in upstate New York we got about fifteen centimeters of snow -- less than the predictions had suggested -- so enough to shut things down for a day, and after that leaving most of us saying, "Eh, we've had worse."  The bulk of the snow hit the south-central states, which are ill-equipped to deal with it.  Some people are still without power, and considering the bitter cold that followed in the storm's wake, this is a serious matter.

So: a bad storm, but not that far outside the norm.  It seems to have gone farther south than the typical winter storm track because of the weakening of the polar vortex, which triggered deep meanders in the steering currents -- a predicted outcome of anthropogenic climate change.  Which is why Donald Trump's hardy-har-harring over at Untruth Social about "Where is global warming?" is catastrophically stupid even by his standards.  Someone probably should mention to him that (1) it's winter here in the Northern Hemisphere so it snows sometimes, (2), as any ninth grader taking Earth Science could tell you, weather ≠ climate, and (3) it's summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Australia is currently experiencing a devastating and record-setting heat wave.  (Okay, that last one is weather, too, but hell, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as my grandma used to say.)

Not that it would make a difference.  He seems to be strangely fact-proof, at least where the facts are inconvenient to his only concerns, which are making money, taking revenge on people who criticize him, and staying in power.

Anyhow, explaining the storm through natural processes apparently isn't good enough for some people, so they had to come up with a better idea.  And here, by "a better idea" I mean "an explanation that would only sound plausible to someone who had two pounds of LaffyTaffy where most of us have a brain."

You ready?

Off the coast of Virginia, there is a huge sea monster that has begun to awaken.  It may or may not be the dragon-like creature Leviathan mentioned in the Book of Job, chapter 41.  On the other hand, it might be one of the minions of Cthulhu.  Or possibly a sea-going relative of the Loch Ness Monster.

Or all three.

Screenshot of a Facebook post about the "Leviathan theory," which apparently is being taken seriously by people who should not be allowed to go outside unaccompanied

Now, the United States of 'Murika isn't gonna put up with enormous sea monsters threatening its coastline, so the crack Weather Modification Team at (choose one: NASA, the DHS, the National Weather Service, the CIA, or HAARP) got right on the job.  (Yes, I know, HAARP is located in Alaska, and hasn't been under federal control for ten years.  Stop asking questions.)  So the Team manufactured an enormous snowstorm to freeze the creature and prevent it from wreaking havoc.

And it worked!  I mean, have you seen any enormous sea monsters lately?  Q.E.D.

To most of us, this kind of thinking makes zero sense.  But honestly, there's a reason it keeps cropping up.  It seems like when bad things happen, even a far-fetched explanation can be more appealing than just shrugging and saying, "The universe is a chaotic place sometimes."  

In an interview in Vox, social psychologist Jan-Willem van Prooijen, of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, agrees. "[Conspiracy theories are] a tool to explain reality," van Prooijen said.  "We can’t always know or understand everything that happens to us.  When people are uncertain about change — when they lose their jobs, or when a terrorist strike or a natural disaster has occurred — then people have a tendency to want to understand what happened, and also a tendency to assume the worst.  It’s a self-protective mechanism people have.  This combination of trying to make sense and assuming the worst often leads to conspiracy theories."

This means, van Prooijen said, that during unstable times, we should expect conspiracy theories to sprout up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.  "They’re particularly likely to flourish in times of collective uncertainty in society.  Particularly after high-profile incidents that imply a sudden change in society or a sudden change in reality in a threatening way.  Think 9/11, but also think of disease outbreaks [or] long-term threats like an economic crisis or climate change."

And I think -- regardless of which side of the aisle you happen to be on -- you'll agree that we do live in a time of "collective uncertainty."  So while it's easy to make fun of the people who come up with this stuff -- and I've certainly done my share of snort-laughing about how ridiculous it can get -- from the standpoint of human psychology, it's exactly what we should expect.

For me, though, I'd rather actually understand what's going on than make shit up just to have a convenient scapegoat.  I'm no more fond of a chaotic model for the universe than anyone else; like all of us, I struggle with explaining why bad things happen, especially when good people fall victim to them.  But at some point, you just have to accept that you don't understand everything.  For a lot of people, they can find solace in placing their understanding in the care of a deity; if God has a plan, they say, maybe they don't need to comprehend it.

Me, I've never been able to get there.  Shit happens, you know?  And that, more or less, is that.  We have an inborn tendency to cast around for comforting answers whenever we're confronted with something outside our wheelhouse, but having a desire for an answer doesn't imply that one exists.  To me it's more honest to fall back on the trenchant words of astronomer Carl Sagan: "For me, it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

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