Different strokes

So once again, a member of the extreme evangelical fringe of Christianity has launched a campaign against our taking pleasure in something which we are biologically hard-wired to find pleasant.

Mack Major, a Christian writer from Philadelphia who owns the site Eden Decoded, has written an article that claims we shouldn't masturbate because masturbation can "summon a sex demon."

Here's a direct quote, in case you think I am making this up:

There are such things are sex demons.  And the danger in masturbating is that one could inadvertantly [sic] summon a sex demon to attach itself to you through the act of masturbating.  And once that demon attaches, it is difficult to get it to leave.  It will drive you to masturbate, even when you don’t want to. You’ll be hit with urges to play with yourself so powerful that only an orgasm will allow you some temporary relief.

Notwithstanding the fact that if this were true, the millions of teenage boys worldwide would be keeping the sex demons busy 24/7, Major seems convinced that by engaging in what a friend of mine calls "shaking hands with the unemployed" you are writing yourself a one-way express ticket to hell.

Major is also vehemently against any use of gadgets for increasing your enjoyment, even if those are used with a partner.  Erotic toys provide yet another means of ingress for those pesky sex demons:

Many of you who are reading this have sex toys in your possession right now.  And whether you want to accept it as fact or not: those sex toys are an open portal between the demonic realm and your own life.  As long as you have those sex toys in your home, you have a doorway that can allow demons to not only access your life at will, but also to torment you, hinder and destroy certain parts of your life as it relates to sex and your relationships.

Which highlights yet again my disagreement with the devoutly religious over the definition of the word "fact."

Besides the scary sex demons, it turns out that pleasuring yourself can also cause volcanic eruptions, and he's not using that in its justifiable metaphorical sense.  He means literal volcanic eruptions.  He tells us all about the pornographic scenes found on the walls of Pompeii, many of which involved the god Priapus, who was depicted as a naked dude with an enormous hard-on.  And he links that directly to what happened:

He [Priapus] was really popular in the ancient city of Pompeii… The walls of many of the homes and palaces were painted with detaield frescos of very graphic pornographic sexual scenes… Keep in mind that Pompeii was suddenly destroyed and thousands of lives were wiped out in an instant.

So yeah, that was a really unhappy ending.  Be that as it may, it's hard to see the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius as having anything to do with jacking off, or there'd be a major explosion underneath every adult theater in the United States every single night.  And the headquarters of PornHub would right now simply be a giant smoking crater.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The exasperating thing about all this is that masturbation is 100% normal, nearly everyone does it, it relieves stress, helps you sleep, and (for men) decreases the risk of prostate cancer.  What we have here is simply another way for the extremely religious to make everyone feel guilty, uptight, and anxious over something entirely harmless, and to maintain their control by convincing their followers that they're hellbound if they don't follow the leader's advice to the letter.

Major ends by telling us one last cautionary note:

When we imagine having sex with another via masturbation, we are actually summoning the power of the spirit realm to manifest the thing we are imagining.

Which is patently ridiculous, because if this were true, Kate Beckinsale and Liam Hemsworth would never have a free moment.

So anyway.  My advice is: in the privacy of your own home, do what comes naturally, enjoy it, and find something else to fret about.  I'm guessing that even if there is a supreme deity, he/she/it has much better things to do in Universe Management than keeping track of what you do in your "Alone Time."

Debate debacle

I have a particular aversion to seeing people humiliate themselves.  I remember as a kid watching sitcoms on television, and when I knew a character -- even one who richly deserved it -- was going to be put in an embarrassing situation, I often couldn't bear to watch it.

Still, there are certain exceptions.  I have to admit to experiencing an emotion that can only be described as "glee" when I heard that Sarah Palin was going to debate Bill Nye on the topic of climate change.

What, it wasn't bad enough that Ken Ham had his ass handed to him in a debate with Nye?  Ham at least is somewhat articulate, even if he doesn't seem to understand the concept of "evidence."  Palin, on the other hand, often seems to be speaking in some weird dialect that involves replacing every third word with a randomly chosen noun or verb.

Either that, or she does her speeches while drunk.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So a Nye vs. Palin debate would basically be Godzilla vs. Daffy Duck.  It would be worth watching purely for the comedic value.

However, I did wonder what Nye thought he stood to gain by debating her.  When your opponent has a fourth grade vocabulary and thinks that saying "You betcha" followed by a finger-gun constitutes a valid talking point, there's nothing much you can do that will have any effect.  Especially given that the topic is science.

So it was with combined disappointment and relief -- along with saying, "Aha.  That makes better sense" -- that I found out that Nye isn't actually debating Palin.

Palin is debating clips from speeches on climate change Nye has made.

So in effect, she'll have a cardboard cutout of Bill Nye standing there, play some carefully chosen sound bites, state her rebuttals, and declare victory.

The whole spectacle is set to coincide with the release of the petroleum-industry-sponsored propaganda piece Climate Hustle, which will be about as scientifically valid as Andrew Wakefield's anti-vaxx film Vaxxed that caused such a kerfuffle when it was pulled from showing at the Tribeca Film Festival.  The difference is that the anti-science climate change deniers and Tea Party right wingers like Sarah Palin are being funded by people like the Koch brothers, who have considerably deeper pockets than the anti-vaxxers do, and therefore far more influence.

Despite my reluctance to watch a long exercise in self-humiliation, I might watch the Sarah Palin climate change "debate."  If for no other reason, to pick up a few more lines like the following, part of a speech in 2011 in which she was trying to talk about the bravery of Paul Revere:

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.

Yeah!  Right!  What?

So I wonder what she'll have to say about anthropogenic climate change.  And whether she can pronounce "anthropogenic."  My advice: tune in on May 2.  When else will you have the opportunity to watch the spectacle of a person being defeated in a debate by someone who isn't, technically, there?

Vaccination vitriol

If you react to people challenging your beliefs by calling them frauds, shills, or sellouts, it's a pretty good indication that you're on shaky ground yourself.

The topic comes up because of the response the anti-vaxxers had to the shift in allegiance of a woman named Carmit, whose decision not to be vaccinated for whooping cough resulted in her newborn contracting the disease.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Carmit realized her role in her infant's illness, and made a plea for pregnant women to receive a whooping cough booster so that others would not have to go through what she and her daughter did.  "I wish I could turn back time," she said.

Her widely-publicized video brought the anti-vaxxers howling out of the woodwork.  Here's a sampling of the vitriol Carmit had thrown her way.

From someone who evidently has never heard of the No True Scotsman fallacy (or punctuation):

[I]f she's a true anti-vaxxer she'd know about viral shedding from a recently vaxxed person coming too close to her baby It's a RED HERRING The PR trolls must be getting desperate to stoop to this crap You can almost see them sitting around their table working out their next strategy to divide and conquer the "troops"

Well, to start with, whooping cough is caused by a bacteria (Bordetella pertussis), not a virus.  And even with a vaccine for a viral disease, you don't "shed" live virus after being vaccinated.  But why bother with science, right?

Then we have someone saying that there's no way that an honest person could have evaluated the facts and changed her mind:

What a crock of crap.  No anti vaxxer upon learning the truth, there is no going back... ever. 

Then she started to have accusations of being a fake, someone hired by the hospital or the pharmaceuticals industry to hoodwink people:

This woman looks so familiar im [sic] trying to find out from where...  I know I jave [sic] seen her before and thats [sic] a bit sus [sic] as i too think it might all be made up

I just wonder if it's a made up story and she's a paid pharma actor.  Can anyone get her image and use google image search to see if you can find her real name. 

Shill!  She should be ashamed of herself!

Then we heard about how the hospital set the whole thing up:

So many weeks in hospital, sleep deprived, you can be brainwashed to believe anything and they push hard at you with multiple doctors.  My suspicion is that they gave the baby antibiotics which makes whooping cough worse and they have taken advantage of her and got her to read from a script. 

After that, the accusations became even wilder -- including that Carmit's daughter in the video was actually a doll:

GC health is running a campaign to increase pregnant mum vaccines.  The lady is a paid actor with a doll.  It's going ballistic and makeing [sic] people think pregnant women need a shot to save their baby from whooping c.

I'm 95% sure she's holding a doll. 

The kids [sic] neck looks like it's about to break and you never see it move or breath during the whole video.  The lady really does have a baby but this may just be a fake to scare us all. 

Sweetie this is a fake prop baby.  I've been in the film industry for over 25 years.  She is an actress and that is a doll.  Jeez. 

Others chimed in with suggestions for what she could have done instead:

That's Bullshit she doesn't need willing [sic] cough vax she just needs to build up immune system with colloidal silver.

Right.  Colloidal silver.  Which besides being generally useless, has as a side effect turning your skin blue-gray -- permanently.

And then we hear that this is a false flag to distract us from discredited anti-vaxx researcher Andrew Wakefield's film Vaxxed, which came out on the same day as Carmit posted her video:

This story came out on the same day that Vaxxed was released.  The biggest load of crap propaganda.  Have you watched the video?  Obviously an actor.  And her "baby" doesn't move or even breathe.  I call bullshit.

And finally, we reach Conspiracy Theory Nirvana, wherein we find out that the entire story is made up -- neither Carmit nor her baby is real:

That whole story is made up.  It's part of the pro-vax campaign.  Campaigns are organised, so this story is too.  The story is full of contradictions and other absurdities.  Even if you don't know anything about the topic then still it's a very strange story that should raise a lot of red flags.

The whole thing is nauseating.  It's appalling that someone would be so desperate to cling to their counterfactual stance that they would respond to a challenge with slander, accusations of lying, and even doubts that the challenger exists.  What, are you so sure of yourself that you can't imagine anyone looking at the facts and coming to a different conclusion?

Or are you just aware you're on such thin ice that you lash out at anyone who points it out?

In any case, I'll end with a wish for continued good health for Carmit and her daughter.  I'm deeply sorry that on top of illness, you're having to put up with threats, accusations, and libel.  But at least this shows up the anti-vaxxers for what they are; anti-science, anti-fact, and more concerned with their preconceived notions than they are with truth or compassion.

Here comes the sun

If you needed further evidence of why we need sound science education -- and what happens when we don't -- look no further than "Sun Gazing: Why I Stare At the Sun," over at the site in5d Esoteric, Metaphysical, and Spiritual Database.

And in case you're thinking, "No... that headline can't really mean what it sounds like it means," unfortunately it does.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Right out of the starting gate, we're told that all of the stuff we've been told about sun exposure causing skin cancer, skin damage, and sun blindness is wrong.  "All of these things," the author tells us, "have little to do really with the sun."

In fact, the opposite is true.  Sun exposure heals melanoma.

So then, what causes skin cancer and sun blindness?  Respectively, the answers are: toxins (of course), and...

... glasses.

Lest you think I'm making this up, here's the relevant passage:

Your skin is your largest eliminatory organ, whereby unprocessed toxins are released through the skin’s pores. Interactions between the toxins and the sun’s rays, bring about what we know of, as skin cancer. 

Skin damage, such as leathering of the skin, is caused by lack of EFA’s in the diet. Sun blindness or damage to the eyes, is caused by the use of corrective lenses. Glasses, and contact lenses both, cause an unnatural glare on the eyes, when exposed to the sun. This can cause serious damage to the eyes over time.

EFAs are never defined in the article, but I found out that it stands for "essential fatty acids," i.e., linoleic acid and alpha-linoleic acid.  So apparently if you consume enough of those, sunburn isn't a problem.

We're also told that sunscreen causes cancer.  So use sesame oil instead.  Presumably that way you'll hear a nice crackling sound as you sit in the sun, similar to chicken wings hitting the oil in a deep fat fryer.

Then we get to the main gist of the article, which suggests that we spend up to fifteen minutes a day staring at the sun.  It has to be near sunrise or sunset, though:

The practice entails looking at the rising or setting sun one time per day only during the safe hours.  No harm will come to your eyes during the morning and evening safe hours.  The safe hours are anytime within 1-hour window after sunrise or anytime within the 1-hr window before sunset.  It is scientifically proven beyond a reasonable doubt that during these times, one is free from UV and IR rays exposure, which is harmful to your eyes.

Righty-o.  It is "scientifically proven" that the sun waits for an hour after rising to switch on its ultraviolet and infrared rays, probably after it's had its second cup of coffee.

Then we're given a variety of puzzling statements and directives:

• Food makes us commit the maximum pain to others and exploit others. 
• You have to walk barefoot for 45 minutes for the rest of your life. 
• The sun energy or the sunrays passing through the human eye are charging the hypothalamus tract, which is the pathway behind the retina leading to the human brain.  As the brain receives the power supply through this pathway, it is activated into a brainutor.  One of the software programs inherent in the brain will start running and we will begin to realize the changes since we will have no mental tension or worries.
• 70 to 80% of the energy synthesized from food is taken by the brain and is used up in fueling tensions and worries.
• The Pineal gland has certain psychic and navigational functions.  Navigational means one can fly like the birds.
• After 6-months of sungazing you will start to have the original form of micro food, which is our sun.  Additionally, this can avoid the toxic waste that you take into your body while you eat regular food.
• Photosynthesis, which we misunderstand, does not in fact need chlorophyll.

So science be damned, apparently.  But that won't matter to you, because after nine months of staring at the sun, "you have become a solar cooker."

And no, I did not make that statement up, either.

It's kind of funny that despite the fact that the author is unequivocal about how wonderful sun gazing is, (s)he seems to be aware that this article is 100% unadulterated horseshit.  At the beginning of the article is the following disclaimer:

PLEASE NOTE: This sungazing information is for educational purposes only. We do not recommend sungazing to anyone. If you are considering sun gazing, please research this as much as possible.

I dunno, sure as hell sounded like you were recommending it to me.  But in case we were uncertain about that point, it's reiterated at the end:

Disclaimer: The information on this web site is presented for the purpose of educational and free exchange of ideas and speech in relation to health and awareness only. It is not intended to diagnose any physical or mental condition. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice and treatment of a licensed professional. The author of this website is neither a legal counselor nor a health practitioner and makes no claims in this regard.

I'm no legal expert either, but what does the statement "After 3-6 months of sun gazing, physical diseases will start to be cured" sound like to you?

As far as I can see, you can't just give people bogus medical advice and then get away with it by saying at the end, "Please note: This bogus medical advice is not actually medical advice!"

I'd like to think that no one is gullible enough to fall for this, but you just know that there will be people who are.  Right now there are probably people out there staring at the sun in order to activate the higher vibrations of their chakras, or some such nonsense, and will spend the rest of the day walking into walls because they've burned a hole directly through their retinas.

At this point in writing this blog, I'm beginning to lose my sympathy for the people who are getting suckered.  There are laws in place to protect people from being prey of fraudulent medical advice, but at some point you just have to learn enough science to protect yourself.  There will always be charlatans out there trying to sell the newest variety of snake oil, not to mention well-intentioned people who are (to put not too fine a point on it) insane.  So arming yourself with a little bit of science is really your best bet.

That, or a good pair of sunglasses.

Alien revelations

No one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal proof of intelligent life on other planets.  It would demonstrate what I've been saying for years -- that given the right conditions, developing living organisms is straightforward and common.  It would mean that we're not alone in the cosmos, something I'd find reassuring.  And it would give us an opportunity to explore the minds of creatures whose thoughts float on a completely different biological matrix.

I mean, I'm the guy whose favorite movie is Contact.

But all wishful thinking aside, I think it's pretty unlikely that they've come here.  The distances involved are simply too large.  When you consider that the fastest man-made vehicle, the Juno spacecraft, will take five years just to get to Jupiter -- itself only one-sixth of the way out from the Sun in our own solar system -- the idea that even an advanced civilization has crossed the interstellar wastes and come in for a visit is pretty far-fetched.  Science fiction aside, faster-than-light travel really does seem to be impossible.  And fanciful proposals for ultra-fast travel, such as the Alcubierre warp drive, have yet to be proven practical or even possible.

So it was with a great deal of eye-rolling that I read a news story today about the most recent weird twist in the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Hillary Clinton's campaign manager has said that if elected, Clinton will come clean on the government's role in covering up UFOs and alien contact.

John Podesta, who not only serves as Clinton's campaign chair but was Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton, sounds pretty serious about this.  In an interview with Jake Tapper on The Lead, Podesta said it's time that the government 'fesses up:

The U.S. government could do a much better job in answering the quite legitimate questions that people have about what's going on with unidentified aerial phenomena...  What I've talked to the secretary about, and what she's said now in public, is that if she's elected president, when she gets into office, she'll ask for as many records as the United States federal government has to be declassified, and I think that's a commitment that she intends to keep and that I intend to hold her to.

Podesta's been on this kick for a while.  Last year, while working for the Obama administration, Podesta tweeted:

Finally, my biggest failure of 2014: Once again not securing the #disclosure of the UFO files. #thetruthisstilloutthere cc: @NYTimesDowd

When Tapper asked Podesta whether he believed in aliens, he sidestepped:

That's for the public to judge once they've seen all the evidence that the U.S. government has...  There are a lot of planets out there.  The American people can handle the truth.

Which certainly sounds like it's a veiled "Yes."  After all, if Podesta didn't think there had been alien contact, what would be the big deal?  He's not likely to say, "The American people can handle the truth that there haven't been any real encounters with extraterrestrials."

What's to handle?

Me, I'm skeptical.  Of course, I would be.  Every time there's been news of revelations from government regarding their role in covering up alien contacts, it's turned out to be the same old anecdotal eyewitness stuff that really isn't admissible as evidence.  After all, last year the Air Force declassified and released (online, for free) the files from Project Blue Book, and what was in there turned out to be... not much.  My guess is that even if Podesta and Clinton end up making some grand pronouncement, it's gonna be more of the same.

Even so, the conspiracy theorists are all abuzz about this.  Some are predicting that Podesta is going to be taken out before he has a chance to reveal anything.  Others say that anything Podesta says will have been screened to remove all of the interesting stuff -- just as Project Blue Book was.  Why exactly the government would be so determined to prevent us from knowing that there was intelligent life out there is never fully articulated.  They have their reasons, apparently.  The sinister, all-knowing, all-powerful They.

So we'll see what happens.  My guess is that the whole thing will fizzle, even if Clinton gets elected.  Probably all for the best.  Even if there have been visitors from another world, we have more pressing concerns at the moment, like how not to continue fucking up this world to the point that it's uninhabitable.

Scary Sophia

I find the human mind baffling, not least because the way it is built virtually guarantees that the most logical, rational, and dispassionate human being can without warning find him/herself swung around by the emotions, and in a flash end up in a morass of gut-feeling irrationality.

This happened to me yesterday because of a link a friend sent me regarding some of the latest advances in artificial intelligence.  The AI world has been zooming ahead lately, its most recent accomplishment being a computer that beat world master Fan Hui at the game of Go, long thought to be so complex and subtle that it would be impossible to program.

But after all, those sorts of things are, at their base, algorithmic.  Go might be complicated, but the rules are unvarying.  Once someone created software capable of playing the game, it was only a matter of time before further refinements allowed the computer to play so well it could defeat a human.

More interesting to me are the things that are (supposedly) unique to us humans -- emotion, creativity, love, curiosity.  This is where the field of robotics comes in, because there are researchers whose goal has been to make a robot whose interactions are so human that it is indistinguishable from the real thing.  Starting with the emotion-mimicking robot "Kismet," robotics pioneer Cynthia Breazeal has gradually been improving her design until recently she developed "Jibo," touted as "the world's first social robot."  (The link has a short video about Jibo which is well worth watching.)

But with Jibo, there was no attempt to emulate a human face.  Jibo is more like a mobile computer screen with a cartoonish eye in the middle.  So David Hanson, of Hanson Robotics, decided to take it one step further, and create a robot that not only interacts, but appears human.

The result was Sophia, a robot who is (I think) supposed to look reassuringly lifelike.  So check out this video, and see if you think that's an apt characterization:

Now let me reiterate.  I am fascinated with robotics, and I think AI research is tremendously important, not only from its potential applications but for what it will teach us about how our own minds work.  But watching Sophia talk and interact didn't elicit wonder and delight in me.  Sophia doesn't look like a cute and friendly robot who I'd like to have hanging around the house so I didn't get lonely.

Sophia reminds me of the Borg queen, only less sexy.

Okay, okay, I know.  You've got to start somewhere, and Hanson's creation is truly remarkable.  Honestly, the fact that I had the reaction I did -- which included chills rippling down my backbone and a strong desire to shut off the video -- is indicative that we're getting close to emulating human responses.  We've clearly entered the "Uncanny Valley," that no-man's-land of nearly-human-but-not-human-enough that tells us we're nearing the mark.

What was curious, though, is that it was impossible for me to shut off my emotional reaction to Sophia.  I consider myself at least average in the rationality department, and (as I said before) I am interested in and support AI research.  But I don't think I could be in the same room as Sophia.  I'd be constantly looking over my shoulder waiting for her to come at me with a kitchen knife, still wearing that knowing little smile.

And that's not even considering how she answered Hanson's last question in the video, which is almost certainly just a glitch in the software.

I hope.

So I guess I'm more emotion-driven than I thought.  I wish David Hanson and his team the best of luck in their continuing research, and I'm really glad that his company is based in Austin, Texas, because it's far enough away from upstate New York that if Sophia gets loose and goes on a murderous rampage because of what I wrote about her, I'll at least have some warning before she gets here.

Control vs. conspiracy

Being a science teacher, I'm perhaps to be excused if I think that a lot of the world's problems would be significantly mitigated if everyone learned more actual science.

It wouldn't fix everything, mind you.  Even I'm not gung-ho enough to think that.  But if we all could admit that anthropogenic climate change is real, that evolution happened, that vaccines work, that scientists aren't some kind of evil cadre of conspirators who would like nothing better than to destroy the Earth -- well, it would go a long way toward making this a much saner world.

This idea is bolstered by some research that I just ran across -- although it dates to 2008, I hadn't heard about it.  Entitled "Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception," by Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky of the University of Texas, it describes research supporting the idea that when people feel confused or out of their depth, they have a tendency to see patterns that don't exist.  It's as if the mind becomes desperate to find something to hang on to, and attempts to force order from chaos.  The authors write:

Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions.  Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self.  Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them.

Science writer Ed Yong draws a connection between this phenomenon and belief in conspiracy theories.  In his wonderful blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, Yong writes:

Obviously, the effect has both good and bad sides that should make for interesting discussions.  For a start, an ability to spot patterns isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It could be downright beneficial if it ramps up a person’s skill at spotting subtle trends that are actually real (although future studies need to test whether this actually happens). 

Even spotting false patterns could have psychological benefits if it restores a person’s sense of control, increases their confidence or even reduces their risk of depression.  Scientists, fond as we are of truth and fact, would typically argue that it’s better to get an accurate picture of the world around you.  Whitson and Galinsky agree but they also take a pragmatic stance, saying that “it may be at times adaptive [to allow] an individual to psychologically engage with rather than withdraw from their environment.” 

Of course, there are instances when making false connections can be downright damaging, especially if they’re used as the basis of bad, or even fatal, decisions.  Imagined pharmaceutical conspiracies or implications drawn about medicines from one-off anecdotes could drive people to embrace fruitless or potentially dangerous forms of alternative treatment.  People can avoid taking responsibility for, or psychologically coping with, events in their lives if they ascribe them to higher powers or sinister agencies.  And seeing too much meaning in the actions of others could lead to paranoia and severed social ties.

Which certainly supports the conjecture that belief in conspiracy theories would be stronger amongst people who feel that they have little control over their lives.  If you feel yourself to be at risk, if you think your home, family, or your entire way of life is in danger of being irreparably damaged, you begin to cast about for explanations -- because, after all, even a terrifying explanation is better than all of those bad things happening for no reason at all.  So you begin to put together pieces of information, all the while looking for a pattern.

And Whitson and Galinsky's research implies that if there is no pattern, your brain simply invents one.

See the pattern?  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's not that I don't understand the drive people have for there to be an explanation.  The idea that bad things just happen because they happen -- that the world is so constructed that it raineth alike on the just and the unjust -- is a pretty bleak view.  

But there are a lot of things that we do understand, and that's where science education comes into play.  Whitson and Galinsky's research shows once we know more about those phenomena for which we do have an explanation, we not only make smarter decisions, but our feelings of befuddlement and confusion diminish.  We're less likely to find illusory patterns and miss the reality, or to be taken in by people who are muddying the situation because of a specific agenda (currently the case with the political attitudes toward climate change).  

It brings me back, as I have many times, to the wonderful quote by Carl Sagan: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."