Pretzel logic

Many of us here in the United States have been appalled and dismayed by the response some people are having to the recent double-whammy of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, and the attempts afterward to clean up the mess.

First, we have the fact that the meteorologists who were instrumental in predicting the hurricanes' paths, and who almost certainly saved lives by doing so, are being inundated with threats alleging that they're covering up the fact that the hurricanes were created and/or steered by operatives in the United States government itself.  Alabama-based meteorologist James Spann describes being told to "stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else."  

"I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather," said Michigan meteorologist Katie Nickolaou.  "I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of ten thousand nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that.  But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed...  Murdering meteorologists won't stop hurricanes.  And I can't believe I just had to say that."

Proving the truth of the observation that "everything's a conspiracy when you don't understand how stuff works."

Then there's William James Parsons, the lunatic in North Carolina who threatened to kill FEMA workers who are trying to help residents who lost everything during Hurricane Helene.  News sources are saying Parsons was part of a "militia" -- why they don't call him a "domestic terrorist," which is more accurate, I have no idea.   "This is unprecedented," said Craig Fugate, who headed FEMA from 2009 to 2017.  "I know we’ve had individuals, but not an area or a group that’s threatening FEMA."

My first reaction to all of this was much like Katie Nickolaou's; utter bafflement.  How does it make sense to have a violent response to a fact I don't happen to like?  I can remember being in college classes where I became intensely frustrated by concepts I couldn't manage to understand, and not enjoying that one bit; but even then, I knew my problems would not be remedied by my punching the professor in the face.

But with regards to the current situation, I realized upon reflection that my initial reaction -- that the actions of the people making threats against meteorologists and FEMA workers were completely illogical -- is wrong.  What they are doing follows its own peculiar, twisted logic, that when you view it from a historical perspective makes total sense.

When far-right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh first really took off back in the mid-eighties, they did two things.  The first, which to a quick glance seemed the more dangerous, was to spew ultra-conservative talking points -- anti-science, anti-immigrant, anti-equal rights, anti-LGBTQ, pro-corporate, pro-military, pro-unrestricted, unregistered gun ownership.  The other was far quieter, bubbling right beneath the surface, but threaded through the entire message.  And although it was subtler than all the bluster about specific issues, in the long run it was far more insidious.

"Listen to me," Limbaugh said, again and again.  "I'm the only one brave enough to tell you the truth.  Everyone else is lying to you."

Honestly, it's a genius strategy.  Once you have someone disbelieving the facts, and certain that everyone else is lying, they're in the palm of your hands.  

After that, you can convince them of anything.

What we're seeing now is the end game of that strategy.  Donald Trump and his wannabe fascist allies have taken it and stretched it to the snapping point -- and yet it seems to be showing no sign of breaking.  He can say "Haitian immigrants are eating your pets," and instead of laughing at him, his followers make threats against Haitians who are here legally -- and anyone who dares to publicly support them.  He can talk about the media as "the enemy of the people" and his followers obligingly start beating up reporters.  People like the astonishingly stupid Marjorie Taylor Greene can say "They can control the weather.  It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done," and rather than people saying, "okay, now I see you're talking complete bullshit"...

... the MAGA extremists start threatening meteorologists and the FEMA workers sent to help the innocent victims of storms.

While it's maddening and infuriating and any number of other synonyms for "what the actual fuck?", what it's not is illogical.  It's the end result of forty years of being told over and over, "The scientists and politicians and news media are lying to you."  Not, some of them may be lying or are misinformed, so use your brains and the available hard evidence to form your opinions; they're all lying, every last one, all the time and about everything, for their own nefarious reasons.

Oh, except for me.  I'm telling you the truth.  Obviously.

What is kind of hard to understand, though, is that these types call the rest of us "sheep."  That's a truly monumental scale of irony, but not one I'd expect them to acknowledge, or even recognize.

I'm honestly not sure how to combat this kind of pretzel logic.  The Trump wing of the Republican Party long ago ceded its entire identity, heart, and brain to one man's control, and now anything he says is de facto gospel truth.  At this point, he could ask them to do just about anything, and they'd acquiesce without a moment's hesitation.

Which is terrifying -- and an urgent call for anyone who is as appalled by this as I am to get yourselves to the voting booth on November 5.  This man, and his fanatical cult followers, can't be allowed ever to get within hailing distance of public office again.

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Top secret message

There's a strange tendency in some humans to want to stir things up -- if life is boring or mundane, to create a flurry of interest for no reason but to sit back and watch it happen.

This was part of the plot of the lovely Norwegian film Elling (which, if you haven't seen it, you must put it on your list).  The titular character is a chronically anxious, reclusive man who is released from a mental institution and, while trying to find his way in the outside world, decides to become the Rebel Poet.  He writes short inspirational poems and then hides them in all sorts of unlikely places, including food boxes in grocery stores.  After a short time, his new vocation succeeds beyond his wildest dreams -- and he hears on the national news that the entire country is trying to figure out who the Rebel Poet is, and people are searching everywhere to be the finder of one of his poems.

Closer to home -- well, my home, at least -- we have the (real) mystery of the Toynbee tiles, which in the 1980s appeared in two dozen cities in the United States and four in South America.  They were tiles made of linoleum, sealed to road and sidewalk surfaces with asphalt-filling compound, with bizarre messages:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Erifnam at English Wikipedia., Toynbee tile at franklin square 2002, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What the messages mean isn't clear; who Toynbee is, for example, isn't certain.  There's speculation it refers to British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, or that it has something to do with Ray Bradbury's short story "The Toynbee Conveyor," but there's no particularly good logical reason for either one.

Well, we have a modern example of the Toynbee tiles phenomenon happening right now.  They're called the "Schuylkill notes" -- Schuylkill County, in northeastern Pennsylvania, seems to be the epicenter, although they've also been found in Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, and North Carolina.  They're small, typed notes, often prominently featuring the word "LIES," and touching on New World Order conspiracy theories and governmental coverups.  There are lots of names mentioned, including Obama, Trump, and Biden (may as well include all three, I guess), the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Elon Musk, and Vladimir Putin, and a whole host of corporations -- Bayer, Astra Zeneca, Fox News, Pillsbury, Domino's, Nescafe, Toyota, and Aquafina, to mention a few.

The Lord of the Rings also makes an appearance in some of them.

The weirdest thing about the Schuylkill notes is where they've appeared.  They've been found not only in easy places like pinned to trees in state parks, but -- like the much more positive and inspiring notes that Elling planted -- in sealed boxes of foods and medications in department stores and grocery stores.  This might suggest that the person who planted the notes worked in the factory, except for the fact that they've been found in everything from boxes of MilkDuds to packages of Tylenol.  

The difficulty with these kinds of things is that once people see the notoriety something is getting -- Schuylkill notes now have their own subreddit (linked above) and their own Wikipedia page -- they want to cash in on the attention.  This invites copycatters, and the whole thing spreads.  I suspect that the first Schuylkill notes were planted by some conspiracy theorist nutter in Schuylkill County, but that a good many of the others from farther afield are imitations.

In any case, thus far, the origin of the Schuylkill notes is -- like that of the Toynbee tiles from forty years ago -- a mystery.  But a mystery is just an invitation for the other loonies to get involved with their own spin on what it all means, like the following comment I saw on Reddit:

I believe the elongated skulls found in Italy, Peru, etc he mention are about Denisovans.  A group like the Neanderthals.  They had elongated skulls and there are people who believe them to be signs of alien life in ancient times or mystical creatures that can move Earth with their minds and other "superpowers".  There's also a specific elongated skill [sic] found in China called the Dragon Man and a few more popped up and they think that it could be a "dragon man lineage" that could be another link in our evolution.  If I understand right, I believe he is saying that the elongated skulls are actually another race of intelligent life forms called the Dragon King's [sic].  They worship the Roman God Saturn.  They rule the Illuminati and the Illuminati orchestrates dividing, controversial events to control the population.  I guess in the goal to please the Dragon King's [sic]and in turn please Saturn?

Sure!  Right!  I mean, my only question is, "What?"

Somehow, I don't think prehistoric Asians would be likely to worship the Roman god of the underworld, nor would they have anything to do with Peru.  But maybe I just don't have the superpowers to understand.

In any case, I'm guessing that like the Toynbee tiles, the Schuylkill notes will die down once the perpetrator gets bored and moves on to other hobbies, like picking at the straps of his straitjacket with his teeth.  At that point it will just be another subject for an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, and the rest of us can go back to our boring, mundane existences, untroubled by finding out about conspiracies between the Dalai Lama and Domino's Pizza from a note in a box of PopTarts.

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Moon eyes

The oral tradition presents anthropologists and historians with a difficult, sometimes insurmountable, problem; given that by definition its antecedents were not written down, there is no way to tell whether a particular legend is true, is entirely made up, or is in that gray area in between.

Sometimes corroboration of the true tales can come from odd sources -- such as the story amongst the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest of a massive earthquake and tsunami, that was later shown to be true not only by geological evidence -- but by written records from Japan.  But hard evidence of this type for legends in the oral tradition is rare, and in any case, an earthquake in the Northwest isn't exactly a far-fetched claim to begin with.

It's when the stories are more out there that it becomes harder to discern whether they're entirely mythological in nature, or whether there might be some bit of real history mixed in there somewhere.  Which brings us to the strange tale of the Moon-eyed People of the Appalachians.

Botanist, naturalist, and physician Benjamin Smith Barton, in his 1797 book New Views of the Origins of  the Tribes and Nations of America, talks about a conversation he'd had with Colonel Leonard Marbury, who had worked as an intermediary between the Cherokee and the American government.  Barton writes, "... the Cheerake [sic] tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'Moon-eyed-People,' who could not see in the day-time.  These wretches they expelled."  The Cherokee chief Oconostota supposedly told Tennessee governor John Sevier about them, saying they were light-skinned, had "come from across the great water," and were the ones who'd built some of the monumental earthworks in Tennessee and neighboring states. 

Soapstone carving in the Cherokee County (North Carolina) Historical Museum, believed to be a representation of the Moon-eyed People

Those two references seem to be the earliest known sources of the story with at least moderate reliability (although note that both are second-hand).  Through the nineteenth century, the legend of the Moon-eyed People -- who were light-skinned (some said albinos), small in stature, and saw better at night than during the day -- was repeated over and over, then embellished and twisted together with other legends.

One of those is the odd Welsh tale of Madoc (or Madog) ab Owain Gwynedd, who after a family conflict in around 1170 C.E. sailed away from Wales with some friends, who ultimately settled somewhere in eastern North America and intermarried with the locals.  Of course, "somewhere in eastern North America" is a pretty broad target, so this opened up the gates for a variety of claims, including that there's Welsh blood (and/or Welsh linguistic influence) in the Monacans and the Doegs of Virginia, the Tuscarora of New York, and even the Zunis of New Mexico and the Mandans of North Dakota.  This runs up against the problem that there's no good genetic or linguistic evidence supporting any of this -- despite claims of "Welsh-speaking Indians," there's pretty certainly no such tribe.  So braiding together the Moon-eyed People (for which there's no hard evidence) with the legend of Madoc ab Owain (ditto) doesn't make the case for either one any stronger.

Side note: aficionados of science fiction and fantasy will probably recognize the Madoc ab Owain legend as the basis of Madeleine L'Engle's alternately brilliant and cringy YA novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which has the main character, Charles Wallace Murry, time-traveling back through Madoc's line of descent in North America.  Brilliant because it weaves together all sorts of contingent histories and what-ifs with a legend that's kind of cool; the cringy part is that a major plot point revolves around a "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" thing, mixed in with a heaping helping of the Noble Savage myth.  I loved the story as a kid, but now it's hard to read it without wincing.

Be that as it may, as far as the Moon-eyed People goes, what we're left with is... not much.  Even the Wikipedia article on the legend admits, "Sources disagree as to the accuracy of the stories, whether or not the stories are an authentic part of Cherokee oral tradition; whether the people existed or were mythical; whether they were indigenous peoples or early European explorers; and whether or not they built certain prehistoric structures found in the region."

So it's a curious story, but the dearth of evidence -- combined with the fact that what we have is filtered through the eyes of white Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were inclined to view Native legends as quaint at best and outright demonic at worst -- means we have to put this in the "most likely mythological" column.

On the other hand, maybe we should wait for the people over at the This Hasn't Been History For Quite Some Time Channel to get their hands on it.  I'm sure they'll have an answer at the ready.

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Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my obvious hat of Skepticism Blogger, I also wear a second one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic oddity that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a quirky novel called The Accidental Magician that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," I've "discovered" that (1) a character who I thought was nice but rather bland has turned out to be scrappy and edgy, (2) a character who started out as a bit of a puffed-up, arrogant git unexpectedly became a serious badass, and most surprisingly, (3) a character I thought was dead is still alive.  

I honestly had no knowledge of any of this when I started the story.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to an article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the story Yotsuya Kaidan (1825) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but suffice it to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing, because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The amoral domestic terrorist Jeff Landry in my novel In the Midst of Lions is a good example; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  And I'd like to meet Leandre Naquin from The Communion of Shadows just so I can give him a big hug.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.

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The collapse

I've mentioned before that I have an absolute fascination with historical mysteries, which is why if I had the opportunity to visit one place and period, it would be somewhere in western Europe during the "Dark Ages" -- the time between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (usually placed at 476 C.E., when the puppet emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the Scirian leader Odoacer) and the founding of the Carolingian dynasty and re-consolidation of power by Charlemagne 325 years later.  During that interval, damn little is known for sure -- we have some names, like Clovis and Charles Martel and Arthur Pendragon -- but how many of the accounts from that period are true and how many later inventions and add-ons, we'll probably never be certain.

There's another time period, though, that is (if anything) more mysterious still -- partly because it's much further in the past.  This is the Late Bronze Age Collapse, that happened in the twelfth century B.C.E., in which two of the most powerful civilizations in ancient Eurasia, the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittites, suddenly disintegrated, and others in the region, including the Egyptian New Kingdom and the Assyrian Empire, were seriously weakened (although ultimately survived and rebuilt).

Whatever happened, it happened fast.  Two of the main cities of the Hittite Empire, Hattusa and Karaoğlan, both burned right around the same time, and from the archaeological evidence, so many people died their bodies were never buried.  Greece was equally hard-hit, with just about every Mycenaean palace and citadel burned or demolished; the period afterward has been nicknamed the "Greek Dark Ages," a period of about four hundred years from which we have almost no records.  Whatever caused it, the Greek peninsula seems to have been left largely depopulated.  One estimate is that ninety percent of pre-collapse settlements in the Peloponnese, the southernmost region of Greece, were abandoned during that one event.

The Mycenaean "Mask of Agamemnon," ca. 1550 B.C.E. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Xuan Che, MaskOfAgamemnon, CC BY 2.0]

So what caused the collapse?

The simple answer is that we don't know.  It may well have been a confluence of bad stuff; earthquakes, plagues, and famines are all possibilities, although it's hard to imagine why any of the three would then lead people across an entire region to destroy just about every last city.  Another possibility is severe and prolonged drought caused by a climatic shift, followed by open rebellion by people desperate for food and water.  (Recall that back then, the kings were considered to be intercessors to the gods on the behalf of the people; when the rain stopped falling and the crops all died, it's entirely possible the people overthrew their own rulers for not intercessing hard enough.)

It's also possible that both the Mycenaeans and the Hittites were overcome and destroyed by a mysterious group called the "Sea Peoples," who are mentioned in records of the Egyptian New Kingdom (the Egyptians were also attacked, but successfully repelled them and managed to survive).  Who these Sea Peoples were isn't known for sure, but they may have been an alliance between the Lukka of coastal southwestern Anatolia, the Peleset of what are now Israel and Lebanon (the name is probably a cognate to the biblical name "Philistine"),  and the Weshesh, who may have been from Sicily or southern Italy.  But the truth is, we're not sure of that, either.  The Sea Peoples left no records of their own and seem to have moved around a lot, so any artifacts they left behind haven't told us much.

And of course, it could be a combination of all of these.  Changes in climate and natural disasters are known to have been responsible for famines and epidemics, and when those happen, people often up stakes and try to move to a more congenial venue -- which is inconvenient for the people who already live there.  The attacks by the Sea Peoples may have been a result, not the root cause, of the collapse.

But there's no doubt that the effects were devastating.  The eastern Mediterranean would take four centuries to recover completely, leaving behind a historical whodunnit that still puzzles us today.  But it does highlight how tenuous survival was back then.  The people of the ancient world were one bad harvest between relative comfort and famine.  Epidemics were regular visitors, sometimes wiping out settlements entirely.  When things get desperate, the veneer of civility disintegrates pretty rapidly.

It's to be hoped our modern civilization would be resilient enough to weather such calamities, should they strike, but the reality is, we're not really that different from our distant ancestors.  It's nice to think that in severe trials, we'd help each other -- that we might remember Benjamin Franklin's words, "We must hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."  Like us, the Bronze Age empires probably thought they'd be around forever, but when catastrophe struck, they seem to have promptly self-destructed.

Let's hope we can learn some lessons from their failure.

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The problem with cynics

A man I know is one of the most cynical people I've ever met.

He said to me on more than one occasion, "I hate people."  Despite the fact that the designation "people" includes his wife, children, the person he was talking to at the time (me)... and himself.  He distrusts just about everyone, badmouths them incessantly behind their backs, and in his business micromanages everything to a fare-thee-well.  As a result, he's lost customers, his staff might as well be processed through a revolving door, and has developed a well-deserved reputation in the industry as someone to be avoided both by potential clients and by employees.

His cynicism has, in fact, become his reality.

[Image credit: Andy Lendzion]

It's an awfully common phenomenon.  My own mom was a fearful, suspicious person who thought the world was a deeply dangerous place, full of people waiting to take advantage of you, or even hurt you or kill you.  While watching television she gravitated toward "true crime" shows -- Cops and CSI, that sort of thing -- which of course show you the seediest, most violent slices of humanity.  This further reinforced her opinion about the horrible risks of stepping outside your own front door.  I'll never forget the last phone call between us before I left on a month-long walking tour of the north of England, my first-ever trip overseas, when I was about thirty years old.  I was ridiculously excited about it, but she was full of cautions about all the terrible things that could, and probably would, happen to me.

Her final words to me before we hung up were, "Remember, don't trust anyone."

In England.  I mean, for cryin' in the sink, it wasn't like I was going to Turkmenistan or North Korea or something.

And, of course, I had a perfectly lovely time, met some wonderful people (several of whom are still friends, three decades later), and told her so when I got back.  Didn't change her outlook; her attitude seems to have been that I'd simply gotten lucky, and don't count on it happening ever again.

It's not that I'm immune to this sort of thinking myself.  I've written Skeptophilia for over twelve years, and the focus is frequently on pseudoscience.  I've had to be on guard to stop my attitude going from "this person believes this particular piece of pseudoscientific rubbish" to "wow, everyone is really dumb."  It's why I try to split my posts between pseudoscience and actual science; to say "look at the amazing things the human mind can achieve" at least as often as I say "look at where we've stumbled."

I used to tell my Critical Thinking students something that I still believe to this day is an essential truth: cynicism is as inaccurate as, and as lazy as, gullibility.  We laugh at gullible people, call them fools, stooges, suckers, chumps, and a variety of other unflattering names.  But there's nothing inherently smarter about disbelieving everything.  Both gullibility and cynicism are excuses to stop thinking, to avoid doing the hard work of evaluating the facts and evidence and coming to a justified conclusion.

And yet, cynics have acquired an undeserved air of erudition and wisdom, as if they're the only ones smart enough to have "seen through" everyone.  People are stupid and/or evil, the world sucks, everyone is dishonest, the government is hopelessly and thoroughly corrupt.  End of story.  No need to think about it any further than that.

The problem is, the actual facts and evidence don't support that conclusion at all.

The topic comes up because I'm currently reading Jamil Zaki's wonderful book Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, which I heard about through the amazing podcast Hidden Brain a few weeks ago, and which should be required reading.  Zaki's point, which he supports with tons of data from his own studies and those of other psychologists, is that not only is the default condition of humanity to be cooperative, kind, and compassionate, but that trusting others usually generates trust in return.  Companies where the bosses trust their employees to work hard, be creative, and collaborate are not only happier places, they're far more productive than autocratic, micromanaged, competitive, factory-model sweatshops.  Just like the examples I started with, of the nasty-tempered cynical business owner and my own frightened, suspicious mom, you create the reality you live in.  If you look for ugliness, you're sure to find it.

What we often ignore, though, is the deeper truth that if you look for goodness, you'll find that, too.  What we choose to cultivate in ourselves is what we ultimately find ourselves surrounded with.

Understand that I'm not recommending adopting a Panglossian attitude of "everything's for the best in the best of all possible worlds."  There is injustice, dishonesty, exploitation, bigotry, and true evil out there.  It's just that defaulting to "everything sucks" is not only incorrect, it's lazy -- and it gives us a convenient excuse not to work toward fixing what is wrong about our society.  Part of the problem, of course, is media; we're fed a continuous diet of bad news because it keeps our attention.  (There's a reason it's called "doomscrolling.")  As just one of many examples in Zaki's book, how many of you have accepted without question that violent crime in the United States is escalating?  It's a major talking point, especially by one particular political party, and we accept it because it fits our mental model that everything is going to hell.

In fact, violent crime in the United States has fallen drastically in the last five years, with overall totals declining in 54 of the 69 largest cities, and rates for certain categories of crime going down between twelve and twenty percent.

But that fits neither with the political agenda -- "you're in danger" drives people to the polls, so they can vote for the person who says they can fix what they just now made you scared of -- nor with our self-congratulatory sense that maybe some people are stupid enough to get fooled by pollyanna-ish optimists, but at least we are smart and well-informed and admit the harsh reality.

Zaki points out, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the best approach is to split the difference between cynicism and gullibility.  Neither trust everyone immediately nor reject everyone out of hand; base your opinions, and your actions, on facts.  (And, it must be said, don't determine your "facts" with a three-minute Google search to locate a couple of websites that agree with what you already believed.)  It's better to default to trust than to suspicion -- and, significantly, you're no more likely to be wrong if you do so.  One of the more surprising studies in Zaki's book is about whether cynical people are better at recognizing when they're being lied to.  Since they're inherently suspicious, you'd think so, wouldn't you?  It turns out that both cynical and gullible people are bad at discerning liars from truth-tellers.  It's the skeptics -- the ones who base their answers on careful consideration of what the person actually said -- who score the best.

All in all, cynicism not only poisons your own joy, it feeds you an inaccurate view of the world.  And, like the people I started with, it creates a small, mean, toxic world in reality, which reinforces the cynic that they were right all along.  It's like the quote by Ken Keyes: "A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror."

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Quantum homeopathy

In response to a post I did a while back about the tendency of people to believe loony ideas if they're couched in ten-dollar vocabulary, a loyal reader of Skeptophillia sent me a link to a paper by one Lionel Milgrom, of Imperial College (London), that has turned this phenomenon into an art form.

The name of the paper?

"'Torque-Like' Action of Remedies and Diseases on the Vital Force and Their Consequences for Homeopathic Treatment."

ln it, we witness something pretty spectacular: an attempt to explain homeopathy based on quantum mechanics.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I'm not making this up, and it doesn't seem like a spoof; in fact, the paper appeared in the open-access Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.  Here's the opening paragraph:

Within the developing theoretical context of quantum macroentanglement, a mathematical model of the Vital Force (Vf) has recently been formulated.  It describes the Vf in terms of a hypothetical gyroscope with quantized angular momentum.  This enables the Vf's state of health to be represented in terms of a "wave function" derived solely from secondary symptom observables produced in response to disease or homeopathic remedies.  So far, this approach has illustrated the biphasal action of remedies, resonance phenomena arising out of homeopathic provings, and aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

So right out of the starting gate, he's talking about using the quantum interactions of a force no one has ever detected to explain a treatment modality that has been repeatedly found to be completely worthless.  This by itself is pretty impressive, but it gets better as it goes along:

According to this model, symptom expression corresponds to precession of the Vf "gyroscope."  Conversely, complete removal of symptoms is equivalent to cessation of Vf "precession."  However, if overprescribed or given in unsuitable potency, the curative remedy (which may also be formulated as a wave function but this time derived solely from changes in Vf secondary symptom observables) may cause the Vf to express proving symptoms.  Thus, with only observation of symptoms and changes in them to indicate, indirectly, the state of a patient's Vf, the safest treatment strategy might be for the practitioner to proceed via gradual removal of the symptoms.

When I read the last line, I was lucky that I wasn't drinking anything, because it would have ended up splattered all over my computer.  Yes!  By all means, if a sick person comes in to visit a health professional, the health professional should proceed by removing the sick person's symptoms!

Because proceeding by making the symptoms worse is kind of counterproductive, you know?

His talk about "overprescription" made me chuckle, too.  Because if you'll recall, the late James Randi demonstrated dozens of times that the result of consuming a whole bottle of a homeopathic remedy is... nothing.  On the other hand, since the homeopaths believe that the more dilute a substance is, the stronger it gets, maybe "overprescribing" means "prescribing less."

Which reminds me of the story about the guy who forgot to take his homeopathic remedy, and as a result died of an overdose.

*rimshot*

And if this isn't enough, Dr. Milgrom (yes, he has a Ph.D., astonishingly enough) has also published other papers, including "The Thermodynamics of Health, Healing, and Love" and "Toward a Topological Description of the Therapeutic Process."

What's next, "The Three-Body Problem: A Classical Mechanics Approach to Handling Love Affairs?"

I have to admit, though, that there's something almost charming about this guy's attempt to bring pseudoscience under the lens of physics.  His blathering on about imaginary "vital forces" and the precession of microscopic gyroscopes as a mechanism for disease is, if nothing else, creative.  While what he's claiming is complete bollocks, Dr. Milgrom's determination to keep soldiering on is kind of adorable.

The good news, of course, is that his papers are unlikely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced.  The only danger is the undeserved veneer of credibility that this sort of thing gives homeopathy in people whose minds aren't yet made up.  One can only hope that the thorough debunking of this fraudulent practice that has been done by actual scientific researchers will prove, in the end, to be more persuasive.

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