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June 12 - July 4, 2024
parsimony,
Most harvestable old growth between the Cascades and Puget Sound was clear-cut, shipped to sawmills and plywood mills across the west and turned into ship masts, piles, joists, flooring, rafters, siding, and windowsills.
By removing mature, fire-resistant trees and replacing them with highly flammable plantations, clear-cuts create ideal conditions for wildfires.
Max Brooks’s epistolary barn burner, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, bears a strong family resemblance to this narrative.
S.R. 123, due east of Rainier. On the 123, I’d find a trailhead for the Shriner Peak fire lookout. If I hustled, I could squeeze in a summit hike with a 360-degree vista of Rainier, Saint Helens, and Mount Adams. The 123 would then spit me onto U.S. 410 and back to Seattle.
“burden of proof fallacy,” a claim that attempts to avoid the burden of proof by shifting it onto someone else.
Bertrand Russell, when challenged to explain why he was an atheist and not an agnostic, since he couldn’t prove that God didn’t exist, famously replied, “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove [it].”
(true parsimony would account for every possibility first before Bigfoot).
The goal of complete understanding recedes as we approach it.”
Steven Pinker, is an ancient part of our circuity. In his book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters,
When finding ambiguous set of tracks, the San assume they’re from a commonly known species unless they find definitive evidence the tracks belong to a rarer one. This is the essence of Bayesian reasoning,
A transmogrifying alien (played by seven-footer Kevin Peter Hall, who was also Harry in Harry and the Hendersons) hunts the men for sport,
our brains aren’t great at discerning the truth. They’re good at telling stories, stories that attempt to resolve or give context to our uncertainty, fear, and confusion, stories we want to believe are true. Psychologists call this “narrative fallacy”
recasting events as compelling and meaningful anecdotes with logical chains of cause and effect, with us at the center of the action, the star of the show.
The single most pervasive cognitive deficit we all suffer from is confirmation bias.
“Once you really believe,” Kurt Andersen wrote, “you can always find new evidence to support your beliefs.”
let me say that believing in evidence still counts as belief, and preexisting belief makes it easier to overlook details that contradict your preferred hypothesis
“You scientists don’t know everything. I don’t need to trust your institutions. I can trust my own instincts and my own beliefs.” Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected
“I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.
Research suggests that we experience a dopamine rush when processing information that supports our beliefs.
In her book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett says that humans are hardwired for certain kinds of delusions.
“Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” Barrett wrote in her 2020 book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
“The emotion is no guarantee that you are dealing with an authentic memory.”
The power of suggestion, intentional or not, can be a potent distorter of reality, as Loftus’s colleague Gary Wells has argued.
This “bias blind spot,” she says, is more pronounced in people with higher intelligence, attesting to a phenomenon that most of us have encountered at one point or another: smart people aren’t as smart as they think.
we see what we want to see, which is what we already believe is there. Even when what we see is a close approximation of reality, it eventually gets reshaped and supplanted by memories that may be no more real than our dreams.
white-nose syndrome, an invasive fungal disease that has killed more than 90 percent of North America’s hibernating bats in the last decade, had no recovery plan at all.
The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation,
The Wind Eagle and Other Abenaki Stories.
“forest walkers,”
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer,
schlock
What’s hard to fathom even now is the tension and terror of that age. In one eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972, some twenty-five hundred bombs were set off by revolutionary groups in the United States, almost five a day.
Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,
Adjusted for inflation, the wages of American men have hardly budged for half a century. And for white men with only high school diplomas, median earnings lost 13 percent of their purchasing power between 1979 and 2017,
Knausgaard wrote, that “everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy… I always longed to be away from it.”
My wife hates this kind of talk. The very name “Knausgaard” triggers a Pavlovian eye roll and finger gag, My Struggle being, in her mind, a case study of the precious male ego and “solitude” synonymous with white boy privilege.
“I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from.”
relinquishing attachments not only to physical objects but to the past, to our very identity, in order to bridge the gap between perception and reality.
Michael Ignatieff’s book On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.
There is a line extending from flying-saucer obsessives to 9/11 truthers to Donald Trump.” All are a part of a new American religion, a surreal alchemy of hokum that may very well usher in another two thousand years of zealotry and superstition.
All animals leave sign. There’s no question. Every animal defecates in the woods, every animal dies in the woods, and every animal leaves other types of evidence that they were there.
