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July 4 - July 21, 2023
Why not have the public decide—the wisdom of the crowds? The verdict would no longer be susceptible to the mood of the sitting judge. But wait, crowds can be shockingly irrational. They can morph into mobs where the sum of their collective brain power dilutes as the size of the mob grows. Is there really any other occasion in life when you would chant angrily while wielding a pitchfork and torch? Crowd justice is the precise recipe for lynchings.
To find out what is actually true requires careful and thorough investigations and not the simple act of reading media accounts and forming your opinion based on them.
In theory, everyone should get a fair trial, but in practice a high-profile attorney can sway a jury to feel one way or another, on a level that influences their interpretation of the data, and thus, in a choice moment, sow bias in the courtroom—bias that might not have otherwise been present when the trial began.
When scientists overhear the dramatized courtroom call of “I need a witness!” we think to ourselves, “For what?” Psychologists fully understand this disrespect of eyewitness testimony.6 Two sane people can observe the same events or phenomena and report them differently with equal sincerity and confidence in their own account.
The more extraordinary or shocking the event—like witnessing a violent crime or greeting a space alien—the less likely the various accounts of the experience will match. That’s why the methods and tools of science were invented in the first place—to remove human sensory frailties from the acquisition of data. Eyewitness testimony may sit high in the court of law, but it sits low in the court of science. If you show up at a conference and the best evidence for your research is that you saw it happen, we will show you the exit door.
maybe railing against people you disagree with takes less effort than exploring why they think differently from you.
“If an argument lasts longer than five minutes, then both sides are wrong.”
Given how often illness befalls us, from childhood through old age, and given how often our body parts malfunction, perhaps we should instead be amazed that the human body works at all.
My seventh-grade science teacher was a big fan of the human body. He was especially fond of the heart, which can pump for eighty years and longer without shutting down: “No machine we’ve ever built has lasted that long without repair.”
you’re dead within a week if you consume no water. Catastrophic organ failure leads to a stoppage of your beating heart.2 So no, the heart does indeed require constant maintenance. We just don’t think about it that way.
competitive runners who have no feet use curved blades attached to their legs. You’ve surely seen them in the Paralympics. They look nothing like the human foot, yet are better designed and are more energy efficient for walking and running. For these reasons and countless others, there is little incentive to invent intelligent robots that look exactly like us, given the flaws and shortcomings of the human form.
More bacteria live and work in every centimeter of our lower colon than the sum of all humans who have ever lived. To them, we’re nothing more than a warm anaerobic vessel of fecal matter. Who’s in charge? We are, mostly. Unless you disturb the microbes—throwing them out of equilibrium. Then they’re in charge, ensuring you know at all times your distance to the nearest toilet.
you get more living organisms than cells of our own bodies.4 The number may be as high as 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) microbes. Some of them may even influence what foods we crave, such as chocolate, as they break down larger molecules into smaller ones that more easily pass into your bloodstream.5 You think your cravings are your own. Instead, the chocoholic bacteria in your gut are what’s summoning the bonbons.
Science itself did not reach experimental maturity until engineers developed tools to hone, extend, and even replace each of our five senses, themselves highly susceptible to our accompanying mental states.
highly valued machine in hospitals, magnetic resonance imaging has no taproots within the profession. No amount of money given to medical researchers would have fueled the discovery of the machine’s foundational principles. That’s because the MRI is based on laws of physics, discovered by a physicist-stargazer, who had no interest in medicine. The same is true for a hospital’s entire radiology department (including X-rays, CT scans, and PET scans), EEGs, EKGs, oximeters, and ultrasound. You name it. If the hospital machine has an on/off switch, its function is probably based on a principle of
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The clarion call to fund practical research over fundamental research, and the persistent plea to not spend money in space when we could spend it on Earth, represent noble but underinformed desires. Want to advance civilization? Fund it all. You never know beforehand which discoveries will transform your field, birthed in professions not your own.
For nearly five months of a nine-month pregnancy, the human fetus cannot survive outside of the womb, even with intensive medical attention. Maybe one day we will know how to bring a fertilized egg to maturity in a medical vessel, but right now, that time feels far off in our future. In the US, arguments rage over how much control we grant to state and federal lawmakers over the uteruses of its citizens. Some demographics feel strongly that pregnant people should not have the right to terminate their pregnancy after the first six weeks, around the time you can first detect a heartbeat via
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Overall, three out of four Republican voters13 support some kind of anti-abortion/pro-life posture, strictly enforced by laws, in spite of Republicans otherwise wanting less, not more, government in our lives.
Of the more than 5 million known pregnancies per year between 1990 and 2019,16 nearly 13 percent were medically aborted.17 Yet all by itself the uterus spontaneously aborts as many as 15 percent of all known pregnancies during the first twenty weeks. Many more miscarriages go unnoticed since they occur in the first trimester, often before you know you’re pregnant. Combined, the number of spontaneous abortions may surpass 30 percent of all pregnancies.18 So, if God is in charge, then God aborts more fetuses than medical doctors do.
Whatever is the ideal, you’re not it. Entire industries exist to make you feel inadequate, requiring you to invest boundless time or money or both to achieve normal status. It runs deep. So deep we can hardly think in any other way,
Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Most of us have embraced the notion that we use only 10 percent of our brain. This dates back more than a century, but was never true.27 It nonetheless persists because deep down it serves our longings. Psychics want it to be true so that they can claim untapped powers of mind await us all. Teachers want it to be true so they can motivate their underperforming students. The rest of us want it to be true because it gives us hope for ourselves.
Humans are no doubt the smartest creatures ever to exist in Earth’s tree of life. Our brain consumes 20 percent of our body’s energy,29 so even our physiology values the organ.
There’s one thing we’re physically better at than all other animals. We can stalk any land animal to exhaustion. Cave paintings of early humans commonly depict hunters of deer, bison, and other large grazing mammals, including mammoths. Each species is stronger than us and can outrun us, but they can’t run forever. Our mostly hairless bodies allow us to sweat efficiently and cool as we pursue our dinner, while our furry prey eventually overheat and collapse.
Assessing the effort that we invest trying to get big-brained mammals to do what we say, we tend to measure their intelligence by an ability to understand us, rather than measure our intelligence by an ability to understand them. Since we can’t meaningfully communicate with any other species of life on Earth—not even those genetically closest to us—how audacious of us to think we can converse at all with intelligent alien life upon first meeting them.
If a wafer of silicon with some electrical current passing through it is capable of outperforming our brains in so many ways, maybe we’ve overvalued our capacity for thought. Not surprising. We like thinking highly of ourselves.
a purposefully conceived computer would not likely be capable of all the inane and irrational behavior that we’ve exhibited in the history of our species. Computers are better than that. So this could be the best evidence yet that we don’t live in a simulation. Call it the inanity defense.
maybe the knowledge of death creates the focus that we bring to being alive. If you live forever, then what’s the hurry? Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow. There is perhaps no greater de-motivating force than the knowledge you will live forever. If true, then knowledge of your mortality may also be a force unto itself—the urge to achieve, and the need to express love and affection now, not later.
if death gives meaning to life, then to live forever is to live a life with no meaning at all.
Florists remain in business because the death of flowers—typically within a week of receiving them—is precisely what gives them meaning to your loved one.
Contrary to the collective delusion that Mother Nature is a nurturing, caring entity that cradles and protects all its forms of life, Earth is instead a giant killing machine. Holding aside all the climatic and geologic forces that would just as soon have you dead, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes, there’s no end of creatures that want to suck your blood, inject you with venom, infect your physiology, or simply eat you.
One practical problem: if everyone born never dies, and if people keep making babies, then Earth’s population will rapidly outstrip the resources to support it. So the day we stop dying must also be the day we find another orb to accommodate our overproduction of air-breathing humans. This need for extra planets will never cease. But the universe is vast, and just in our small sector of the Galaxy, the catalogues are now rising through five thousand known exoplanets. We just need to invent terraforming technologies and either warp drives or wormhole transportation systems, and all will be
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Sounds morbidly romantic, but when I die, I’d rather be buried. My infrared energy crossing the vacuum of space is of no use to anybody or anything at any time. Put me in the ground, six feet under, and let the worms and microbes crawl in and out of my carcass as they dine upon my flesh. Let the root systems of the plant and fungal kingdoms of life extract nutrients from my body. The energy content of my molecules, which I had assembled throughout my lifetime by consuming the flora and fauna of this Earth, will return to them, continuing the biosphere’s cycle of life.
If you want an extra $400 per year to take a job where there’s a 1 in 25,000 chance of dying in that year then, whether or not you know it, you have personally valued your own life at $400 x 25,000 = $10 million.
even excluding organized armed conflict, humans find reasons to murder other humans at a rate that exceeds 400,000 per year—yes, worldwide, humans commit homicide more than a thousand times a day.
On the whole, I don’t fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
“They’re Made out of Meat
