I don't believe.

So I've never believed in God. It didn't make any sense to me. But lots and lots of people I knew did. And they all wanted me to believe. For a long time, I was of the mind "maybe, but I'm just missing it." I've moved past that into "God doesn't exist."

Intolerant Atheists are a different breed from intolerant theists. I accept that other people believe in God, even though I think the reasoning makes no sense at all. I don't try to change them. I don't call them stupid. While I essentially agree when atheists say it's believing in a fairly tale and mass delusion, I don't think that style of confrontation is beneficial to anybody.

Now some people think that being religious actually causes harm, so they have a more justifiable reason for wanting people to actively denounce their beliefs. I know that I found it incredibly annoying when I was being pressured to get saved and accept Christ as my savior and all that. I don't want to be that guy that is behaving the exact same way.

I wish I could see what the world would look like if religion didn't (and possible never did) exist. Not some idealist movie maker thing. But I wish there was I way I could see the reality of it.

Fox News Rant

If somebody says "Fox News Channel regularly lies and intentionally misconstrues statements of Non Republican officials," the common response is "MSNBC and The Daily Show do the same, but our side is too good to bother pointing them out, like the childish Democrats."

Okay, so they don't deny that Fox News Channel actually does those things. That's good.

But how realistic is it that when engaged in political warfare, that among all the dirt slinging, and name calling, and opposition bashing that happens, that one side would decide that they're above actually correcting misinformation from the other side, and calling them out on their errors.

I offer this: the reason there aren't tons of stories about how non-fox news channels intentionally mislead their viewers is because they don't intentionally mislead their viewers.

Another possible response to the above statement is "But those are just opinion shows and therefore are irrelevant."

For that I have an analogy. Suppose I'm a popular opinion TV show host on a news channel. I tell my viewers that everybody should stop eating McDonald's hamburgers because it's wrong since they use human baby meat. Now, the opinion that it's wrong to eat McDonald's hamburgers is fine. But reason is being shown as a fact, but it's actually a falsehood. When everybody on my show agrees with me, or I don't allow the people that offer an alternative perspective to speak for more than a minute without interrupting them, doesn't that matter? When the news company I work for encourages me to make such statements, shouldn't that be a problem? When some says "Actually, they use beef," and I respond with "that's not true" repeatedly, shouldn't I have some sort of responsibility to my viewership to actually be aware of the truth? 

Opinions are fine, but many opinions are either about facts (That car is ugly because it's purple and purple is ugly), or built upon a foundation of fact (Fewer people watch television commercials, so a change in how television is broadcast is a good idea). Now if the car is orange, my opinion makes no sense and has no validity. Same thing if more people are watching commercials than before. If people are making their opinions about ideas that aren't true, then they're arguing about nonreality. but they are portraying the nonreality as real, and hoping you don't know.

If I say James is a terrible employee because he always shows up late, never completes his work on time, and distracts his coworkers from their job, you'd probably be inclined to agree. Except if James has only showed up late once, consistently is ahead of his deadlines, and actually actively helps his coworkers do their job better, you'd have a more difficult time agreeing he's a terrible employee. I might still think he's a terrible employee, and that's valid. But my reasons aren't. If you had to choose whether or not James stayed employed, wouldn't you want the most correct information you could get? 

If I say studies show that viewers of Fox News are consistently more misinformed about current issues, I might get such responses as "Those studies could say anything. Did you read them yourself, or just what somebody told you they said?" That's generally a blatant disregard for the standards of several news outlets that comment on the study. Producing the actual study generally causes a shift in topic. Another often heard response is "It's all a big left-wing attack on Fox News, because we're the only opposition to them." 

I don't think international skepticism and criticism of Fox News is a a grand, left-wing conspiracy to discredit them. I think most of the people can recognize what is happening when they see it, and some percentage of people actually call them out on it. But Fox has somehow gained the trust of it's viewers, and people believe who they trust more than they'll believe anybody else. Especially when the people they trust are all constantly repeating the same few messages, one of which is "Everybody else is trying to keep us from showing you the truth." When those people say things like "If you think I'm wrong let me know, here's my contact information." It seems to add a lot of credibility to the speaker, except that speaker tends to never show you any sort of responses they may get, which the viewer would assume to mean there were no errors is his statements. Of course it could also mean he just didn't show you what he received. 

There is so much information showing how Fox News lies, distorts, and misconstrues things (all in one direction). Systematically ignoring study after study, example after example, is a testament to the hold that channel has on the people that watch it passionately. If I saw half a dozen studies that said the news program I watch is highly correlated to being misinformed, I wouldn't be comfortable with that.

Education

Education reminds me of fast food. At least in the way we treat it. The people that create fast food are demonized for the unhealthy things the serve, and the obesity problem in America. There is a substantial voice saying they need to serve healthy food on the menu. But when they do that, nobody buys it. That gave us exactly what we asked for, but it wasn't what we REALLY wanted. We want the greasy cheap, unhealthy burgers because it tastes good. We don't want to eat healthy. We wish we wanted to eat healthy. It is a convenient excuse to say I have to eat out because I'm busy, and they don't serve healthy food. When there's no excuse left, we still eat junk. Because junk tastes good. We aren't willing to put our health above our instant desire for what tastes pretty darn good.

When it comes to schools, there is no shortage of problems. There are a lot of things that could be done better. but I think the biggest problem is as a society, we don't behave in a way that expresses education as important. We might say it. We might even believe it. But our consistent actions say otherwise. Sometimes we don't even understand that we aren't supporting education. Often times, we support good grades. That is nowhere near close to being the same thing as education. When kids get bad grades they might get in trouble. If a kid gets good grades and learns nothing, everything is okay. That is a problem.

We worry about behavior problems in school. We worry about whether or not students are showing up to class. We worry about test grades. We worry about the social influence of classmates. If there was an overwhelmingly singular focus on actually learning, a lot of that would go away. It wouldn't be so socially acceptable to treat school as a joke. If the vast majority of the teachers, faculty, students, parents, and everybody else actually expected you to LEARN, then showing up would be a given. You don't show up, you get behind, you just made things tougher for yourself.

When it's socially unacceptable to be dumb, people would put more effort into becoming educated. Culture influences an amazing amount of behavior. People will try to fit in to where they are most of the time. In other countries, education is so valued that even the crappiest jobs are filled with people with degrees. If you want a decent job, you need a degree. Everybody wants a decent job, so everybody gets a degree. All the decent jobs get filled, but you didn't get one, and you need to earn a living. Now you're a janitor with a bachelor's degree. It may seem like a waste of time to get a degree if you're a janitor, but if you ever want to be something better, then you can. In a society like that, what hope do you have if you don't have a degree?

I've watched documentaries that are talking up the benefits of charter schools, and when they show the incredibly successful ones, there is a dominant theme. Passion and commitment from everybody involved. While critics are quick to point out than on average charter schools don't perform better than regular public schools, I'm not talking about average. There's a positive feedback in the best charter schools. The teachers do incredible amounts of work to make sure that every single child is learning, doing whatever it takes. The faculty supports them. The parents expect their children to learn, and they speak the same positive message at home. Everybody around the child is saying you can and will learn. The biggest positive about a charter school is that parents made a choice to send the kids there. That means they already have put in extra effort into attempting to get a decent education from their child. It's possible the charter school isn't a good one, but chances are, the school the child was taken out of wasn't a good one, either, and they are doing what they can to do something better.

School is a joke. The only people that look at grades are colleges. All that matters is passing. No job you have is going to ask you what your GPA was. The problem with that line of thinking is that education is more important that just something needed for a job. It helps with life. Decisions are made from available information. The more information you have, the better decisions you can make. Education means acquiring information and being able to interpret it. When you learn you are practicing the process of taking information and making it useful and hopefully relevant. No job will ask you what your GPA is, but when your resume is filled with typos, is poorly formatted, is on green paper, and is 3 pages long, it's clear that you didn't learn how to write a resume, and also didn't learn to look up how to write a resume.

Your job might not ask you what you got in your classes, but when you can't do your job, it won't be long before you don't have it any more. One of the biggest complaints employers have about employees is lack of basic skills to do the job. Jobs are forced to do remedial training because their employees can't do the basics.

More important than job performance is understanding what is happening around you. Critical thinking allows you to intelligently evaluate information that you encounter. It's not being taught. It's talked about a lot, and everybody says it's important, but like the initial analogy, behavior shows otherwise. In the first 2 years of college students gain very little ability to think critically. I had a personal experience with a teacher where I was questioning the validity my teacher's statement. Asking for some sort of proof that what he said had any sort of resemblance to reality showed that he could only resort to fallacy after fallacy with an eventual threat to have me removed from class under the premise of disrespect.

It seems like Americans are starting to stand up for big changes lately. The little guys stopped cards from issuing needless fees on bank cards. We also stopped Sopa. Fights like these are continuous. Maybe it's possible that demanding education in our schools will be another thing we'll learn is worth having. Not grades, but learning. And not talk, but action, and commitment by the masses. Eh. Probably not. There are too many people with too much to gain in the short term by keeping us dumb and easily influenced *cough* fox *cough*.

My Thoughts on Cognitive Dissonance

I just learned about a concept called cognitive dissonance. Basically when what you believe goes against what evidence is telling you, you experience cognitive dissonance. It's uncomfortable, and in order to lessen the discomfort we have to change our belief or not trust the evidence. 

In a TED talk I just saw (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqONzcNbzh8), the speaker gives two great examples. The first is being a pilot, and learning how to fly with only instruments without the visual of the world around you. Your body is telling you one thing, and the instruments are telling you another. You believe your body, even though it's wrong. He also gives the example of a friend of his that works at a hospital that sees the effects of smoking on people, yet continues to smoke, claiming it keeps her thin, and that it's better health-wise to smoke than to be obese.

Without understanding that this happens, things make less sense. This basically explains certain types of irrationality. I couldn't understand how people could not accept mounds of evidence put right in front of their face. We have a need to justify what we do and say, and if that requires ignoring evidence that we're wrong, that tends to be preferred over the alternative. 

I know I don't like being wrong. But by accepting that I'm wrong when I've been provided with evidence, I can be right in the future. Being wrong about something often means you have to be wrong about things relating to it, otherwise the puzzle of complex ideas won't fit together. 

We should be skeptical when people try to persuade us. There are many tricks people use, and too often, we're lied to for somebody else's personal gain. But when it turns out that they are right, we should be willing to accept that what we previously thought was actually incorrect. We can go forward with a better understanding of what is happening around us if we don't deny what evidence shows us.

I like Google Plus

Facebook has been around for a long time. I wasn't that interested in it when it was becoming popular. I also wasn't interested in myspace or Friendster. I never joined either of those. I suppose Facebook was essentially the same thing in my mind, given I had never experienced any of them.

But through social pressure, and an urge to get in contact with the people I once knew, I decided to join. I did briefly reconnect and chat with an old high school friend. I also came across family members I didn't know I had.

What impacted me most was the superficiality of everything. People would talk just to make noise. It rarely felt like anybody actually said anything. I don't do well in those kinds of conversations. So after a week of being a Facebook member, I dropped it. Things I liked were uninteresting to everybody else, and what was interesting to everybody else, I didn't like.

Even though this blog's title involves the idea of nobody else caring about it, I have different expectations from a blog that I would for something like facebook.

I like Google Plus. I heard about it fairly early on. Thanks to Teamliquid.net I got an invite before it was part of public beta. I like the idea of defining who you are talking to before you let it out. I also am a very big fan of the culture that emerged where people actually speak in ways you might expect them to speak in real life. People discuss and debate and engage in actual conversation about ideas. On the internet, that usually only lasts an instant before it degenerates into an incoherent mess of name-calling or successful use of red herring fallacies.

It also seems like the community is largely a supportive one. People usually let others have their own judgments.  When Steven Jobs died, there were lots of people praising his contribution to the world. There were others that felt in death, people were cherry picking the nice things about his personality, and ignoring other, less nice things that were just as important to remember about him. But few started arguments in those threads. They respected the other people's posts, and simply made their own statements in their own streams.

Similarly, different people have different ideas about what makes good photography. Trey Ratcliff is well known for his use of HDR. There are other artists that think the way it's used ruins most photography. That's fine. But attacking individuals for their choice of how they want to express their art is a bit too far, if you ask me. A certain underwater photographer seems to froth at the mouth when he sees HDR used in ways he doesn't appreciate. I don't need that animosity in my stream of posts. He got uncircled. So far, that's the only blind anger I've come across. I'd say that's pretty impressive.

Google plus has turned into something different than I think the creators expected. I think they expected it to be more like Facebook than it is. They always wanted selective sharing, but I doubt they expected to be connecting strangers quite like this. People say they don't use Google plus because all their friends are on Facebook and don't want to switch over. Plus can be for multiple things. You can use it exactly like Facebook if you want. But you can also use it to join a community that is interesting to you. You don't need your friends on Google Plus to enjoy being there. You can come across amazingly beautiful photographs every 30 minutes if you follow popular photographers.

You can keep up to date on the latest tech news and gadgets if you're into that. You can choose to follow people that spread information about how science can potentially change our world in ways you'd probably never imagined. Basically, if you have a hobby or interest, odds are you can connect to people on google plus that share that same hobby or interest. And if you want to share things with your friends that aren't on Plus, it's fine. Just click the box that sends them an email. Share with who you want, regardless of whether they use the service or not.

Humanity of dragons

When I watched the movie How to Train Your Dragon, there were a couple of concepts I thoroughly enjoyed. The first and probably the most obvious one, is that real learning is better than picking and choosing how much information you're willing to accept or even seek out.

The second one is about forgiveness. The Vikings and the dragons had been at war for generations. In most scenarios, if two factions are have been violent towards each other for so long, one side being nice means the other would die, if even just for vengeance, and the cycle continues.

But the dragons are better than that. When the vikings stopped trying to kill them, they immediately responded likewise. The dragons held no grudges. If the dragons had been more like people, everybody would have died. But instead, they learned to live in harmony, simply because they forgave and understood each other.

Why be right?

I recently had a discussion with my roommate about what truth means. It was an interesting conversation. We disagree, but we understand what each other thinks, and we both think the other is wrong. That's fine.

While I was at work, I was interested in hearing a coworker's perspective on it. He started out by defining truth the same way I would. But then when asked probing questions, he used it the way my roommate did. I explained my thoughts, and also mentioned that his thoughts echoed those of my roommates. I also showed how he seemed to contradict himself. 

So that turns into "I just want everybody to believe what I believe." I got asked the question "Why is it so important for you for people to be right? Why can't you just let people be wrong?" Before I could completely answer, I had apparently deeply frustrated both of my coworkers, even though I was only talking to one. I was laying the groundwork for my explanation, when I was asked to drop the conversation. That was incredibly frustrating.

Somebody asks why what you believe is important to you, then doesn't let you answer. I asked the person I was talking to if he actually wanted to know. His response was "Well, I did ask you. And you answered it." I replied that I was getting there, but I hadn't answered it yet. 

That made me think two things. First, what did he think my answer was? Second, given that I told him I didn't answer it, and he didn't ask for clarification or what my answer really was, he really didn't want to know.

I'm going to write it here, because I need to get it out.

Why do I believe it's important to be right? First, opinions aren't facts, and you can have whatever opinion you like, and I might not agree with it, but whatever. Opinions can't be right or wrong anyway. When it comes to actually data, facts, information, etc, it does matter. We don't live in isolated bubbles. We interact with others constantly. When we interact with people we communicate with them, and share.  So if we have our factual information wrong, we will spread that wrongness to the people we interact with. I can't think of anything positive gained by sharing of erroneous information. 

We also formulate our opinions based on what we believe to be true. If you think I'm a mass murderer, or serial rapist, you'd think differently than if you think I'm an upstanding law abiding citizen. You can think what you want about either group, but at least be right about which group I'm in. 

Society has achieved it's greatest advancements when we seek out knowledge and spread it.