Algorithms have figured out that the best way to snatch up what’s left of our dwindling attention spans are anger, fear, and misinformation, and they learned this from us.
People are lousy at mitigating their biases, especially the more they’re attached to them. While they can often recognize these flaws in others and even be reasonable regarding an array of topics, they can’t see the same flaws in their own arguments, which makes me begin to reexamine and doubt them in general.
A big one for me is religion. As an atheist, I don’t understand why so many believers appear to be so desperate to convert me.
I’ve seen appeals to authority, which are different than deferring to authority.
People have argued that since Einstein and other prominent scientists and philosophers believed in god, atheists must be missing something.
Einstein was brilliant, but he was also wrong about a lot, and he understood the difference between beliefs and evidence and that he wasn’t immune to his own biases.
When you say people should believe in god because Einstein and Aristotle did, that’s appealing to authority. When you go to the dentist to get a root canal, you’re deferring to authority. Unless you’re a dentist, they probably know a hell of a lot more about dental care than you do, and this raises another question.
Einstein and Aristotle didn’t believe in the same god or gods, and both had different conceptions of how god supposedly operates. So when a believer argues I’m foolish to not believe, I’m tempted to ask exactly which god they’re talking about.
Atheism is not a belief. It’s based on a lack of any empirical evidence. If a god appeared before me tomorrow, my first trip would be to a psychiatric ward. If a god appeared before thousands, I’d still be skeptical. Mass hysteria or delusions have been observed and documented, and as I would with any scientific finding or hypothesis, I would do my best to tear it apart before even beginning to seriously consider it. Even if all the evidence supported my hypothesis, I would comb through anything I might have missed. Maybe I didn’t have the time or money to use more sophisticated data collection techniques, or I used an inappropriate form of data analysis.
This is why all contemporary scientific papers and theses included a Directions for Future Research section, which is basically an accounting of every way you might have fucked up. The language is a bit more technical, but it amounts to “I didn’t do this because I was too stupid to realize it might be important at the time and I didn’t do that because our lab couldn’t afford it.”
The number one predictor of your religion and religiosity is that of your parents, and again, we have no empirical evidence of the existence of any god. All we have are contradictory fairly tales, and Greek Mythology, which actually makes sense compared to contemporary religions, is no longer considered to be a religion, it’s considered to be a collection of myths, or a bunch of stories that enough people at least pretended to believe in to feel some kinship with strangers who were fellow believers and allow large numbers of them to work together.
Christianity has co-opted Greek Mythology and other older religions because it made it easier to convert our ancestors, but religions have an expiration date, and Christianity in the US is sour milk. It’s become more divisive than helpful, the mother of all conspiracy theories, and an excuse to do nothing.
In essence, it’s Calvinism. The wealthy and healthy must be good because they’re healthy and wealthy, and the poor and sick must be bad because they’re poor and sick.
Again, this is very convenient. Why bother with reforms or helping anyone when everyone is already getting what they deserve?
Christ says to accept strangers and aid those in need, but the politics of most people who claim to be Christians don’t reflect this when it comes to immigrants or healthcare. They’d sooner pay tithes to the billionaire owners of megachurches than pay anymore taxes, and as much as I hate paying taxes like everyone else, the modern world as we know it would not have existed or be in the dire straights it’s in now if more wealthy people just paid their fair share.
I have an informed belief in math and science because they’ve proven to be the best ways to parse reality, and as flaws have been found and techniques have improved, I’ve rolled with it.
Seminal experiments from the past, including Dr. Kettlewell’s study of peppered moths in the 1950s that supported evolution, would not make it past a review board today. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming, but his methods were limited by technology, and as a result, he pinned moths to trees. His pictures are still relatively common in school textbooks, but you can’t pin moths to trees because it doesn’t reflect reality.
Maybe predators can better smell the injured or dead moths. Maybe a moth that was easier to spot was also more capable of flight and escape.
I spent a good chunk of grad school seeing if experiments with flawed methodologies replicated, and I have no doubt students of the future—assuming we survive—will find flaws my contemporaries missed.
What I can’t do is accept god as the solution to every problem we haven’t figured out, and if you’re intellectually honest and accept god as a creator, you have to ask who created god, and the answer to that question appears to be people.
It’s like when you get tired of answering questions from a kid and just say “Because I said so.”
The world is complicated, but in order for most of us to grow up, we have to drop religion, or at least differentiate it as a belief rather than an answer.
Our platforms will improve once we start looking for data and evidence, instead of trying to validate our beliefs, and the irony of this is that the people who seem to be the most ardent believers appear to be trying to convince themselves. They already know, and no number of views or likes can change that.
They’ve begun to admit doubt, and this is at least a start.
Take care of yourself Harry, we need minds like yours to sort out the informational quagmire in which we find ourselves. Go getum Harry!