Things that are Obviously Untrue

How can people believe things that are obviously untrue? Well, I can demonstrate it to you.

Everybody knows that people have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.

Except that this is obviously untrue. Like, so obviously untrue that I can easily prove it to you in this post.

Have you ever experienced an emotion? How did you know? How did you know what emotion you were experiencing? How do you know if you’re sad or angry? It isn’t any of those five senses.

Hold out your hand in the air, touching nothing. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “Where is my hand?” Don’t do it by memory, just sense where your hand is.

Have you ever been hungry? How did you know?

How awake do you feel right now? How do you know that?

Now if you want to understand why people believe things that are obviously untrue, ask yourself—if you ever believed that people have only five senses, why did you believe that? How did you get the idea in the first place?

Sort of an interesting exercise; hopefully it helps you understand other people who you had a hard time understanding, before.

People want to live their lives, not your agenda

Most politicians seem to have some vast idea of these huge groups of people that need to have “something done about/for them.” As a result, they take these actions that are vast generalities that end up harming as many people (or more people) than they help.

In fact, most human rights disasters throughout history are the result of this sort of generality. A politician (or author) says, “This whole group of people needs to be helped by harming this other whole group of people.” It wasn’t true that the first group all had a single problem, and it wasn’t true that the second group was the source of that problem, even if that problem did exist!

The truth is that most people are living normal lives and they don’t want to have some vast complexity enforced on them by inflation, war, threats of violence, propaganda, lawsuits, punishment, extreme taxes, loss of their property, etc. Most importantly, they’re living individual lives, each different from each other. Some people are experiencing oppression. Some people are in danger. Some people are out to harm others for their own profit. But most people just want to be free to live the lives they want to live. They want to finish that book they are reading, start that painting they wanted to make, go see their friends, go to the movies, get that piece of clothing they were thinking about, ride their bike, post memes on Facebook, throw rocks at the pond, spend time with their kids—an infinite variety of individual normal things that make people happy.

Governments around the world have a historical tendency to destroy those things in the name of some “vast and important” political crusade, usually based on an ideology written by somebody who lives in an ivory tower and has rarely ever interacted with much of actual humanity. It’s not just governments, too—large financial institutions have done the same thing, since they have power over currency and the economies of whole countries. In some totally blind attempt to “save” some semi-imaginary group of people (or perhaps, to increase the money in their own bank account) they end up destroying the normal, daily happiness of millions of people.

It’s not always evil people who are doing it, either. Very often, it’s well-intentioned people whose education didn’t cover the consequences of applying vast generalities to a population of different individuals.

Continue reading “People want to live their lives, not your agenda” →

What is truth?

A lot of people (and a lot of philosophers throughout history) have been confused about the subject of truth.

Some people believe that if somebody has done “a study” that means that the data produced by that “study” is true. Others believe that if something is written in a book by an authority, then that is true. Some believe that only the scientific method can produce truth. And some have completely given up and decided that nothing is true and nothing can be known.

None of these are accurate.

I have a suggestion on this subject. First off, what is true is what is true for you. But what does “true” even mean?

The dictionary says that “true” means that something agrees with facts or reality. That sounds very black and white to me, as though things could be absolutely true or absolutely false. Also, it’s not very helpful if you’re attempting to deal with a lot of metaphysical or philosophical concepts about your own life, your own ideas, people’s opinions, or anything where there might be shades of gray (which is everything).

First off, it’s important to understand that there is a scale of truth–things can be more or less true. There’s no absolute truth, that’s nonsense. But there is truth. (This is the error that people who believe in “relative truth” make–they tend to take the concept of “relative” as meaning “nothing is really true or false and we all just make it up as we go.” Perhaps this helps them feel better about something bad they did once upon a time.)

So now, let me tell you an idea I have, and you can tell me if it works or not:

In order to understand truth, one must understand the purpose one wishes to accomplish. Any data is true to the degree that it helps you effectively accomplish that purpose.

Let’s look at some examples.

Continue reading “What is truth?” →

Competence

I’ve had a few people say to me, “Wow, you’re good at everything.” That’s not really true, but there are some things I’ve become pretty good at. I get the impression that some people feel like it’s magical or that I have some special ability that others don’t have. But that’s not true.

To explain this, let me tell you something that my mother told me.

I’m a songwriter, and I remember when I was about 16, listening to a particular song that I really loved and saying out loud, “Wow, I could never do that.” My mother, who was in the car with me, said, “You experience that song in three minutes, but it took a lot longer than that to put it together, maybe 100 hours. So to you it seems magical when you see it, because you couldn’t have made it in three minutes.”

This is true of almost everything that I’m good at. I’ve been singing since I was four years old. I’ve been acting since I was about eight years old. I’ve been actively writing since I was about 12. I’ve spent decades looking up thousands of words in the dictionary, carefully going over each definition to make sure I fully understood each one. I’ve been working with computers since I was eight years old, and actually started my professional career in IT when I was 14 years old.

So when I show up and sing a song in three minutes and it sounds nice, or when I come to a meeting at work and I say something in 5 minutes that seems profound, it’s because there’s literally decades of experience behind those things.

The reason that I’m good at these things is because I was interested in them and I planned for the future. I’ve always believed that I would have to have a job some day. It seemed like computers would provide a good job. Plus, I liked computers and it was hard to get me to stay away from them, even when I was a kid. I worked toward that career one way or another, taking the opportunities that I found when they were available. Now I have a career as a software engineer.

There’s nothing especially magical about me except that I was aware of the future, and willing to do something for however long it took to get to that future. The most frequent issue I see with people is either (a) having no plan or (b) not working at the plan no matter how long it takes.

There are no “overnight successes.” Every single time you look into one of these “overnight successes,” they always had some huge dedication behind them. If you insist on instant gratification, or even gratification after just a few months, you’re going to live a disappointing life. Huge goals require huge work to get there. It doesn’t have to be extreme, grinding, physical labor or something. It doesn’t even have to be unpleasant. It just has to be done, however long it takes to do it.

Vested Interests and Consequences

Almost anything gets a bad name when people try to use it to promote their vested interest. Religion got a bad name through the centuries when people tried to use it to gain power or forward political agendas. Social media gets a bad name when people use it to spread propaganda or disinformation that supports some vested interest.

Not every vested interest is “the government” or a vast conspiracy. A few of them are, and they’re very powerful and very noticeable. But even individual people do this sort of thing, and it contributes to the decay of important pieces of our society.

For example, sometimes a person semi-innocently (but knowingly) tries to start a viral marketing campaign using information that has some slightly misleading information in it. Sometimes a business executive, desperate to preserve the business that they feel is so important, spreads a deceiving message in the hope that the end will justify the means.

There are even many politicians who are good people, put into impossible situations where in order to do good they must retain their position, and to retain their position, they feel they must spread misleading information to their voters.

These aren’t fundamentally evil people. They aren’t intentionally seeking to destroy the world and the institutions they depend on. They are people with a poor understanding of the consequences of these actions (both to the society and to themselves).

Yes, the individuals who do this aren’t, all by themselves, damaging the trust that people place in things. But collectively, when lots of people do it, then the tool they use (religion, social media, television, pamphlets, public gatherings, chat rooms, etc.) tends to be attacked.

The solution isn’t to destroy the tool. That doesn’t change the motivations of these individuals. They will find another way to accomplish the same goals. They feel their survival or the survival of others depends on it.

The only solution that I can think of is to raise the awareness of ethics in the civilization as a whole, and to educate people on the consequences of these sorts of decisions. Yes, that’s a lot of work. But all too often, people avoid actually solving problems because the solution “sounds too hard,” and instead they go off and do things that will never solve the problem, because those things seem “easier.”

Probably there are stopgaps. You can try to create automated systems that detect misinformation. You can contract with fact-checking organizations. You can try to write regulations. But as we have seen, all of these solutions eventually become a whole new problem, sometimes just as bad as the problem they were trying to solve! We can’t just keep solving problems with things that create new problems. We need to see and resolve the real root cause of things, and on the subject of civilization, the answers there are always in the human mind, not in some system, tool, or rule that will magically make all our problems go away.

Fighting

A lot of people have been tricked into “fighting” things in a way that actually reduces their own freedom and perpetuates the thing that they are trying to eliminate.

I’ve had some trouble expressing this, because it’s hard to explain, but I think I’ve found a way to explain it adequately.

There are three types of fighting: bad fighting, good fighting, and fun fighting.

Continue reading “Fighting” →

Changing People’s Minds

I think some people believe that you can just throw a bunch of facts at somebody and that will change their mind. It’s true for some people, but for a lot of people it’s just not true.

First off, in order for a fact to be useful, a person would have to treat it as more important than how they feel about a thing, and dare I say, perhaps most people won’t do that on every subject. I would wager that for almost everybody, there are at least a few subjects where their personal feelings are weighted more heavily for them than their external observations. Sometimes this is okay, especially where it’s harmless. Other times it can be dangerously irrational and lead to very bad outcomes for the individual, those around them, and their civilization.

Some people have subjects on which it isn’t even their own feelings that dominate their decisions, but rather a stimulus-response pattern based in past bad situations. This is at its peak in psychotics, if you’ve ever been around one—they aren’t cute, funny people, but rather very unpleasant, irrational people who hardly even respond to things that are happening in present time and are instead enacting some drama from god knows when/where. But one doesn’t have to be psychotic to have this phenomena occur. Normal people have this sort of thing happen all the time, on some subjects—it’s to a much smaller degree then it is with a psychotic, but it still happens.

This is why, every time I’ve tried to work out the solution to some societal ill, the only thing I can come back to is that we have to help people improve their understanding, ability to observe, and help them be free of the demons that haunt their days. Otherwise there’s very little likelihood that we will be able to solve the vast problems of society. It’s composed of individuals, and unless you help those individuals as individuals, you’ll never truly solve the fundamental difficulties of this civilization.

How Propaganda Works

I’ve been thinking about it, and I think this is the principle that current propaganda is operating on:

If you confuse somebody enough, you can insert almost any information into their mind as a “solution” to the confusion. They will then believe this information to be true, so much so that they will defend it vehemently and spread it to others.

This works best when you’re talking about some area that most people don’t understand and where it would be very difficult for them to actually have a full understanding.

Of course I could use current medical concerns as an example, but that pisses everybody off, so let’s not do that.

Instead, I’ll point out that I’ve seen this happen with computer-related things all the time. Usually, what I suspect is happening is something like this:

1. A government wants to undermine another government for complex political reasons. Or a very aggressive computer company from Country A wants to undermine a computer company from Country B for business reasons.

2. This government/company looks does some research to figure out what outrages the citizens/customers of the target country/company.

3. They find something bad that’s happened, or something that can be spun to seem bad. However, this “bad” thing is actually very complex. They plant news articles (through various means, such as subtle bribery, planting information that journalists will find, making friends with journalists through savory or unsavory means, getting their agents employed in the right places, etc.) that claim that this complex thing is actually “a terrible thing that you should be outraged about,” more or less.

4. The “bad” thing is so complex that it can’t be understood by most people, but they _can_ understand the emotional message of these planted news stories. So they take the emotional news stories as factual explanations of this complex situation. Really, the stories are just manufactured based on, “What outrages these types of people the most?” And then they work backward from that to manufacture the headlines and stories.

5. The target company or country is forced to respond to the outrage of its public. However, since this outrage is based on oversimplified or incomplete information, the “problem” being solved usually doesn’t really exist. And if you’ve ever solved a problem that doesn’t exist, you’ll know what happens: you create a problem.

6. Now, wait a few months for everybody to forget about the original outrage. Now there is a real problem that you can get this country/company punished for. The real problem is probably also complex, so you can now keep running this cycle over and over until you’ve crushed your target completely.

One of the funniest things is that nowadays there is a group of Americans who are outraged by “So and so is trying to fool you,” so even saying that somebody is trying to brainwash people or fool people _can itself be used to fool people_.

The only real solution is understanding—at least the understanding of how to know things, or how to figure out how reliable or true some information is. Unfortunately, too many people use the criteria, “This sounds similar to things I already believe, thus it is probably true.” Unfortunately, propagandists know this about you and will definitely use it to insert information into your mind that serves them more than it serves you.

There is no substitute for actual understanding. This doesn’t mean you have to become an expert in every field. But if you are going to take a position about something important (like something that affects to whole society) and try to convince others about it, it’s worth diving into the subject at least a little so that you have some confidence you understand the actual facts behind it. And be willing to change your mind—the outcome of your research might not agree with your original feelings on the subject.

Consequences and Credibility

Let’s talk about consequences.

Every person that I have personally known who was involved in pharmaceutical research was a good person who genuinely wanted to help people. There are stories here and there of some individuals who have bad intentions, but for the most part, most of the people involved seem to be well-intentioned.

Also, pharmaceutical companies make many life-saving devices. Nobody is arguing about the heart monitor, the pacemaker, the IV, the sterile gloves, etc. that have saved millions of people’s lives.

Sadly, some of the largest companies in the pharmaceutical industry engaged in unethical practices surrounding some types of drugs. (One could argue this goes back as far as pharmaceutical use of cocaine in the 1800’s.) They have been thoroughly exposed and penalized for this behavior, including some of the largest lawsuits in the history of the USA. They continue to be attacked for this behavior–rightfully so, I believe.

This behavior, driven (as far as I can tell) by short-sightedness, greed, and sometimes political motives, led to a distrust of the entire pharmaceutical industry over time by a large percentage of the general population. (Another significant contributor was the behavior of the American Medical Association, which I believe may have had similar motives of power and greed at one time, even when most medical doctors were themselves fantastic people who wanted to help others.)

What this means is: now, even if the pharmaceutical industry was to develop a safe, effective, and live-saving treatment for a widespread illness–one that was truly intended to help people–there are some people who would always doubt them. And those people would be hesitant to receive this treatment, even if it was fully safe.

The point here is that the stupidity and greed of a small number of executives is not just a matter of “this hurts the company” or “this helps the company.” If you as a company take responsibility for some part of the entire civilization (like its health) and then you destroy your credibility with the public, you’re actually harming any future ability you have to solve massive, world-wide problems, simply because people will no longer trust you as a source of help. And if enough executives at enough companies display enough bad behavior, you’ll destroy the reputation of your entire industry.

The Most Powerful Weapon

The most powerful weapon in the world is PR. It is not the atomic bomb, guns, tanks, planes, chemical, or biological weapons. All of these things can be overcome or stopped by PR, and far more people can be hurt or helped by PR.

What is PR? Well, more or less, it’s the handling of human emotions, usually on a broad scale. It turns out that most people are driven by how they feel about something as opposed to what they think about it. As such, you can get people to feel certain emotions and thus get them to take specific actions or believe specific things. Because emotion is the senior quality for most people, even more so than reason.

Even if people think they are being logical, they often miss the emotional component behind their reasoning. But you can see it—people will talk about how they feel about a piece of data or express their conviction (itself an emotional state) that something is the case in some very emotional way. I’m not saying everybody is irrational all the time. I’m just saying that people are more driven by emotion, more easily, than they are driven by data. Data is helpful, but mostly if it drives them emotionally in some way. I’m not saying that this is how I think things should be, I’m saying that this is most commonly how the civilization works, and if you ignore it, it’s hard to get very far in affecting society on a broad scale.

At some point, somebody realized this and started to develop some of the only truly workable social technology that man has—the technology of Public Relations. I would love to tell you that the initial users of this technology intended to help man, but as far as I can see, that was not the case. Since its inception (which I suppose in the West one could trace to Charlemagne in about 800 AD or so, but that’s debatable) it has been used by people in power (or those who wish to be in power) to consolidate their power, eliminate their enemies, and manipulate the populace into doing their will.

Although in modern times this technology has been extended to be very helpful to business and individuals, as far as I can see, its most common use is still the same—to manipulate populaces to satisfy some agenda, often an agenda that is actually harmful to that populace but which they will buy with full love and hunger, because they have been so convinced that it is true, right, and good.

Today the technology of PR has become very sophisticated. It recognizes that you won’t get to everybody with the same message. That different types of people need to have different messages.

Let’s say that your goal was to get everybody to stop buying bananas. There are a lot of things you have to look at here. What’s the emotion you want to cause people to have? What’s the emotion that stops things? Well, hate or anger. Fear, if you want to stop the listener themselves, but hate or anger if you want to get people to stop the banana companies. So, you have to figure out how to get people to feel hate or anger about bananas, or the companies that make them, or the people that eat them, etc.

So first, one thing you have to look at it—who do people listen to? Or perhaps more accurately, who is most capable of driving people’s emotions? For some people, this is the “mainstream media,” like NBC, CNN, Fox News, etc. So you have to craft a message that (a) the readers of those channels will agree with and that (b) gets them to hate bananas.

However, many clever people who work in PR have realized that there is, today, widespread distrust of the “mainstream media.” So what do you do? You create numerous small websites and spread the data through social media. You use a _different_ message, but still one that will get people to hate bananas in the end. This works because the data doesn’t come from “the mainstream media,” but instead it comes from your “friends,” or from “independent sources.” If you do this well enough, you’ll even convince people to start spreading your message themselves, which is great, because word of mouth is still one of the most effective advertising methods around. Maybe you can even convince some famous people, and then they will spread your message too—for free! It helps if you use your “independent media” to amplify some of these famous people’s statements too—it’s a great cycle for you, the PR agent.

One of the best parts of this strategy is that, for the most part, it is not strictly necessary that the data you are spreading is _true_. Now, don’t get me wrong—lying in broad PR is absolutely going to backfire against you eventually. But it does still work (in terms of having the effect you want on the society) if you do it fast enough and broadly enough, because remember, it’s not about what’s true—it’s about what makes people feel the way you want them to feel, a feeling that they agree with and that fits into their framework of ideas.

There really are people in the world who would do literally anything to get what they want. Not everybody thinks about the fate of humanity, many people think just about their own desires or about their own family. And some of these people have the power, money, and connections to do almost anything to get what they want. It turns out that the most effective way to accomplish that, in the modern world, is very often via PR. It’s a subtle weapon that will let somebody do almost anything if they can use it with enough skill and force (force meaning, usually, money).

The force that is today attacking most people, most nations, most companies, is PR. It is using (or trying to use) you to do its work, and nowhere is that more apparent than on social media platforms like Facebook.

There are some things you can do to avoid this:

1. Understand that you live in a world where, unfortunately, PR is being used as a weapon all the time, and you are the target.

2. Always ask for the whole data. Don’t accept one picture, one snippet of a video, one sentence that somebody said. Ask for the source material and read the whole thing. Ask for specifics—don’t accept data that says “they” or “people.” Don’t accept data that doesn’t have a location or time. Don’t accept data that says “a group” but doesn’t say how many or who are in it.

3. Don’t participate in spreading messages that will produce hatred, anger, or fear. These are almost always the tools of PR agents being used to manipulate you into being their free advertiser. Instead, it’s usually possible to do #2 above and then, if there is something bad happening, share something uplifting or empowering that tells people about true solutions that have been actually proven to solve the problem that’s being talked about.

It’s often hard to learn the exact truth of something, but it is possible to recognize when the data you are being given is just weaponized PR, and simply ignore it. Like, you don’t have to solve every mystery, you don’t have to have an opinion about every cause, you don’t have to take a side in every debate. You aren’t morally broken if you choose simply to not be involved. If the data is being thrown at you just to get you to feel some emotion and thus take action on the speaker’s behalf, but you can’t actually get the full data or be confident that any of it is provable, then it’s fine to just skip it. We don’t have to be the victims of this. We just decide to be, sometimes.