Not Yet Nirvana

I don’t know about you, but my existential angst has reached near critical mass. Racism, bigotry, misogyny, and jingoism, while certainly not new to this country, have become legitimized. Truth has always been hard to find, but now verifiable information is a virtual Grail quest. Apparently, all established, credentialed news agencies are not to be trusted. I am now admonished to accept as fact, the posts of a masked person who speaks with an electronically altered voice on the Internet. The mask incidentally is symbolic of Guy Fawkes, a religious zealot who tried to assassinate the Protestant English King James, on the 5th of November 1605. And there are many other Internet sites claiming to speak truth to power that escape that meddlesome chore of fact checking. There are countless sites explaining how the government, that nameless nemesis always the culprit no matter which political party has the majority, is rendering the population compliant by spreading lithium via che...

Confirmation bias is what we do when we search for information that supports our position. We have all been guilty of this type of thinking from time to time. And what makes it even harder is the abundance of bad information, especially on the Internet which is where, let's face it, we do most of our arguing. In this venue, in today's charged political climate, it is a full time job fact checking other people’s claims. It has come to the point where we actually have to fact check the fact checkers. Scientists look for evidence that will prove their hypothesis wrong. This is one reason why science, with all its flaws, remains the best modality available for learning stuff. But I am not a scientist, I barely made it out of high school and I dropped out of college. I am a middle class, blue-collar worker, average in every respect. In my defense, I have read a lot. And not just crackpot books with weird political agendas. I’ve read books, by Shermer, Sagan, and Asimov, to n...