Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/21
Daniela Wakonigg, Assistant Managing Editor of Humanistic Press, talks to Conatus News about the meaning of and threats to humanism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Tell us a little about your family and personal background. Where did you grow up? What was the environment like with respect to values and/or religious beliefs?
Daniela Wakonigg: I am Austrian and I grew up in Germany, where I still live today. I was an extremely curious child and still am an extremely curious adult. I’m interested in natural and human sciences, arts, and politics. It’s actually hard to find a topic I’m not interested in!
I was raised as a Roman Catholic but started to doubt and to think about the big questions of life–Is there a god? What will happen after death?–when I was still in primary school. As I couldn’t find answers I decided to study Philosophy and Catholic Theology (and also German Language and Literature, as it appealed to the artistic side in me). I left university with a Master of Arts and as an atheist, after a very lengthy and intense, but unsuccessful, search for convincing reasons to believe in the existence of divine powers.
My personal philosophy involves causing as little harm as possible–to the environment, to my fellow humans, and to non-human animals. I’m also trying to make this world a little better. Fighting for a better world, however, isn’t always possible without hurting someone’s (religious, political etc.) feelings. But sometimes it’s necessary, unfortunately, to hurt someone’s feelings in order to prevent things that are far worse.
Jacobsen: When did humanism ‘click’ for you? When did you decide it was the right path for you?
Wakonigg: After leaving faith, I just didn’t want to think about it anymore. I was simply fed up with it. But over the years, I realised that atheists were again and again attacked or simply not regarded in media, in politics, and so on.
One year, media reported about the Easter Sermon of a famous conservative cardinal in Germany in which he attacked nonbelievers. In his view, all the evil in the world was caused by nonbelievers. I was so angry about it that I decided to find out if there were others like me, nonbelievers, who were no longer willing to accept defamations like that.
So I got in touch with different secular societies in Germany and soon became part of the secular movement in Germany myself. And I found out that I am not just an atheist but also a humanist, which means I do not just define myself by my denial in the existence of a god/gods, but also by my belief that humans should be kind and helpful to one another, uniting through our similarities rather than allowing ourselves to become divided by petty differences.
Jacobsen: Now, you are one of the managing editors for Humanistic Press. Why this name? How did it come about and how has Humanistic Press grown over the years? What are the main activities and impacts of Humanistic Press?
Wakonigg: Humanistic Press was founded in 2006. It’s based on a registered association made up of different societies and private people who promote secular humanism and freethinking in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The registered association “hpd e.V.” is the legal structure that makes our editorial work possible. But our editorial team works independently of the association or its members.
The original idea behind Humanistic Press was to create a press agency that would provide media with secular/humanistic news–just like the Catholic press agency in Germany provides them with news from the Catholic world, and the Protestant press agency in Germany provides them with news from the Protestant world. That’s where the name comes from: Humanistischer Pressedienst (Humanistic Press Service). But the media simply weren’t interested. To them nonbelievers, atheists, and secular humanists, were too small a group to be recognised, although they comprised about 30% of the population even by that time.
So Humanistic Press decided to become a medium itself and started doing what we still do today. We report on the activities and events of different organisations that fight for secular humanism in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We also report on political, legal, and social issues in those countries from a secular point of view. We offer exclusive stories no other media are interested in–stories about blasphemers, about satirical art that criticises religions, about people who were mistreated or abused in religious establishments, about state money given to churches and the links between church and state in general.
We focus mainly on German speaking countries, but we also consistently report on topics that concern humanism and atheism around the world.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the more moving, difficult, or rewarding experiences in your time there?
Wakonigg: The most moving experience was and still is meeting secular activists from other countries and listening to their stories. These are people whose wellbeing and even lives are in danger in their home countries just because they are raising their voices for humanism and atheism.
When you are constantly working for the rights of atheists in your own country, you start seeing just the negative parts, the things that are not yet in order. Meeting atheists from other countries makes you become aware again about the benefits nonbelievers already have in Europe compared to other parts of the world.
And it personally gave me an insight: atheism/secular humanism is really a uniting force. I remember meeting secular bloggers from Bangladesh who were seeking asylum in Germany. When I talked to them I immediately felt familiar with them. We had the same way of looking at the world– a science-based way, a way that focuses on the wellbeing of people, on the need for education, women’s rights, and human rights more broadly.
Though I had never met someone from Bangladesh before and though we had grown up in completely different countries and cultures, I felt more familiar with them than with a deeply religious Christian in Germany.
Jacobsen: What are the biggest needs of the humanist community?
Wakonigg: Their biggest need is to be heard and to be seen as a growing and already very large group in society, because they are still being ignored by politics and media. But it’s up to them to be heard and seen, by publicly saying that they are atheists, by becoming aware that they are a group and by organising.
Jacobsen: What is the best argument for humanism that you have ever come across?
Wakonigg: Your question actually includes two questions. The first one is: What’s the best argument for atheism that you have ever come across? The second is: What’s the best argument for humanism that you have ever come across? Because atheism and humanism are not the same. But the second often results from the first. And for both, there are many sound arguments.
To initiate an inquiry into atheism, I recommend exploring questions like: Why do people in different parts of the world believe in different gods? How could some gods have vanished (Greco-Roman gods, for instance) and why do you think yours won’t vanish? If you have a problem with the idea that the universe/the Big Bang came out of nothing, why don’t you have a problem with the idea that your god came out of nothing?
To me, the most convincing argument for atheism is the amount of suffering in the world. It’s an old problem theologists and philosophers call ‘theodicy’: How can a benevolent tolerate suffering?
For me, all the answers that make room for the existence of God are either cynical or not convincing. This is of course a question for people who grew up with the idea of a loving, merciful god. After finding out that a god like that is logically impossible, it’s just a small step to finding out that the idea of any god is rather ridiculous.
Once you absorb the logical improbabilities of a loving Creator, you realise that there is exists only one possible way to make this world a better place. And that is by making it yourself. No god will help you, no god brings meaning into this world. The only one who can do it is yourself and your fellow humans. To me that’s a pretty good argument for humanism.
Jacobsen: What turns a believer into a non-believer? Arguments from logic and philosophy, evidence from mainstream science, or experience within traditional religious structures?
Wakonigg: There are different reasons why people become atheists. Some people simply never believed because they weren’t indoctrinated with a faith as a child, like most people from the former German Democratic Republic. Then you have people who were heavily indoctrinated with religion as children and who become atheists because they got kind of an overdose.
There are people who had had very emotional, personal experiences with members of a religion, like child abuse. Others simply find out that there are double standards in religions whereby authority figures say holy things and do quite unholy things, which causes them to doubt. Others are naturally more inquisitive and are exposed to different ideas through their reading.
Most of the older atheists I know became atheists either after encountering negative experiences with religious structures or after exploring philosophy and logic. The younger atheists I know are atheists, generally speaking, because they find the explanations of science more convincing than those religion offers.
Jacobsen: What do you consider the main threat to humanism?
Wakonigg: The fear of people to think for themselves.
For some reason people seem to be afraid of fully taking responsibility for themselves and for the world. They want a strong leader who will tell them what’s good or bad and what their purpose in life is.
This is what a god essentially provides–structure and security. Within this system, my tribal god is of course always stronger than yours! And if he isn’t, he is at least providing me with a place in heaven.
Maybe it’s a heritage from our ancestors who used to live in groups with a strong leader.
But if you dare to think and–very importantly–dare to accept the results of your thinking, humanism is just a footstep away.
Jacobsen: What are some of the demographics of the readership at Humanistic Press? (Age, sex, political affiliation, and so on)
Wakonigg: I’m very glad to say that we are being read by people of all ages. 16% of our readers are 18-24, 22% are 25-34, 21% are 35-44, 17% are 45-54, 12% are 55-64 and another 12% are 65 or older.
Roughly 70% of our readers are male and about 30% female. That’s not too surprising because around the world more men than women identify as atheists or nonbelievers and you have more men than women working as activists in secular humanism–something that will hopefully change in the future.
The political affiliation of our readers is also pretty much average for ‘None’s around the world. The majority of ‘None’s and also of our readers has rather a left wing affiliation and a liberal thinking as far as civil rights are concerned.
About 95% percent of our readers are, unsurprisingly, from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland–German speaking countries. But we do, to our surprise, also have a small amount of readers from countries all over the world, despite the fact that our content is completely in German.
Jacobsen: You can be reached through Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. How else can people become involved, even donate to, Humanistic Press?
Wakonigg: Of course donations are always welcome! Apart from that, everyone is free to become a member of the registered association that makes our journalistic work possible. But the easiest way to become involved is by voluntary writing for hpd or by giving us tips for stories that might be interesting for our readers. You can also write stories or give us tips in English and we will translate them.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Daniela. It was a pleasure.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/19
Despite being a secular nation, Canada struggles with promoting secularism, as schools and hospitals are highly influenced by religion. An interview with Dave McKee, Communist Party of Canada, on the country’s problems with religiosity in the public sector.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What stereotypes do you often hear about communism in Ontario and Canadian discourse?
Dave McKee: We certainly hear less of the old Cold War stereotypes than we did 15 or 20 years ago. Some of this change is because a lot of time has passed, but I think a lot of it also has to do with an increasing desire for alternative political views that can help explain the increasingly difficult concrete conditions that people face in their daily lives.
That said, there are some stereotypes that occasionally emerge here in Ontario. One is that Communists are a band of authoritarians who want to impose a rigid, mechanical society that is opposed to individual rights. Another stereotype is that the Communist Party is a political movement that is funded by foreign governments. I even had someone ask if, as a communist, I would outlaw pizza!
These statements aren’t at all true – the Communist Party of Canada is a “home-grown” movement that has fought for over 95 years to achieve socialism in this country. Our vision of socialism includes the profound extension of democracy into all aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life.
Probably the most common stereotype, though, is that “communism has failed” and so our movement and Party are condemned to be ineffective. This is simply ahistorical. True, socialism was overthrown in the USSR and Eastern Europe, but any honest assessment of socialism in those countries will clearly reveal the tremendous achievements and vitality of a dynamic system that transformed the lives of millions of people for the better. I would never argue that Soviet socialism was perfect, but it was not a failure – it still stands as the bar against which current and future liberative movements must seek to measure up. The fact that socialist and communist movements are growing all over the world suggests to me that it is capitalism, not communism, which is failing.
Jacobsen: The UK is more secular than Canada. This gives more flexibility for secular activists too. What organizations should young politically-minded students look into?
McKee: In Ontario, where I live, the main arena for secular activists is probably public education. The provincial government funds a Catholic school system, parallel to the public school system, and this situation has come under increasing criticism and opposition. There are several avenues for activists to get involved in this area – local school councils (sometimes called parent councils) are a good option, although they are not specifically focused on this question. Another option is the Campaign for Public Education, a coalition of labour and community activists, that has worked for many years on issues of equity, funding, and democracy within the public school system.
Another public institution in Canada with lingering religious involvement is hospitals, many of which maintain an association with a particular church or religious order, even though they are publicly funded. The biggest issue for hospitals and healthcare is opposing privatization, so we don’t see a sharp, ongoing debate around religion and hospitals. There are moments when it springs up, though, as in the recent arguments over whether Catholic hospitals should offer medically assisted suicide. These same hospitals have, at different times, been the centre of debates around abortion services. In Ontario, one of the key organizations campaigning for public healthcare and hospitals is the Ontario Health Coalition.
For young secular activists who have a Marxist or socialist perspective, a good organization to look into is the Young Communist League (YCL). This is an organization of youth and students that is politically united with the Communist Party, but organizationally independent. The YCL is active on a range of political and social issues, in both domestic and global contexts.
Jacobsen: You have taken stances against the separate publicly-funded school system in Canada. What is the situation now? Is it becoming more secular or less so?
McKee: It’s a bit of a tricky issue.
Recent studies show that, over the past 15 years, Catholic school enrolment in Ontario has fallen by around 6%. Through the same period, public school enrolment, in general, has also fallen. We can conclude two things from this: First, the proportion of public school students who are enrolled in Catholic schools is slightly reduced. Second, the proportion of students who are enrolled in private schools has increased –many of these institutions are religious, but information about the proportion is not readily available.
Looking at this, we could say that the publicly-funded system is very slowly becoming more secular, but that there also is a growing religious education sector that is privately funded.
Jacobsen: How did Canada implement this separate publicly-funded school system? What effects did and does this have on the democratic values of the country? What are some warnings for other countries’ young people with similar histories regarding their school system, e.g. the faith schools in the UK?
McKee: The whole genesis of Catholic school funding is rather bizarre. It dates back to the “original” constitution of Canada, the British North America Act of 1867 (BNA), which preserved the education rights of certain religious minorities in Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec, respectively). At that time, there were concerns among the ruling class, which was English, about the language and religious rights of the anglophone Protestant minority in francophone Catholic Quebec. These rights were secured through language that pointed to the example of Catholic rights in Ontario, and were preserved. Concretely, Catholics were entitled to a Catholic school in Ontario and Protestants were entitled to a Protestant school in Quebec. This language is so specific to Ontario and Quebec that it is not even entirely clear how binding it is on other provinces in Canada.
Currently, it is generally interpreted as enshrining the right of Catholic schools in Ontario to receive the same public funding as the secular public school system. It is probably the most-used argument against establishing a single secular school system in Ontario.
This is problematic and undemocratic on so many levels. Catholic school funding is based on a constitutional provision that emerged through the desire of English-speaking Canada to protect and maintain its privileged and powerful minority within Quebec. As such, it is a universalized policy that is peculiar to a particular dynamic in Canada – the oppression of the francophone nation by the anglophone nation. But here we are now, a century and a half later, and some basic questions are being asked: “What about the rights of other religious minorities in Ontario?” “How appropriate is a policy that equates religion with national identity?” “Should religious education be publicly funded at all?” “Since society is dynamic, shouldn’t the constitution reflect and respond to changes over time?” “If an institution is to be publicly funded, should it not also be governed and delivered in a manner that is universally accessible?”
In 1999, the United Nations Human Rights Commission considered the issue of Catholic school funding in Ontario and determined that it was a discriminatory practice. The committee stated that, in order to comply with its legal obligations, Ontario should either stop funding Catholic schools or provide education funding to all religious schools. The government chose to ignore the decision, maintaining a policy and practice at odds with international law.
As you note, the issue of public funding for religious schools is not unique to Ontario or Canada. While there are differences between the situation here and, say, that of faith schools in the UK, the current effect of publicly funded religious education is substantially the same in at least three ways:
1. It preserves the dominance of one religion (in this case, Christianity) over all others;
2. It ensures that religious views generally maintain a high profile within society, far out of proportion with a relatively smaller population of actively religious people; and
3. It continually ascribes a sizeable and broad public role to a specific religious institution, thereby hampering the fully universal provision of public services, which can only be achieved through secular institutions.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dave.
McKee: Thank you!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/18
In the fifth instalment of this Q&A with Conatus News, Dr Alexander Douglas discusses economic philosophy and contemporary economic issues.
Dr Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we discuss the philosophy of economics, its evolution, and how the discipline of economics should move forward in a world with increasing inequality so that it is more attuned to democracy. Previous sessions of our Q&A can be found here, here, and here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is philosophising about economics useful in the development of insights into economics itself?
Dr Alexander Douglas: Many economists doubt that it is. They can argue that they get along just fine without reading any philosophy of economics. And I suppose they do, given their goals. Companies and governments keep on hiring them to give advice and make forecasts. Philosophers can criticise their models for being not scientific enough, or ignore what is of real human value. Anyone can criticise their forecasting record based on whatever external standard they deem appropriate. But the economists can always reply: ‘If we’re so wrong, why are we always consulted?’ I think philosophers of economics ought to think about that question. But doing so would mean moving in the direction of social critique and away from contributing to economics as such.
Joan Robinson claims, in Freedom and Necessity, that the task of the social sciences is very different to that of the natural sciences. It is, she says, to provide society with an organ of self-consciousness. I think contemporary economics fails at this task. Economists build models in which the system works a certain way; they plug in values and predict outcomes, and policymakers and others base their decisions on these predictions. What is left out is the amount of social control required to keep the systems working in this theoretically tractable way. Economists rarely discuss this, as far as I know. Nor do they acknowledge the extent to which their models are self-fulfilling prophecies: the systems they describe work the way that they do because decision-makers unconsciously internalise the models that describe them working in that way. A real organ of social self-consciousness would make us aware of all this. If economists don’t provide one, maybe philosophers will have to.
Jacobsen: How will the economics of the future change – as the implicit philosophy and descriptions around it change into the future?
Douglas: I’m not sure what the engine of change would be. While economics is heavily criticised in certain portions of the media, economists are still, as I said, routinely hired to produce the analyses which government agencies and businesses use to determine their strategies. The analyses are based on models, the basic types of which were developed in the 1970s. Economists criticise some of the types and promote others. But, from the outside, I don’t see a huge amount of theoretical innovation; within the economic profession, improvement is just about making the right upgrades to the classic machines.
To me, this theoretical conservatism goes with political conservatism. We theorise how we govern, and vice-versa. Economic modelling is all about predicting and controlling human actions with increasing precision – winning that little bit more margin by tracking us with better algorithms. Politics works to render us algorithmically tractable. The goals work in a positive feedback loop. The more our political institutions can trap our behaviour into predictable patterns, the better the economic models can track us; the better the models track us, the better the institutions can control us. If we refuse to be described in this way, we can refuse to be governed in this way, but we can’t successfully refuse the one and not the other.
Jacobsen: Do you think the era of individual economic philosophy is almost dead, where a pluralistic approach becomes ideal because of the complexity of an international economy such as our own?
Douglas: Pluralism sounds nice. But the problem is that different approaches are non-diversa sed opposita. They are at odds with each other more than they complement each other.
Take the most fundamental question: how the entire economy, in the most general sense, works. One answer appeals to the idea of a ‘dynamic’ general equilibrium. Households maximise their utility over an entire lifetime, looking over the menu of goods that exist now and will be produced in the future. Firms decide which goods to produce by optimising a profit function, which is partly determined by the household utility functions. The government tries to minimise losses from inflation and unemployment, and this policy can, as Michael Woodford demonstrated, be derived from household utility functions. Samuel Bowles called this picture ‘utopian capitalism’. I think most economists see the real economy as an approximation, though perhaps a distant one, to this utopian picture (some might call it dystopian).
Here is an entirely different picture, which I tried to sketch in my book. Institutions determine the prices, production, and allocation of goods, in a way that is almost entirely independent of household utility. Companies get big enough to hold spare capacity and run operations too complicated for their shareholders to understand. They don’t need to worry about profit maximisation. Smaller firms, rather than competing with the market leaders, simply copy their apparently successful strategies. The government, meanwhile, chooses its policy targets by thinking about what will win votes, not what will maximise household utility. And production decisions are primarily determined by central bank policy.
Here is a concrete example of the latter. If you’re a bank in the UK, and you issue a mortgage, you can swap the mortgage with the Bank of England for pure cash (or a reserve balance): mortgages are on the Eligible Collateral List. Their placement there was a political choice. If, on the other hand, you issue a loan to an entrepreneur, you can’t swap the loan for cash (unless you find someone to buy it), and you’re stuck with the loss in case of default. Unsurprisingly, the financial sector is much more interested in lending to house-buyers and aspiring ‘property asset managers’ than to entrepreneurs in other sectors. And so we get a British economy obsessed with trading in property and doing very little else. Households readily internalise this obsession, but I doubt that it came from them originally. I think this is a pretty clear case of the economy being directed from the top, by political decisions that have nothing to do with maximising household utility.
The first picture is of a traditional free-market economy; the second is of a command economy. I suspect we live in a command economy. For all the rhetoric about free enterprise, the defeat of the Soviet Union by the Western powers was the victory of one sort of command economy over another – one controlled through the monetary system rather than through the industrial system. But whether or not you agree with me depends on which approach to economics you take. I don’t think we can avoid this argument by taking some ecumenical approach.
Jacobsen: Does modern economics imply a certain amount of faith in particular axioms? If so, what is the faith? What axioms?
Douglas: Yes, at the broadest level most economic theory (including Marxist theory, I should say), implies faith in the existence of a market system, in which capitalists pursue profit by producing at the lowest possible cost the goods that people want. I’ve never seen much evidence that our system works like that. Certainly its behaviour resembles that model to some degree of approximation, but then it resembles anything to some degree of approximation.
Above I tried to sketch out another model – not a mathematical model, but a verbal one – that I think our system resembles a greater degree of approximation. The production and allocation of goods are decided by the executive decisions of committees whose members got there by a combination of inherited privilege and blind chance.
Economists can reply that a verbal ‘model’ of this sort is unscientific: it is a satirical caricature with no mathematical precision. But then caricatures and models are the same in one way: they flatten reality by emphasising certain features and ignoring many others. Mathematical models can deliver precise predictions, but caricatures can predict outcomes in a different way – more generic, but perhaps more nuanced in a deeper sense. Which is preferable depends on what our ultimate purposes are: what we want our economic theory for. I return to Robinson: if we are after an organ of social self-consciousness, caricature might be preferable to mathematics. But if we want to sustain the status quo at the lowest possible cost, economists are probably getting it about right.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/17
Andrew Seidel, Director of Strategic Response at FFRF, speaks to Conatus News about religion, secularism, and United States law.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: FFRF is sometimes criticised for taking on small issues. Why sweat the small things? Are ‘small’ issues used as wedges for larger ones?
Andrew Seidel: I’ve given a whole talk on this topic. Several actually–under different titles, but always something along the lines of ‘Sweat the Small Stuff.’ FFRF sometimes gets flack for taking on small issues, as if it doesn’t matter to fight for the smaller things. But if you don’t fight the small things–the small violations–they are always used to justify larger violations.
This is particularly important in our system because we are in the common law system. So when a court decides an issue, it is going to look at what courts have said before; it looks at small violations and then uses them to uphold larger violations. You can walk through court decisions going back in time and see small violations being used to justify the government endorsing one religion over another or to justify other state-church violations.
Examples of these small violations are often what courts call ceremonial deism. The little things that are ubiquitous to public religion: ‘In God We Trust’ on currency. Saying, ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. Things like that. The Supreme Court saying, ‘God save the United States in this honourable court’ before the sessions. These get trotted out repeatedly to support more significant violations, even governments putting up religious displays or offering a prayer before a legislative session every day.
We are prosecuting a case where a judge has a prayer before his session of court and trotting out these same arguments and saying, ‘We have been doing this for decades and centuries. It is not that different from the United State Supreme Court saying, “God save the United States in this honourable court.” ‘
I think it is less a wedge strategy than that old story of the frog that slowly gets boiled.
Jacobsen: Better to nip problems in the bud, basically.
Seidel: It always reminds me. James Madison wrote a great line. In Virginia, they proposed a three penny tax that would support Christian preachers. James Madison wrote something called the Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments.
It is the greatest defence of state-church separation that exists from that era. It is 15 or 16 points. In it, Madison wrote that it is ‘proper to take alarm at the first experiment honour liberties.’
Then he goes on to say that the men of the colonies–the free men of the British colonies of America–didn’t wait until all of the violations of their rights had entangled themselves in precedent and basically become confirmed over long periods of time, making them so much harder to challenge.
That idea is entirely visible in our Supreme Court jurisprudence. One of the biggest cases to come down was in 2005. It was a really bizarre set of cases. There were two separate 10 Commandments monuments. One was in Texas. There were a couple in Kentucky county courthouses. The Supreme Court decided both of those cases 5-4 on the same day. The Kentucky commandment monuments had to come down. The Texas monument could stay up. The one judge who switched his position was Justice Breyer. He changed his position because he said that in the Kentucky cases it was apparent that the county boards intended to promote religion.
The displays were recent and had been challenged as soon as they went up. In Texas, it had been up for something like 60 years without being challenged. Obviously, according to Breyer, nobody thought the monument was meant to be religious—that is, nobody thought it was a constitutional violation—so it could stay up. As far as legal reasoning goes, it is as deficient as you can get. It is one of the worst and most illogical reasons and decisions that I have ever seen.
And yet, it is one of the decisions that govern religious displays across the United States now. If they have been up for a while, they get to stay. Which brings us back to the Madison quote. If the Ten Commandments display in Texas had been challenged at the time, Breyer would not have been able to make that decision.
Jacobsen: How do the FFRF and similar organisations–though they may not be as robust as to focus on the legality of things–make arguments on propriety?
Seidel: Just because something is legal does not at all make it appropriate; especially when talking about a representative democracy, religion is the most divisive force mankind has ever developed.
I think if you marry religion to power, especially power in a democracy or a representative republic where the power comes from ‘we the people’, you’re going to see huge swathes of the population alienated.
It can be used as a weapon for many politicians, who use it to pander and divide deliberately. The thing that has always struck me is that it is so unnecessary. There is absolutely no reason to ever have religion in the government in any way, shape, or form.
To me, the questions always been, ‘Why?’
I think the answer is often simple: to manipulate. Sometimes, it is done deliberately to divide the population. Other times, it is done to motivate the ‘base’, as they call it; other times, it is because the person is a ‘proud believer.’
There is no argument in there that suggests that it is proper—let alone in keeping with the values of inclusiveness and equality that America supposed to hold dear—to marry religious power and governmental power.
One of the things FFRF is fighting to protect is the Johnson Amendment. This is a rule here in the United States that says that tax-exempt nonprofits can’t get involved in partisan politics. I am going to Capitol Hill to keep it in place next week, but we always talk about how important it is. Not just because it is an important common sense rule, not only to make sure charitable donations go to charitable work and not political campaigns, but also because churches really have the ability to alter elections.
If a preacher says, ‘You’re going to hell if you vote for a particular candidate’, then it is difficult for a true believer in the faith to go against that command. We’re talking about severing the power religion has and the power government has in everyday life.
Jacobsen: Are there any instances in the history of the United States in which governmental or state legal power was abused to benefit the non-believing community alone in a similar way others have done for a particular religious sect–often Christian–in the United States?
Seidel: It is a good question. I cannot think of a genuine example of that happening. Now, there are a lot of people on the Religious Right here who say that fighting for a secular government is the same thing.
They argue that we are fighting for an atheist government.
I think it is important to separate those two things or distinguish between them. The example I use to try to explain this to people is coaches at public schools who are praying for their students. We get a lot of complaints about that actually.
So imagine, before a game, the team gathers together. In a Christian government, the coach says, ‘Okay, we’re going to pray.’
Now, if the government were endorsing atheism, the coach would be saying, ‘Okay kids, church is stupid. Nobody pray. Go home and burn your Bibles.’
We have never had that. With a secular government, the coach would huddle the team up and simply say, ‘Okay kids, go out and play the best football game you can play. Here is the plan.’ Just doing their job and not referencing religion at all. That’s it. That’s what we’re fighting for.
The FFRF does not favour atheism or favour privileging atheism and non-religion above others. We are just fighting for a secular government.
Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, said, ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’
Jacobsen: I’ve always liked that quote.
Seidel: I love that quote. It is a rough draft of my book, but I have always liked that one.
Jacobsen: As a footnote to that, you and I can agree that any non-believer who desires some superior status to the religious would likewise receive condemnation because our aim is equality.
Seidel: Yes, that is often lost on people. The FFRF is not fighting for privilege. We are fighting for equality. I think you said it well.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Andrew.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/02/06
Maija and Tim Ahrentløv, founders of Invisible Pink Unicorn, speak to Conatus News about atheism and starting a jewellery business targeted at atheists.
The classic Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) symbol was designed by Tim Ahrentløv in 2003. He published it online and made it free to use, offering free file downloads from the website. Tim then received many emails over the years from people who had either tattooed the symbol on their body, put it on their car as decal, or otherwise incorporated it in their lives.
He made a gallery with the images on the website. Throughout the years, many different people and online shops have sold t-shirts, mugs, hats, and other merchandise featuring the symbol. In 2013, 10 years after Tim designed the symbol, he and I spoke about the possibilities of doing more with the symbol.
The idea for handmade fine metal jewellery was thus born.
We redesigned the classic IPU symbol to make it into an elegant jewellery design. Initial production began in 2016 and we aired the online shop late December 2016. The jewellery is represented on invisiblepinkunicorn.com and on Instagram and Facebook as @ipujewelry. The classic IPU symbol is represented on invisiblepinkunicorn.org and on Twitter and Instagram as @ipuspotting. We use the hashtag #dontbeinvisible for both.
Scott Jacobsen: I appreciate you taking the time today to talk about the Invisible Pink Unicorn. You two founded the jewellery shop, Invisible Pink Unicorn. This seems to be a play off on one of the more prominent examples given in the non-believing community, including the orbiting teapot, the flying spaghetti monster, and so on. What was the inspiration for the Invisible Pink Unicorn symbol back in 2003?
Maija Ahrentløv and Tim Ahrentløv: The Invisible Pink Unicorn story was one of the first stories to circulate the Internet newsgroups. It is a story that atheists tell to make a point. When believers use the ‘God did it’ explanation whenever some phenomena is left unexplained by science, atheists reply with a ‘The Invisible Pink Unicorn did it’ to illustrate the lack of explanatory power behind such reasoning.
Tim wanted to create a symbol for atheism and put it out there. So he designed a stylised representation of a unicorn. It is part the mathematical void symbol and part a reference to the Invisible Pink Unicorn story from the newsgroups. Parody is not part of the design or the intent behind the design.
Jacobsen: How has business been over the years?
Ahrentløvs: The commercial part is a new initiative that we began mid 2016. So we are just starting out on the business side of things.
Jacobsen: Invisible Pink Unicorn jewellery is a niche market, I assume. If so, do you expect there to be a long-term growing sales market for it?
Ahrentløvs: Selling jewellery to atheists must be the definition of a niche market. It will require a lot of patience and effort to grow the business. Selling jewellery is hard. Pitching the idea of wearing your non-belief to atheists is even harder. But we are definitely in it for the long haul.
Jacobsen: What is the purpose of this particular theme for the jewellery? Who else sells similar jewellery?
Ahrentløvs: The symbol just means ‘Atheism’. We would like the jewellery to say: ‘I’m an atheist, but that does not make me a bad person’. To our knowledge. our combination of idea and execution is rather unique.
Jacobsen: As a symbol for atheism–and this is almost a universal for public figures or organizations–any death threats from the self-proclaimed representatives of the religion of peace or the religion of love for being public advocates or proponents of atheism?
Ahrentløvs: All is quiet. We hope it will stay that way. After all, our mission is not to dig the trenches any deeper, to stir up yet another controversy, or to hurl insults at believers. In fact, we are actively working very hard NOT to communicate directly to theists at all.
Our business is first and foremost with atheists. Because we have the opportunity to put a friendly face on atheism and make a conscious effort to change the stigma of atheism. If we can help erode harmful sentiments about atheists–one theist at a time–then maybe later on, the atheist and the theist can have a civilised talk about the other stuff too. About science, evidence, epistemology, and why atheists don’t believe in a God.
Jacobsen: What seems like the best argument for atheism to you? Is this a good alternative means of atheist activism, selling symbols through jewellery?
Ahrentløvs: The jewellery is not about arguments for atheism. We want to be clear about that because we don’t want the jewellery to be associated with that kind of story. We want to leave the arguments for atheism to the atheists themselves. The jewellery is for atheists wanting to show that they are atheists. It is for friendly, everyday, non-activist atheists who also believe that ‘coming out’ could help dispel prejudice about atheists.
All we want with the jewellery is to give such an atheist a subtle and unobtrusive way of expressing: ‘I’m an atheist, but that does not make me a bad person.’ When people find out that this person they like and respect is an atheist, it will challenge their negative notions about atheists. It might help them realise that being an atheist doesn’t say anything about who you are as a person.
Jacobsen: Is there a possibility of expanding the market to selling other atheist symbols for you?
Ahrentløvs: No. We need to focus. But we hope we can inspire others to follow and help us grow this cause and this market.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion about our discussion today?
Ahrentløvs: We just wanted to thank you for your interest and giving us the opportunity to reach more atheists out there. Thank you so much.
Jacobsen: Thank you for time, Maija and Tim.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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In Part Three of this Q&A with Conatus News, Dr Stephen Law discusses authoritarian philosophies, epistemology and education.
Dr Stephen Law is Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. He is also the editor of THINK: Philosophy for Everyone, a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (published by Cambridge University Press). Stephen has published numerous books on philosophy, including The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (on which an Oxford University online course has since been based) and The Philosophy Files (aimed at children 12+). Stephen is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. He was previously a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and holds B.Phil and D.Phil degrees in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has a blog atwww.stephenlaw.org. Stephen Law was Provost of CFI UK from July 2008-January 2017 taking on overall responsibility for the organisation, and particular responsibility for putting on talks and other educational events and programmes.
Scott Jacobsen: In the first session, we discussed faith schools in the United Kingdom (UK) and critical thinking education, and in the second session we discussed religious education in the UK and the critiques of philosophy. You mentioned the threat of purported authorities from religions and did mention the atheist community-party, which leads to the next thought for me. Many religious philosophies turned fundamentalist can become dangerous, delusional, and tyrannical. However, and, at the same time, what about the philosophies of national ideologies including National Socialist fascism in older Germany or some communist tyrannies? Are these more deadly and threatening than religions turned ideologies to you?
Dr Stephen Law: More deadly or threatening? Well, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin each achieved a far higher body count than the Holy Inquisition, so in one obvious sense, they were more deadly. I am not sure what we can extrapolate from this though.
It is worth reminding ourselves that Nazism was not, as many suppose, an atheist philosophy.
Hitler and the Nazi’s anti-semitism was religious, creationist, and anti-Darwinian. The Nazis drew on Biblical sources in justifying their views about race (for an interesting, evidence-led perspective on this see here)
Nazi attitudes to the Jews were not foisted on unwitting German people, but were already widespread. Anti-semitism was rampant, with deep roots in Christian thinking, both Protestant and Catholic. In 1936, the Primate of Poland issued a letter to be read from every Catholic pulpit in the country – a letter that, while opposing violence against Jews, said the following:
“It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free-thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion. It is a fact that the Jewish influence on morality is pernicious and that their publishing houses disseminate pornography. It is a fact that Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on Polish young people is a negative one.”
Anti-Semitism was also deeply embedded in the Protestant Churches. Daniel Goldenhagen, in his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, reports that one Protestant Church publication would, in the words of a contemporary observer, “Again and again describe the Jews with great zeal as a foreign body of which the German people must rid itself, as a dangerous adversary against whom one must wage a struggle to the last extreme . . . Dissent was rare . . . One churchman recalls in his memoirs that anti-Semitism was so widespread in clerical circles that “explicit objection [to anti-Semitism]could not be ventured.”
What all these horrific regimes – Hitler’s, Pol Pot’s, Mao’s and Stalin’s – had in common was not atheism, but authoritarianism. All were profoundly opposed to free-thought. All brutally suppressed dissent. If we want to avoid such moral catastrophes in future, I believe our best bet is not the promotion of religion – which can be brutally authoritarian too – but the promotion of free-thought amongst the citizenry and political secularism that protects the freedom of all to practice or criticise religion as they wish. Philosopher Jonathan Glover notes:
“If you look at the people who shelter Jews under the Nazis, you find numerous things about them. One is that they tended to have a different kind of upbringing from the average person, they tended to be brought up in a non-authoritarian way, bought up to have sympathy with other people and to discuss things rather than just do what they were told.”
I think this should be our recipe for raising new citizens.
Jacobsen: Even if pupils are, as per the minimum standard recommendations from Session 2, encouraged to think for themselves, especially on religion, and exposed to a wide range of views, will this necessarily be practised? For example, could the seriously motivated and devout work to subvert the best intentions of these minimum standards?
Law: Of course. In my book The War For Children’s Minds I argued for certain minimum standards regarding moral and religious education that all schools – religious or not – should meet because I thought that the introduction of such standards is practically achievable in the short term. However, they are just minimum standards. Note that I think all schools should ensure that pupils are exposed to a variety of views about religion – including atheist and humanist views – from those who hold those views. This at least would be a counter to the kind of strawman representations of atheism and humanism that might otherwise be presented in the classroom.
Jacobsen: If we take the current, most widely accepted epistemologies in philosophy, and if we take the modern incarnation of the scientific method, what seems like the probable future of epistemology and science?
Law: Greater insight into the workings of the universe, better technology, and so on. However, I am no utopian. I am not that optimistic about the future of humanity. Humanists such as myself are often accused of naive thinking on which, once all embrace science and reason, a Brave New World will open up before us and humanity can look forward to endless peace and contentment. Most of us humanists are not that silly.
Jacobsen: Thank you once more, Dr Law, it’s a continued pleasure.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dan Barker, former minister and co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation speaks to Conatus News about the organisation and its work.
Dan Barker is a Former Christian Minister and the current Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His new book Free Will Explained is coming out February 6th. Here we ironically talked about everything about him and his work except his upcoming publication.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen:I want to start from the beginning regarding your participation and finding out about the Freedom From Religion Foundation. How did you find out about it? How did you become involved?
Dan Barker: That process started back in the 1980s. I was a minister for almost 20 years. I changed my mind and became an atheist. Back in 1983, there was no internet. You had to find or buy books, or go to the library. I thought I was the only atheist in the world.
Of course, I knew I wasn’t. I read a book called Wow to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So by Annie Laurie Gaylor. It talked about how our modern laws are based on the sexism of the Bible to a significant degree. I thought, ‘This is fascinating.’
I wrote her a letter. I said I was an ex-minister. Her mother wrote me back. Her mother started this organisation called ‘Freedom From Religion Foundation’ (FFRF) in the 1970s. It went national in 1978. So, in 1984, after they got my letter, Anne Gaylor, who is the principal founder, said, ‘That is a good story. Why don’t you write us an article?’
So, I did. I wrote an article for the FFRF. The producers of the Oprah Winfrey Show thought it was a good article and so invited us on their TV show. So, that is how I found out about it. Three years later, I went to work for the Freedom From Religion Foundation as a PR director.
Jacobsen: Off-tape, we were talking about some of the recent victories for the organisations. For the United States, what are some of the more recent ones?
Barker: Among our recent victories, we have had several court victories in 2017. The housing allowance is a wide-reaching victory because it reaches every single clergy in the United States, including ministers, priests, and rabbis.
Anyone considered the IRS Code calls a ‘Minister of the Gospel.’ When they wrote that back in the 1950s, they were thinking of Christian ministers. They said, ‘We want to reward our ministers for fighting godlessness,’ which is the phrase they used.
They meant any clergy in the United States. I am sure rabbis are surprised to be considered Ministers of the Gospel. I am sure they are happy to take the break. Any clergy who gets a salary or an income from their church allows them to exclude their housing from their reportable income.
It drastically lowers the amount of taxes they are required to pay. There is a law in history for why they did this. When I was a Christian minister in California, I was able to take advantage of that housing allowance tax break.
But now that I work for another non-profit, churches are just other non-profits. In the IRS Code, they are 501(c)3 non-profits, like a charity or a museum or whatever. Now, I work for another non-profit, Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is challenging the idea of God and is fighting for keeping religion and church separate.
I no longer get that break. It seems unfair that the government is taking sides, playing favourites with people who have one particular religious viewpoint. In other words, there is a God and ordained clergy and excluding those of us who don’t agree.
It took us three lawsuits to do it back in 2009. We started in California. We pulled out. Then we filed out again, and we won back in 2013. But the Appeals Court did not overturn the merits of our victory in Federal Court. The Appeals Court ducked the issue by saying, ‘You don’t have the standing to sue.’
One we were told what we need to do to get standing to sue, it took a few years to get it. We got what is called ‘injury.’ The IRS turned us down when we asked for a refund. The IRS said, ‘No, you don’t get it. You are not a minister.’
We go back to court. We won again on the same grounds or merits. We are waiting to see. We assume the US Government will appeal the law and we’ll go back to Chicago in the 7th Circuit of Appeals.
Then this time we decide the case on the merits and not on the standing. This is a big deal. It means every priest or minister who has been taking advantage of this sizeable tax break will no longer have it. It means they will have to pay their ministers more.
Of course, they don’t want to do that when it comes down to money. You think they would do that, and this is not related to our lawsuit, if the ministers are in touch with this all-powerful God who answers their prayers and provides their needs.
Why do they have to go begging for tax dollars?
Jacobsen: [Laughing]
Barker: Why don’t they prove how mighty this God is and pay their priests and ministers a livable wage rather than having to admit, ‘Whoops! We can’t cut it without the taxes?’
Even Benjamin Franklin said, ‘When a religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are obliged to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of it being a bad one.’
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Speaking more generally, what are some of the activist activities – political, economic, or otherwise – that you are aware of that are ongoing for a potentially big win for the formally non-religious in America?
Barker: We’re seeing some mopping up of blasphemy laws. We used to have some in our states. Free speech and blasphemy are now becoming a good solid win. Although you see in Ireland they still have it on the books. It is embarrassing.
It is embarrassing because Pakistan has blasphemy laws and they are pointing to Ireland saying ‘See, a Western country has blasphemy laws, so we can too.’ Ireland is embarrassed because they are being used as an example.
But I guess, I am not entirely sure of the extent. In general, to address the question of course, the freedom to speak and of conscience. In many countries of the world, you can be jailed or killed for disagreeing with the powers that be.
That often has to do with religion and the subsequent lack of freedom of conscience around the world. In the Western world, we tend to have that. The sociologists tend to point that out. Phil Zuckerman says that the countries with better standards of living, more functional, equality for women, and a working wage with all needs met then religion goes down – way down – when the people are happy.
So, you look at the Nordic countries, most notably Denmark. Zuckerman points out that about 4% of the Danes say that they believe in God. It is tiny, but about 50% or roughly half of the Danes will still consider themselves cultural Christians.
They will get married in a church and have funerals in a church, but they don’t believe in God. It is like North American Jews. Of those that I know, most have it as an ethnic, cultural heritage thing. They don’t believe in God.
They just love their culture. When we see any country in the world where the standard of living is going up for whatever reason, then religious devotion goes down, which leads people like Phil Zuckerman and others to suggest – and this looks like a good suggestion – that religion is viable only in countries that are dysfunctional, where things are bad and there is a lot of misery.
You see in a lot of the developing world where religion is growing. It would be similar to wanting to win the lottery. Your life is miserable. You are hoping for some way out of it. Religion gives them some hope, ‘I am going on to a better life someday. My needs will be met because my life is terrible right now.’
In the global scene, the more equality for women that we can achieve and the more we can take of care each other’s needs then the country has less religion. I think healthcare is one of those needs and many of these countries doing well have universal healthcare and countries like America are envious or jealous of them.
When we went to Scotland, and Annie Laurie had to go to the hospital in an ambulance, they didn’t ask a thing. Think about how much that would cost in the United States here.
Jacobsen: You are looking at the social benefits and community benefits that come from religion in light of that fact that people live in impoverished conditions. Countries without a lot of standards or minimum standards that we take for granted that they don’t have, but the local church might provide – either through community or a hope in the hereafter, even though there is no evidence.
Barker: Yes.
Jacobsen: I do want to note that you do write music. You wrote as a clergy person, as a minister. You also write music outside of it. So, can you plug some of more secular pieces?
Barker: Yes, the Freedom From Religion Foundation has produced four CDs. There are three CDs, and one of them is a 2-CD set. It is more than 50 songs called Freethought Songs for atheism, secularism, or scepticism.About half of those songs are traditional such as the old German anthem called Die Gedanken Sind Frie. Joe Hill’s song Pie in the Sky and John Lennon’s Imagine. The songs we know are general freethought songs. The other half are songs that I wrote.
They go way back to the 1980s when I left the ministry, such as the earlier ones like Can’t Win with Original Sin.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Barker: Another is the Friendly Neighbourhood Atheist. It is kind of like a Saturday morning Mister Rogers children’s show, like ‘What is Atheism?’ A song called Lucifer’s Lament. Lucifer is complaining that he can’t get his work done because of all of these acts of God.
Then some positive things like The World Is My Country based on the words of Thomas Paine. Life is Good, life is unbelievably good. As an unbeliever, it is unbelievably good. It is like a gospel song with non-gospel lyrics.
What was particularly fun for me, a well-known Broadway composer named Charles Strouse who wrote the musical Annie. He wrote the musical Bye Bye Bird. He is in his mid-80s now. He and I wrote a song together, which was a blast.
This was one of the rare times where all I did was the lyrics. I sent him some lyrics and he set them to music. We called it Poor Little Me. I arranged a lot of the lyrics of Yip Harburg to music. Yip Harburg was the composer or the lyricist who wrote Somewhere the Rainbow, and It is Only a Paper Moon.
He sent me some poetry, and I sent music to them. The poetry is nice. I hope my music is beautiful as well. I also set to music the works of Robert G. Ingersoll who is the 19th-century orator. He just really wrote and spoke with just beautiful prose.
One of his recitations was called Love. It was the basic recognition of human love and family. You don’t need a God or religion to have love. Those are a few of the songs on those albums. If you are a musician, you want to do music.
It is what you do. I take atheism and agnosticism and scepticism. I take them as positives and worth celebrating and singing about. It is not like we get together and hold hands, which is very embarrassing and very few atheists want to do that.
We are all musical creatures and love that. I love continuing to use music for a good purpose
Jacobsen: I have one last question, which would be of interest to the readers and of central interest to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. How can people become involved through the provision of skills or talents, donations, or simply becoming a member?
Barker: All of that. We are almost at 30,000 members now. All members have different talents, resources, time, and money. We know students are usually impoverished. So, we actually allow students to come to our conventions for free.
We even have scholarships for students. We have them at different levels. We know students are busy too. Historically, it turns out. The kind of people who join groups like ours. Our group is entirely discretionary. You don’t have to join it.
Our members are often retirees – 1/3 of FFRF members are now retired. They have the time, interest and resources to join. It looks like nonbelievers are an older group but, actually, in the country, about 35% of Americans under 30 are thoroughly non-religious.
But they don’t join groups like ours. We have student essay contests. We have four national student essay contests. The 1st prize is $3,000 and then $2,000 and $1,000. We have awarded a lot of money to students over the years. There is a high school seniors contest, a college student contest, a grad student contest, and students of colour or minority student contest.
A lot of students entered them. It is amazing. You tend to think blacks and Latinos are believers, but they are not and have broken away and are thinking for themselves. Also, we have the ‘Out Of The Closet’ billboard campaign with your message and face on it.
We post it and then you can put it on social media. We also have unafraid of burning in hell billboard.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Barker: You put your face on a Devil’s mask thing. That comes from Ronald Reagan’s son doing an ad for us. Rachel Maddow had it on her show. It was Ron Reagan who is an unabashed atheist, who is not afraid of burning in hell.
That is catching on, especially in Halloween seasons. That is free. Many of our online offerings are free, especially to students including our new unpleasant God website. It is unpleasantgod.ffrf.org.
Where you can show everybody what the God of the Bible is like, you can look up misogyny and the verses. You can look up jealous and genocidal, and infanticidal. Then you can share that.
You can show people. You can click share and show it on your Facebook or whatever. If anybody has any legal expertise, we make complaints all over the country.
We make complaints in schools all over the country. Sometimes, we need local counsel. An attorney on the ground at that location. We have people at that site that can help you do whatever you want.
They can do the minimal filing stuff. They can even work with us on drafting the briefs and help us to make arguments. We have those resources and that kind of people.
If anybody has extra cheese, that is useful. You can go to the website ffrf.org and look at ‘Get Involved.’ We have chapters all over the country. You can look up if there is a chapter in your area. The chapters deal more with the local issues. Our Portland chapters, for example, deal with the Portland public schools.
North Carolina chapter deals with North Carolina issues. Then they can communicate and compare notes and share resources and find out how best to solve the local problems. There are a lot of ways.
Another thing that is helpful is a group putting us in the will. If we have been around long enough, about 40 years, it can be a nice way for a person to live on after they die. Your inheritance can go to a group that keeps fighting for you after you’re gone.
It is bittersweet. We get these things from people who are dead. They died, but that is what they wanted. They wanted to keep that fight against fundamentalist religion.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dan.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/20
Rebecca S. Markert is the Legal Director for the Freedom From Religion Foundation. She discusses the association’s work and more with Scott Jacobsen.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You have formal training in political science and international relations, and earned a Juris Doctor as well. How did you come to find an interest in those particular topics? How have these qualifications assisted in personal life?
Rebecca S. Markert: I was interested in international relations after I spent my senior year of high school as a Rotary Youth Exchange student in Hamburg, Germany. After that year abroad, I became interested in studying German and working in international affairs. During the course of my undergraduate work at Wisconsin, I discovered I really enjoyed my political science coursework. I started taking more of those classes and ended up with a triple major.
I wasn’t originally planning on going to law school. I thought I would get my Master’s in international affairs, but started working on Capitol Hill and became really interested in domestic issues. Then I worked on a campaign for the U.S. Senate doing compliance work with federal election law and realized how useful a J.D. would be.
These experiences have been incredibly useful in my current job as Legal Director for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FRFF). Obviously, my legal training helps with FFRF’s legal work, but my experience on the hill also helps when we’re looking at legislative efforts to dismantle the wall of separation between state and church. Also, my experience working with a diverse constituency helps when working in a membership association.
Jacobsen: How did you find the Freedom From Religion Foundation?
Markert: Once I graduated from law school and decided to settle with my husband in Madison, Wisconsin, I started looking for attorney jobs. I was lucky to find that FFRF posted for its first in-house staff attorney the same year I passed the bar in Wisconsin. I applied and the rest is history.
Jacobsen: Why did you choose the Freedom From Religion Foundation?
Markert: I loved constitutional law as a law student and was drawn to civil rights or criminal law because of that. Working for FFRF allows me to work in constitutional law every day – something not a lot of other attorneys get to do often if ever in their careers. I work on issues of national importance. It’s very exciting to work on issues that have real significance.
Jacobsen: What do you consider some of the more pertinent, bigger goals for the Freedom From Religion Foundation? How can other organizations help? (How have they helped?)
Markert: One of FFRF’s main purposes is to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state. The biggest goal for FFRF is to keep that wall, as Associate Justice Hugo Black stated, “high and impregnable.” The biggest area of complaints about breaches of separation between state and church are in our public schools. This is astonishing given the clear case law that’s existed for decades about what is permissible and what is not in public schools. FFRF prioritizes these cases because of the age of school children affected by religious intrusion in their schools and the rights of the parents to direct their children’s religious or irreligious upbringing.
Jacobsen: Your main work is on the First Amendment caseload including areas of public schools, religious symbolism, and electioneering. All about the intrusion of religion in public life, whether overreach or utilization as a political tool to rally votes. What are some of the more notable cases, your work on them, and the eventual outcomes of them?
Markert: Some of the notable cases I worked on are as follows:
In 2013, FFRF along with the ACLU of Ohio sued Jackson City School District in Jackson, Ohio, to remove a portrait of Jesus that hung in the hall of honor at Jackson Middle School for decades. During the course of litigation, the district moved the portrait from the middle school to the high school. This complaint originated with FFRF, and when it came across my desk, I didn’t believe that it was true. There was strong precedent in the Sixth Circuit, of which Ohio is part, that found these displays in public schools unconstitutional. I thought it would be a quick victory and could be resolved with a letter of complaint. The superintendent refused to remove the portrait without a court order. Later that year, he got one. The case was victoriously settled with a consent degree on Oct. 4, 2013. The court order mandated permanent removal of the portrait and parties agreed to a financial settlement requiring the school to pay the plaintiffs a combination of damages and legal fees totalling $95,000.
I also work on a lot of religious display on public property cases, notably cross displays. This year, I was involved with two lawsuits involving crosses on public property. The first was in Santa Clara, California, where a large granite cross was erected in a public park, named Memorial Cross Park. The 14-foot cross apparently commemorated the 1777 Catholic mission that founded the city. The cross was donated in 1953. I wrote to the city requesting removal of the cross in 2012. The city agreed the cross was constitutionally problematic but continually delayed removal. In January 2017, FFRF sued, and the cross was removed quickly and the case settled in March 2017. The city agreed to pay attorneys’ fees totaling $6,500.
The second cross case involved a 25-foot tall cross in Bayview Park in Pensacola, Florida. A cross, in one form or another, has been there since 1941. In 2016, after unsuccessful attempts at getting the City to remove the cross through non-litigation efforts, FFRF along with the American Humanist Association sued the city for its removal. In June of this year, a federal judge agreed with us that it was unconstitutional and ordered the cross’s removal. That order stayed pending appeal. The City has now retained the Becket Fund, a religious right legal group, to represent them on appeal. The case is currently pending before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but FFRF is confident the lower court decision will stand.
Jacobsen: You are the President of the Legal Association for Women in Madison, Wisconsin. What is the purpose of the organization?
Markert: The purpose of the Legal Association for Women is “to promote the rights of women in society and advance the interests of women members of the legal profession, to promote equality and social justice for all people, and to improve relations between the legal profession and the public.” LAW offers monthly luncheons which include Continuing Legal Education programs, and annual events. You can find out more here: http://www.lawdane.com/
Jacobsen: How can citizens donate and become involved in the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Legal Association for Women?
Markert: You can donate or become a member of FFRF at our website: https://ffrf.org/donate
Donations to LAW are also welcome and information about those can be found here: http://www.lawdane.com/#/contact/
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Rebecca.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/03
Bob Churchill, Communications Director for The International Humanist and Ethical Union speak to Conatus News about the 2017 Freedom of Thought Report.
Bob Churchill is the Communications Director for The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), Editor of The Free Thought Report. He is also a trustee of Conway Hall Ethical Society and a trustee of the Karen Woo Foundation.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The new Freedom of Thought Report (2017) by the IHEU, looking at discrimination against the non-religious on a global scale… Let’s talk about it: What big changes took place since the previous report?
Bob Churchill: There’s lots of new information about specific cases. In the Editorial Introduction we focus on seven key incidents which occurred since the previous year’s edition. This includes murders of humanists or atheists in Pakistan, India and the Maldives, and a series of anti-atheist pronouncements by government officials in Malaysia, also a new upsurge in ‘blasphemy’ hysteria again in Pakistan which saw several secular activists forcibly ‘disappeared’ and men accused of running atheist social media channels arrested on ‘blasphemy’ charges. And there were cases in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Mauritania in which men who have faced ‘apostasy’ charges have been faced with possible death sentences for being atheists.
In Sudan an extremely brave atheist activist Mohamed Al-Dosogy was forcibly subjected to a psychiatric test before before being released, in Saudi a death sentence for apostasy against Ahmad Al-Shamri was upheld, and in Mauritania a writer called Mohamed Cheikh Ould M’kheitir, who’s been jailed since 2014 for writing about religious hypocrisy around caste discrimination, looked set to be released in November after his sentence was downgraded to two years, which he’s already served, but no – it appears the prosecution is demanding yet another re-trial.
As I say, this is all in the editorial, and there’s more information on specific cases in the country entry for each place. Our ratings system for countries is based on big issues, like whether a specific kind of law exists, or whether a particular kind of discrimination occurs, therefore the ratings themselves don’t change radically from year to year as you can imagine. But still, there were a few changes in 2017! Most notably was a positive change which is that Denmark scrapped its ‘blasphemy’ law, which in that country had a potential prison term, which we consider a ‘serious’ problem! So the rating for Denmark in the category of free expression fell from ‘serious’ to one place lower. That’s happened in a few countries over the past few years including Malta and Iceland.
Jacobsen: What countries remain the worst for the non-religious? What countries left that category?
Churchill: No country left that category this year. We apply boundary conditions to each country across four thematic areas, and each boundary condition has a different severity level. The worst severity level is ‘grave violations’. In most cases, if a country has a boundary condition in one thematic area at the ‘grave violations’ level then it probably meets another few boundary conditions at the same level, so it’s going to be rare that a country moves out of the position of having at least one of the worst conditions. That would require, for example, a country which currently has a death-for-apostasy law getting rid of it, or a country which currently derives all its laws from religious edicts to stop doing that, and also to stop doing whatever else it’s doing at the same severity level.
In fact, in the six years we’ve been running the report I don’t think any country which met any of our most severe boundary conditions has lost any of those worst conditions. I’d interpret ‘the countries which remain the worst’ as any which meet one or more conditions at the ‘grave violations’ level, which is – if I just consult my list here: Afghanistan, China, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
Jacobsen: What countries remain the best for the non-religious?
Churchill: Very few countries have a clear slate across all four thematic areas of the report, but they do exist: Belgium, Netherlands and Taiwan. Now this isn’t to say that it’s impossible for an atheist to be bullied or persecuted in those countries, of course it is. And we know for example there are some problems with the treatment of atheists living as refugees or seeking asylum in otherwise well-performing European countries, where essentially the lack of a litmus test for atheism is leading authorities to discount the concerns of atheist asylum seekers, or for example putting liberal, non-religious people in detention centers with sometimes very conservative and threatening fellow refugees. That’s a problem we are concerned about. But formally speaking Belgium and the Netherlands in Europe and also Taiwan do very well.
It’s interesting to note that, maybe contrary to the expectations of some, Belgium and Netherlands both have what is called ‘pillar model’ secularism, and Taiwan is similar, although that’s a country entry that we need to expand on. The point is, rather than church-state separation as such, there’s a promotion of equality and state neutrality between religious or ‘lifestance’ groups in these countries, including humanists. So if you’re a separationist-type secularist then this isn’t wholly satisfactory, but in terms of non-discrimination which is what our report focuses on then their equality of treatment is very positive. Interestingly, Norway was heading in that direction, but very recently there’s talk of a new law which would privilege the Church of Norway including giving them a larger slice of public funding than other religious and other lifestance groups, so that’s a rating to watch that could slip back next year!
Jacobsen: What positives and negatives come from the report in the big picture?
Churchill: The most serious concern for any humanist or progressive should be that we live on a planet where over 80 countries have some ‘serious’ or worse problem for the non-religious. In 30 countries – a list which at this moment in history is entirely predominated by Islamic states or countries with predominantly Muslim populations or regions – there’s a detriment to your freedom of thought so severe that we would call it a ‘grave violation’. This includes countries that can take your children off you if you declare your atheism, or where you can be murdered with near impunity and the government will blame the victim for the murder because posting something satirical on Facebook was ‘incitement’, or where the state could hand you a death sentence for ‘apostasy’ just for saying ‘I don’t beThese are huge violations. Of course many religious minorities face other kinds of control and suppression, but I think the international community has been overlooking the extremeness and severity with which the non-religious are treated, to the point where they are often almost invisible. When a government shrugs and says ‘there aren’t any atheists here’ that should be as laughable and absurd as when they say ‘there are no gay people here’ or similar. In all but the very smallest of island nations for example, then it is obviously wrong, obviously a symptom that people are socially marginalised, or not free to ask questions or to express themselves.
So I think that should be one of the big take-away messages of the report: that there’s this huge swathe of the planet where many people will openly demonise atheism and non-religious persons, where religious criticism and humanist values are seen, wrongly, as a western imposition or even a plot to destroy culture, and where the non-religious are denied their right to freedom of thought and expression.
There’s a lot that’s negative in the report, but one thing I do try and point out is that the non-religious are not going away. Even in some of the very worst countries, or the countries we’ve focused on in 2017 like Bangladesh, Maldives, Sudan, Pakistan and so on, and I can think also of Egypt and many MENA region countries, the backlash against atheists is often very explicitly linked to the perception of spreading atheism. Again and again the concern is that social media and a globalised world, and also the spread of Jihadi terror, is turning some proportion of the population away from religion, especially the young.
Now, at the same time, some religious identities are hardening, turning more conservative or fundamentalist. But the perception of what they call ‘creeping atheism’ is usually borne out by the statistics: very slowly in most countries the world is secularising. And my personal view – though I recognise I can’t really derive this from the data as such – but I think a lot of the resurgence in anti-atheist rhetoric and even the murders we’re seeing is a backlash against this secularisation. It’s a conservative religious mentality that is losing the argument, that is losing ground as ideas and information find their way to every smartphone and campus, and then they have this violent, oppressive reaction to it.
It’s doubtless not much of a comfort if you live in a country where your life is at risk if you champion humanism or atheism or secularism, and it’s not intended as such, but it is a cause for some hope. The backlash gets more violent because of real progress. And that progress isn’t going to stop I think: the non-religious aren’t just going to go away once they’ve seen behind the curtain! So it’s absolutely vital now that we get the human rights of the non-religious recognised, enshrined, and made an international touchstone issue. That is what we’re trying to do with the report – make it known, put the issue in front of international institutions and ensure that national delegations know that their records will be tarnished if the abuse or ignore the rights of their non-religious citizens.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Bob.
Churchill: Thank you!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/12/23
Dr. Caleb W. Lack Ph.D, Professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, speaks about clinical psychology and the misconceptions about secular therapy.
Caleb W. Lack, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, and the Director of the Secular Therapist Project. Dr. Lack is the author or editor of six books (most recently Critical Thinking, Science, & Pseudoscience: Why We Can’t Trust Our Brains with Jacques Rousseau) and more than 45 scientific publications on obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and tics, technology’s use in therapy, and more. He writes the popular Great Plains Skeptic column on skepticink.com and regularly presents nationally and internationally for professionals and the public about clinical psychology and secular therapy. Learn more about him here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are common misunderstandings about secular therapy?
Dr. Caleb Lack: I think that many people, especially the religious, would hear “secular therapy” and think that it would only be something that a non-believer would engage in. In fact, all of the evidence-based therapies that we have for mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, and the like are “secular”, or developed without the use of supposedly supernatural aids and interventions. Almost all therapists who are religious (as opposed to “religious therapists”) use secular therapy in their practice. In other words, they are not using prayer, or exorcism, or invoking some religious concepts to heal a person of their mental health problems. Instead, they are using our “secular” therapy techniques.
Jacobsen: Is secular therapy more effective than prayer, ritual, attendance in places of worship, AA, and 12-step for recovery and improvement of general wellbeing?
Lack: That’s a good question that’s difficult to answer. We know, for instance, that regular meditative practices can provide a huge boost to well-being, as can regular social interactions. If your meditative practice is prayer and your regular social interactions are church-based, there’s nothing wrong with that at all. You’re likely to be healthier than someone who doesn’t do those things. However, you’re not more likely to be healthier than someone who regularly engages in mindfulness exercises and engages in regular outings with their bowling club or board game playing friends. In other words, it’s the type of things you do (e.g., positive social interactions), not whether they are secular or religious in nature.
On the topic of AA and 12-step programs, it’s a bit easier to answer, and I actually did a debate on this subject last month. Overall, our most evidence-based treatments for substance abuse and other problematic compulsive behaviour (which is what AA and the 12-steps focus on) are all secular in nature. Self-help group-based programs like SMART Recovery or Moderation Management don’t use any religious overtones or practices. Despite this, they show much better outcomes than AA, especially when paired with individualised therapy such as motivational interviewing or cognitive-behavioural therapy.
Jacobsen: How does clinical psychology provide complementary tools for secular therapy, assuming different domains given different titles for them?
Lack: Related to what I mentioned before, all evidence-based therapies are secular in nature. That doesn’t mean that clinical psychologists like myself who aren’t religious can’t work with people who are, or that clinical psychologists who are religious don’t work with those who are not. There’s a significant amount of research taking place that looks at how we can adapt particular evidence-based therapies to those of particular faiths. I’m actually leading a clinical round table at a major national conference later this year on that topic, and we have panellists speaking about how CBT can be most effectively used with patients who are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and non-religious.
What our clinical outcome research does is inform us what the most effective techniques are to help a person who has a particular form of psychopathology or a specific behavioural, cognitive, or emotional difficulty. Once we have those basic understandings down, we can then work on developing modifications of those for other groups, whether by age, developmental level, racial/ethnic background, or religious belief.
Jacobsen: If someone believes in a god, does any evidence exist to support better mental well-being in the clinical psychology literature? If any, is this outweighed by any opposing literature? Or is the evidence pretty neutral for belief or non-belief?
Lack: There’s actually large amounts of literature examining this very issue! Most of the early work appeared to show that being religious was a protective factor, meaning that it helped your overall well-being to stay higher (like this major review article). However, more recent work has dug deeper into this area, and has found that it’s not actually the “religious belief” that’s providing this boost. Instead, newer research has found no differences between the religious and non-religious. Other studies that have compared mental health outcomes point to the strength of a belief system, regardless of if it is religious or non-religious, as the best predictor of positive mental health. It actually appears that the positive effects of religious belief in early studies is due to social engagement and being in supportive groups, and has nothing to do with religious belief, but instead with the trappings that often accompany it. So, if you’re an atheist who has a supportive community you belong to, you’re just as well off as a religious person in the same. If you don’t have that, you need it! That’s why the work that larger national groups such as Recovering from Religion, Oasis, or Sunday Assembly and local organisations (such as Oklahoma Atheists, where I am) is so important, as it helps build those communities
Jacobsen: What is the consensus view in the clinical psychology community of those who believe in ghosts and angels, and prayer and speaking in tongues? Are these viewed as coping mechanisms for stress and anxiety, as delusions, as core to mental well-being, and so on?
Lack: Generally speaking, a key component of any definition of someone who is suffering from a mental disorder or psychopathology is that the symptoms they are experiencing have to be causing them distress, or impairing their ability to function in their environment. So, if someone believes in intercessory prayer, speaks in tongues, or other things and it’s not causing them problems in their environment, or emotional or cognitive distress, most mental health professionals would say “Okay, that’s fine. Come back if they are making you feel scared or worried, or causing conflicts with the people around you.”
I will say, though, that some new research coming out of my lab indicates that paranormal beliefs outside of the “typical religious belief” spectrum is related to higher levels of mental health problems, although it’s someone we need to do much more research on.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/11/15
As Earth’s biosphere undergoes its sixth major extinction event, 15,000 scientists have issued a stern warning regarding climate change.
The signatures were gathered as part of a collective effort to warn humanity about the detrimental effects a warming planet will have on the survivability of the human species. Forestry Professor William Ripple from Oregon State University came across a similar warning from 1992 and decided to relaunch the campaign on its 25th anniversary.
Ripple identified the following trends in ecological decline over the past 25 years, since 1992, including:
- A decline in freshwater availability
- Unsustainable marine fisheries
- Ocean dead zones
- Forest losses
- Dwindling biodiversity
- Climate change
- Population growth
Despite this, efforts by the global community have brought about one positive outcome: There has been a decline in the depletion of the ozone.
The signatures aim to raise awareness about the negative impact our industrial activity is having on the our planet.
Scientists around the world are highly concerned about climate change and the effects it will have on societies in the coming years. As more countries industrialise and others develop, there will be an increase in global consumption patterns, which will lead to a heavier global carbon footprint.
Development will bring more people out of poverty and raise living standards, but it will likewise increase carbon emissions, creating a threat for the survival of our species.
Science and Technology Professor at Virginia Tech, Eileen Crist, said:
Sometimes people miss … the most significant event: the rapid rise of the global middle class, which is now more than three billion people in the world and it’s expected, by 2050 or so, to rise to five billion people.
This swelling of the middle class raises the potential for ecological disasters. One of the biggest factors is, simply, population growth. If family sizes were to decrease, and if consumption patterns were to be reduced per person, then the net carbon footprint could be reduced.
Global carbon emissions, however, have risen 62% since the original warning issued in 1992.
This has produced profound effects. In many major cities, thousands of people die each year due to respiratory issues brought on by high levels of pollution in the air.
The very young and the very old are the chief victims of air pollution due to physical vulnerability.
Crist went on to say:
We are in the throes of a mass extinction event that is anthropogenic. This is not something we can fix. If we lose 50 to 75 per cent of the species on the planet in this century — which is what scientists are telling us what will occur if we continue to operate as business-as-usual — if this happens, this can not be fixed.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Ibrahim Abdallah is the co-founder of Muslimish. In this interview he discusses his stance on religion, how Muslimish facilitates a safe environment for Muslims and ex-Muslims, blasphemy laws and threats to free speech.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your current stance towards religion? How does this impact your personal life?
Ibrahim Abdallah: I think religions are false primitive ideologies and I am against them as a system of governing people in our times.
It affects my life positively. It generally has to lead me to act rationally, guided by scientific information and data; it makes me aware of my primitive origins which help me deal with their pre-wired impulses more efficiently; and above all, it makes me a better father for my children since I don’t teach them lies as truth.
Jacobsen: In order to create the support and space for the free exchange of ideas, how does Muslimish facilitate this environment for Muslims and ex-Muslims?
Abdallah: By organising meetings, real meetings, on the ground, where people meet each other. This is not a Facebook group. We meet in person, we practice having a discussion, we find common objectives, and we enjoy having our culture back without all the primitive ‘hocus-pocus.’
Meeting intelligent, questioning believers has taught me to focus on people’s actions and not what they say they believe. Besides terrorists, no one really believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible or the Quran, everyone else picks and chooses. Also, Muslim believers meeting ex-Muslim atheists and hearing their issues with the Islamic faith helps to normalise former Muslims in the American-Muslim community. Our hope is that this interaction will lead the entire community towards a more pluralist, pragmatic, rational, and secular approach to its unique problems.
Jacobsen: Why do blasphemy laws need to be abolished? How do they violate human rights?
Abdallah: Muslims in Muslim-majority countries are not allowed to change their religion in direct violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With that said, blasphemy laws are older than modern laws and what we now understand to be the basic human right of free speech.
Blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority countries are the main reason millions of atheists and secular people are not able to publicly advocate for equal rights for women or even criticise unhealthy or unethical religious behaviour without fear for their freedom and safety.
Jacobsen: How are the irreligious silenced in Muslim-majority countries?
Abdallah: Actual state laws prohibit criticising Islam with punishments ranging from imprisonment, in Egypt; to beheading, in Saudi Arabia. And that is if the person opposes certain aspects of Islam and is not silenced in other ways through family and community pressures.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more egregious penalties for those who are viewed as ‘not ‘Islamic enough,’ insufficiently Muslim, or nonbelievers?
Abdallah: Execution is the most egregious penalty there is.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more promising movements that expand the conversation for ordinary Muslims and ex-Muslims?
Abdallah: There is a group in London called Faith To Faithless, and there are now Muslimish groups in NYC, Detroit, Atlanta, Toronto, and Chicago, with plans to expand to all major US cities.
Jacobsen: What are the larger impediments to the free practice of ordinary Islam and for those who have left Islam to live peacefully without threats to life?
Abdallah: State laws and fear of community terrorism.
Jacobsen: What are the 3-year plans for Muslimish?
Abdallah: We don’t have a 3-year plan. We continue to hold meetings, grow our community and strive to strengthen its connections. Our 20-30-year plan is to be a large enough group that can represent the former Muslim and secular Muslim voice in the American-Muslim Community. We cannot allow terrorist enablers to be the only voice of Muslims in America.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Ibrahim.
Abdallah: Thank you for giving Muslimish a platform.
For more information, visit: http://www.muslimish.org/
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/11
John Perkins is the President of the Secular Party of Australia. The party is intended to promote secular humanist ethical principles in Australia as well as advocate for the separation of church and state. Scott interviewed John Perkins in April on the Secular Party of Australia, and the associated ideas, policies, and initiatives. In this educational series, they discuss secularism in Australia.
Scott Jacobsen: What is the current state of secularism in Australia? How does secular culture benefit Australian society?
John Perkins: Secularism exists in Australia in the sense that there in no state religion. However, Australia offers generous benefits and tax concessions to religious organisations. Australia would majorly benefit financially from a more secular culture, whereby religions are not supported, subsidised and promoted by the government. Currently, billions of dollars per annum are expended supporting religious schools. Religious organisations are tax exempt, costing further billions in government revenue. “Advancing religion” is, of itself, considered a charitable purpose, whether there is a public benefit or not, which is the core problem.
There would be an even greater benefit from a secular culture by creating a more harmonious society without the sectarian divisions which religious ideologies create. These divisions are intensified by religiously segregated schools that promote indoctrination of children into particular religions. This happens to a much greater extent in Australia than other comparable countries. Enrolments in religious schools, especially Islamic schools, have increased.
Jacobsen: What are some major ongoing threats to secularism’s survival?
Perkins: Paradoxically, as the population has secularised over recent decades, the state has increasingly advanced religious causes. As government social services have been privatised, religious organisations have been granted supervisory roles. Education is the main area in which secularism is threatened. While chaplains have been introduced at government schools, it is private religious schools where the main threat lies.
Religious schools have proliferated, with government support, and in the case of Islamic schools, with Saudi seed funding. Apart from teaching the standard curriculum, there is no control over what is taught in private religious schools. Hence a whole generation may pass through these sectarian schools, which may indoctrinate extremist views, without contact with students of other religions. The secular nature of society is thus eroded.
Jacobsen: You want to bring about “true” separation between church and state. What might be the negative outcomes if the culture was largely non-secular – where the church and state separation is nearly non-existent?
Perkins: The negatives can be observed when separation of church and state is absent. A few countries have strong constitutional separation of church and state. In most non-Muslim countries, however, there is little separation and the consequences are mainly in terms or inequity and wastage of economic resources, as in Australia. In all Muslim majority countries, however, religious law challenges or dominates civil law. Many Muslim counties constitutionally enshrine sharia law, which is the antithesis of secularism.
There are strong blasphemy laws in most cases. Freedom, human rights and democracy are undermined, as civil law is subservient to religion. As a consequence of the rise in global Islamism in recent decades, we have witnessed many countries fall into dysfunction, violent dystopia and failed state status. Few people, however, are able to recognise this as being an inevitable consequence of the loss of secularism, an essential ingredient of modern civilisation.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, John.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Caleb W. Lack, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, and the Director of the Secular Therapist Project. Dr. Lack is the author or editor of six books (most recently Critical Thinking, Science, & Pseudoscience: Why We Can’t Trust Our Brains with Jacques Rousseau) and more than 45 scientific publications on obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and tics, technology’s use in therapy, and more. He writes the popular Great Plains Skeptic column on skepticink.com and regularly presents nationally and internationally for professionals and the public. Learn more about him here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does evidence-based therapy work?
Dr. Caleb W. Lack: There’s not one way that an evidenced-based practice works, because that’s more of a general name than a specific model of treatment. Evidence-based therapies are those therapies which have been shown to work via clinical trials that are placebo-controlled, blinded or double-blinded, and that make use of control groups. Our gold standard trials (randomised, double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies) allow us to have great certainty that any improvement someone makes is due to the treatment itself, and not just placebo effects or regression to the mean (where people would naturally improve over time, regardless of what treatment they do or do not get).
Jacobsen: How does cognitive behavioural therapy work?
Lack: CBT is the broad name for those therapies that attempt to change how we either act or think, in order to change the way we feel, think, and act. Depending on what’s bringing a person into therapy, the focus can shift between working on thoughts and cognitions, working on actions, or often by targeting both at once. The general idea behind these therapies is that many people develop maladaptive ways of thinking about situations or interpreting information, which then changes our behaviour in ways that cause us to feel sad, anxious, fearful, and other negative emotions. What a good CBTer does is work with clients to identify what behaviours are maintaining or reinforcing these negative emotions and thoughts, and then develops highly specific interventions designed to address both the maladaptive thoughts and behaviours.
To give an example, let’s say that someone comes in and reports symptoms typically seen in major depressive disorder, things like a lack of energy, avoidance of previously enjoyable activities, irritability, feelings of sadness, and so on. A CBTer would work to identify several things. First would be what types of automatic negative thoughts the person was having. These are thoughts that just “pop” into your head, so to speak, and often then cause you feel sadness or worry, even fear. After identifying these, you could begin work with what we call cognitive restructuring, which is working with the client to have them start questioning the validity of such thoughts, comparing what the thought is to reality. In doing this, one begins to see that their depression is causing them to have a skewed view of the world, one that doesn’t match up with objective reality. At the same time this is happening, you could also begin to target the behaviours which are maintain their depression, and those tend to be escape and avoidance behaviours. Using what we call behavioural activation, you begin (in a very progressive, careful fashion) to stop avoiding activities and instead engage in them as you did when you weren’t depressed. The therapist then helps the client learn these new skills (cognitive restructuring, behavioural activation) both in session and via between-session assignments and tasks, often referred to as homework. Before too long, the person will find themselves more easily able to both engage in activities they would have avoided and to catch those depressive thoughts and fight back against them.
Jacobsen: Why do you use these therapies over others?
Lack: For me, as a scientist-practitioner, I place my trust in what works for the treatment of any health problem in repeatable, verifiable, empirical evidence. Just as I wouldn’t want my physician giving me medications that I don’t know works, or a surgeon doing an operation that isn’t supported by research outcomes, I would hate to be a mental health practitioner who relies on intuition or hypotheses that are unproven when I’m working with someone. By relying on evidence-based therapies, whether that’s CBT, or interpersonal therapy, or applied behavioural analysis, we can provide our clients with the greatest chance of improving and being able to have better lives.
Jacobsen: Will there ever be a point at which a therapist is only needed minimally for the recovery into healthy living of a patient?
Lack: That’s a great question. We actually have a fairly good amount of research into both traditional bibliotherapy (taking evidence-based interventions and turning them into self-guided books) and technology-assisted therapy (using computer programs, either alone or in combination with therapy) across the past three decades. I would summarise it by saying that, if a book or program is based on a good, well-studied therapy, then by following it you can often see notable improvements. Here are two greatlists of such books; software options I recommend include e-couch and Mood Gym, and here is a nice overview of OCD treatment technology. However these improvements tend to be a) less than those seen when working with an actual therapist and b) the greatest among more mild cases of depression, anxiety, and so on. For those people who have moderate to severe levels of impairment in their lives, seeing a therapist is certainly the first step to take.
Jacobsen: How do you approach the individual needs of the subject as they first enter the room, shake your hand, and sit down – whether literally or metaphorically? Is it more listening and helping them help themselves or assertive engagement in the moment with the tools of the trade, or both, or others, etc.?
Lack: My first rule of working with someone is understanding that people are people, and we are all more similar than we are different. By that, I mean that everyone who comes in wants and deserves certain things from me. First is that people want a non-judgemental atmosphere, where I don’t try to push my personal beliefs or some personal agenda onto them. Second is to be treated as an individual, not as a disorder or a symptom. I can have two people come into my office with a diagnosis of OCD and they can have very little in common, both in terms of demographics and in terms of what types of obsessions or compulsions they are struggling with. Good treatment begins with a good case formulation – understanding why this person, right here, has OCD or depression or what have you – and then moves into the application of evidence-based modalities that have been show to help with those problems. Third is using methods that are most likely to help achieve a particular goal. A key aspect of being a good provider is what we call “flexibility within fidelity.” This means that we need to use and stick with those treatments that actually work, while at the same time being able to mold the treatment to the individual, taking into account characteristics like religion or lack thereof, social support, education, developmental level, and much more. So, although I may use the same overall treatment, like exposure with response prevention for OCD, the application of that treatment may end up looking a bit different depending on who I am working with.
Stay tuned for more from Dr. Caleb Lack!
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Cynthia Todd Quam is the President and founder of ‘End of the Line Humanists’, and writer and poet. In this interview she talks with Scott Jacobsen about all things humanism.
Scott Jacobsen: What is your family and personal story – culture, education, and geography?
CTQ: I was raised in a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant family, originally from Pennsylvania. We moved to the Chicago area when I was two. My mother was Presbyterian and involved in the church, though not particularly devout. My father, a commercial artist, simply ignored religion; he never attended church but never openly disparaged it – I suspect because of the social norms of the time. I’m the elder of two children; my sibling is an evangelical Christian, and has been, more or less, since her teens. I attended public schools, where I was an introverted child and a reader. Not sure what I wanted to study, I dropped out of state college at nineteen to live on my own and work in downtown Chicago.
I grew sceptical of religion at an early age and spent most of my life as a nonbeliever, except for a brief period in my mid-twenties when, after attending a “Jesus rally”, I was “born-again” and identified as a Christian. Shortly thereafter, I married a Catholic and took classes to join the church, culminating in what they ironically called the “grand slam of sacraments”: baptism, first communion and confirmation, all on the same day.
Fortunately, none of that stuck. By my early thirties, I was divorced and finished with religion. I was a single parent for ten years. During that time, I went back to college as an adult, earning a BA in English, and then an MFA in Writing and Literature. I remarried, and my husband and I adopted two teens internationally, bringing our combined total to six children, who are now all grown. I spent some years teaching college-level English courses, but now devote my time to writing, family, and our humanist group. I have lived in the Oak Park, IL area, a proudly diverse community with a strong cultural and intellectual base, for the last 20 years.
SJ: When did humanism become self-evidently true to you?
CTQ: I remember at seven or eight being told that people who were not Christian – including those who had never heard of Christ – were going to hell. That didn’t seem fair. When I learned there were people of other faiths who in turn thought Christians were sinful and doomed, the whole concept fell apart for me. It was obvious, even at that age, that one religious claim was as subjective as another. The only part that made sense to me was the Golden Rule, and my personal ethics evolved to approximate that. Years later I found the website for American Humanist Association, which supports being “good without a god.” The idea was to live an ethical, compassionate life without religion. That was the “Aha!” moment for me. I understood that I had been a humanist for most of my life.
SJ: You are a writer and poet. What is the typical content and inspiration for the poetry and the writing?
CTQ: When I first began writing poetry, I wrote about my personal life: love won and lost, interpersonal relationships, life experiences. My poetry chapbook, The Letter Q, is mostly concerned with those subjects. I’ve also always been interested in mysteries, first as a reader and then as a writer, and I’ve focused some of my work in that direction and continue to find it engaging. I have a mystery novel in progress, and one of my poems in that vein was recently anthologised in the Nancy Drew Anthology, Silver Birch Press.
Some of my earlier poetry was about falling away from faith. Later, as the Religious Right began to rise to power, my writing changed to reflect concerns for social justice and the separation of church and state. My humanism began to inform and inspire my writing, and also the reverse. I began work on a humanist novel, which is still in progress. When I came to the part of the story where my protagonist meets a humanist group, I realised that I had little real experience of that sort. So, I gathered other like-minded individuals and formed a local organisation, End of the Line Humanists (so named for the two elevated train lines that terminate in our town), a chartered chapter of the American Humanist Association. Not only did it give my writing the depth of actual experience, but in the process, I found my philosophical community. In the end my novel took a back seat to my real-life humanist work.
After the 2016 election I, like many others, found I had a lot to say. I began to write and publish articles on the current political climate, and humanism has given me the context for that work.
SJ: You wrote An Action List for the (Un)Faithful on November 29, 2016. You outlined things for activist humanists to do, if they so choose, to get some change going. Of those listed, what are the top two or three more effective ways to advocate for humanist principles and values “in the immediate wake of Donald Trump’s victory” and for the next four, possibly eight, years?
CTQ: Humanist values are humane values, and so the obvious answer would be to work on social justice issues in whatever ways we can. However, since so many of our rights and values are threatened because of religion, or religion’s alliance with corporate money, it becomes essential to address the source of these attitudes.Toward that end, I feel that coming out as a nonbeliever is one of the most effective things a humanist can do. Of course, there are times and places, even in this country, when it isn’t safe to do so. But it’s crucial to make ourselves visible on a personal level and insist on inclusion and acceptance. As the Trump campaign has shown – to unfortunate effect in his case – normalisation actually works. LGBT rights have come a long way in a seemingly short time, but that rapid progress could not be made until gay people were willing to identify themselves, band together and demand that they be heard. The same was true for the disabled. Only after we are accepted will people listen as we point to the out-sized influence of religion in government and its effects on our social order.
Another way to highlight humanist values is making art. The artistically talented among us need to bring our ethics and philosophy into our work. Very few books, plays, movies, or songs have specifically shown atheists, agnostics, or humanists in a positive light, though that is changing. If we want to be heard, we need to be acknowledged by and reflected in the culture. Prominent humanist characters and role models will do more toward the acceptance of non-theists than anything we could preach. Some claim that a few seasons of “Will and Grace” did more to further the LGBT cause than all the years of gay activism put together.
SJ: What is the importance of humanism in America at the moment?
CTQ: Humanism shows people a way to be moral without worshipping a deity or participating in religions with draconian social agendas. I feel for younger people who’ve been sold the idea that you’re either religious or you’re sinful. Popular music is filled with their angst: “it’s where my demons lie,” “don’t want to let you down, but I am hell bound,” “‘we were born sick,’ you heard them say it.” Many give up, finding it impossible to think of themselves as honourable people without a religious framework. Humanism is one answer to that. It allows us to make being decent to one another our most important value.
Also, in what many are calling the “post-truth” era, humanism is one of the few evidence-based life philosophies. It provides a model at a time when a return to evidential truth is essential for the survival of our democracy, our culture and our planet.
SJ: What is the importance of secularism in America at the moment?
CTQ: Secularism is crucial at this moment in history, and in particular danger, as those now in power are desperate to legislate their archaic values before they are further outnumbered. Separation of church and state is the only way to ensure fair representation for all. It protects both believers and nonbelievers from coercion by institutions which may become more popular or powerful. Secularists fight to ensure our children’s education will be based in fact; that we may follow our own consciences in matters of love, worship, marriage, and reproduction; that the dangers to our environment will be acknowledged and mitigated. The importance of secularism in the coming years will be as a watchdog to safeguard American values and constitutional rights.
SJ: What social forces might regress the secular humanist movements in the US other than Trump alone?
CTQ: That depends on what you mean by “regress.” Trump’s election and the Republican ascendancy are actually energising humanists and other secular groups. The AHA reported a large bump in donations following the election, and we’ve seen the will to action rise in our own organisation. Young people are increasingly more secular, and their ranks are growing. Religion can’t hold out against this reality forever.
Trump, of course, is not the only problem. Mike Pence is a Christian nationalist who would be even worse for humanists. And with so many branches of state and federal government controlled by conservatives, who – let’s face it – owe their jobs to evangelicals, there is no doubt that secularism will be under wide attack in the coming years. Congress will try to repeal the Johnson Amendment, allowing churches to endorse candidates from the pulpit and involve themselves in political campaigns. Some state legislatures are already proposing and passing more “religious freedom” laws, allowing businesses and organisations to discriminate against people who don’t share their religious point of view. I believe we’ll see prominent individuals spotlighted and judged on the basis of whether their religious views correspond to those of fundamentalist Christianity, particularly in upcoming elections. But those are really political forces.
The biggest social hurdle for humanists is how we are perceived by the public. Recent polls show that Atheists, humanists and non-theists in general are held in lower regard than virtually any other group. We need to work on visibility, educating the public about ourselves, and improving and normalising our image. We also need a few brave souls to run for office.
SJ: What tasks and responsibilities come with being the founder and current president of the End of the Line Humanists? What is the current size of the ELH?
CTQ: End of the Line Humanists is only three years old. We are a small but growing organisation. As president, I plan activities, convene and lead meetings, write and handle most communications and promotion, book venues, coordinate with other officers, and represent ELH to the public and our parent organisation. Since our officer elections in June of ’15, I have helped with some of those tasks.
ELH has 60-70 people who come to our events; about a third of those are dues-paying members. Usual attendance is around 20, more for special events. We have over 150 on our mailing list and over 300 members on our Meetup group, so it seems that many are watching what we are doing and saying, perhaps waiting for the right moment to join us, perhaps just learning and thinking. We don’t have a building and must hold our meetings and events in public spaces. However, we are growing every day and have a stronger core group and more enthusiastic members as we evolve.
SJ: ELH is run out of New West Suburban Chicago. What is the humanist culture like in Chicago? What activities, campaigns, and initiatives take place there through the End of the Line Humanists?
CTQ: The American Humanist Association has two charter chapters and one affiliate chapter in the Chicago area. Each has its own mission and character. We occasionally attend each other’s functions and/or work together, as we did when we were host chapters for the national AHA conference that was held in Chicago this past summer. Being a large metropolitan area, there are chapters of other non-theist groups including American Atheists, Secular Coalition for Illinois, and Freedom from Religion Foundation, to name a few, and a number of independent non-believer Meetups and gatherings.
Job One for our group, which is new and small, has been to build a local humanist community. We hold social events, present speakers, discuss important issues, disseminate information about humanism, and run an annual food and funds drive for the local food pantry. We volunteer at the annual library book sale and are currently working with the Oak Park Homeless Coalition to set up volunteer nights for our group.
Since the election in November, our membership is more enthusiastic and more inclined toward activism. The timing is right for us. Having built a base of mutual values and trust, we are now ready to engage. We have formed a humanist action committee to seek out and recommend various issue-based actions that our members can take, both together and individually, in order to make a difference and bring more humanist light to the world. For example, we will be attending the March for Science in Chicago on April 22nd. We have also put together a speaker series for this spring and summer. Our first event will be a panel discussion held at the Oak Park Public Library on March 26th: Wide Awake: Progressive Rights Watch for 2017 and Beyond. Representatives from local rights and environmental organisations will participate to update us on what is happening in their areas, and what we as citizens can do to safeguard our rights and freedoms. (Details of the event below.)
SJ: You were interviewed in The Wednesday Journal too. You told the story of gathering humanists from the local areas such as Forest Park and Oak Park. In becoming more acquainted with humanism, you noted some principles were “tolerance, service to others, making the world a kinder and gentler place.” Also, the ELH membership are ambivalent about organised religion and not by necessity atheists. Other than these principles and dual-nature (religious or irreligious, inclusive “or”) of humanism, what makes humanism appealing to you?
CTQ: Actually, the ambivalence to organised religion statement came from a former ELH member who was also quoted in the article. I would say her opinion is not the norm for our group members. Identifying as atheist or agnostic is not required to join our organisation; but nearly all of us eschew religious belief. Humanists by definition are people who believe in living ethical lives without the supernatural, and that is pretty clear-cut as we practice it, not really dual-natured. It is actually this clarity that is appealing to me – the idea of good for its own sake, rather than for heavenly reward, or to avoid divine punishment. Humanism falls under the atheist umbrella; the difference is that the emphasis is on what we believe in rather than what we don’t. I find that positive focus inspiring.
SJ: What informs humanist beliefs for other humanists in general based on interactions with them? Some might note ecstatic/transcendental experiences, improved relationships, disillusionment with established religions, or something else.
CTQ: Just like religious believers, humanists have an entire spectrum of reasons to be involved. Many people are, as mentioned, disillusioned with religion; many are simply looking for like-minded individuals or social engagement that doesn’t involve a church. Most find that letting go of the Big Brother aspects of traditional faith gives them substantial relief from guilt and anxiety, and the development of and reliance on their own personal ethics is empowering. Many more seek a way to contribute to society that is not funnelled through a faith-based organisation. Most humanists tend toward liberalism on social issues, sharing a respect for the planet and the humanity of all the people living on it. In practice, we live for the same things that religious folk do — relationships, family, jobs, hobbies, interests – minus the gods. And we value many of the same things: good health, freedom, honesty, integrity, kindness, etc.
The humanist approach has traditionally been more rational than emotional; however, that is expanding as we explore new ways to express the joys and trials of life within the context of our philosophy. As to ecstatic experiences: one of the much-debated questions in humanism is if humanists can by definition be “spiritual.” Some say ‘yes’, others ‘no’. Some find transcendence in things like nature, yoga, meditation, or the arts; others strictly refute that any higher state is possible or real. We may sometimes disagree, but we value open discussion first and foremost.
SJ: Also, what makes humanism seem more right or true than other worldviews to you – arguments and evidence?
CTQ: The humanist value of doing good for its own sake is hard to argue against, even for the religious. Also, I think the fact that one’s intellect and emotions can be in sync really helps. No mental or semantic contortions are necessary to function as a humanist. We don’t have to disavow obvious realities or twist our lives to follow the often-contradictory rules in one 2,000-year-old book in order to feel secure. As for evidence, we have the evidence of the world: the fossil record, scientific method. However, in the case of an invisible deity who allegedly created the universe and controls our lives, the burden of proof is clearly on the believers. As we nonbelievers like to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
SJ: For those that want to work together or become involved, what are recommended means of contacting you?
CTQ: Those interested in our organisation can email us at beings@ELHumanists.org and ask to be added to our mailing list. Others ways to keep up with our activities are to visit our website at www.ELHumanists.org or join our Meetup or Facebook group. The best way to get to know us is to come to one of our events. We’re very friendly and always happy to meet and welcome new people.
SJ: Thank you for your time, Cynthia.
Event details:
Wide Awake: Progressive Rights Watch for 2017 and Beyond
A panel discussion on safeguarding our democracy, rights, and environment
Oak Park Public Library
834 Lake St., Oak Park, IL
Veteran’s Room
Sunday, March 26th, 1:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Featuring:
- Brad Bartels, Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association
- Anthony Clark, Suburban Unity Alliance
- Terry Grace, Move to Amend
- David Holmquist, Citizens’ Climate Lobby
- Ian Wagreich, American Immigration Council
- William Zingrone, Secular Coalition for Illinois
Join us as we discuss issues of critical concern in the coming years. Learn which of our rights, policies and programs are currently vulnerable; what congressional, judicial and executive actions to watch for; and what we as citizens can do to protect our civil liberties.
This is an informative program intended for the general public. The audience will have the opportunity to ask questions and join in the discussion.
This program is sponsored by End of the Line Humanists, not the Oak Park Public Library.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/11
Dr. Caleb W. Lack is a licensed clinical psychologist and the Director of the Secular Therapist Project. Here, he discusses these topics with Scott.
Dr. Caleb W. Lack, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Central Oklahoma, and the Director of the Secular Therapist Project. Dr. Lack is the author or editor of six books (most recently Critical Thinking, Science, & Pseudoscience: Why We Can’t Trust Our Brains with Jacques Rousseau) and more than 45 scientific publications on obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and tics, technology’s use in therapy, and more. He writes the popular Great Plains Skeptic column on skepticink.com and regularly presents nationally and internationally for professionals and the public. Learn more about him here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What separates clinical psychology from other domains of psychology?
Dr. Caleb W. Lack: Clinical psychology is one of the most applied sub-fields in psychology, as both research and the practice in this area are focused on understanding, preventing, assessing, and treating psychological distress and impairment. For most clinical psychologists, this means working with people who have cognitive, behavioural, or emotional difficulties, but in further specialities like behavioural medicine or paediatric psychology, it may mean working on one’s behaviour or thoughts to help decrease a chronic or acute physical health problem.
The closest other psychology sub-field to clinical psychology is that of counselling psychology. The primary difference is that clinical psychology tends to focus on more severe, less common psychological problems (such as schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder) while counselling psychology often is focused on more normative life stressors (i.e. marital problems, stress from typical life changes). Research foci and methods are also often different. While counselling programs (in the U.S., at least) are starting to have more of a focus on severe issues, the two are still distinct.
Jacobsen: What common terms can readers expect to encounter here? What defines them, with examples, please?
Lack: Two major terms that I will often use are evidence-based psychology (EBP) and cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT). EBP refers to therapies and assessment methods that have a solid grounding in scientific research which has controlled for both placebo effects and regression to the mean. This means therapies that have had multiple clinical trials published in legitimate, peer-reviewed journals. Such trials will optimally be randomised, placebo controlled, double-blinded trials, which are the gold standard for treatment outcome studies. Therapies which have lower levels of evidence (single-blinded, wait-list controlled, small N designs, and so on) must have a sufficient amount of studies to be considered EBP. Anecdotes and the number of people who use a particular therapy do not matter, just the evidence showing it actually works.
CBT refers to a wide collection of therapies that focus on changing the way that we think or act in order to change our emotional state. Depending on what a person is struggling with, a therapist using CBT may focus more on thoughts by using techniques such as cognitive restricting or on behaviour using techniques such as exposure with response prevention. Most CBTers, though, will work on both cognitions and actions, as well as incorporating relaxation or mindfulness techniques. CBT is distinct from other types of therapy in several ways, most notably, in that it tends to be briefer and time-limited, as well as highly structured and directive. While the therapeutic relationship is seen as necessary for making change, it is only a starting point and not the focus of therapy. There are many distinct types of therapy that fall under the umbrella of CBT, including parent-child interaction therapy (PCIT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), parent management training (PMT), and many others that are developed for specific problems such as depression, OCD, anorexia, and more.
Jacobsen: Who seem like some of the foundational names and associated theories in the field?
Lack: That depends on your theoretical orientation! As a psychological scientist and cognitive-behavioural therapist, my big list focuses on those who have contributed to a scientifically informed, evidence-based view of human behaviour and the treatment of disruptions to our functioning. Historically, Lightner Witmer is regarded as the father of clinical psychology, as he coined the term and opened the world’s first psychological clinic in 1896, following that up by founding the first journal of clinical psychology. Other major figures in the early part of the field were those who were first laying out the laws of behaviourism, such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and E.L. Thorndike. In the middle part of the 20th century, researchers like B.F. Skinner had their experimental work turned into clinical applications by people like Joseph Wolpe and Ole Ivar Lovaas who rejected the pseudoscientific underpinnings of most people doing therapy, which were based on psychoanalytic or psychodynamic views of human nature. In the 1960s, pioneers such as Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck began incorporating new work on social cognition into working with mental health problems, setting the stage for a unified cognitive-behavioural therapy movement that has steadily built increasingly effective therapies for most major mental health issues over the past 50 years. Over the past 30 years especially, clinical scientists such as Judith Beck, Alan Kazdin, Marsha Linehan, Scott Lilienfeld, David Barlow, Edna Foa, Phillip Kendall and many others have massively improved our understanding of origins and treatment for mental health problems.
Jacobsen: When patients come to secular therapy, what is the respectful, constructive attitude therapists take in working with the patients to help them build the tools to overcome their problems?
Lack: The best advice that I can give anyone when choosing a mental health professional is to see someone who practices evidence-based psychology. Stated simply, EBP is a guiding principle that means a therapist, whether that person is a psychologist, counsellor, social worker, or psychiatrist, is guided in the treatment and assessment methods they use by the current best practices as defined by scientific evidence. Unfortunately, many therapists have not been trained in these methods and instead, rely on intuition; what they think has worked well, or what they were trained in, regardless of the evidence or lack thereof for its effectiveness. Asking a potential therapist what their primary therapeutic orientation is, and how they know the type of therapy they do works, are great ways to find out if a therapist uses EBP.
The second piece of advice is that you need to be sure that your therapist does not attempt to push their own personal value system onto you. While this is both an unethical and inappropriate thing to do, from my own experience with clients, I can tell you that a large number of them report this happening (and it was a major impetus behind the creation of the Secular Therapy Project). While this does not mean that you need to find a therapist with your exact religious, political, ethnic, and cultural background, it does mean that your therapist needs to respect what your beliefs and values are and recognise that their job as a therapist is not to convert you. If you find yourself in a situation where this is occurring, I would recommend giving the therapist a warning that you are becoming offended by their actions. If they continue to push their own agenda at the expense of your mental health, a report to their licensing board would be appropriate.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/28
In this interview, Arifur Rahman talks to Scott Douglas Jacobsen about discovering blogging and how this provides freedom of speech to minorities, who would otherwise not be heard. Arifur Rahman also talks about how the Bangladeshi government fails to protect freedom of speech, while atheist and secularist bloggers keep being murdered.
Arifur Rahman is a London-based Bangladeshi atheist, humanist, and secular blogger who has long campaigned for secular values. Dozens of people were killed in Bangladesh since 2013, under accusations of ‘blasphemy’.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was your moment of political awakening and political activism?
Arifur Rahman: When we started, we didn’t think of this as a political activity, at all. Now, we realise that in some way it was, but we didn’t see it that way. The definition of political activism we knew didn’t involve what we were doing. To answer your question, how did I get involved? It spontaneously happened. I was in the UK. I was here for the last 12 years. I came here to study. Eventually, I got a job. I stayed back.
While I was here, it was an interesting phenomenon happening across the globe, blogging. People could write their own thoughts, express their own mind, using some sort of internet platform like WordPress or community blogging. To us, that was something new.
Before that, anything we’d see written would be either a newspaper, which was going through an editorial process, or a book. People would reprint some material. It would not be an individual’s thoughts. People would write stuff. When we found out about the Internet, we saw an opportunity to write our own thoughts.
We took it on. We began to express our minds. For us, it was a way to connect like-minded people across the globe. I was an expatriate in of like mindthe UK. There are a lot of people like me. Obviously, being outside of Bangladesh, you don’t get to meet everybody like you used to in person.
We discovered this digital presence. We discovered that if we get involved with blogging we can express ourselves. We could find like-minded people in Bangladesh and other countries across the globe. What made me start writing and blogging is more of a reaction to what we’ve seen in our language and in our country: we saw a rise in Islamist narrative spreading.
Islamists were using the power of the Internet to spread their ideas. We see it around us now, but we saw it rising 10 years ago. We started protesting. We started countering their narrative, as it should be. There are lots of details surrounding it. In summary, that is the answer to your question.
Jacobsen: As a platform with blogging, people call you bloggers, but, in essence, you are writers. In a way, it is digital protest when other ways aren’t necessarily available without significant, sometimes physical, harm to the writers. What are some more prominent cases that are more tragic of people who have had physical altercations because of their being a Bangladeshi blogger or writer?
Rahman: This physical violence is something very recent in Bangladesh. It only started in the beginning of 2013. Before that, all sorts of threats were often like death threats. Islamists and extremist Muslims, whatever category you put them in, were doing death threats quite regularly. “What you are writing boils our blood and you are doing it behind the anonymity of the Internet, and we dare you because you would not actually come to meet us in real life, and if we see you in real life, we are going to sort you out.” We used to hear and read this very often.
We never realised that we would ever get really, really seriously hit by that. In early 2013, a colleague of ours, a great satirist, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was murdered in front of his house. Then, we realised something was going to happen. That was the first murder of that year. In 2013, there were more murders, but the government, as a result of Islamist uprising, took a stance of appeasing Islamist methods or strategies. The government initiated the passing of some laws, which criminalised atheist practices; not atheism per se, but vilifying religion or critically talking about religion.
Then, 4 of our colleagues were sent to jail. Everything was surrounded by serious media activity by the Islamists because they own a lot of news outlets and television channels. The general view of the people was that they fell for the narrative that the Islamist media were spreading. In 2015, 2 years later, a Bangladeshi-American citizen who lived in America and who was almost like me, was murdered. I was there on that same day.
I met him an hour before, in person, alive, and we were walking around the book fair that he was visiting. Then, an hour later when we all went to the hospital he was dead, as he was brutally murdered by the Islamists. That was surreal. Following that, a month later, one of our colleagues was murdered, at least, in Bangladesh. Niloy Chatterjee, among others, was also murdered.
We had other murders too. Non-bloggers, like teachers, were murdered. General activists were murdered as well. Most of the time, after every killing, the media would not come out and denounce these killings. The media would be more interested in trying to find the reason why they were murdered. They were trying to find out what these murdered people were writing about. They would target any critique of religion and amplify it in the media to make it okay for the murders to happen in the public mind, whether the prophet was “insulted” or otherwise. So, religion somehow allows that sort of recoil.
Jacobsen: You mentioned two phrases before: “extremist Muslims” and “Islamism”. Are these differentiated terms to you?
Rahman: We never used to differentiate between them, at least in Bangladesh. Recently, I have seen all of these killings happening. In July, there was an ISIS-style attack, which took place in a restaurant where almost 14 people were killed in an ISIS-style murder. Literally a murder; they took over the restaurant. They locked themselves in and slaughtered people. Interestingly, these killings were not of bloggers. These were foreign nationals, like Japanese and Italian expatriates visiting Bangladesh.
This happened inside a diplomatic zone, the most secure area of the country. After that, the government and the whole country seemed to have come to their senses or, at least, pretending to come to their senses. Obviously, the excuse-giving actions were just starting. They said, “Oh, these are some few bad apples”. So, the Muslims who were very much eager unanimously say bloggers should be killed and should be sorted out. Now, they are distancing themselves from these killers.
Now, they’re saying, “These are Islamists.” We can’t really argue with them because we don’t have much media firepower. They are saying some are Islamists. My definition of an Islamist is: One who thinks of Islam as a source of law which can be inflicted in political life and structure of a country; whereas, extremist Muslims are the same people, but who would not violently act upon their belief. That’s how I would vaguely differentiate them.
But, given the chance, an extremist Muslim can become an Islamist. An Islamist is an extremist Muslim, by definition, but an extremist Muslim is not always an Islamist. In the core, everybody wants to believe that Islam is a way of life and Islam is something that needs to shape the existing structure of a society, in general.
Jacobsen: What are the numbers that you know – estimated – of those protesting through blogging about their being ex-Muslims or atheists being in Bangladesh, the UK, or elsewhere?
Rahman: We are always the minority. We are never the majority for a variety of reasons. The predominant religion in the UK is not Islam. Here, Islam itself is a minority. And then, we, apostates and atheists who have an Islamic background, are a minority within a minority. So, the numbers are not visibly high. However, there are a lot of closeted atheists out there who would not voice their opinion or identify themselves because of fear based on ostracisation, recoil, or being chucked out of family or society.
In the UK, the situation is like that. In Bangladesh, even though it is predominantly an Islamic or Muslim country, the Islamism we face is a new phenomenon. Bangladesh was not like that, even 30 years ago. It was formed in 1971 by kicking out a relation between Bangladesh and Pakistan. We separated from Pakistan; we used to be one country. Surprisingly, it was separated by India in-between Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was something weird the British did. We wanted to be a Bengali nation rather than a Muslim nation.
Bengali is a secular identity. It is based on language, culture, literature, etc. It refers to the more human side of things. Pakistan is more Islamic. It is no surprise that it’s referred to as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. I don’t have to tell you. You know. Because of global politics and intervention of the United States inside Bangladesh, the situation started to change. Saudi Arabia took an interest of rooting out the cultural element within Bangladesh and tried to terraform Bangladesh into a predominantly Muslim country. It the past 30 years it has become more Islamic.
That is the history of the situation.
Jacobsen: You mentioned a phrase: “minority within a minority.” Those are groups that aren’t necessarily considered by the larger populace in general. They might actually be subject to worse discrimination because if you’re within a minority that is already discriminated against. If you’re in a minority within a minority, your discrimination might be worse based on ostracisation within that minority, and not being considered even within the mainstream discourse. Does that seem correct to you?
Rahman: The term “minority within a minority,” is a term coined by Maajid Nawaz. He is saying that within the Muslim community there is a bunch of ex-Muslims. I am not originally from the UK. If somebody is breaking away from a minority community, and that minority community is a religiously identified community, their becoming an atheist (or even their becoming a humanist or identifying as a human), indicated that they’re becoming part of the bigger pot. If we’re leaving Islam and become atheists, we are not creating our own community. We are blending into the larger community.
Unfortunately for Maajid Nawaz and people like him, for some reason, they want to keep us. We have even broken away from the minority community. They want to keep us tied to the religious identity, which I don’t personally like. Earlier, you were saying about the numbers. In Bangladesh, there is a huge number of people who are of an atheistic disposition. Unfortunately, because of social pressure and peer pressure, and the same fear of recoil from their family and their immediate social groups (even direct threats of dying), a lot of people are closeted.
When we started our movement, our goal was to create a snowball effect. It worked. We saw a lot of young people declaring themselves as atheists. They were losing their fear of religion. It is not love for their religion that keeps them in the religion. It is fear. A lot of young people came out of their closet, it was creating a critical mass of atheists. After that, the deaths started.
The killings started to reverse the effect that our actions had. The killers are successful because the media and the killers together started this campaign against us. They were, and still are, quite successful. Fear is embedded in everybody. Nobody would openly claim that they are atheists. Even if they do, they would be careful to not welcome the wrath. In Bangladesh, there are many atheists, but you can’t just report their number through a census.
Jacobsen: Now, since we’ve covered the terminology and some of the background, and your own becoming politically active, I want to cover some of the content that the writers or bloggers write about, whether based in Bangladesh or elsewhere. What are some of the critical thoughts that they are putting forth about religion in particular?
Rahman: This is a good question. It goes back to the fundamental question: why? Somebody who came from an Islamic background has seen how it works and how in Islam, or in any other religion for that matter, through indoctrination, teaching, and parental teaching, people are guided towards the faith and religion. We have seen that. We can see that religion is actually crippling us. It is taking away a lot of human values and capabilities. Values and capabilities which a human should be allowed to fulfill and pursue.
In Islam, the beauty of love is not allowed or it is heavily restricted and guided. So, Islam would say, ‘You can love your wife, but you cannot fall in love with somebody before you are married.’ That is a restrictive direction. Love is not just platonic. Love has no strict definition, no boundaries.
That is defined as a crime. If you fall in love with somebody, if you express your love more than platonically, then you will have committed a sin, in Islamic terms. It is completely inhuman and medieval. We started talking about those things. That is only the tip of the iceberg. So many injustices happen within this minority community in the UK, or any other pockets of Muslim ghettos throughout the world, because they are autonomous systems. They managed differently than what is in the larger society. We don’t know what goes on inside. It is almost like the mafia.
We saw the way the rest of the world is like. If we use a bad analogy of race and colour, we try to be white. It is a bad way to say this. For example, the white Christian culture that has polished and furnished their own culture, has included all of these human elements. Maybe, they have weaponised them to make the world more capitalist, but that is a different discussion. But it looks like the design was supposed to be that ‘you guys are brown people and Muslims, so you should have a less than human life; whereas, the rest of the world can enjoy the beauty of life, express themselves and enjoy music, art, literature, and poetry, and so on.’
Anything that is about people being creative and happy is a no-no in Islam. Their goal 24/7 is to please their God. They are told by their mullahs that this is their purpose. It is to be partly a human. You can live the life in this world, but your ultimate goal is the afterlife. We saw this, in our terms, as bullshit. We started talking about it. If somebody is maintaining a system, they will not like that sort of divergence.
Jacobsen: More often, men run the system. Is that correct?
Rahman: Absolutely, all of the time.
Jacobsen: Are the restrictions, therefore, more stringent on women than on the men?
Rahman: Oh! (Laugh) It goes without saying.
Jacobsen: (Laugh)
Rahman: Like the medieval times, Islam is a male-dominated, patriarchal system. In fact, it is so literal in Islam that it reflects in Islamic law. In Islamic law, the so-called Sharia Law, a woman is equal to half of a man. So, that means two women equals one man. If you ask to give evidence in Islamic law, if you’re bringing one male witness, you cannot bring one female witness. You have to bring 2 female witnesses. That is a simplification, but that is the fact.
If you need to sign a deed, or a contract, and if you need a witness, you cannot have one male and one female witness. You need one male and two female witnesses. This principle has a lot of various different manifestations. For example, another version of this is if a woman gets raped then it is her fault for getting raped because she was not supposed to be going out of her security boundary, which is maintained by the male guardian. A woman cannot be her own self in the Islamic system, ever. A woman is primarily owned by her father, then when she is ready to be wed, she would be handed over to her husband, who would then literally use her for sexual purposes, for breeding purposes, and for house maintenance purposes.
When she is old, she will become and go under the security boundaries of her son. She cannot be her own person. She is property. Women, in Islam, are just property.
Jacobsen: There’s another system called triple talaq, which is, basically, a one-word say of the man to divorce his wife, within Islam.
Rahman: Yes.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more astute critiques of Islamic law that Bangladeshi bloggers have written that you have seen or have written yourself?
Rahman: I never bothered with debunking Islamic law itself. My focus was primarily about modern life and how Islam does not fit into modern life. Because it was a big team, there were some of us writing in that manner. Some were talking about science. I, primarily, tend to bring the fight in my own daily life. For instance, we talk about how the world should be and how Islam does not fit in the ideal world. One of the critiques I have done of Islamic law is that it does not follow the correct way a law should be created and accepted, in whoever the subjects are, e.g. the common law the world runs on. A law should be formed and then should be ratified through some democratic processes. Ideally, the proposal would go through some system like a parliament, depending on the country. Εventually it should go through a process and become accepted as a law and be enforceable.
Islamic law, fortunately or unfortunately, does not follow this. Its stem or root would be the primary book, the Qur’an, then the hadiths or the sayings of Mohammed, and then the rest would be determined by so-called Islamic scholars. There is an international standard for them and for how an Islamic law can come into effect. It is more of a council-type thing. There is no method. You cannot challenge or question an Islamic law. The choice is always based on the qazi, a representative of the Islamic power culture.
This is how an Islamic law comes into effect. There are other things also. Inside Bangladesh, even though it is not 100% Islamic, there are aspects that govern parts of life. For example, there is a law for family law, as they call it. That is governed by Islamic sources. When somebody dies, and if they have property, and if they have male and female children, the way that property gets divided is decided by Islamic law. It is not equal. Women always get less than men. It is imbalanced.
We criticise it. To give another example, inside Bangladesh, when the government and people wanted to change the unfair family law, the mullahs, the enforcers, came down to the streets and started protesting. Since they have leverage, they used that leverage to revert the government decision. So, inside Bangladesh, that law is not there. There is the education system too. We have a triple education system: English system, Bengali system (mainstream), and a huge madrassah education (huge Islamic education). The madrassah education is a bunch of people who don’t know how the world works, have zero knowledge of English, history, science, mathematics. All they know is the scripture and different incarnations of it. The madrassahs only work to build another mullah.
It is a mullah-production facility. The only purpose of a mullah is to lead a prayer in a mosque. That is all they are good for, all they can do. They are not trained for other social or national services. For example, anybody coming out of a madrassah are not even accepted in the services. There is a huge number of people who are a worthless piece of junk. Bangladesh is a severely densely populated country. Within 6,000 square miles, we have 117,000,000 people.
If you can imagine that, if you can put that in perspective, it would be shocking. It is one of the most densely populated countries. The Bangladeshi government cannot enforce family and birth control measures. Mullahs come out and say somebody’s life is a gift from God. It is almost like the Christian churches saying to not use contraception. Those are a few examples I can think of right now.
Jacobsen: That segues into something personally important: women’s rights – international women’s rights, empowerment, and general advocacy, when I think about it, many of the cases that you’ve noted are mostly run by men. Men are the religious leaders. The madrassahs are training mullahs, who will be men. The restrictions in marriage, social, and personal life are more stringent on women than on men. In that sense, at least within the Muslim community in Bangladesh, and based on what you’re saying, international women’s rights are not well-respected or implemented in those areas.
Rahman: Interestingly, Bangladesh is trying to keep its image. It is a highly advanced chameleon, at least the system. It has recently become a dictatorship. What I mean is that it is not the military dictatorship that you know. It used to be a bipartisan system, but now, the majority party has made ties with the majority Islamist party. Thereby, they gained a lot of support and power by supporting Islamists. This highlights the power of the media. Another Islamic state, Saudi Arabia, owns a lot of media throughout the world, and the power of lobby is not something I need to explain to you. A good example is the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Saudi Arabia is a member. At some point, it was the chairperson of that council. It’s an oxymoron that Saudi Arabia can become a chairperson of the Human Rights Council. The reason I say Bangladesh is highly supported by Saudi Arabia is that in the whole world there are only two countries that declared the day King Abdullah died a national mourning day. One was Bangladesh. The other was the United Kingdom, which is quite unusual. All of the reasons I am saying this is the image of Bangladesh as highly managed by media in the rest of the world.
There was a report recently that said Bangladesh has achieved, among all of the other South Asian countries, better gender equality, as they call it. However, the reality is more and more women are getting raped because the male psychology inside of Bangladesh is predominantly becoming a rapist psychology. Historically, because Bangladeshi women were not always having to wear the burqa or Islamic veil, they did not have to go to school – not all of them – but Bangladesh did a better job of having women going to school and getting educated. This has all changed.
Violence against women is becoming more prevalent. There are activists inside of Bangladesh who are working for women’s rights, such as Sara Hossain, who also works for human rights and women’s rights. She is a well-known, renowned lawyer. In our generation, Marzia Prova, in India, is working on having girls use sanitary napkins, and also to have them used in the garment industry where most of the workers are women. With women being there, they tend to use unhygienic methods for this. That is another good thing, I would say.
Jacobsen: Is you work causing trouble?
Rahman: We are causing trouble. We thought we were causing trouble, but society thinks of us as troublemakers because the majority of the people are actually, in some form or degree, Islamic-minded within our societies. They don’t think much. They don’t want to think much. They haven’t been taught to think. Most of the people are subject to the Islamic system. We thought the businesses and the modern world might help us free them from the shackles. But we realised the Islamic system has become today’s monster because of the help from the bigger system.
That is a revelation for us. No matter how much we try to break free or change, we will always be seen as fringe. Even if we want to become the mainstream, the whole system with enough firepower came down so hard on us that we became completely scrambled and a lot of our friends have to hide, seek asylum in other countries, and deactivate their social network accounts and completely rethink and reshape their life.
So, inside of these communities, and inside non-Bangladeshi communities where Islam is not the main problem, it is even more difficult because of the white Christian or the secular white societies, as I mentioned earlier. They have been trained to see Muslims or ex-Muslims and other cultures as just brown people rather than different shades and cultures. It is an Islamic way of looking at people, Brushing them with the same Muslim stroke makes things even more difficult. Even if we come out, we are seen as ex-Muslim. I don’t like the term. Some see it as a temporary strategy. That means, even if we left Islam, that hangover still haunts us.
Even if we try, we will still not be able to be a human without any colour of background. The system is still very interested in cutting people up by colour and religion. Even if you just want to become a human, they are still getting a lot of help from the world.
Jacobsen: In a way, you are playing by the religious fundamentalist rules by having the label “ex-Muslim.”
Rahman: Correct, correct, I fight with some of the ex-Muslim leaders sometimes because I come from Bangladesh. When we came out of Islam, we became gnostics. Gnostic means atheist. Unfortunately, those in North America and Europe that come out as ‘atheists’ come out as ex-Muslims, as if the divide is still continuing. I don’t know for whose benefit.
Jacobsen: In a way, some of that might reflect fear relative to the country’s quality of life, and so on, from reprisals in the country.
Rahman: Right.
Jacobsen: Atheism does not have a positive valence in any country. It might be tactful in one’s family, community, and country to label oneself gnostic rather than explicit atheist (though gnostic means atheist). How did the fundamentalist religious leaders view countries in Western Europe, in North America, compared to their own? What is their perspective there? You did mention white seculars and white Christians in Western Europe and North America, say, viewing much of the world as simply brown people rather than different colours, different ethnicity, different religions, and so on.
Rahman: The Islamic leaders class them as kafirs, which means non-Muslims. They don’t differentiate between America or Europe. To them, they are all kafirs. When the concept of discussion about these countries comes up, they focus on the social life of a white person, and on their interpretation of how life should be; so they are more focused on drinking, premarital sex, or fornication, and they have a very dim view of alcohol altogether. They have trained their disciples and subjects’ minds towards Western and white people saying that these people are kafirs. These kafirs drink, have sex with people they aren’t married with, and these things combined are used to portray a picture of the devil or near-devil.
That’s the social discussion, but when they obviously blend in with political aspects. The Middle East comes into the narrative. They have killed Muslims in Palestine. They have bombed a lot of countries. In that discussion, they blame the whole of the Western world in one sentence or container. It doesn’t matter if the USA, France, or the UK has bombed. They say, “The Western kafirs have bombed a Muslim country.” They simplify things for their subjects. Most of the time, the mullahs are more interested in managing the minds of their subjects.
They aren’t interested in a mindful discussion or the content of the debate. Their interest, most of the time, is in how they can present the discussion in front of their subjects so that the subjects respect them because their system is based on authority. The mullahs are in a position of authority. Whatever they say, their subjects consume and adhere to.
Jacobsen: I notice another thing as well, which has had, at least in America and the UK, been thrown around: “Islamophobia.” Of course, there’s anti-Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-atheist bigotry. Even when individuals critique particular ideas within Islamic doctrine, they will be termed racist. There is a confusion to me between criticising a set of ideas and a group of people. If one critiques a set of ideas, then this becomes a critique of people. Do you notice this?
Rahman: Oh yes, it is part of the system. It is not by chance. It is by design. It is a defence mechanism of the idea itself. A defence mechanism being that it would infect their subjects with the ideology, and then, thereby, multiplying in numbers. When the ideology is under scrutiny, it would hide behind the subjects and would declare that the subjects are being targeted. It is a very smart way of defending itself. Essentially, it is using the subjects as its shield against criticism. So, there’s a parallel narrative between racists and them.
There is a number of uneducated people in the population who are subject to the same type of simplification. There is xenophobia against migrants in the white population, cheating benefits, taking our jobs, and so on. I did the Rubin Report once. In that interview, I said it was my suspicion that the Christian white supremacists may be working behind the screen together with the Islamists to feed the hate between the two silos. My suspicion was that nobody is trying to set the record straight.
Everyone is creating more and more confusion, then gaining political benefit and other benefits from it. Islamists are interested in hiding behind Muslims and then anybody criticising the ideology, they call them Islamophobic. But, then again there are people like Donald Trump in America or UKIP in the UK, and Pegida in Europe. All of these are white supremacists. They are not worried about Islam. They are more annoyed and critical about other races because their narratives are not defined properly; they blend them together. Muslims become either brown people or brown people become Muslims.
Jacobsen: For a last question, we talked at length of Sharia Law/Islamic Law. In the UK, there are segmented areas with Sharia courts. What are your own thoughts on this? Do you see this as a problem? What are some solutions, if so?
Rahman: It goes back to what I said earlier about it being by design. The government and the state wants to keep the Muslims inside of the ghetto. Maryam Namazie and a few others like her did a petition to repeal or investigate the Sharia courts inside of the UK. Unfortunately, Theresa May, who is a very Christian person, decided that she is going to investigate and employ the very same people who are behind the Sharia courts and who are proponents of the Sharia courts to investigate the Sharia courts. As you can see, the government and state have not changed their mindset and are going ahead with their own strategy of empowering the very same people who are not just part of the problem, but they are the problem itself.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Arif.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/23
Kwaku Adusei is the founder of the Common Sense Foundation in Ghana. He has been involved with the Humanist Association of Ghana. Here, he talks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about the Common Sense Foundation, his discovery of Richard Dawkins, losing religion and becoming an atheist, and finding humanism and becoming a humanist.
Scott Jacobsen: How did you first become involved in Humanism? What makes it more or less true to you as a worldview?
Kwaku Adusei: It has been a long time. Somewhere in 1999, I was interested in the Bible. I started reading the Bible, trying to understand what is really in that book. The more I read, the more I come across something. I went to read the books of Exodus and Genesis. That was the Jews’ starting point. That means that the Gentiles are not part of God’s family. Some Israelites were ordered to go to Amalek and killed the Amalekites.They slaughtered them all. I thought, “What kind of God is this?” A God who can kill a mass group of people. A God who can create even with word of mouth. That God cannot kill by himself, but only through others. I thought some propaganda is behind the story. Some political propaganda. They are seeking to achieve a political end, to achieve something by trying to use the Word of God to cover it up.
You get my point; it is something used to deceive people. The more I read the Bible, I thought, “This isn’t making sense. Why don’t I go and get other books?” So, I started reading the Bhagavad Gita. The holy book of the Hindu people. I read books of logic. I thought, “These books aren’t making sense as far as logic is concerned.” Then, I started making the transition from the religious life to the humanistic life.
I started reading Richard Dawkins’, The Selfish Gene. I read Christ Conspiracy. I read Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ. After reading all of these books, I thought, “This thing we call God is nothing but something designed to deceive or enslave the masses. So, that is what took me away from the religious life.” Now, it was not easy for me. The books began to shape me. I became demonised. I said, “Hey, I know what I am doing.”
My family and my loved ones, they all neglected me. I said, “No, I still have to be strong and live my life.” So, every day I make sure I read my logic books and anything that has to do with science. Unless, it can be scientifically proven, then I will not believe it. If people say, “If it’s God’s will, it will come to pass.” If I say this, I will not be applying logic and reason. In 2002, I became a full atheist.
That’s where I started moving into atheism. After atheism, I thought, “I need a step forward.” For one, we are humanists. Without human beings, it will not be easy to do whatever you want to do. If you are calling yourself irreligious, how do you work together with them on this particular planet? I started looking for others who were also thinking like me. It was difficult to me. I hid my humanist ideology for more than 5 years.
Maybe, it was 6 years. In 2010, I found 4 people who were also like me. We would get together on a weekly basis to discuss humanist ideas to make sure we made a meaningful life for ourselves without adherence to supernatural forces or higher powers. 2 years ago, I was trying to find humanist groups across the company. I saw it on Facebook and connected with IHEYO. They said they had a group in Accra, in Ghana.
I also got my friends involved, who were humanists in Kumasi, Ghana. I started to form a humanist group associated to the one in Accra. So, we agreed and formed a humanist group in Kumasi here. When I formed the humanist group with Roslyn, I figured, “We cannot hide in the darkness. There are people outside willing to hear from us. So, why don’t we go outside?” Others can understand that the religious people are not what they are hearing about.
So, I joined one of my friends, who is a radio presenter. He was preparing something for all atheist people. The programme features people from Hare Krishna. People from Christianity and Islam. So, I joined that programme. The outcome was [Laughing], I got a lot of backlash. People tried to even kill me. Some people got to understand me. As I talk to you, I have 59 members on my platform, where we interact each and every day on humanist ideas to get more people involved.
Jacobsen: You also founded The Common Sense Foundation. What is the target audience and the purpose of it?
Adusei: Yes, The Common Sense Foundation. We are an organisation of the Humanist Association of Ghana. First of all, it is one part of my plan. I want to make a radio programme. I started to realise there are more people who are willing to hear our message. I put my phone number on the radio station. People started calling me and saying they wanted to learn more from me. That’s where I created a WhatsApp platform and then had some direction with them on daily issues.
I thought, “Why don’t we have a platform to spread the news across the country?” If that is what we are proposing, then we can do that. Then we formed the humanist community and The Common Sense Foundation. Our main target is the youth because the youth are more open to information. The youth have now come to realise that religion is killing people. Religion is dehumanising people.
Religion is making people slaves. The youth have the mindset, but they don’t have the courage to come out of that mess. We have come to give them that boost. We have come to encourage them. So, they can be strong, be bold, and can move from religion to the secular world, which is what we seek to do — to build a critical thinking centre where we can organise a forum to encourage them.
That way, they can realise things without panic or being hypnotised by the religious people. We cannot teach logic to some of the adults because they have already made up their minds. The youth is always looking for new information. The Common Sense Foundation is there to give them the information that they need, to help encourage them to live their lives, and tell them that they can do whatever they want to do without adhering to any spiritual forces.
We realise they have the doubts, but that they are now free to move to another level. We talk to them. So, that is what we are doing now; we go to the radio stations and talk to people. Those that want to talk to us, contact us, and then we put them on the WhatsApp platform to share ideas and have fun. That’s all. It is difficult for us because sometimes we don’t organise very big programmes, so that we can also invite people from outside it.
Eminent and experienced humanists come to give lectures, but we are moving in that bigger direction. Especially with the critical thinking centre, the work with the young people, it is difficult for us. We are talking to other friends who are humanists in their work. We will see if they can try to help us. The target, though, is for the youth.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time. It was nice talking to you, Kwaku.
Adusei: You too.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/07
Malaysia’s religious departments could take action against a group of Muslims if proven that they have been involved in “atheist activities”.
The Malaysian government says it will investigate claims on social media that Muslims attended a recent meeting organised by international group Atheist Republic in Kuala Lumpur.
According to the Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department, Datuk Dr Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, the government will investigate if there are Muslims who have joined the Kuala Lumpur Atheist Club
According to Asyraf Wajdi, jurisdiction on Islamic faith is under the Syariah Criminal Enactment of each state, while at the Federal Territories level it is under the Federal Territories Islamic Religious Department (Jawi). He told reporters after officiating the Indera Mahkota Division Umno Youth Delegates’ Conference:
“If it is proven that there are Muslims involved in atheist activities that could affect their faith, the state Islamic religious departments or Jawi could take action. I have asked for Jawi to look into this grave allegation.”
The issue first came to light after several Islamist blogsites posted a photo of the group’s gathering in Kuala Lumpur.
News coverage led to a lot of Malaysians also calling for apostates to be fired, jailed, and even beheaded.
In many countries across the world, social rules disallow public displays and conversation about atheism, so the atheist communities can be disparate, which can leave many atheists feeling isolated.
The Atheist Republic (Twitter, Facebook, and website) is the largest public atheist Facebook page.
The page has more than 1.7 million likes, making it the most popular atheist community on any social network. It uses that platform mostly to post memes that criticise religion – though stresses that it doesn’t intend to attack religious people.
The Atheist Republic has consulates throughout the globe in the major cities of the world.
The Atheist Republic does work within communities through activities, including helping people in the midst of natural disasters and in fundraising, such as the Atheist Republic Metro Manila.
It also helps to bring non-believers together, ensuring that atheists, who tend to be disproportionately demonised, ostracised, and stigmatised, can feel a sense of belonging and community.
Despite the dangers, Atheist Republic continues to help those who leave or want to leave their religion through fundraising, community-building, and providing other help in times of need.
Atheist Republic has received numerous comments online.
Founder of Atheist Republic, ex-Muslim and member of Conatus News, Armin Navabi, said,
They are now asking for me to be beheaded for simply starting a group where Malaysian atheists can meet each other. Atheist Republic’s Malaysian consulate is now being targeted by their government. Our Indonesian consulate is also under attack. Tell me why is our Manila consulate not under such attacks? It can’t be the economy since Indonesia and Malaysia have a higher GDP per capita than the Philippines. It can’t be western colonialism. They are all in the same area. Can it possibly be that Indonesia and Malaysia are Islamic and the Philippines is Christian? Weren’t Indonesia and Malaysia supposed to be examples of “moderate” Islamic countries?
In response to the controversy, Rev. Gretta Vosper – a United Church of Canada minister – wrote to Chrystia Freeland, who is Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, urging her to reach out to Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak. Vosper said,
I write with deep concern for atheists and secular humanists in Malaysia. Recently, whether intentionally or otherwise, one of Malaysia’s Government Ministers, Shahidan Kassim, who is reported to be close to the Malaysian Prime Minister, incited extremists to violence against atheists, secular humanists, and ex-Muslims by challenging Malaysians to hunt them down “vehemently” and return them to the Islamic faith.
The statement from the government official was to a photograph of several young people who are members of a Facebook group, The Atheist Republic. They had gathered together to meet one another and build friendships. It was a casual and friendly gathering and, as so often happens when joy is present, photographs were taken and posted to social media.
The founder of the Facebook group is Armin Navabi, copied on this letter. He is a friend and an ex-Muslim who lives in British Columbia. Subsequent to the posting of the photograph, Armin has been the subject of threats, including a call for his beheading. Others have called for the burning alive of the members of The Atheist Republic pictured in the photograph.
In 2013, Bangladesh, despite its status as a secular state, refused to placate extremists calling for the execution of secular humanists, instead choosing to label them atheists and further incite hatred against them. In 2015, Avijit Roy was murdered by machete-wielding attackers while in Dhaka for a book fair. The editor and publisher of Avijit’s book, The Philosophy of Atheism, were both subsequently murdered. Avijit’s co-author, Raihan Abir, is a good friend. He was recognised as a refugee by the Canadian government in 2015. He and his family are now helping grow Canada and make it a better place.
The congregation I serve has received permission to bring to Canada as a refugee a Bangladeshi atheist and his family. We chose this family because the father’s photograph has been so widely distributed across Bangladesh and elsewhere that he cannot be seen outside of the place he now hides, fearing for his life. The photograph of the happy gathering of atheists in Malaysia will be used to imperil their lives and to “hunt them down vehemently” as Minister Kassim has urged Malaysian citizens to do. All their lives are now in grave danger.
We cannot stand idly by and watch Malaysia become another Bangladesh, indifferent to or even supportive of the murder of atheists and secular humanists. Canada has had a long and friendly relationship with Malaysia, dating back to the earliest days of that country’s founding. We continue to build on our sixty year history and share our Canadian values within our relationship. Those values include the protection of marginalized groups and advocacy for religious freedoms. The right to refuse religion, the freedom from religion must be just as strongly defended as the right to believe.
I urge you to reach out to Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Najib Razak, and remind him of his democratic obligations to protect all Malaysians, regardless of their religious beliefs or lack thereof. I urge you also to request that he publicly and swiftly denounce the words of Minister Kassim before they are used to spread fear, sanction violence, or lead to the murder of innocent civilians.
The Malaysian Consulate released a long statement tonight explaining the “hidden crisis of ex-Muslims” and the legal form of freedom afforded to religion in the country:
“Many Muslims who have attempted to convert or leave Islam have received death threats. Those who have converted or left Islam, lead a secret double life. The civil court claims that conversions are under the jurisdiction of the [Sharia] courts, but converts contend that as they are no longer Muslim the [Sharia] courts hold no power over them. Authorities only allow Sunni Islam to be practised, arresting those who stray from those beliefs. Converts taken to be rehabilitated by Islamic authorities are forced to dress and act as Muslims.
If ever there was a phobia that we’re experiencing in Malaysia, it’s not Islamophobia. Its Apostophobia (fear of apostates). A fear or hateful stand that is usually swept under the carpet since everyone is bent of protecting the sensitivities of Muslims…”
Any crackdown on non-believers in Malaysia will affect its global image as a moderate Muslim-majority country, international non-profit group Atheist Republic said.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/06
Doug Thomas is a secular activist and Canadian agnostic humanist. His academic background is in North American Constitutional History and North American Literature. He is both the president of Secular Connexion Séculière (SCS) and an active member of the Society of Ontario Freethinkers. Interview edited for clarity.
Scott Jacobsen: Would you say you come from a humanist family background?
Doug Thomas: I suppose I did, in a way. My parents were what I would call practising Christians; that is, they followed the ethics of Christianity, or the humanist ways of dealing with people and situations, but they weren’t particularly religious and certainly weren’t people who quoted the Bible at every turn. When I decided I didn’t believe in the divinity part of Christianity, their only concern was that I maintain the set of ethics.
Jacobsen: What work did you do before entering into professional humanism and did this previous work help you in your current path?
Thomas: By way of clarification, I try to maintain professional standards in my work with SCS, but it is a voluntary position.
My academic background includes a degree in research and communication and another degree in methods of teaching those skills. The university calls it a degree in History and English, and it can carry on with its delusion if it wishes. Perhaps it is relevant that the core of the History degree was North American constitutional history—an insight into the structure of governments.
I taught secondary school intermittently for twenty years and this certainly gave me experience with all kinds of social and cultural backgrounds and with how people perceive things based on those parameters. Communication skills are vital to keeping thirty or so individuals who would rather be doing something else engaged. At the same time, I was developing theatre and co-operative education programs in the school system so I gained considerable experience in working with senior school board officials.
I also spent a number of years in the business world, quite a bit of it selling manufacturing management software. To be successful, I had to find out more about the client’s business than they usually told me and then explain why I thought my company’s solution was the best for them. Again, communicating abstract ideas and benefits gave me applied experience with the research and communications skills I acquired at university.
The third useful endeavour has been working on various boards of directors and community committees over the years. These include the local Chamber of Commerce and several liaison committees between local businesses and the community.
As a result, I am comfortable contacting and communicating with government officials at all levels, from school boards to the ministries of governments. They have particular concerns about how they can get their job done. Knowing how to detect those concerns and bring forward ideas that help them rather than challenge them is very useful.
Jacobsen: Now you’re the president of the Secular Connexion Séculière. What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?
Thomas: When we founded SCS in 2011, I think we had the idea that secular humanists in Canada were looking for a group that would work actively to represent the secular humanist perspective and concerns to governments and to society in general. Certainly, we heard people speak enviously about the Freedom From Religion Foundation in the US. and I guess we assumed people would welcome SCS with open arms.
One task, however, has turned out to be getting the attention of secular humanists who are scattered across a large geographical area, with two official languages and many different social and cultural backgrounds.
Most of my task has been to establish SCS as a presence in the secular humanist landscape, differentiating it from the other two national organisations and gaining the confidence of secular humanists. We began that differentiation by refusing charitable status. That separated us from other groups in two ways. First, we had to explain why donors could not have income tax deductions for donations, and second, we had to make the point that we could speak to governments in ways that the other two groups could not if they wished to keep their charitable status.
My other task, more serious than I originally thought, was to establish communication in both official languages, English and French. Even the basic terms of secular humanism do not translate well through the cultural filters of these two languages even though, historically, they are welded at the hip.
Communication within the secular humanist community has been a continuing challenge and I still spend considerable effort to find ways to do it. The social media tools that mesmerise everyone are surprisingly ineffective in getting people’s attention, and, frankly, they are full of so much chaff and static that much of their supposed effectiveness is wasted.
In addition, Canadians are transfixed like moths to a flame by American events. Often Canadian issues, even those that directly affect them, sit in the shadows and are less exciting than American ones. This phenomenon is not unique to secular humanists, but it is a major challenge in getting Canadian secular humanists’ attention.
Of course, the central task has been to get the attention of politicians and bureaucrats. They are busy people and getting through the various bubbles around government agencies is a challenge. Consistent and persistent efforts pay off, but they take a great deal of time. This frustrates most secular humanists so getting them to write their MPs or Senators on a regular basis is difficult.
That is one reason that, recently, I became a registered lobbyist with the federal government. This has helped develop confidence in SCS with secular humanists since it can now claim recognition from the government and it helps do the same with bureaucrats because they see SCS as a serious representative of secular humanists—one that is open about its contacts with them.
Jacobsen: What seem like the perennial threats to the practice of humanism? Who have been unexpected allies?
Thomas: The most persistent and perennial threat is the sense of entitlement that religions have in Canada. Religious people assume their philosophy is the norm and the anything else is a threat to civilisation itself. This is largely a matter of historic presence. Since the late 16th and early 17th century, Europeans have been coming to this part of the world, declaring that their religion, primarily Christianity, is the only moral path. Since they have dominated the government and social structure since then, encountering secular humanist unnerves them and they tend to push back.
Christians, for example, assume that their right to freedom of religion includes the right to impose their religion on others over PA systems and in public ceremonies. They tolerate the presence of other religions and will accommodate them because they think theism of any kind provides some kind of moral base. When secular humanists speak up against this imposition of religion, the reaction is often negative and we are accused of denying them their freedom of religion.
Since following a known religion is accepted as the norm, and since most politicians do claim a religion as their own, getting politicians to change the discriminatory legislation in Canada, or even recognise that it exists, is difficult. Sometimes I can tell that they are sympathetic, but that politics won’t let them really act.
Religions already have representatives on every parliamentary committee for the simple reason that most MPs are religious and those who are not keep their political heads below the rampart. For example, when the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Physician Assisted Dying met, it chose to hear from four religious advocates, but from none of the three national secular humanist organisations. SCS has raised this inequity with members of the federal bureaucracy and continues to attempt to appear as witnesses before parliamentary committees.
The other threat is complacency. For the most part, discrimination against non-believers in Canada is pretty benign. However, that results in a “don’t ask-don’t tell” society that keeps social discrimination under the radar. For example, non-believing university students do not put their involvement in secular humanist organisations on their resume as religious students do because they know it will be taken negatively, but it is difficult to take that to a human rights tribunal.
The systemic discrimination that the International Humanist and Ethical Union has identified in Canada, is also problematic, partly because it gives permission for theists to promote their philosophy in O Canada, for example. The blunt truth is that several Canadian laws, including the Criminal Code of Canada and the Income Tax Act discriminate against non-believers.
Surprise allies have included almost all Canadians to whom I have explained the two offending sections of the Criminal Code of Canada: the anti-blasphemy libel law (section 296) and the clause giving religious people permission to publish hate literature (section 319, 3b). Most people, religious or not, are unaware of these clauses and are shocked and supportive of change when they hear about them.
Jacobsen: As a humanist organisation meant to facilitate communication and dialogue among Canadian humanists, how does Secular Connexion Séculière accomplish this?
Thomas: This is may be our biggest task and challenge. SCS tries to work in both official languages and we work on keeping an informative website up to date and attractive. I must admit to carpet bombing Facebook groups when an issue seems important enough, but that is surprisingly ineffective.
SCS is proactive in attending conferences like the Imagine 7 Conference in Toronto this spring. We are one of the sponsors and hope to raise our profile with the humanists who attend.
Recently, we have appointed provincial advocates covering 9 out the 10 provinces so that we have direct representation. These advocates will be contact points for secular humanists who feel that their right to freedom from religion has been compromised. SCS can offer advice and, when appropriate, intervention in these situations. For example, there have been a number of cases where religious groups have managed to get religious materials into public elementary schools in violation of that right. SCS has intervened successfully to get school board officials to enforce their policies against this.
SCS also has a new SCS Forum for people who contribute more than $20 annually to the organisation. This will let interested secular humanists participate in guiding SCS policy and priorities.
Listing SCS with web pages like Atheists Enlight Ontario Network (www.atheistsenlight.network) and the Secular Directory (www.Seculardirectory.org) will, hopefully, raise people’s awareness of SCS.
Jacobsen: The Secular Connexion Séculière has a number of goals and principles. It does not seek governing powers in the humanist community in Canada. It wants to assist the efforts of Canadian humanists. What are some of the main educational initiatives and social and political supports provided by the Secular Connexion Séculière for the Canadian humanist community?
Thomas: I mentioned the new provincial advocates. These are an addition to SCS’ work in teaching secular humanists how to deal with situations in their community and, of course, supporting them in their efforts.
SCS has focused for some time in educating politicians about the right to freedom from religion. Sometimes, this has meant informing local politicians about Supreme Court decisions like the Simoneau v. Saguenay decision that clarified that opening prayers at municipal council meetings are unconstitutional. Some of those councils thought the decision applied only to Québec.
Informing the federal government and its bureaucrats of our secular humanist concerns about systemic discrimination and sensitising them to these concerns continues to be a major task. The hard truth is that there is no magic way to do this. Consistent and persistent emailing and writing campaigns are the only truly effective way to work on this.
We are developing Skype and You Tube presentations to bridge the geographical gaps in Canada. Given the cost of travelling across the country, both in time and money, these may become staples in our education and awareness campaign.
SCS is embarking on a new fund raising campaign, albeit a modest one by most standards. Even though SCS is a completely voluntary organisation, we need funding to operate. For example, we are working toward getting media releases published in major media outlets. Since Canada’s so-called free press is actually a vertically integrated capitalist system, no major outlets will publish independently sent news releases. We have to pay a media company to run a campaign for us at a cost of about $1,500 per campaign.
Jacobsen: I like the new O Canada non-theist and non-sexist lyrics from Secular Connexion Séculière. What was the inspiration for the new lyrics? How can these be implemented throughout the country and replace the lyrics biased towards one grouping– the theists– of the country?
Thomas: I have long been interested in the concept of having a national song that all Canadians can sing and have watched the amazed faces of the American women’s hockey team when the whole arena of fans sang it during the gold medal ceremony in Calgary. As a university student in the 1960s, I was an active participant in a protest that got movie theatres to play O Canada at the beginning of movies instead of God Save the Queen. When Pierre Trudeau proposed the current theist version of the song in English, I actively opposed it and advocated for restoration of “in all of us” into the second line.
The current motivation is simply that non-believers, immigrants, and women should all be able to sing O Canada without being hypocrites. Neither of the official versions allow that. The National Anthems Act of 1980 does not provide for any penalty for singing other words. It simply declares the current words as the official version.
Implementing the new words must have two approaches. One, get as many people aware of and singing the new version as possible, and two, continue to make Senators and MPs aware of the deficiencies of the current version. To this end, SCS recently sent emails to all Senators encouraging them to consider the new words while they debated a minor change in the words – “all thy sons command” to “all of us command.”
Jacobsen: What is your philosophy in running Secular Connexion Séculière?
Thomas: SCS should be the voice of secular humanists speaking to governments and it should be the go-to organisation when secular humanists need support in situations that affect their right to freedom from religion. SCS should focus on eliminating both systemic and social discrimination against non-believers in Canada.
Jacobsen: What are the upcoming initiatives for Secular Connexion Séculière? What are the new battlegrounds, and the most controversial ones? How can they be tackled and won?
Thomas: SCS is broadening its approach to include provincial matters through its provincial advocates and increased intervention in local situations. SCS is developing a plan to make all school boards across Canada more aware of the right to freedom from religion and to encourage those boards to review and enforce their policies on inclusion and equality to include non-believing children.
The new battlegrounds, or at least the ones we are now ready to tackle, are the provincial governments, school boards, and business that are not aware of or choose to ignore the rights of secular humanists.
O Canada will certainly be a wedge issue since people just assume that it has some kind of special constitutional place in our heritage when, in reality, it has been rewritten several times and doesn’t deserve an argumentum ad antiquitatem (appeal to tradition).
In the background will be the struggle to stop the practice of parliamentary committees selecting witnesses to support their own biases. Achieving more openness in this selection process will take some serious lobbying.
Again, there are no magic bullets. While some members of the secular humanist community are frustrated that SCS does not look like the Freedom From Religion Foundation, SCS actually does pretty much the same thing without the money that their 30,000 or so donors provide. Billboards are effective in motivating non-believers in the social discrimination atmosphere of the US., but probably have much less effect than the letters that the organisation sends to governments—the kind of letters that SCS sends regularly.
Jacobsen: Folks can donate and contact Secular Connexion Séculière. How else can people become involved with Secular Connexion Séculière?
Thomas: SCS is still looking for advocates in Québec, Nunavut, The Northwest Territories and Yukon Territory. For that matter, SCS would like to have advocates in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island rather than covering all the Maritimes from Newfoundland and Labrador.
Secular humanists should report incidents they think are violations of their right to freedom from religion to their provincial advocate (http://www.secularconnexion.ca/provincial-action/).
Secular humanists should write their MPs. This is like voting between elections. I can guarantee that religious groups are doing this all the time. One should not expect immediate feedback, but MPs tally emails like votes and every vote on the secular humanist side of an issue helps.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion about the conversation today?
Thomas: Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to give people an insight into SCS. Merci bien.
I often feel that I am trying to sell abstract ideas to people who do not perceive any immediate threat to themselves. If they could hear and understand the frustration of Canadian secular humanists whose children have religion imposed on them; of those who live in fear of dismissal if their boss learns of their secular humanist life stance; of people who must feel left out of ceremonies, then perhaps they would be more inclined to step up. My challenge, regardless of how SCS can do it is to raise awareness and sensitivity to the problem both within the secular humanist community and with the general public and government.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Doug.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/03
David Rand is the president of Atheist Freethinkers. He participates in a Board of Directors and several affiliate coalitions including Rassemblement pour la laïcité (Quebec), Atheist Alliance International (AAI) and International Association of Freethought (IAFT). Here is his story. Edited for clarity.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To begin, do you come from an atheist family?
David Rand: No, I grew up in a devout Christian environment. There was a certain liberal aspect to my parents’ religiosity, but they participated religiously (pun intended!) in their church and donated regularly to it and to other religious organisations (for example the Bible Society). My mother’s side of the family was also staunchly monarchist. I rejected Christianity in my early teenage years. In my early twenties I realised that I was an atheist and had been for many years. I also realised that I was against the monarchy, although that issue was less significant.
Jacobsen: What sort of work were you engaged with prior to your involvement in professional atheism? Did it help with your current work?
Rand: Well, I would not call what I do “professional atheism!” I don’t get paid for it and never did (and surely never will). But I do engage fully in movements to criticise religious obscurantism and to fight against its influence in society, especially its political influence. In the 1970s and 1980s I was very active in the gay rights movement, first in Vancouver and then in Montreal. That was where I learned about political activism. There was, in fact, a clear link between my gay activism and my atheist activism: in the 1990s I was very concerned about the founding of various gay Christian churches and groups. Talk about an oxymoron: “gay Christian!” So I wrote an article about the dangers of embracing the ideology of one’s oppressor, and it was published in the American magazine Free Inquiry. Thereafter, I started an atheist web site (now located at www.davidrand.ca), and that was the beginning of my work for atheism and secularism. Subsequently, I was involved in various organisations, in particular several years on the board of a Quebec secular organisation. Then in 2010-2011 I helped found Atheist Freethinkers.
Jacobsen: Now you’re the president of the Atheist Freethinkers. What tasks and responsibilities come with this position?
Rand: It involves managing, in collaboration with our Board of Directors, our internet presence (two web sites, discussion groups for members, Facebook pages and groups, Twitter, etc.) and organising our monthly meetings. My responsibilities involve a lot of reading and writing – blogs, speeches, press releases, position papers, etc. Most of what we do is bilingual, French and English. Atheist Freethinkers is affiliated with several coalitions including Rassemblement pour la laïcité (here in Quebec), Atheist Alliance International (AAI) and International Association of Freethought (IAFT). I am also a spokesperson for the IAFT. I occasionally travel to speak at various events: for example, in March/April of 2017 I spoke at Days of Atheism in Warsaw and in September I will be speaking at an IAFT congress in Paris.
Jacobsen: What are the perennial threats to atheists? Who have been unexpected allies?
Rand: Undoubtedly the greatest threat for atheists is politicised religion, when religion obtains political power. This is most obvious when that power is exercised by Islamists, who promote a medieval theocratic totalitarianism. However political Christianity remains very dangerous, for example in sub-Saharan Africa, the United States and Poland. The current pope is a silver-tongued obscurantist. I recently stumbled upon a caricature comparing him with a pile of excrement sprinkled with brightly-coloured sugary confection. I think that image expresses very well what the Vatican is all about.
I must also point out that one of the greatest threats to secularism (and hence indirectly threatening atheists) in the current political climate is the so-called “regressive left” (I am not satisfied with that term, but have yet to find a better one) which is ferociously anti-secular – so much so that regressive “leftists” tend to demonise secularism by falsely associating it with racism and xenophobia.
As for unexpected allies (although this is not completely unexpected) persecuted religious minorities are potential allies. A year and a half ago I spoke at an interfaith event organised by Ahmadiyya Muslims. The theme of my talk was the complete vacuity of religious morality or “divine command theory” as it is called formally. Of course the Ahmadiyya (who are sometimes horribly persecuted by Islamists) have a completely different worldview from ours at AFT, but they welcomed our participation in a very friendly manner and did nothing to prevent us from expressing our point of view. On the other hand, I would question their support for secularism.
As a Montrealer, I must also mention that there is strong support for secularism among Quebec nationalists and so they are, or should be, allies of atheists. However, the demonisation of Quebec nationalism (mainly by Canadian nationalists) is a serious impediment to that alliance.
Jacobsen: Your blog covers a variety of topics: atheism, LGBT, women, Islam and Islamism, Canadian multiculturalism, and so on. What guides the selection of topics? Can people become involved with the blog? If so, how can they help out?
Rand: The selection of topics is guided by our basic concerns as atheists (as expressed for example in our Manifesto, www.atheology.ca/manifesto/), by current events (for example the niqab or Motion M-103) and by whatever the individual author would like to write about. Our members are encouraged to write for the AFT blog. I have written many blog entries, but so have other members of AFT or signers of our Manifesto. (I also have a personal blog at blog.davidrand.ca)
Jacobsen: What are some of the main educational initiatives, and social and political supports, provided by Atheist Freethinkers for the atheist community?
Rand: On the educational front, I would say that our greatest strength is our criticism of communitarianism (a.k.a. multiculturalism) and its extremely deleterious effect on any movement towards secularisation. Being based in Montreal, we are acutely aware of this dynamic. The infamous “two solitudes” must be taken into account in order to understand the fight for secularism in Canada.
There are many in Canada outside Quebec who would call themselves secularists but whom I would call pseudo-secularists. If you do not question communitarianism, if you instead promote so-called “open secularism,” if you fail to recognise the importance of republican secularism, then you are on the wrong side of the fence because you are facilitating religious privilege.
There are obvious measures we can all agree on, such as removing “supremacy of God” from the preamble to the 1982 Constitution, repealing the law against “Blasphemous Libel” and eliminating all financial exemptions and privileges for religious organisations. However, in my opinion, a complete and consistent secularisation of Canadian federal legislation would necessarily involve at least the following measures as well:
- Repeal of the religious exception in the Hate Propaganda legislation.
- Elimination of line 17(1)b) of the Citizenship Regulations.
- Repudiation of Motion M-103 and any other motion against so-called “Islamophobia.”
- Banning all religious accommodations (e.g. the Sikh head covering in the RMCP).
- Repeal, or at least substantial modification, of the Multiculturalism Act.
- Banning religious symbols in public services, including those worn by public servants while on duty (but not by citizens using those services).
- Banning face-coverings everywhere in public services (both employees and users).
Jacobsen: How can atheists better mobilise politically and socially in societal and communal life, and emotionally and intellectually in individual life?
Rand: A complex and very open-ended question. If atheists constitute a community, it is a very heterogeneous one, if a community at all. I remember an article from a couple of years ago where the author promoted the idea of atheists as an “ethnic group.” I am totally opposed to such an approach. We are not just another religious or ethnic group. We must not fall even further into the multiculturalist trap, increasingly essentialising people’s religious affiliation, dividing society up further into clienteles, even more easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians. If we followed that route, then atheism would, paradoxically, become just another religious identity.
Rather, we must organise and unite on issues we share with other atheists: that is, an uncompromising criticism of religion, recognising that supernatural religious beliefs are utter nonsense, unworthy of our respect. Just as believers have a right to practice their religion, we non-believers have every right to live without having others’ beliefs shoved down our throats. But we must also ally with others who may not identify as atheists in order to promote secularism, which means that believers too would be protected from the religious excesses of their co-religionists and of those who follow other religions.
It would also help to stop being so timid about recognising what atheism and secularism have in common. They are different concepts, but they share one major aspect: both involve a refusal to accept divine authority. The atheist makes his or her moral decisions without reference to a god. Similarly, the secular state must base none of its laws or procedures on so-called divine command. That does not in any way prevent religious believers, as individuals, from participating fully.
Finally, I’m not sure what you mean by “emotionally,” but intellectually we must continue (and here is some good news) what atheists have already undertaken with enthusiasm: the analysis, criticism and deconstruction of religious beliefs, dogmas and practices in order to become stronger in our resistance to the ever-present and sometimes overwhelming religious propaganda that floods our society. But that criticism must not stop with Christianity. We must be just as critical of other religions such as Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, etc., which are minority religions in Canada.
Jacobsen: What are the upcoming initiatives for Atheist Freethinkers? What are the new battlegrounds, and the most controversial ones? How can they be tackled and eventually won?
Rand: Our priorities are; I think:
- continuing and deepening our criticism of communitarianism.
- rejecting modern forms of old restrictions on freedom of expression such as so-called “Islamophobia” which is the new recycled blasphemy.
Both are controversial, especially the first, at least in Canada. The initiatives would involve:
- Educational work to explain to atheists (and to the general public) the importance of the above priorities, and
- On the federal level, working for the legislative changes that I listed in a previous answer, starting with repeal of the religious exception in the Hate Propaganda law.
- On the provincial (Quebec) level, working for numbers 6 and 7 of the legislative changes listed above, i.e. banning religious symbols and face-coverings in the public service, and eliminating the religious component of Quebec’s Ethics and Religious Culture programme, which imposes compulsory religious instruction on children throughout elementary and secondary school.
And, as always, the money aspect must not be neglected: opposing all financial privileges enjoyed by churches and other religious organisations.
Jacobsen: People can look at the Atheist Manifesto and sign it, and can become members of Atheist Freethinkers, and even can donate. How else can people become involved with Atheist Freethinkers?
Rand: They can:
- attend our monthly meet-ups (www.meetup.com/lpa-aft/). For the time being they are held only in Montreal, but we would like to offer them in other centres.
- join our Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/librespenseursathees/).
- subscribe to our Twitter feed (twitter.com/lpaaft or twitter.com/aftlpa)
- consult one of our web sites (www.atheology.ca or www.atheologie.ca)
- consult one of our Facebook pages (www.facebook.com/atheology.ca or www.facebook.com/lpa.aft)
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion about the conversation today?
Rand: The immediate future looks bleak. Religions are enjoying a comeback, thanks, in part at least, to the so-called regressive left. We must persevere. We also need to analyse the role of neo-liberalism in this sorry situation.
But in the longer term I am more optimistic. I think the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is part of the death throes of religion. The treachery of religious institutions and the utter vacuity of the extravagant nonsense they promote are becoming increasingly obvious to more and more people. Religious believers, including Muslims, are abandoning their faith, sometimes quietly (because they fear reprisals) and sometimes more openly. But sooner or later, that house of cards must crumble.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, David.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/02
Waleed Al-Husseini founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. He escaped the Palestinian Authority after torture and imprisonment in Palestine to Jordan and then France. He is an ex-Muslim and an atheist. Here is an educational series on ex-Muslims in France.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With the foundations laid in Session 1, and in our interview, how does the Council of Ex-Muslims in France help ex-Muslims not feel alone?
Waleed Al-Husseini: To speak about this in France, the situation is complicated for many ex- Muslims because they experience threats. That’s why they don’t show themselves in public. But they always take the risk to meet in coffee shops, or restaurants, to try to make friends. They don’t want to feel alone. Also, such meetings and being with other ex-Muslims gives them some courage. At the Council of Ex-Muslims in France, we provide conferences in public wherein many can get support. Also, we as ex-Muslims recently had a big secular conference in London – a conference in which many Ex-Muslims came together.
What we do for society is the main fight for us – to show that we exist and that we are active, to work for laïcité – I intentionally use the French word because it’s different than secularism. I prefer to use it, always.
So, we work for that. That’s why we are with all the organisations who work for laïcité, and are also a part of the segment of French society who fight for these values.
We speak Arabic. Islam is Arabic. We know all these Islamist movements. We know how Islamists work. We have important knowledge about a problem which has become truly international.
Jacobsen: Maryam Namazie is an articulate, passionate, and insightful voice of ex-Muslims in Britain. Has she been a beacon of hope and inspiration for the Council of Ex-Muslims in France? And has she helped the council in any way?
Al-Husseini: Yes, of course, we created Ex-Muslims in France with her. She always supported us. We are all part of an important group of ex-Muslims, a group that has people in Germany, UK, France, and North America. We all work together and support each other. In the conference in London, we were are all there together.
Here in France, we have more than 100 ex-Muslims involved with our organisation. We have many friends and supporters as there are many other French people fighting for the same values; this gives us the power to feel that we are not alone!
Jacobsen: The Council of Ex-Muslims in France calls for equality and universal rights including the right to criticise religion, the right to atheism, the right to secularism, the right to freedom for women, to right to protection of children, and the right from intimidation tactics by religion. How much success has your organisation had on each of these fronts?
Al-Husseini: Acquiring these things are long processes. We want our voice to be heard on these issues. In Muslim countries, we try to help those who are arrested, make their story known, and contact governments, especially if it is an atheist or activist who has been arrested.
All the movements for rights in Islamic countries, such as the one we did in Tunisia this week for not fasting during Ramadan, are a stance of solidarity. For them to admit that we exist is a success, because they never admitted that before, but we still need more effective and ubiquitous successes.
Jacobsen: Have there been murders of ex-Muslims in France for their renouncement of Islam? Does this happen as often with another religion’s faithful becoming faithless? Or does this happen mostly with Islam?
Al-Husseini: At this point in time, it’s only Islam that does this. The other religions are past this; only Islam still closes on itself after 1,400 years, and doesn’t accept anything modern.
Jacobsen: What can improve the state of free speech for ex-Muslims in France? What can build bonds between ex-Muslims in other countries? What can help build a community/coalition of ex-Muslims in countries in the Middle East?
Al-Husseini: Many things can be done to improve the situation. Firstly, we need more opportunities to talk – they need to give us the space to speak our minds and to not limit free speech or speech in general in the name of “Islamophobia”. This word has always been used to stop people like us, and to stop others from listening to us. Why? Because we can stop terrorists through discussion and showing many things. If you want to stop terrorists, then listen to ex-Muslims.
What can help build communities is to first put pressure on the government, to stop all the blasphemy laws and stop treating ex-Muslims as threats and criminals; through this, people may stop attacking us. Then many of us will be more open about who we are in public and speak more freely without so many threats from the religious communities and the government. I can tell you that there are ex-Muslims in every family in Muslim countries, but they can’t speak.
Jacobsen: Thank you for taking the time once more, Waleed, always a pleasure, my friend.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/08/01
Ian Bushfield, M.Sc. is the Executive Director of the British Columbia Humanist Association (BCHA). He earned an M.Sc. in physics from Simon Fraser University and a B.Sc. in Engineering Physics in 2009. He is the Events and Development Coordinator, and has been the Director of Development, at the Cerebral Palsy Association of British Columbia. He was the Founder and President of the University of Alberta Atheists and Agnostics. He is an Ambassador for Dying with Dignity. He grew up in the “Bible Belt” of Alberta – Southern Alberta. He fought to reduce the influence or mention of God at the University of Alberta convocation ceremony. Here is his story.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed. Let’s start the interview talking about your background. Do you have a family background in humanism?
Ian Bushfield: Not formally. I was raised in a fairly non-religious household. It was basically areligious in that we didn’t really even talk about religion. I joke that I first learned about religion from The Simpsons.
SJ: When did humanism become the philosophical and ethical worldview for you?
IB: I think like most secular people, Humanism was always my somewhat default mindset, even if I didn’t really come across the term and context until university. I was raised with the idea of being good to others because it’s the right thing to do and, at its core, that’s all Humanism is. So as I got involved in atheist activism in my undergrad, I came across Humanism in my reading and I naturally gravitated to it as an identity for my worldview.
SJ: What seem like the more pressing topics for humanism in British Columbia at this time?
IB: BC is a pretty nonreligious province, yet we still retain a few specific privileges for religion. I think the most egregious are the public funds that go to religious private schools, through our own sort of voucher program, and the fact a number of our public hospitals are still run by religious institutions. Both these schools and hospitals are able to turn people away who don’t conform to the institution’s narrow dogma. For example, some evangelical schools require students to be able to speak in tongues, while Catholic hospitals in the province refuse to provide abortions or medical assistance in death, both of which are legal in Canada.
Beyond that, BC is no more immune than the rest of the world to the rising xenophobic, misogynistic and anti-Humanist populism we’re seeing around the world. We’re lucky in Metro Vancouver to have a fairly tolerant and multicultural society, but there are still white nationalist groups and anti-immigrant sentiments bubbling under the surface.
SJ: You made a video about the Big Bang, which was great. I recommend it. You work as the executive director of the British Columbia Humanist Association (BCHA) in British Columbia (BC), and for a better world through compassion and science. It begs the question: what is the “better world”? Also, how, and why, are compassion and science the two best tools to reach that better world?
IB: Thanks. My concept of a ‘better world’ is somewhat utilitarian – that is, one with more flourishing and less suffering. Compassion in this case is shorthand for being empathetic to the plight of others and seeking means and paths to improving as many people as possible, both alive today and in consideration of future generations.
I say science is one of the best tools we’ve discovered to learn about the world as I think it’s empirically true (and yes, I realise that’s a bit circular). Science at its core asks us to test our ideas against the real world. So if we have a set of propositions about why apples fall from trees, science gives us a path to figure out which one is closer to reality. The same process works for solving more human problems, like how to tackle an overdose epidemic. Here in Vancouver, science has shown that a supervised safe-injection site and related harm reduction policies save more lives than the sort of “war on drugs” mentality. Of course, science on it’s own is not enough. We need compassion or some kind of value system to guide what and how we use that tool.
SJ: What tasks and responsibilities come with being the executive director of the BCHA in BC?
IB: My job is basically to handle the day-to-day operations of the organization. Whether that’s lining up programming for our events in Vancouver, giving advice to local groups across the province, working on any of our campaigns or even answering interviews like this, no two days are the same.
SJ: The BCHA had a recent success with the biblical texts, Gideon Bible distribution, in some schools in the province. Some of the story, in general, is in the article. What are the next battlegrounds for the BCHA in BC? Why?
IB: As I mentioned, I think two of the big challenges are going to be around the public funding of religion in our private education system and in our public healthcare system. Those are going to be long fights as none of our politicians want to upset those constituencies at this time.
Our other challenge is working to get recognition to perform marriages in BC. Humanists in a number of countries around the world and in the province of Ontario are able to perform weddings but the Government of BC doesn’t consider us qualified under the law here. We’ve put out a report documenting the differences between these jurisdictions and believe we can press the government to either change the law or take the case to court.
SJ: You work for the ‘Politicoast’ podcast. What tend to be the political themes discussed on the podcast? Why?
IB: PolitiCoast is more of a hobby in my spare time than a job in of itself and it’s completely independent of anything else I do. Mostly, my friend Scott & I wanted to get more discussion about BC politics out there as it’s somewhat neglected in the broader scene of politics podcasts. We met through Vancouver Skeptics in the Pub so I think we both try to bring a bit of that sceptical approach to our analysis, even if we come from slightly different partisan bents.
SJ: “Terahertz” is a common theme, e.g. Terahertz Atheist. Why this title throughout some work for you?
IB: I took on the moniker back in undergrad when I was working in a terahertz spectroscopy lab and kept it as I continued to work on similar technology in my graduate studies. Basically it refers to the band of the electromagnetic spectrum between radio waves and infrared radiation. We’ve only recently been able to generate those kinds of pulses and they’re incredibly useful for analysing the properties of semiconductors and are actually also used in some kinds of airport full-body scanners.
SJ: You contributed to the Canadian Atheist, Pharmaceutical Journal, Postmedia Network Inc., St. Catharines Standard (Letter), Terahertz Atheist, The Province (Letter), and the Vancouver Humane Society. You spoke for the Secular Student Alliance, on Afternoons with Rob Breakenridge, and Left at the Valley, and at the Café Scientifique Vancouver, South Fraser Unitarian Church, and Leeds Skeptics. You are a founding donor for Bad Science Watch. You have been featured in Humanist Action and Indi in the Wired. What inspires this activism and writing in multiple domains through different outlets and organisations?
IB: I think it’s just a curiosity that extends to a wide array of different interests. I spend a lot of time, probably more than I should, reading things I come across through social media and that forms different thoughts and ideas in my mind. Perhaps it’s my privilege, but then I guess I’ve just felt confident enough to express them anywhere people are willing to hear me. I do like to think that it’s all tied to a common thread of Humanism though, whether it’s promoting better science, equality and liberty, scepticism or even a politics that puts people first. That’s not to say all Humanists will necessarily agree with me on everything of course.
SJ: You provided “significant support” for E-382 (Blasphemous Libel), which argued for the removal of blasphemy libel. As e-382 stated in full:
Whereas:
- It has been eight decades since the last conviction under Section 296, and thirty-five years since the last charge of blasphemous libel was laid;
- Blasphemous libel serves no purpose in Canadian law or modern-day society, and would likely be found to contravene section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects freedom of expression;
- In Canada and elsewhere, blasphemy laws have been abused to suppress minorities and stifle inconvenient speech;
- Authoritarian states point to Canada’s blasphemous libel law to defend their own laws criminalizing blasphemy;
- Repealing Canada’s blasphemy law would demonstrate, at home and abroad, Canada’s commitment to the value of free speech for all; and
- Freedom of expression is the foundational human right in our society. Many others, including freedom of assembly and freedom of conscience, are derived from freedom of expression.
We, the undersigned, residents of Canada, call upon the Government of Canada to repeal Section 296 (Blasphemous Libel) of the Canadian Criminal Code.
Was it a success?
IB: The campaign is still in progress. We’re lucky that this government was elected in part with a promise to reform the justice system, including the Criminal Code. So in her response to the petition, which received over 4700 signatures, the Justice Minister said that the blasphemy law would be included in the review of the Criminal Code. We’ve seen one bill come forward to strike sections from the Code that the courts have ruled unconstitutional and frustratingly the blasphemy law wasn’t included in that draft. We expect the government is still working on other bills and we’re optimistic that this section will be repealed in one of those.
SJ: You weighed in on the Trinity Western University LGBTQ+ issues:
“It represents a shockingly outdated view of the discrimination faced by the LGBTQ community,” said Ian Bushfield, director of the B.C. Humanist Association, another intervener.
Are there similar cases outside, even inside, of BC?
IB: This case is relatively unique in Canada. We don’t have many private religious universities in the country and TWU is the first to really push the limits of how many programs it can offer while still maintaining very strict anti-LGBT policies. So as this case moves forward to the Supreme Court of Canada it will really be a litmus test of what approach our courts take to religious freedom as an organisational right. In the USA, the courts have opened the door wide and allowed religion to trump a lot of other concerns with rulings like Hobby Lobby. We’re hopeful that the courts in Canada will take a more balanced approach and include other considerations, like the equality rights of women and the LGBTQ community, in their ultimate decision.
SJ: You spoke on the “Urgency of Humanism.” In BC, this seems like an easier message to disseminate with the ‘oasis’ of non-believers, the Nones, or those with no formal religious affiliation. What, still, is the urgency of humanism?
IB: While BC is overwhelmingly non-religious, and our polling suggests as many as 70% of British Columbians don’t practice a religion or faith, Humanism is more than just rejecting organised religion – it’s that positive and progressive framework that gives life meaning. With rising intolerance and open bigotry, I think we, even in BC, need an open and inclusive Humanism more than ever.
SJ: You can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter. Any other recommended means for people to be involved with or contact you?
IB: I’m not sure whether it’s a blessing or curse, but as far as I can tell I’m the only Ian Bushfield to ever exist, so I’m pretty easy to find online. I’m most active on my personal Facebook page, where anyone can follow my public posts, and Twitter.
SJ: Thank you for your time, Ian.
IB: Thanks for the questions Scott.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/29
Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley, and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and PhD in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we explore, as an educational series, the philosophical foundations of psychology. Session 1 & Session 2.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the epistemology underlying statistics in psychology? Where does psychology begin to find its statistical limits?
Dr. Sven van de Wetering: I think the more or less explicit epistemological assumption underlying the use of statistics in psychology comes right out of Skinner and his notion that the human organism can be thought of as a locus of variables. In other words, human cognitive, emotional, and behavioural propensities can be meaningfully studied as dimensions that can be expressed numerically, as can environmental events likely to influence those propensities. Furthermore, the task of psychology is conceived of as being to figure out ways of measuring those underlying variables and of inferring how they influence one another. We depart from Skinner, though, in rejecting his absurd claim that one can explain all variability, that the concept of error variance is meaningless. Because error variance is a fundamental feature of the complexity of human organisms, and the even more complex environment in which they operate, inferential statistics then become an important tool to separate incorrect hypotheses from correct ones. Also important in all this is the assumption that human beings are very good at finding patterns in any sort of data, including pure noise, and that safeguards are needed to prevent us from inferring patterns where none exist. Human beings are seen as very fallible creatures, and inferential statistics are seen as safeguards against that fallibility.
Jacobsen: What are some of the most embarrassing examples of statistical over-extension in psychology studies ?
van de Wetering: I’m not sure, I routinely get embarrassed by over- or misapplication of statistics, but I do sometimes think people don’t know what inferential statistics means. Two patterns frequently bother me, though I can’t think of particular examples off the top of my head. One is people who conduct a study with a small sample size, fail to find a statistically reliable difference between treatment groups, and then blithely proclaim that the null hypothesis is true, as if the study’s lack of statistical power is some sort of virtue. The second pattern is almost the opposite of the first: people who conduct studies with enormous sample sizes, find a statistically reliable difference between groups, and then trumpet the finding as an important one. They don’t bother to report effect sizes, probably because to do so would be to acknowledge that the effect they have found, though statistically reliable, is too small to have a lot of real-world significance.
Jacobsen: We did some preliminary work in an interesting area, environmental psychology. You have an expertise in political psychology. How can statistical knowledge about political psychology influence knowledge around issues of environmental psychology, e.g. climate change denial – as opposed to scepticism?
van de Wetering: Many people who are very concerned about anthropogenic climate change are baffled by the large numbers of people who deny that human actions are having an appreciable effect on the Earth’s climate. The scientific evidence appears to be so overwhelming to those who accept it (not that most of them have read much of it) that the only explanation that they can fathom for climate change denialism is that it is rooted in sheer ignorance of the scientific facts. Statistically, though, scientific ignorance does not appear to be a major factor in climate change denialism, given that the correlation between belief in anthropogenic climate change and general scientific literacy is close to zero. Instead, we find an extremely strong correlation between belief in anthropogenic climate change and measures of ideology. In the US, people who strongly identify with the Republican Party or who self-identify as very right-wing are very likely to deny that human actions are responsible for changes in climate, regardless of how much they know about science in general or climate science in particular.
Jacobsen: The statistical approaches often come in conjunction with “folk psychology.” So, some Folk psychological explanations for a phenomenon exist, then they either become supported or not through scientific studies. Why is this the basis of lots of research? How is it weak? How is it robust?
van de Wetering: We use folk psychology as a heuristic because we don’t really have standardised procedures for hypothesis generation. If we don’t have a formal theory that acts as a source of research hypotheses, then informal theories (i.e. folk psychology) are the next best thing. The primary strength and primary weakness of folk psychological theories are the same, namely that they are fairly easy for us to understand with our limited cognitive apparatuses. This is a strength because theory is always under-determined by data, so if multiple theories are possible, we might as well go with the ones that are easy to understand. This is a weakness because there is no a priori reason to believe that true theories of human psychological functioning are easily comprehensible. An example of this is connectionist modelling of human cognition. Connectionism has some pretty substantial explanatory successes to its credit, but has not caught on as well as might be expected just because it is so absurdly non-intuitive that nobody really has a good gut sense of what connectionist models are actually asserting.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Sven – pleasure as always.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/18
Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley, and is now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and PhD in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we explore, as an educational series, the philosophical foundations of psychology. You can find the first session of our Q&A here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What philosophy best represents the opinion of most psychologists regarding the means by which human beings think, feel, and act?
Dr. Sven van de Wetering: I think we are still very far from a consensus on this issue. My personal take would be to still use the metaphor of the human as a computer. The gross outlines of the computer’s programming have been laid down by the process of evolution by natural selection, and the fine tuning done by various forms of learning. Feelings are part of the overall system, not some sort of exogenous factor.
These ideas are all at least several decades old, and to my mind, they work well together, but each component of the triad of information processing, evolution, and learning is rejected by some psychologists. Some psychologists find that thinking of cognition as information processing is unhelpful, others believe in information processing, but consider the human information processor so general in its functioning that evolutionary psychology has no heuristic value, and some are happy with the concept of the mind as an evolved computer, but think that learning processes only do some very minor tweaking around the edges, and are not really worth worrying about.
I guess what I am trying to say is that psychology is a fundamentally pluralistic enterprise. No single theory answers your question because the human mind is a very complex device that can be fruitfully described at many different levels and from many different points of view. Pluralism is an uncomfortable and cognitively demanding stance that is not for everyone, even among people with PhDs in psychology. Furthermore, even pluralists get things wrong (a lot), so one sometimes wonders what the payoff is. Other than psychology being fun, of course.
“Certain statistical procedures need to be taught because academic psychologists expect one to know them, and one therefore needs to know them because it is expected, regardless of the intellectual merits of doing so.”
Jacobsen: What is the worldview, and statistical outlook, that you try to inculcate in students and in mentored pupils such as myself?
van de Wetering: As with several other aspects of psychology, I find that it has to be taught in two ways. One is at the level of the community standards of academic psychology. Certain statistical procedures need to be taught because academic psychologists expect one to know them, and one therefore needs to know them because it is expected, regardless of the intellectual merits of doing so.
The other is to do whatever it takes to find out what the data actually means. This often entails doing more descriptive work than what you see in many journal articles. In some really egregious examples, I have seen published articles where authors claimed their hypothesis was supported because some test said p<.05, but when I actually looked at the group means, the difference between them was in the opposite direction from the one predicted.
This is an extreme example, but something I see much more commonly is people writing things such as “Variable y induces people to produce behaviour x.” But when I look at the actual data, I find that both groups actually tended to avoid engaging in behaviour x, but members of the experimental group were slightly less likely to avoid behaviour x than members of the control group, and therefore people actually engaging in behaviour x made up a fairly small proportion of the overall sample.
Still more frequently and less egregiously, people will write about a difference in means as if everyone in every group was behaving in the exact way that the group mean indicates they are behaving. There is often little or no acknowledgment of variability in responses, even though the reported standard deviations indicate that this variability is substantial.
If I can summarize this paragraph, let me say that p values are given too much attention at the expense of descriptive statistics, and descriptive statistics are often being treated as if they describe everything, rather than being highly aggregated summaries that throw a lot of information away. It is of course right to summarize and to ignore individual cases in our research reports (because to do otherwise would invite cognitive overload), but we should try to avoid conventions in writing that make it seem like the individual cases don’t even exist or that the summary statistics contain all the information of interest.
We of course go into research with hypotheses in mind, but if we don’t spend many hours playing with the raw data, we don’t get to find out what the data are actually telling us. It’s always exciting when p<.05, but that’s always only a small part of the story. Playing around with the raw data, graphing them, noticing anomalies, etc. helps keep us alert to the complex messiness of human behaviour, and helps steer us away from unjustified formulations such as “variable x causes this change in variable y” when really all we know is that in one study, on average, variable x was associated with that change in variable y, and there is seldom evidence that variable x had that effect on variable y for every single person in the study, or even for a majority of people.
Jacobsen: Between rigour and relevance, where has there been the most fruitful growth of real data about people?
van de Wetering: I am very hesitant to pronounce on this, because I am more attuned to developments on the side that emphasises rigour. That being said, I think developments have not been entirely positive on my end of the playing field, given the replication crisis and all. It may be that things are even worse among those who emphasise social relevance, but my personal opinion is that no branch of psychology is in a great place right now.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Sven – always a pleasure.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we discuss the philosophy of economics, its evolution, and how the discipline of economics should move forward in a world with increasing inequality so that it is more attuned to democracy. Previous sessions of our Q&A can be found here, here, and here.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dr. Douglas, as previously discussed, a gap in knowledge, theory, and predictable consequences have developed in economics. When did this occur?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: Economics didn’t always seek status as a precise empirical science. Adam Smith famously declared disinterest in what he called “political arithmetic”. He might have been thinking of William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1690), which attempted to advise the king on the specific economic effects of various policies. Smith, at least as I read him, was more interested in the moral psychology of economic activity, such as the sorts of motivations that drive people into economic interaction and the psychological effects of being engaged in it. I think he was closer to a novelist than a scientist. He sought to dramatize capitalism and present the sorts of character that inhabit it. There is a world of difference between this, and the ambition to use economic theory to forecast the specific effects of various policies or institutional changes.
The mania for the latter sort of calculated forecasting took off with the innovations in national accounting statistics that began with the development of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States, and in other similar departments around the globe, in the middle of the twentieth century. Now economic aggregates are treated as the report card for the standing government. The government takes credit when the numbers look good. The opposition blames the government when the numbers look bad. Both agree to propound the illusion that the government somehow controls these numbers.
Jacobsen: What might be the upper limit in predicting human choices?
Douglas: I don’t know. Neuroscience might one day discover some algorithm that predicts precise behavioural outputs from easily-sorted classes of inputs. We’d then have a precise method for predicting behavioural responses of human agents to environmental changes. But, again, even if this were possible, who knows whether it would be of any predictive use. Huge differences in behavioural outcomes might be made by differences too small for the instruments to measure.
At any rate, I don’t see why we should be trying to predict human behaviour – or what I’d rather call human action. The eighteenth-century materialist Baron D’Holbach dreamed of a day when the government could “hold the magnet” to move its citizens around like iron filings, after having developed a complete science of psychological “magnetism”. He was, in other words, an early advocate of governance by manipulation of incentives – perhaps an ancestor of today’s proponents of “nudge” theory. I find this idea disturbing. I believe that the unpredictability of human action is a precious thing that should be preserved, and instead of trying to render human action predictable and thus controllable, I’d rather we strove to develop an ethics and a politics that fully embraces uncertainty. Maybe if we stopped trying to control each other so much, we’d find that the world is becoming less dangerous rather than more.
What really worries me is that in developing a theory that treats people as cipher-like “pleasure machines” – to use Geoffrey Hodgson’s term – and in designing our institutions on the basis of that theory, we will end up reducing people to what the theory treats them as being. Economists often say that their theory is value-neutral, that they aren’t telling us how people should be, but merely telling us how people are. They treat opposition to their project as a superstitious reaction against scientific enquiry. But they don’t consider that the prevailing theory of human nature can end up transforming human nature. For example, if you regard humans as little more than consumers, you might cover the landscape with advertising, seeking to tap into this lucrative monomania. Then when the advertising becomes so abundant that people have nothing else to look at, they really do become the monomaniacal consumers they were assumed to be. This is, I think, what Ruskin was getting at in the first part of Unto This Last. A key job for philosophers is to fight this tendency that degrades the human spirit in practice by underestimating it in theory.
Jacobsen: Could the rules for economic behaviour – exchange of products and services – become looser with weakened social ties, and thus loosen the Wittgensteinian view on “rules”?
Douglas: In the ‘Wittgensteinian’ view that I proposed (which may not really have much to do with Wittgenstein), rules are instantiated at the level of communities, not individuals. Certainly we could explain the exchange of products and services by identifying the various social rules that drive these exchanges, beginning our analysis at the level of the community rather than the individual. But in doing so we would be giving up a crucial principle of mainstream economics, namely methodological individualism: the principle that the unit of explanation for economic behaviour are individuals. Individuals, in mainstream economic theory, are supposed to have preference-orderings, which are rules governing their behaviour (“swap one apple for two or more oranges, but not less”).
The ‘Wittgensteinian’ argument I hinted at has the conclusion that preferences can’t pertain to individuals on their own. A rule requires a crowd in order to be concretely instantiated. A rule that isn’t properly binding has no concrete reality; it exists as a mere abstraction. But a rule that I impose on myself isn’t properly binding. I always have absolute power to exempt myself from the rule. The same holds for a small group, who can always conspire to excuse themselves. But a crowd develops an inner tendency towards conformism, exercising peer-pressure and the “tyranny of public opinion” to keep its members in the fold. If (concretely existing) rules are peculiar to crowds, then so are preferences. Individuals explore and experiment; it is the crowd that gives rise to the rigid preferences from which economists begin their analyses.
“Critics of capitalism often focus on the exploitation of the worker, but, as Joan Robinson said, it is often worse under capitalism to not have your labour exploited – at least not in the labour market.”
Jacobsen: How do economic choices (tendencies) change over the course of an individual’s life?
Douglas: Well, it is only in the middle of our lives that we can expect much from the Invisible Hand – and that’s only for those who are able and legally permitted to sell their labour. During childhood and old age, we can only count on what others are obliged to give us. I believe that our societies pitifully under-provides for the non-working population. Young children are packed into classrooms in ugly buildings, often taught by inadequately-trained assistants. The elderly languish in miserable and understaffed care facilities, or are left alone at home. Provision for the disabled is always strongly urged as it is inadequately funded. For centuries the domestic labour of women, unrecognised as a commodity by the market, was at best remunerated with a bare subsistence living; and to some extent this remains true. Meanwhile, income-earners get to enjoy the highest material standard of living in history: things that used to be luxury commodities – holidays abroad, designer clothing, exotic cuisine –are now mass-produced for widespread enjoyment by the waged.
John Kenneth Galbraith once depicted an American family meditating on “the curious unevenness of its blessings” – an engorgement of private consumer goods alongside threadbare public services. Today this unevenness translates into a massive inequality between income-earners, who can access the consumer goods with which the market is gavaged, and non-income-earners, who are stuck with the vanishing trickle of public services.
There is no reason to expect anything different according to standard economic theory. Why would a market society produce anything for those who have no commodities to offer in exchange, or are not permitted to exchange what they have to offer, or offer a sort of value that is not recognised as a legitimate commodity by the market? Critics of capitalism often focus on the exploitation of the worker, but, as Joan Robinson said, it is often worse under capitalism to not have your labour exploited – at least not in the labour market.
Jacobsen: Thank you once agin Dr. Douglas.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka (EMSL) is an organisation devoted to the representation of a minority within a minority – ex-Muslims. This is an educational interview with direct, frank answers on serious questions for a widely unacknowledged persecuted community: the ex-religious, and in this instance the ex-Muslim. I feel personal impetus to research, interview, and present these minority within a minority interviews. So here we are.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Within the ex-Muslim community, there are so many stories discussing the discrimination, prejudice, hate crimes, physical violence and attacks, and so on, against the ex-Muslim community, usually from the Muslim community at large. What is the state of irreligious freedom in Sri Lanka?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka is a non-Muslim country, and being irreligious (even though there are only a very few individuals) is not considered as a serious crime by the majority i.e. the Buddhists and the Hindus. Yet Muslims are concerned, of course, as it is considered the ultimate betrayal of and attack against the community and the religion. As far as our members are concerned, knowing these realities that happen everywhere, most of them have chosen to remain closeted. Very few of them have decided to openly discuss their non-belief with the family and friends. They have to face physical violence, discrimination and isolation, and these have taken a considerable psychological toll on them.To our surprise, while working towards forming the Ex Muslims of Sri Lanka, we found out that there is not even a single irreligious, atheist organisation for the Ex-Buddhists or Ex-Hindus existed in Sri Lanka, even though the two religions do not prosecute those who desert the faith, unlike Islam. So, we are the first of this kind to be formed as an organisation / group at the national level.
Jacobsen: Maryam Namazie is an articulate, passionate, and insightful voice of ex-Muslims in Britain. Has she been a beacon of hope and inspiration for the Ex-Muslims in Sri Lanka? Also, has she helped the Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka in any way?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Yes indeed, she has been a considerable motivational strength as far as Sri Lankan ex-Muslims are concerned. When the founder of the EMSL decided to form the group, he contacted many ex-Muslims around the world and she was one of the very few who responded and provided guidance. We are very grateful for being accredited as one of the affiliated bodies of Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB). We were also invited to participate in the International Conference on Freedom of Conscience and Expression in the 21st Century. But unfortunately we were compelled not to submit our visa applications in order to protect our identities from being exposed, considering the British visa applications are handled by a VFS office (third-party entity), not by the British High Commission.
Jacobsen: There is a foundational need for equality and universal rights, including the right to criticise religion, the right to atheism, the right to secularism, the right to freedom for women, to protection of children, and from intimidation tactics by religion. What success stories have there been in relation to each of these fronts for ex-Muslims in Sri Lanka?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Since none of our members have declared themselves publicly as ex-Muslims (except the few exposed themselves to their intimate family and friends), we are not in a position to provide a definitive answer to this question. But we can recall an incident when a female Muslim writer named Shameela Seyyida was forced to flee the country in the face of violence after expressing her liberal views whilst being interviewed for BBC radio with regard to protecting the rights of the women who are involved in prostitution.
Here in Sri Lanka, Muslims marriages and divorces are governed by a special law that is in accordance with Sharia law, known as the Muslim Personal Marriage Act. The law allows Muslims to marry little girls, girls even lower than the age of 12. There are voices against the law and demanding to amend the law on par with present day civil societies, but the clergies-controlled local Islamic Authority, All Ceylon Jamiyathul Ulam, refuses to accept the necessary changes to the law – including defining a minimum marriage age for Muslims. Many of the educated Muslim women are unhappy with the law, but they are afraid to raise their voices in the fear of being labelled as either women with “loose characters” or “evil and wicked women” or even slut-shamed by local clerics.
Jacobsen: What have been notable murders of ex-Muslims in Sri Lanka for their renouncement of the faith? Does this happen as often with another religion’s faithful becoming faithless? Or does this happen mostly with Islam?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Even though we have received a substantial amount of death threats online, So far we have been fortunate enough not to have encountered any lynchings, beheadings or torture so far. It is so disheartening to recall that one ex-Muslim from the state of Tamil Nadu, India, named Farook – a 32-year-old father of two – who was brutally murdered a few months back by pious, bearded Muslims for becoming an apostate. We have not heard anyone being punished or murdered in this century for leaving a religion other than the religion of Islam.
As far as we know, Islam is the only religion that commands to kill those who leave the religion. But it is widely witnessed that Muslim apologists (apologists often identified as moderate Muslims) try to twist the matter by bringing up some earlier Qur’anic versus to show the world that Islam has no compulsion. They do their best to bury the fact that Islam has barbaric law against those who leave the religion.
We have to understand something important from the history of Mohamed to understand the whole picture clearly. The apologists ask us not to take Qur’anic verses out of context, but it is they who cherry pick the peaceful verses to mislead people.
At the time, Mohamed claimed he was the prophet of God, he was 40. He spent the first 13 years in his hometown Mecca, gradually inviting people to follow him, but the vast majority rejected him. After 13 years of failure in his home town, he moved to another city named Medina, situated 450 km away from Mecca. In Medina he became a success as he gained more followers and unlimited power. He lived his next 10 years in Medina till his death at the age of 63.
His prophetic career can be divided into two parts. The first one is the 13 years he spent in Mecca with no power plus his first two years in Medina. The second part is his last 8 years in Medina as a powerful leader, ruler and warlord. The first part is 15 years, while the second part is 8 years – a total of 23 years.
During the first part of his prophetic career, he had lived a non-violent and generally peaceful life, and his preaching was primarily about tolerance, non-violence, and peace. He had lived only with two wives during this period. He married his second wife only after the demise of his first wife. He did not even have two wives at the same time during the first phase of his religious career.
The second part of his prophetic career spanned around 8 years until his death. Having gained all the necessary power in Medina, he started to exhibit his true colours during this period. He even had 10 wives at a time, until his death, including a few teenage girls and an underage child. He waged wars against non-Muslim and Jewish tribes. He carried out mass murders, genocides, lootings, sex-slavery, slavery-trading, and other violent and disgusting crimes.
Now let’s come back to the subject of killing apostates. During the first part of his prophetic career, he did not command any such punishments, but the second and the last part of the career he clearly gave orders to assassinate those who leave Islam. According to Islamic principles, when a new rule is introduced which contradicts an earlier one, the earlier one would be invalidated even if it remains in the Qur’an or Hadith. A good example of this principle is the Qur’anic verse about prohibiting alcohol consumption. The earlier Qur’anic versus ordered Muslims not to drink alcohol while praying, but later on the order was overruled by the complete prohibition of consuming alcohol. Both these orders are found in the Qur’an to date and they are recited by Muslims all over the globe, but it is the second rule that is accepted by Muslims.
So we understand that if there is an order or guidance that is contrary to the earlier one in Islam, the latest one would be the valid one. Muslim apologists have successfully misguided the world by using the preaching from Mohamed’s first part of the prophetic career to build up a fake image of Islam that finds expression in that old chestnut “Islam is the religion of peace”. In reality, of course, the religion is not a “religion of peace”.
Jacobsen: How can people be protected from being misguided by using only the preaching of the first phase of Mohamed’s Islamic life?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: People should be either educated or made aware of the two parts of Mohamed’s religious career, at least in brief. We are not certain that every Muslim understands this so seldom-discussed fact. We believe that if they really know this, the real peace-loving Muslims would have to make a strong decision about continuing to follow and view Islam as a “religion of peace”.
Jacobsen: What can improve the state of free speech for ex-Muslims in Sri Lanka? What can build the ties for those ex-Muslims in other countries?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: We feel within the Sri Lankan context, as well as the world in general, we need to promote questioning, challenging, opposing ideas and tolerate and respect opposing ideas. Moreover, we need to cultivate open-mindedness and critical thinking from a young age to accept self-criticism. According to a survey by the Daily Telegraph, as far as Sri Lanka is concerned, it is one of the top 5 countries in the world with a ratio of 99% of people who think that religion is very important. With this background, improving free speech in our society is an uphill task.
Jacobsen: What seems like the best argument for atheism and against Islam to you?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: To be frank, we do not promote atheism as an alternative to Islam. Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka is a platform for those who have left Islam under various circumstances and not following any other faiths. They can be atheists, agnostics or irreligious.
But with regards to Islam, we clearly think Qur’an is a not a divinely revealed book. Instead, we think it’s a man-made one. Likewise, we also think Mohamed is not a perfect role model for humanity. Our best argument against Islam is Mohamed and his life. If you understand the timeline of events about his life, you will see him as the person he really was.
Jacobsen: For those that renounce the faith outright, have family and friends disowned them? What were the most hurtful comments that you’ve heard? How do they cope?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: As we said earlier, many of our members remain closeted. Despite that their obvious irreligiousness itself has caused them emotional distress. The rest who are courageous enough to admit their faithlessness to their close family and friends are forced to endure depression, isolation, and at certain instances even physical abuse.
The common accusation is that we are conspiring against Islam and Muslims for monetary objectives with support of Zionists and the west. Furthermore, we have been labelled devilish and other not-so-favourable names.
Jacobsen: Are these typical responses to leaving Islam?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Yes indeed, and you find this only among Muslims.
Jacobsen: Why is the reaction so seemingly disproportionate – against even a son, a brother, or a friend?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Nearly all children born in Muslim families are indoctrinated with religious beliefs from a very tender age. Starting with evening religious schools (Madrasa), regular general preachings, Friday’s Jummah preachings, sponsored programs on state own media – including hours of preaching on national radio etc., all brainwash Muslims, especially children. They are taught to think, act and live in a particular way – approved by Islamic teachings. The local Islamic Authority, All Ceylon Jamiyathul Ulama, and foreign-funded (Specially Arabic countries and Turkey) Islamic movements, make this scenario even worse.
Jacobsen: What is the best way to combat far-Right ideologies such as ethnic nationalism and Islamism?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Nowadays, here in Sri Lanka, we are experiencing politically motivated Buddhist extremism, but luckily most of the Buddhists did not rally behind such extremism. Providing a secular-based education would be the best way to encourage critical thinking and inquisitiveness. Moreover, teaching children to respect each other’s views and to promote secular humanitarian values would start a better tomorrow.
Jacobsen: What do the most technologically advanced and democratic, and developed, societies take for granted with respect to free-speech?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: In the majority of Western countries, free speech is more or less guaranteed by a constitution and they have learnt their lessons during the Enlightenment era. There was no such thing, even remotely, experienced by people in countries such as Sri Lanka. Though free speech is nominally mentioned in the Sri Lankan constitution in writing, religion, at the same time, has also been given prominent place. Therefore, religious beliefs overpower free speech.
Jacobsen: Waleed Al-Husseini of the Council of Ex-Muslims of France wrote on the conspiratorial perspective of some Muslims. That is, individuals leaving Islam can be seen as an agent of a Western or Jewish State. What seems like the source of this conspiracy view?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: Scott, once again, we have to go for an answer that is similar to the one of Waleed Al-Husseini. The Qur’an and the Hadiths are the main reason for this conspiracy standpoint. There are a lot of Qur’anic versus and Hadiths said by Mohamed during the latter part of his prophetic career that spread hatred towards Jews and Christians.
Muslims are made to believe that every failure they experience and every failure within the religion can be explained by pointing by Jews, Israel or Mossad. Most Muslims can’t even think that a Muslim can leave the religion by his or her own will.
We are often accused of working for Israel, but we are the only ones who understand the struggles in operating the EMSL. For the past three months, we are struggling a lot to find a place to have a meet-up for our members, but we are still unable to locate a place that is convenient and safe for us. Also, a general look at our official website will make anyone aware that it needs a lot of development and updates, but we are not even in a position to do the necessary developments. Muslims are made to think that people of Israel do nothing but sit and spend their whole time thinking of ways to conspire against Islam. Let’s be honest, we had the same mindset during our days as Muslims.
Jacobsen: How was the organisation formed? Why was it formed? What are its current educational initiatives and social activist works?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: It started as one man’s idea. Originally, it was meant to be a meet-up with his old friend who had also become an ex-Muslim a few years ago. Once they realised that both of them were in the same boat, they strongly felt the need to meet each other. But the plan took a different shape when the founder felt a responsibility to bring all other individuals who had left Islam under one umbrella. That was when EMSL was formed, in December 2016.
Following months of online and live discussions, social media campaigns were carried out to create the dream of forming Sri Lanka’s first irreligious organisation at a national level. The funniest situation was when some hardcore Islamists who were well-known by some of our members tried their level best to join us as spies by pretending to be ex-Muslims. We had to give them cold shoulders and ignore them completely.
We have many plans for online activities and we will do them when the time and resources permit us. Currently, we share other’s materials on our official Facebook page.
Jacobsen: There are a series of planned resolutions from the Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka (or, maybe, they have come out, but in any case). What is the state of them? What will be their content and purpose? What is the most important one? How will these improve the livelihoods of ex-Muslims in Sri Lanka, especially with the political activism pointed at the Government of Sri Lanka?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: With regard to the proposal, they are still at the draft stage. Our objective in bringing such a proposal is to ensure equal rights of irreligious people, atheists, secular humanists, freethinkers, and LGBTIQ communities, and also to enlighten the public with regards to the very existence of such people and communities in Sri Lanka.
The present system of segregating the schools on the basis of race and religion should be abolished. The mind of the children should not be poised with racist and religious fanaticism.
We think the above one is the most important resolution. If the minds of growing children are not poisoned with racist and religious ideologies or when the idea of either following or not following a religion is made as freedom of choice, children will view the world around them differently. That would improve everyone’s lives, including ex-Muslims – at least in the long run.
Jacobsen: What are the upcoming and ongoing initiatives for the Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka? You can be reached through the website, Facebook, and email.
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: We have made steps to prepare video testimonies of some of our members. We have also prepared a message to Sri Lankan Muslims. We hope that message would have reached the media by the time this interview is published.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion based on the discussion today?
Ex-Muslims of Sri Lanka: We are grateful to Conatus News for giving us this great opportunity. Scott, we appreciate your time and efforts in making this interview a success. We hope that this interview would make awareness about Ex-Muslims among local Muslims.
Finally, we would like to take this opportunity to invite Sri Lankan ex-Muslims who have not yet joined us. We know there are a few players in Facebook & Twitter with their own identities as well as concealed identities. We are hopeful that they also join us.
Thank you very much.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/09
Annie Laurie Gaylor is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) with Dan Barker. She has been part of the fight against the encroachment of religion on secular culture, and human and women’s rights for decades. Here she talks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about the FFRF and some personal history.
*This audio interview has been edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To begin, was there a family background in non-belief? Or if there was a background in religion, in family, how did you come to not believe in a formal faith?
Gaylor: I am a 3rd generation freethinker on my mother’s side of the family. My brothers and I grew up without any religious indoctrination. We consider ourselves very lucky. My father was brought up in a religion but didn’t become too devoted. So my parents were of accord, and felt very strongly that it is almost child abuse to indoctrinate small children into scary concepts like original sin and everlasting torment, guilt, shame – before they can even understand abstractions.
In the same office building where my mother worked, the dentist said, “Oh, you have such well-behaved children. How do you account for that?” She suggested that you should not indoctrinate children. It shocked him quite a bit.
Jacobsen: But, growing up at a time when religion was taken for granted in the US, did you not have questions of your own?
Gaylor: Yes. When we would bring up religion to our parents, it was clear they did not believe, but they did not impose it on us. It would come up in the conversation naturally. We got the idea that religion was not for us, that it’s a bit ridiculous. But we knew that it was serious topic that we would one day be expected to make up our own minds about.
Jacobsen: Were you aware of the lack of status of women, in general, within religions at a young age?
Gaylor: Actually, I was, because my best friend was Catholic. My friend once complained that the only reason we had to go to school was because of this woman, and I realised much later she was referring to Eve. I knew vaguely who Adam and Eve were, and only realised belatedly that my friend was blaming school on Eve as if it were a sentence.
Women, or Eve, in her worldview were responsible for everything bad in the world. In that respect, that was a little wake-up call. I grew up free from all of the God stuff. I was, of course, surrounded by religion. As I grew a little older, I realised very quickly, in school, that we were the odd ones out for not having a religion.
Interestingly, there were two main reactions. One of them was envy. That was the most prevalent: “Oh! You don’t have to get up on Sunday to go to Sunday School at church.” It was a clear envy. The second reaction, “But how can you be an agnostic? Because you’re a good girl.” I was well-behaved. I didn’t get into trouble. So early on, I was encountering this ridiculous stereotype, which dogs non-believers still today: That you can’t be good without God, or that our morality must come from religion. So if you’re a moral person, it doesn’t equate that you could be a non-believer. I was the only agnostic girl in the class. There was one Jewish girl and one non-believer in a class of about 30 kids. So I was aware that I was in a great minority, but I never felt the least bit apologetic about it. I felt that this was a very natural way to be.
Jacobsen: This conviction continued with you throughout?
Gaylor: When I later studied women freethinkers in history, I was very struck by Ernestine L. Rose.The daughter of a Jewish rabbi in Poland, she was born behind a wall. She was a rebellious little girl by the age of 5 who didn’t take with religion and ended up coming over to the United States. She became the first woman to lobby for women’s property rights in New York State. In 1848, New York became the first state to enact property rights for married women. It had been introduced by a freethinking judge. Ernestine had come in by 1836 and went door-to-door trying to get women to support this legislation. It took 12 years. She was a famous feminist and an atheist. She was invited to speak, and very celebrated in infidel societies.
One her main speeches talked about how every child is born an atheist, and would remain so unless they are otherwise inculcated. I think she’s right. It doesn’t mean everybody’s born rational and necessarily able to critique religion based on reason, but, of course, dogma has to be inculcated in you, all of the religious concepts and stories. You are not born with those. So I feel like I was just given a head start.
Jacobsen: Of course, one of the most well-known female freethinkers in our history was Hypatia. There were severe consequences for her.
Gaylor: Yes. Of course, even later I think women freethinkers had to be very brave because we only see atheist and freethought in the 1500s, 1600s, and after the Enlightenment in the Western culture. They were still killing women as witches in the 1500s, 1600s, and into the 1700s. So these women were all aware of this terrible history of women being put to death as witches. In the face of this hostile climate, I think the fact that women caught up very quickly as leading exponents of freethought is very meritorious.
For eg., Mary Wollstonecraft from the 1790s, Ernestine L. Rose in the 1830s etc. In the 1820s, Frances Wright became the first woman to speak to mixed audiences of men and women going after the clergy. So women have been very leading advocates for free-thought. All these women were simply subject to all kinds of situations by the clergy. Ernestine gave one speech where 700 theology students mobbed the speech and turned off the gaslight. She was cute. She said, “There is one thing true in Bible. Let there be light.” Or something like that.
Jacobsen: That must have been quite a time to live through.
Gaylor: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was very active in the 1840s and was an agnostic, said, “The Bible was hurled at us from every side,” when they were talking about women’s rights. The feminist movement was largely initiated by women freethinkers, which makes sense because women were told that they had to be in silence and servitude. So it took heretics and infidels to be willing to brave the wrath of the clergy and to violate the strictures of the New Testament.
But I think the feminist movement owes an enormous debt to women freethinkers. I don’t think that’s as publicly known as it should be. That’s one of the reasons I put together this anthology: Women Without Superstition, the first anthology of women freethinkers. It was clearly a theme. It wasn’t what I necessarily started off with as a preconceived notion. But it came up over and over again.
The earliest women freethinkers and writers were also the earliest feminists.
Gaylor: My influence, besides my mother, was Bertrand Russell. Russell was the one that I had read. Even in the 1960s and 70s, when there was very little in the libraries about freethought, you could almost always find Why I am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell. His popular writings from the 40s and 50s, almost single-handedly kept freethought alive in this country.
When everything else was being taken off the shelf, for eg., Ingersoll wasn’t there, but Russell’s writings remain very influential. So I would say that my personal hero, when I was growing up as a junior high school student, was Bertrand Russell. I didn’t really read Asimov that much. But I was pleased to meet him because was always an outspoken freethinker. His wife continues that tradition. I think he was more influential to someone like my husband Dan Barker. Dan. who was raised fundamentalist. would still read science fiction.
Jacobsen: Then you co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) with your mother.
Gaylor: Yes, we co-founded it in 1976.My mother and I started FFRF because we became aware of what it meant. She was the principal founder and was asked to go national with it in 1978. . I was in college when we founded FFRF. It was partly when Jerry Falwell was in ascendancy. We felt nobody was speaking out against his lies. His historic lies. What opened our eyes was my mother’s work for abortion rights. She wrote the first editorial in favour of legalising abortion in 1967, in Wisconsin.She was a statewide. well-known abortion proponent and I would accompany her to her interviews and speeches.
The capitol in Madison would be filled with nuns and priests and bussed-in school children. Every statement they made against contraception and abortion would start with “God”, for eg, “God says abortion is murder.” It was very obvious to us who the organised opposition to women’s reproductive rights was. My mother felt that the work done by women’s groups were great, but unless they were going to get at the root of the problem, which was religious sway over our civil law, that we would never make progress. So that was one of the main reasons we founded FFRF. It was our feminist experiences. Unfortunately, we are still fighting the same battle today.
Jacobsen: That’s right. Now, the current battleground on the issue of abortion and reproductive health rights is with the “Religious Right”. How do you think your mother would feel in the light of actions such as the “Global Gag” rule, which was enacted by the current Trump administration?
Gaylor: I think she would be completely vindicated! I mean, she would feel that we’ve sounded the alarm. She would feel how important it is to carry on. She felt that the enemy of women’s rights was religion. That unless we would actively confront that threat our rights were always going to be in jeopardy.She would feel even more strongly about how important it is that separation of church and state be honoured. Of course, she was dismayed that since Roe vs. Wade, we’ve been on the defensive almost from the beginning.
Here’s what she (Anne Nicol Gaylor) wrote:
In working for women’s rights I fought in a battle that would never end, because the root cause of the denial of those rights was religion and its control over government. Unless religion is kept in its place, all personal rights will be in jeopardy. This is the battle that needs to be fought. To be free from religion is an advantage for individuals; it is a necessity for government.
Something that she wrote in 1987, still very completely relevant and true.
Jacobsen: How do you feel about that?
Gaylor: It just proves how important this battle is. We’ve pointed out how important it is to keep religion out of government if we’re going to protect women’s rights. We knew we weren’t taking this victory for granted. We’ve lost a lot of ground. That we can never have freedom while we’ve got religion in government. Wherever you are, and whatever the religion is. I feel that FFRF is really, at base, working for the Enlightenment, or working to keep it going. It is a very important job. We’ve lost so much ground since the 50s. That’s the decade that I was born in. Ironically, I spent most of my life trying to undo much of the bad precedent that was passed by Congress in the 1950s.
Jacobsen: In the formation and evolution of the United States, what do you think has been most influential in rooting religion in this country?
Gaylor: This idea that we’re a Christian nation has really changed the perception in our country. In fact, we have a godless and secular constitution, but there have been many actions of Congress that have mis-educated the public, such as inserting “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. putting “In God We Trust” on the currency, then adopting it as a second national motto, when we had a perfectly good one, “E. Pluribus Unum,” which celebrates diversity – “Out of many, one.”
That was chosen by our Founders: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams. Thomas Jefferson chose that motto.
Jacobsen: But would you say there are other ways in which American history allows for religion to play an important role?
Gaylor: The National Day of Prayer, which directs the president to direct citizens to pray every year. It has created so much mischief. We sued over that. We had a victory, then it got turned around. We sued over the housing allowance law passed in the 1950s, which is the IRS advantage for clergy. The Internal Revenue Service gives churches the right to pay clergy with a housing allowance that they can deduct from their taxable income. They only good thing I can think out of the 50s is the Johnson Amendment. That’s what Trump keeps talking about overturning. It is codifying that tax exempt groups can’t engage in politicking. He had his executive order last week during the National Day of Prayer. We sued over it. Essentially, he said the IRS is not to enforce the anti-electioneering provisions against churches.
Of course, FFRF is a tax exempt group. So churches are being treated preferentially. So that gave us injury to sue. We sued over this before.
Jacobsen: When was the last time, in your opinion, that separation of church and state has been as much under threat as it is now?
Gaylor: The 50s were the Red Scare. After wars, it was a bad time for individual liberties. We haven’t really recovered from those inroads in the 50s, even though the population – the demographics – have changed a great deal. We’re talking about a quarter of the population that is non-religious. But the politicians and the courts haven’t caught up with the population. We’ had this ‘coup’ with the religious Right with the last election.
But they are not going to acknowledge the changing demographics. They are quite the opposite.
Jacobsen: What countries would you say we can look to as a model? What influences people’s departure from religion?
Gaylor: Iceland is ahead of the game in every way. Although, things can change quickly. The economic side, they really took a beating in 2008. They are very isolated. But they have been good at fighting off the evangelists who want to come and visit them. They used to be a very, very religious and austere place in the 50s, 60s, and in the 70s — the poverty level was part of that, but I think it’s an amazing country.
I guess, you can never completely count on things. The pendulum can swing quickly, but that’s also true in our favour. I think the election in 2018 could be quite pivotal in this country in stopping some of the assaults that are ongoing right now.
Jacobsen: Any feelings or thoughts in conclusion about our conversation today?
Gaylor: I would say that we’ve got our work cut out for us. I truly believe the motto that FFRF has: Freedom depends on freethinkers.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time today, Annie.
Gaylor: I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/04
Houzan Mahmoud is the Co-Founder of The Kurdish Culture Project or The Culture Project and the valued partner of Conatus News in the Conference on Defending Progressivism. She is a women’s rights activist, campaigner and defender, and a feminist. In this wide-ranging and exclusive interview, Mahmoud discusses the Kurds, Iraq, women’s rights, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are a women’s rights activist, feminist, and an anti-war activist. You were born in Iraqi Kurdistan. What were the moments of political awakening for you?
Houzan Mahmoud: One of the things I’ll never forget is the break-out of war between Iraq and Iran. I was only six-years-old at the time. Iraq’s bloody dictator Saddam Hussein coming to political power in 1979 changed our lives in Kurdistan and Iraq forever. Being Kurdish poses all sorts of problems as it is, and living under the fascist regime of Saddam made things incredibly hard for my family. Prior to Saddam coming to power, my brothers took up arms during late 70’s against Iraq’s regime, I was too little to remember the particulars. However, what I do know is that from 1973 to 1991 I grew up and lived under one of the most horrendous regimes in modern history.I am forty-four years old now, but I still live with the horrors I faced during my childhood and adolescence years living in Iraq. From the day I was born, all the way to this moment, all I have witnessed is war, a never ending war in Iraq. That’s why even my life in London is very much shaped and affected by the events that have and are still unfolding in Iraq and Kurdistan. I have many shared memories with my own people from the region, memories of struggle, loss of loved ones, horrors of genocide, and the pain of having to leave our homes again and again. I live like a nomad; even if I live in a home I always think to myself “I am not sure how long I will be living here – where next?”
Jacobsen: How did you come to align with the principles inherent in feminism and anti-war activism?
Mahmoud: I grew up in a war zone, a climate of long lasting and bloody wars, a constant exodus and displacement. I am strongly opposed to war because it only brings devastation and abject poverty. It destroys homes, it destroys entire lives. However, I wouldn’t say that I am a pacifist largely due to the environment in which I was born. As Kurds, we are always subjected to the horror of war, occupation, and repetitive cultural, linguistic and physical genocides. For example, I support the armed struggle of Rojava against the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS). In such cases, you can have one option: you either take up arms or be ruled by the monstrous forces of ISIS.
As for my feminist principles, there were various reasons that are personal, social and political. Of course, when you grew up in a socially-conservative society, a place in which every move you make somehow amounts to either shame or honour, if you adopt progressive views there is considerable backlash, you become a ‘rebel’. The mentality that women are ‘inferior’ and men are superior is somehow imbued within almost every aspects of daily life – politics, art and literature. The language we speak carries a great deal of words that reinforce women’s subordination. I must admit that from a very early age, I was aware of my own position in my society, I felt trapped, powerless and lonely. I felt stranded on a small planet that was destroyed by war. Making the smallest demand for women’s rights felt like a crime. Everything was about war, killing, survival and political-struggle against the enemy. There was little room for feminist ideas. Even when I joined a leftist political party, hoping that it provide the equality I sought after, I felt it was a man’s club. I left it and started reading feminist books intensively, as well as the history of feminism and the different schools of thoughts. I found within feminism a home, a place in which an ideology truly spoke for women. So, yes, going through a painful life journey full of loss and being a woman was and still is not easy. That’s why feminism is vital to me, to my thinking, activism and worldview.
Jacobsen: What are the more immediate concerns for women’s rights relevant to the Iraqi Kurdish community?
Mahmoud: There are many issues to fight against, such as so-called ‘honour killings’, female genital mutilation (FGM), forced and arranged marriages, and other forms of violence – like many other societies in the world. Kurdish women are fighting against all of these issues, and they’re fighting outside invaders too – such as ISIS. So the problems are not limited, but are changing and are varied in addition to the political instability that, as we know, forays into the lives of women and their rights.
Jacobsen: You co-founded Culture Project, which is a platform for “Kurdish writers, feminists, artists, and activists.” What inspired it – its theme and title?
Mahmoud: I am one of the founders of Culture Project and have supported it, as well as having worked with various organisations and campaigns that highlight and assuage violence against women. One thing that was missing was a holistic approach to the important need of raising awareness about gender and feminism and challenging cultural productions that are patriarchal and male dominated. So I discussed the idea with a couple of friends and supporters about creating such a platform, a platform that supported those people who have non-conformist views, as well as challenging regressive/conservative norms and values which are “traditional”. This platform is open for all regardless of sex and gender. We would love to bring forward new faces, young writers and others in order to create a debate and produce new knowledge that challenges the old schools of thought. As for the name, I thought that if we give it a name that gave our organisation the appearance it is female-only, it will just limit our scope of work. We decided to call it Culture Project in order to be inclusive of all people: activists, writers, philosophers, feminists, novelists, poets, etc.
Jacobsen: What have been some of its more popular articles – title and contents?
Mahmoud: We have various writers on both our Kurdish and English websites – websites proving to be very popular. Of course, on the Kurdish website we have far more writers, poets, feminist writers, philosophical essays, art and cultural reviews, etc., as well as short stories. On our English website we have a very well-informed new generation of young Kurds who are active politically and are critical of the status-quo in Kurdistan. They challenge existing gender relations. You can find some very interesting poems, short stories, artistic-writing, and essays. One of the important pillars of our project is that we have gender and feminist awareness at its core. We promote and motivate our writers to be gender sensitive and champion feminist positions. When we were in Kurdistan in May, we hosted a debate on Feminism and Art, which was very well attended and created a very interesting debate.
Jacobsen: As a secular feminist have there been threats to your life, or others involved with the project?
Mahmoud: There have been several threats directed at me when we launched our Anti Sharia Campaign in Kurdistan and Iraq back in 2005. Even now when I write and criticise Islamism and advocate for feminist ideals I get hate mail, threats and expletive diatribes on Social media. Also, one of our writers who openly writes against Islamism received letters containing death threats. The fact is that those of us who are non-compromising and are open in our criticism of Islam and Islamism our lives are automatically in danger. We are not safe in either the Middle East nor in the UK.
Jacobsen: What are the unique concerns of women and girls in war, in contrast to boys and men?
Mahmoud: One of the major features of all wars is the use of rape as a weapon. Most of the times women in war situations end up becoming victims to rape, trafficking, sexual slavery and dealing with the consequences of the devastation that war brings to their societies. For example, women who become widows in socially conservative societies who have very little welfare are living in dire conditions. Conversely, men and boys, who are fighting, face death, injuries and other war traumas. However, in some cases men who are caught as prisoners of war are sexually assaulted as an act of humiliation in order to breakdown their ‘manhood’. The case of the Yezidi genocide committed by ISIS symbolises this horror. Women were taken as spoils of war; they could be raped, sold and turned into slaves. Men who did not convert were killed.
Jacobsen: Looking into the past a bit, you were one of the speakers for the March, 2003 London, United Kingdom anti-war rally. What was the content of, and the reaction to, the speech?
Mahmoud: I used to take part in anti-war demonstrations against US-lead wars in Afghanistan. Later on, when the US and its allies decided to attack Iraq in 2003, I became more involved and active in the anti-war efforts in UK and elsewhere. I asserted my opposition to the war on Iraq, despite the fact of being Kurdish and someone who has suffered immensely under Saddam’s regime. I still didn’t think that any foreign intervention was going to improve our lives. I also emphasised that this war will only bring more terrorism because it will strengthen political Islam, i.e. Islamism. Some people on the political Left liked my opposition to the war but disliked my opposition to political Islam, as they view them as an “anti-imperialist” resistance. To me, however, this is absurd – how can a terrorist force that kills, beheads, and oppresses women have anything to do with resisting imperialism?
There is no doubt that we all wanted an end to Saddam’s totalitarian regime, but I was opposed to foreign invasion. In this region we don’t have a good experience with foreign interventions and colonialism throughout history. Imperialist powers invade, destroy and support or install puppet regimes to serve their interest only. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan – since the invasion we are faced with much more terrorism, instability, poverty, displacement and mass migration of people. There is a humanitarian disaster and an endless tragedy of war and bloodshed.
Jacobsen: You have also featured on major news outlets such as The Guardian, The Independent, BBC, CNN, NBC, and Sky News. You have campaigned strongly against Sharia law in addition to the oppression of women in Iraq and Kurdistan. Does this campaigning against Sharia law extend into the international domain?
Mahmoud: Yes, because political Islamist groups are now everywhere seeking to impose Islamist ideals on people and restricting freedom of speech and expression. Even in UK we have problem with religious schooling, Mosques that advocate for Jihad, and hate speech. We have Sharia councils that violate women’s rights. I am part of the One Law for All coalition that seeks to expose these violations and influence government policy makers. The struggle for women’s rights, secularism and universal values is an international struggle. I always felt I was part of this worldwide struggle even if we are confined to local issues, but we fight with a universal vision for rights, gender equality, secularism and an egalitarian alternative to patriarchal capitalist system.
Jacobsen: What religious/irreligious and ethnic worldview makes the most sense with respect to the proper interpretation of the world to you?
Mahmoud: I am not interested in any religions that seek to convince me of another world. I live here in the now, that is what it matters to me. I take a stand against injustice, class division and the gender apartheid that is currently taking place. We need to replace the horrendous climate that has been created by capitalism and corporate profit-making by creating a heaven on this earth, one in which we are all treated equally, fairly and with justice for all. I have no time for tales of heaven and hell in another world. There is no evidence of such realms. However, I have experienced very similar places here in this earth. After having lived in war zones and having had fought for survival, being in London is to me like heaven. I felt human again. I can enjoy the freedoms I am entitled to as a woman. I owe it to the struggle of generations of powerful feminist movements in this country.
Jacobsen: Does this comprehensive activism – women’s rights, Kurdish culture, feminism, anti-war, and, I assume, others – come from the religious/irreligious worldview at all?
Mahmoud: To me, they come from an irreligious worldview. This is because religions limit our imaginations and they limited our freedom of thought. Religion restricts human creativity, it restricts our freedom of ideas. It subjects people to an outmoded dictates – be they from the bible, the Quran, or any other holy book. The notion of sin, guilt, shame and honour create a gender divide and it imposes a hetero-normative narrative that is shamefully discriminating. As a woman, I felt I was half human when I was religious. I felt everything I do was loaded with guilt, and that I am somehow inferior to men. When I started to question and dislike all the restrictions I realised that religion is not for me and that it is a man made and merely in the service of men. The more I read into world-religion, the more I realised it is extremely patriarchal and oppressive towards women.
Jacobsen: How can people become involved with the Culture Project, or in the advocacy and promotion of Kurdish culture?
Mahmoud: Well, we really need help and support from talented people, people who have editing skills, who can review and analyse art work, who can write reports, proposals, and we need people who have design skills. Any support through volunteering would be deeply cherished.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Houzan.
Mahmoud: You most welcome, it is my pleasure.c
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/02
James-Adeyinka Shorungbe is the Director of the Humanist Assembly of Lagos, Nigeria. It is a secular congregation in Nigeria. Here he talks with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about the Humanist Assembly of Lagos, the impediments to both critical thinking and humanism in Nigeria, pervasive superstition, the general perception of those attending the Humanist Assembly of Lagos, and more.
*This audio interview has been edited for clarity, concision, and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you are the director of the Humanist Assembly of Lagos. What are some tasks and responsibilities that come along with that position?
James-Adeyinka Shorungbe: Essentially, organising the affairs of the organisation, charting annual programs to promote critical thinking in Lagos (Nigeria), maintaining relationships with other organisations such as IHEU, IHEYO, NHM. HAL is also a founding member body of the humanist movement in Nigeria so I was actively involved in that regard.
Jacobsen: What are some of the impediments to the education and advocacy for both critical thinking and humanism within Nigeria?
Shorungbe: First, Nigeria is a society highly entrenched in superstition. So that is a major, impediment, to promoting critical thinking. In order to address that, education and awareness has to be done. While the government is trying to improve the literacy level from its current level of just under 60%, a number topics that promote critical thinking are not being taught in schools.
Evolution is not being taught in schools. Anthropology is not taught in schools. History is not taught, and so on. So there’s education but low application of critical thinking to challenge the norm. Creationism is the only story taught in schools. So this creates an entire mindset of citizens who are highly superstitious. You also have the movie industry churning out a lot of superstition which the citizens all buy into and believe literacy as factual.
As a major impediment, superstition is a big, big problem. To address this, not enough of our message is getting out there. To be honest, I don’t think we’re doing enough to get our message out there in terms of awareness and enlightenment. We have barely scratched the surface in terms of addressing superstition in Nigeria.
Jacobsen: With a large portion of the population having a superstitious mindset, what is their general perception of the Humanist Assembly in Lagos?
Shorungbe: The few people who we have interacted with, they generally do not understand humanism or humanists. Their perception is anything that doesn’t recognise any divine being is straight evil, paganism, evildoers, etc. People we’ve had interactions with, often ask shocking questions like, “So you mean you don’t believe in God?”
When you try to get across the message that human problems and human situations can be solved by humans and are best solved by human efforts, we always get push backs, “No, no, no, you need to have divine intervention.” It is something strange to them, to the society — very strange.
Jacobsen: If you were to take a survey of public attitudes and beliefs, how many humanists can one expect to find in Nigeria, or even Lagos specifically?
Shorungbe: Because Nigeria is a very conservative society and a lot of people do not openly identify as humanists, atheists, and freethinkers, agnostics, etc. it is a bit difficult to count. Many official forms and data gathering applications usually only have the two main faiths as beliefs. However, when you go to online forums, when you go on social media, there are quite a lot of Nigerians who express themselves as nonbelievers.
There was research conducted by the Pew organisation. It stated that as many as 2–3% of Nigerians are humanists, freethinkers, and nonreligious. In a population of 180 million, 2–3% would come to 3 to 5 million Nigerians, but many are not outspoken. But in terms of the outspoken ones, we have very few humanists who are openly affiliated with humanism and agnosticism online and offline.
Jacobsen: Do you think that having an umbrella organisation will play an important part in solving issues like teaching correct scientific theories in the biological sciences and evolutionary theory in schools?
Shorungbe: Yes, definitely, it is. With an umbrella body, you have a louder voice. You have more clout. That is one of the reasons why in Nigeria a number of associations are all coming under the umbrella of the national body, ‘Nigerian Humanist Movement.’ Aside from the online community of The Nigerian Atheists and a couple of chat groups, we are still fragmented in Nigeria.
The Humanist Assembly of Lagos is one of 2 organisations that is formally registered and trying to break barriers and putting the voice out there for other humanists to appreciate that they are not alone. That you can be different. That you can be good without any divine belief. The importance of having an umbrella body is very critical. Now, with an umbrella body, we can have representation to push through the Nigerian National Assembly, through government bodies, etc. We can better organise ourselves to ensure the adoption of more scientific methods in schools — for example, becoming advocates for the teaching of evolutionary theory in school curricula.
Jacobsen: What are some future initiatives of the Humanist Assembly of Lagos? How can people get in contact to help or donate to the organisation?
Shorungbe: For the future, we will be looking to organise events that can showcase and promote humanism as well as critical thinking. Events such as film screenings, lectures, debates etc. We are also toying with the idea of a radio show to enlighten the general public and kick-start discussions within the public sphere. A radio where speakers would come on and talk about everyday human issues and how these can be addressed without thinking they are caused by divine or superstitious means.
Just to enlighten the public of the various challenges one has in life and how they can be addressed by practical action, which do not require divine intervention.
Essentially promoting humanism, freethinking, atheism, agnosticism on a national level.
To get in touch with us, you can contact us via email: humanistassemblylagos@yahoo.com. We also have a page on Facebook, Humanist Assembly of Lagos, and Twitter under @humanistalagos.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Adeyinka.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/20
Rev. Dr. Paul Knupp, Jr. is the Co-Founder & President of the Humanist Society of Iowa. He is a Chaplain for the American Humanist Association and trained in theology and psychological dynamics. Here we discuss some of his work and background and thinking. The interview was conducted by Scott Jacobsen of Conatus News
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there a family involvement that led you to becoming a member of humanist groups in general, and more involved in humanistic judaism? When did this become a philosophical life stance, for you?
Rev. Knupp: No prior family involvement. It became a more ethical and practical stance for me six years ago, when I became a Chaplain for the American Humanist Association.
Jacobsen: You acquired professional training at Drake University, Princeton Seminary, Roberts Wesleyan College, and the University of Iowa. What was the purpose and content of this training?
Rev. Knupp: My training was in ministry, educational psychology, education, and psychology of religion. But this training later greatly helped with humanist work. Theological and psychological dynamics are inherent in all Humanism work.
Jacobsen: What is the general treatment and perspective of humanists in America? For example, some countries’ populations don’t care because they’re integrated in their acceptance of them. Others express open vitriol and prejudice. Others simply don’t know what those terms mean, so don’t know who those fellow citizens in their respective general populations.
Rev. Knupp: All of the reactions you cite here, we have experienced. However, since Gallup polls religious “nones” now at 25% of the population, our acceptance grows daily.
Jacobsen: You are the co-founder and president of the Humanist Society of Iowa. What tasks and responsibilities come with this station? What inspired its founding? Who was the other founder?
Rev. Knupp: A Humanist chapter must have five AHA members sign to form a local body. I garnered this support and we submitted it to headquarters in DC. We formed a set of bylaws and submitted to the state. We originally formed a chapter at the Iowa State Penitentiary. I thought it too ironic to not have our own local chapter, so I helped institute one. I wanted to call it the Lyle Simpson Humanist Chapter, after the 12th AHA president and one of our members, but he would not hear of it.
Jacobsen: What are the demographics of the society? Who is the most likely demographic to be a humanist?
Rev. Knupp: Our ages run from twenties to eighties. We are equally mixed between sexes. We have numerous LGBTQ members. We have some members of colour. We have many atheists and freethinkers.
Jacobsen: How does the Humanist Society of Iowa, if at all, advocate and promote humanism in the public sphere?
Rev. Knupp: We participate in public events, e.g., The Women’s March, The Gay Parade, the March for Science, Darwin Day, the National Day of Reason; we advocate legislatively for our ideals and concerns.
Jacobsen: As a chapter of the American Humanist Association, an affiliate of the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers, of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, and a member of the Central Iowa Coalition of Reason, what benefits come with the memberships?
Rev. Knupp: We increase our numbers for direct social action, as well as our knowledge and information base.
Jacobsen: How do these assist in the coordination of local, states and national efforts for societal and cultural acceptance of humanism, knowledge of humanism, and inculcation of humanist values?
Rev. Knupp: We share national days of protest and direct action, as well as accurate information of national concerns.
Jacobsen: Can you tell us a bit more about your work with prisoners and detainees? How do you feel called to service in this way?
Rev. Knupp: I have written for The Humanist on humanists “behind bars.” The Humanist Society of Iowa is in regular correspondence with the Humanist Community of the Iowa State Penitentiary. I am a monthly external chaplain and sponsor there as well as an attendee with the Humanists at Fort Dodge Correctional Facility. WSome of the most marginalised in our society are those behind bars. They wrote to Mr. Lyle Simpson, and asked to start an AHA chapter. Mr. Simpson sent me to assist them. We formed a chapter at the state penitentiary almost six years ago. One of the members transferred to Ft. Dodge and asked for a chapter there. Mr. Tom Harvey, AHA Celebrant, has assisted me in this work. In terms of priority, those marginalised deserve foremost my time and efforts.
Jacobsen: What are some of the more touching stories for you? How can humanists become involved with the prison population?
Rev. Knupp: The men, offenders, report that Humanism has aided their lives immensely. Every person in the age range of 30+ at the state penitentiary exemplifies a life better lived due to Humanism. The same is true for the Ft. Dodge offenders who are in their twenties. In all cases, the men report a happier and more fruitful existence due to Humanism.
Jacobsen: What are the valuable lessons in life that gathered from this experience and public service?
Rev. Knupp: Never count anyone out, no matter what horrendous deed that has been committed. We all have an embedded potential waiting for self-actualisation. We are born good, for good.
Jacobsen: What have been some of the main campaigns, initiatives of the Humanist Society of Iowa?
Rev. Knupp: Our new president, Gwen Harvey, initiated a training of lobbying for legislative action. She keeps our eyes on important legislative events and rallies our input.
Jacobsen: Who are some of the most unexpected allies for the advancement of humanists in the US?
Rev. Knupp: My own church, in which I was originally ordained, the United Church of Christ, is a surprise supporter.
Jacobsen: In general, what are the perennial threats to the practice of humanism in the US?
Rev. Knupp: Religious dogmatism is a perennial threat. In the US case, right wing fundamental versions of christianity, and evangelical christianity are perhaps most important to be wary of. Other prominent members of the AHA have spoken more about this.
Jacobsen: How can people get involved with the Humanist Society of Iowa, even donate to it?
Rev. Knupp: Go to our Meetup page.
Jacobsen: Any closing thoughts or feelings based on the discussion today?
Rev. Knupp: Thank you and it will take us all to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time, Paul.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/19
Emily Newman is the Communications Coordinator at the American Ethical Union and a member of the Americas Working Group for IHEYO. A staunch humanist and deeply involved in ethical societies, Scott Jacobsen sat down to discuss her story and some of her views. This interview was previously published in Humanist Voices
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Your whole family is steeped in ethical humanism, and ethical societies. Where did your family first come into contact with ethical humanism?
Newman: My parents were married at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture by an Ethical Culture Leader (our form of clergy) and became active members after having children. My father had been raised Jewish and my mother had been raised Catholic but both identified more as humanists/non-theists and had heard of Ethical Culture. They wanted their children to be part of a caring, multi-generational community in the neighborhood. My brother and I both graduated from the Sunday school and became teacher assistants as teens. It was reassuring as a kid to learn about the other Societies and the national organization, American Ethical Union, to know that I was not alone.
Jacobsen: Ethical Culture started with Felix Adler. When was your first encounter with his ideas? What definition really stood out for you?
Newman: I learned about Felix Adler, the founder of Ethical Culture, and his colleagues as well as various freethinkers and social justice advocates. We use Ethical Culture and Ethical Humanism interchangeably so I’m not specifically aware of how “Ethical Humanism” began. I define Ethical Humanism as a philosophy that uses reason and ethics to shape our relationships with each other and the world.
Jacobsen: What does IHEYO mean to you, since you’re on the Americas Working Group, together with other youth activists?
Newman: IHEYO is a way to expand my knowledge of humanism and its impact on the world. As individuals we are always developing and as local communities we are always sharing, now we can learn and do more by connecting with each other internationally. I worry that we too often stay in our bubbles because they are safe and familiar, but by participating with IHEYO we become aware of the many ways in which humanists are similar and different across the globe and how we can inspire each other.
How does ethical humanism better deal with the profound moments of life — birth, rites of passage, death — than other ethical and philosophical worldviews?
Newman: From my experience, Ethical Humanist ceremonies are more personal than religious ceremonies. There aren’t traditional passages or rituals you must follow. The event is developed by the teenager, couple, or family to best represent what is needed and wanted for the people celebrating. That makes each celebration unique and special. We add our talents, we add our quirks, and we add our creativity to make it about that moment with those people.
Jacobsen: Who seems most drawn to ethical humanism? What are the main demographics?
Newman: We draw people who strive for equality and human rights. Politically we have mostly liberals and progressives. I think ethical humanism is attractive to all ages, ethnicities, genders, races, abilities, and people from various socio-economic strata but that is not always reflected in our organisations’ membership due to restraints on transportation, time, and money.
Jacobsen: Who/what remain the main threats to the free practice and advocacy of ethical humanism to you?
Newman: I think we need more strong humanist leaders, spokespeople, advocates to broadcast the message and organise the communities. If we don’t join together to strengthen our voice we will be drowned out by the voices of others who disagree with us, misrepresent us, or push their own agendas. I’m proud to work with The Humanist Institute to train such advocates and promote the humanist life stance.
Jacobsen: What are your hopes for ethical humanism within your lifetime?
Newman: I hope that Ethical Humanism becomes more widely accepted and promoted across the world. I’d love to not have to explain humanism to people because it is being taught and discussed openly in schools, government, communities, etc.
Thank you for your time, Emily.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/17
Anton Van Dyck is the Secretary General and Interim Treasure of the IHEYO, the youth wing of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and a non-profit umbrella with dozens of member organisations and serves as the connecting link between Humanist organisations with young members around the world. They help young humanists (age 18-35) become and stay connected through our programs and annual events. The interview was conducted by Scott Jacobsen.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Tell us about your background in humanism or ethical societies.
Dyck: I think it all went quite naturally since both of my parents are non-religious and verbal in their political views. In Belgian education, we have a special subject. If you want to take religious studies like Catholicism and Protestantism, you can. But we also have a course specifically for freethinkers. As soon as you’re in elementary, you can take it. My dad was an educator who took such classes and so I was vaguely aware of the movement.
When I was abroad on an exchange programme in South Africa, I became aware that being an atheist — which not all humanists are, but most of them are — was not a common thing in many places. It was at that time that I started wondering about ethics, society and life stances. Once back in Belgium I decided, that I wanted to start studying and becoming politically active without picking a colour.” A buddy of mine who was the leader of the Green party for the youth section told me to check out a group called Free Inquiry. “They’re a bit of a special organization”, he said. One Monday night, I stopped by, went into a meeting, and never left. Now, five years down the line, I’m very active.
Jacobsen: In terms of defining humanism, bigger organisations such as the American Humanist Association come out with their own definitions, and documents such as the Humanist Manifesto. Within that paradigm, humanists will obviously define it a little differently. How do you define humanism or freethought yourself?
Dyck: I had a pretty interesting conversation about that with the founder of the Church of Bacon. You might have heard of him, John Whiteside. We agreed the declarations for humanism weren’t very accessible because they are very precise and can be overly complex. After a brief discussion we decided to describe it in the following way – generally, as not being too much of a selfish individual, but reserving the right to be somewhat self-interested when it’s necessary.
At the same time we must be aware of what we’re doing and saying, which refers to the first part of that definition. We’re currently facing a huge problem on both sides of that spectrum. On the one hand we have those that are mocked as social justice warriors that fight for “intellectual safe spaces” and on the other hand we have a bunch of trolls who push buttons to push buttons. Since ideas that aren’t allowed to be challenged downright scare me, I’d consider myself more on the side of the provocateurs. Unfortunately, the interaction between both sides today is often without any positive result and could even be considered intellectually impoverishing. Tolerance is both an active and a passive process. So in order for that debate to be fruitful, we need to find the balance between not being offended by everything and treating each other with a modicum of respect. And by “a modicum of respect” I mean phrasing, not censoring ourselves.
Jacobsen: That’s a very valuable point you make – about respect. I’m thinking of comedy, for instance. Good comedy wouldn’t work without it. A good comedian knows exactly where the line is, crosses it deliberately, makes the audience laugh, and has them happy they crossed the line with them. But regulating comedy is not a solution either.
Dyck: A State without comedians or where comedians have to be regulated is not a democratic state in any way. According to Montesquieu you have the three state powers. Do you know this? The power to create law, the power to execute law and the power to enforce law. So you have judges, government, and parliament. But then, especially in modern western society, you have other very important powers such as the media, which plays an important role in a participating democracy. You also have the critics and the cynics. They all play the role of independent opposition, which you need, to transcend partisan politics. Those last two however, are wild card. The independent checks and balances that keep the other three in check are absent when it comes to critics and cynics, who have an amplified voice now. They act more like independent judges today – however their function is more akin to administrative law, in that they are supposed to be checking on good governance by holding politicians accountable to the principles of a transparent democracy.
Jacobsen: With respect to IHEYO, what is your position? What are your tasks and responsibilities?
Dyck: Right now, I am the Secretary-General. I do a bit of the administration and the executing work. When our president Marieke who has also been interviewed on this forum, says, “I think it would be good to go in this direction,” I have to think of how it would be best to go about it. I think that’s the best way of putting it. I also do some of the secretarial work like write up the minutes, do some follow-up, and general tasks of running the organisation.
Jacobsen: And your educational and professional aspirations lie in the direction of..?
Dyck: I am finishing law school. In Belgium we have a general forming bachelor, which is 3 years, then you have 2 years for specialisation. I chose economic law, which is something very, very different from what might have been expected given my involvement in humanism. But for me, I have a strong fascination for how people unify themselves within organisations. You see the same thing in corporate law.
Big companies have legal entities. They structure themselves so they become effective organisations and that’s something I want to apply in my pro bono work and hopefully, professional career. I’ll see what comes my way. But it is definitely my intention to continue what I am currently doing on a voluntary basis but more professionally.
Jacobsen: What are ways for people to become involved in or with IHEYO?
Dyck: Well, we have our own publication on Medium, where we offer people a forum to put their ideas out there and to motivate them. That does come under the condition that they will get responses of people who have different opinions. By contributing to that, they are contributing to an international community of humanism, which we aspire to be. IHEYO has decided to focus more on providing the platforms for multi- and bi-lateral cooperation between all of the member organisations of IHEYO and IHEU.
We only have a few mandates, but there’s plenty of ways people can join and contribute. First, by looking up your local organisation, and seeing what they’re all about. Maybe, if they don’t have any activities in international humanism, they can start them up, contact us about it, and we’ll help them partner up with other organisations and do projects to size. There are lots of possibilities. They can also join our working groups. We have one per region in the world (Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe) plus a communications group.
Jacobsen: Recommended books? Or, if not books, authors?
Dyck: I have a nice collection of books but my favourites are:
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. The movie is very good as well.
In addition to those two, there are other notable ones. Then there’s Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. This one formed my views while in South Africa because the perspectives of Mandela are simply invaluable. Another one is by Jonny Steinberg called The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs – which talks about a very strange tradition in crime culture, and how gangs have their own strange form of religion, culture, and language. It has elements of the mafia, tribalism, the military and is a really fascinating insight into how group identities work in our society as well.
Jacobsen: What is the strongest argument you have ever come across for atheism or humanism?
Dyck: The strongest argument for humanism would be that the existence of god is irrelevant for the question on what we should do when we’re alive. We should care for each other and try to be good people because it’s the right and rational thing to do, not because we need to save up “goodness-points” so we can go to heaven.
If you want to be truly humanist, it doesn’t matter what comes after life. It matters what you do here and do now.
Thank you for your time, Anton.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/13
Professor Tim Whitmarsh is the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge, Professor of Ancient Literatures at the University of Oxford, and an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter. He is a leading classicist. He has been the A.G. Leventis Professor since October 2014. His research focuses on the Greek life under the Roman Empire, as well as atheists in the ancient world. Here Scott Jacobsen sits down to discuss atheism and its history.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to distinguish between two streams of thinking. First, the common historical conceptions of atheism. Second, the deep history of atheism outside of “common” narrative. When is atheism assumed to have started?
Professor Tim Whitmarsh: These are the crucial questions to begin with. I think if you ask most people, they would say atheism is a product of the modern West. It has its roots in the European Enlightenment, in the rise of science and the Industrial Revolution, and in the formation of modern secular democracies like the United States. There is much truth to this picture of course: atheism as we understand it today is a modern phenomenon. But it’s that qualification ‘as we understand it today’ that is critical. Why should we understand atheism only from a modern perspective? The words atheos (‘atheist’) and atheotēs (‘atheism’) are over 2000 years old. The job of someone like myself, a classicist, is to try to change the angle of vision, and to jolt people out of their assumptions that their own categories of analysis are the only ones possible.
Jacobsen: What are some of the earliest historical records of atheism in the ancient world? And how does this change the conversation from the common perspective?
Whitmarsh: The word atheos is first used in the sense of ‘one who doesn’t believe in the gods’ in a text of Plato from the early fourth century BCE. It was in a speech supposedly given by Socrates at his unsuccessful defence against charges of introducing new gods and corrupting the young. The context suggests it was routinely used in Classical Athens to describe a fashionable philosophical movement. We know for sure that there were people in this era who argued that religion is a human construct designed by legislators to control societies; or that the idea of gods was rooted in a primitive misunderstanding of the natural elements; or that the existence of widespread injustice in our world proves that there can be no divinities. Whether these people called themselves atheoi (literally ‘the godless’ ones) or whether it was a slur on them by others, we don’t know – perhaps a mixture of the two, just as labels like ‘queer’ are now used in both ways. Anyhow, over time, these ideas inspired many among the Greek people to come up with many different forms of arguments against the gods, some earnest, some playful. I argue in the book that the idea of atheism – of a coherent set of non-theistic beliefs that define a cogent worldview – first appeared in the second century BCE, when philosophers were taking stock of their predecessors’ views and trying to organise them more systematically. There was a strong librarian’s mentality during this era (the Library of Alexandria is only the most famous example of a widespread phenomenon): and thinkers tended to generate new ideas in part by putting together pre-existing ideas into new packages. You asked how this changes the conversation: well, it shows for a start that you don’t need the modern West to have an idea of atheism. And more importantly, for me at least, it challenges the presumption that human beings are by default religious, and have been throughout history until the modern West. There’s a peculiar vanity – at once self-serving and self-hating – to this idea that the modern West is fundamentally different in kind to everything that is not it. I am fully with the French philosopher Bruno Latour on this: ‘we have never been modern.’
Jacobsen: By how long does atheism predate Abrahamic faiths such as Christianity and Islam?
Whitmarsh: There are two ways to answer this question. First, I can give you a literal answer, in terms of the story I tell in this book. The story of ancient Greek atheism begins in the fifth century BCE, although its roots lie earlier, in the sixth century, when new structures of scientific and philosophical thought were challenging the established mythologically-based views of the world. So, broadly speaking, Greek atheism emerges around the time of monotheistic Judaism (although some would date that earlier), half a millennium before Paul and his colleagues were establishing the first churches, and just over a millennium before Gabriel revealed his prophecy to Mohammed. But let me stress my second point, which is crucial. The story I tell in the book is just one possible history of ancient atheism, an important one for sure, given that the word ‘atheist’ is Greek in origin, and Enlightenment thinkers like Hume and Voltaire were steeped in the Classics. But it is only one possible history. If you take seriously the idea with which we started, that shifting the angle of vision opens up new ways of looking at the world, then you have to acknowledge that there are other versions of the history of atheism, which remain to be mapped out systematically. An Indian school of philosophical materialism known as Carvaka flourished, and indeed, early Hindu and Buddhist thought was largely free of deity. The same has been said of Confucianism. And indeed, the more you start looking, the more new possibilities open up. The crucial point is, I think, that we should not assume that humans are by default ‘religious’ (whatever we mean by that – but that is a different question). There are different personality types in every culture. It’s particularly important to stress this, since many will want to spin this story as a Eurocentric one, about how those clever old proto-European Greeks got there before the Enlightenment. That is a complete misreading: there was nothing ‘European’ in antiquity about the Greeks, who in fact had their most enriching cultural dialogues with Egypt and the lands we now call Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Iran.
Jacobsen: How was atheism, in essence, wiped out of history after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire?
Whitmarsh: It’s a more complex story than that. In fact, some of the evidence I use for pre-Christian atheism comes from Christian sources. At one level, the earliest Christians embraced the atheists warmly, because they assumed that their arguments applied only to pagan deities. ‘Look!’ they said ‘Even the Greeks themselves didn’t believe in their gods!’ It never occurred to these Christians that there might be more troubling implications in these atheistic ideas for their own faith (or at least if it did, the thought was swiftly repressed). Another aspect to bear in mind is that Christianity was not a monolith. It was fundamentally reshaped as it was adopted by the Greco-Roman elites, and took on a lot of philosophical ideas. All of the big arguments in the fourth and fifth centuries about the nature of Christ – how could he be both divine and human, and in what proportion, and so on – came out of a dialogue with what was a fundamentally materialist strain in Greek thought. So in a sense (a very, very extended sense) a form of atheism survived Christianity. Christology was a kind of schizophrenic debate between absolute faith and a philosophical realism that could never be fully adapted to the idea of a god made human. But I am not arguing that the Church fathers were crypto-atheists! You are right, fundamentally, that the Christianisation of the Roman Empire (and the concurrent Romanisation of Christianity) changed everything. You see it in the late-antique law codes, which show an unprecedented desire to impose Christian belief on everyone. And not just Christian belief, but the right kind of belief. The imperial law-makers reserved their harshest strictures for Christian heretics. Atheistic views can still be glimpsed in the penumbra, as I have said, all societies have their sceptics, but it became much harder to express them in public. In fact, the word atheos was cooped for a different meaning in this period: to mean one who didn’t believe in the Christian god, irrespective of whether they believed in other gods.
Jacobsen: What was life like for Greek people living under the Romans during the time of the Roman Empire?
Whitmarsh: Mixed. By and large, the Empire raised living standards massively, and ensured peace in the heartlands. How much the economic benefits of Empire actually changed life for peasants and slaves is open to question, but many would say that these people were now in drier, warmer houses, using imported goods of higher quality and so forth. For the elite, Romanisation gave new opportunities for travel and cultural enrichment. The Romans weren’t always perceived by the Greeks as an occupying power, in the same way that the British were in India or the Russians in Afghanistan. Identities were not exclusive in antiquity, nor were they racialised. It was perfectly possible to be Roman and Greek simultaneously: there was no contradiction at all, since they referred to two different aspects (they were respectively legal and cultural identities). Over time, Roman citizenship was extended, until in the early third century it was offered to all free male inhabitants of the Empire. And remember, most people operated in local contexts, in city-states, which still functioned in the same way as before, with Greek people taking decisions and publishing their decrees on Greek inscriptions. But of course it wasn’t rosy, far from it. The Romans were unforgiving when it came to insurrection and insubordination, and their response was often arbitrary and brutal. There are stories of Roman soldiers beating up male peasants; and no doubt, it was worse for the women. And the Roman policy-makers could be particularly harsh towards ethnic groups they viewed as trouble-makers, like Jews, particularly after the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE, which the Flavians spun as a triumph over a monstrous foe. It was Jews who resisted Rome the most fiercely, both on paper and militarily. And remember – since you were asking about Greeks – that many Jews were also Greeks, and (again) that did not have to be a contradiction. Some, like the apostle Paul, were Roman, Greek, and Jewish, all at once. Aside from the Jews, others tended to be more acquiescent, although you can find plenty of resistance to aspects of Roman rule, to the idea of one-man rule, to the cult of the emperor, and so forth. Christianity absorbed a lot of that Jewish sense of being fundamentally opposed to the Roman state, but there was also a powerful, contradictory, belief that their faith was entirely compatible (‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s’ – all of that). Again, remember that the vast majority of Christians, for the first two hundred years, were also Greek. So it is a tangled, complex picture, which would take a long time to paint properly; what I have given you is just a snapshot.
Jacobsen: You have classified some work as atheistic, or straight atheism, including those found in Xenophanes of Colophon, or Carneades. Was the term “atheism,” and its associated ideas and relationships, seen as good or bad, positive or negative, in the ancient world?
Whitmarsh: Actually, I wouldn’t classify either of those two as a straight atheist. Xenophanes claimed that the Homeric gods are nonsense, so he was powerfully opposed to traditional ideas of divinity. But he did say there was a single god, who was a cosmic principle. Why he belongs in the story is because he redefined divinity: he said that a ‘god’ is not an anthropomorphic deity, nor a being that humans can interact with, but a single and coherent explanation for all of the diverse features of observable nature. It was that intellectual shift that created the space for a kind of naturalism, i.e. a belief that there is nothing in our world but material nature (what the Greek call physis), which has regular principles that can be explained rationally – which is, I think, a fundamentally atheistic principle. Few ancient thinkers actually went so far as to argue that nature is all there is, but some did. And it would be good to be able to quiz people like Xenophanes directly on the question of what kind of god he was positing, and whether ‘nature’ would do just as well as a substitute. We just don’t know, and modern philosophical terms like ‘naturalist’ or (even worse) ‘deist,’ are in any case misleading. But certainly one of Xenophanes’ intellectual successors, Anaxagoras, was prosecuted in Athens for ‘not believing in the gods’ and for having materialist views of the celestial bodies. So … sorry for another complex answer, but it’s important to be precise in these matters! Carneades, meanwhile, was a Sceptic philosopher: he believed that you cannot make dogmatic assertions about anything in the world. So him and his successor Clitomachus, head of the Platonic Academy, went about inventing and compiling arguments both for and against the existence of gods. What is particularly interesting is that the arguments against the existence of gods were then separated off and circulated independently, and used by groups who defined themselves by their non-belief.
Jacobsen:What was one of the more powerful arguments compiled by Carneades?
Whitmarsh: Clitomachus was the compiler, if we’re thinking about written texts; Carneades didn’t write anything himself. But yes, we can think of them as a kind of double-act. My favourite argument is one that proves that gods cannot be associated with morality. Human morals imply a choice between at least two alternatives, and usually to be ‘moral’ implies that you take decisions that are right but which cost you. So if you are faced by a terrifying enemy in battle, it is easier to run but harder and better to stay and fight. That is an example of the moral quality of bravery. Similarly, defending the poor against the depredations of the rich and powerful – an instance of ‘justice’ – involves personal effort and risk. Yet gods, as perfect beings, are never faced by such decisions. Gods would never feel fear in battle, since there is no chance of them losing. They would never even contemplate making an unjust decision on the part of the rich, since it costs them nothing to weigh decisively on the right side. So we should accept that morality exists only in the human sphere, and reject any claim that associates it with divinity. Not only does this attack an important component of conventional theistic argumentation (‘how can you have morality if you do away with religion?’), but it is also an insightful comment on the nature of morality: being moral is not just about avoiding wrongdoing, it’s also about putting yourself on the line.
Jacobsen: What about ‘pre-history’? Should we reasonably extrapolate into the past the existence of atheists in times with little or no recording found to date?
Whitmarsh: Good question! We are in the realms of complete speculation here, but it is fun, and even sometimes useful to speculate. Let’s zoom out a little, and try to reconstruct the history of religion as a whole. None of what I am about to say is ‘true’ in the sense of being provable, and I am far from being an expert in prehistoric religions. So please run with this, and take it in the spirit in which it is intended. The evidence for something that we might call religious worship begins to appear around the time of the end of the last ice age, around 11,500 years ago. That is when we begin to see signs that survival into some kind of afterlife is on the cards, and that humans may be able to broker some kind of deal with higher powers. But what that ‘religion’ – if that’s the right word – was like in practice is very hard to know, as is what was going on in people’s heads, because all we have are material remains. So of course, it is impossible to say whether it was universally accepted as obviously true, or whether it was sometimes resisted. I personally believe, as I have said, that humans are diverse, and that some form of scepticism is probably found in all cultures: that animates our questing inventiveness. There is certainly plenty of anthropological evidence from modern pre-industrial cultures for people who dispute the efficaciousness of deities and their human ambassadors. But for prehistory, who knows? Something closer to what we understand today as religion – an organised, reflective, ritual system, with clerical hierarchies, based around places deemed holy and certain times of the year, honouring gods who exist in comfort independently of humanity – seems to come with settled habitation, and particularly with urbanisation. In particular, you now begin to get the strong sense that the community who inhabit a particular place is protected by a special deity that has a special care for that people and that city. That process began, very roughly, 6,000 or so years ago: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) has the best evidence in the region covered by West Asia, Europe and north Africa. I would see Greek antiquity as a late manifestation of that process, by and large. Greek gods are not so very different from their older cousins in the near east: the Olympians are primarily gods who care for human cities. But with urbanisation comes imperialism too, real or desired: this is when one city or locale becomes or wants to become dominant over others, and so you get a sense of hierarchy or even transcendence in the divine sphere too. One deity is better than the others, or superior in kind. That military-political hierarchy may or may not map onto familial hierarchies: sometimes you get a top imperial god who is also a patriarchal father-god or a matriarchal reproductive deity, but sometimes not. Somewhere in this competitive world emerge both the idea of a ‘top god’ (or even ‘the one true god’), the awareness that gods come and go, and that divine power is not necessarily cosmic. I would speculate that atheism in the stronger form – the conviction that deities are human social constructs (as opposed to the weaker form of scepticism in the effectiveness of ritual) – emerges, historically speaking, out of a kind of relativism, when cities protected by local deities began to interact and compete. But as I stressed at the start, this is a very schematic map: the reality was much messier and more complex! Once again … Schematic maps are useful for navigation, but the world always looks very different at ground level. And let me stress again that the pattern will look very different elsewhere in the world.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time today, Professor Whitmarsh.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Dr. Alexander Douglas specialises in the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics. He is a faculty member at the University of St. Andrews in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies. In this series, we discuss the philosophy of economics, its evolution, and how the discipline of economics should move forward in a world with increasing inequality so that it is more attuned to democracy. Previous sessions of our Q&A can be found here and here
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is there a lack of consistency in the terminologies used by economists?
Dr. Alexander Douglas: There’s a question about whether economists use terms consistently. But there’s another pressing issue, which is the gap between the language academic economists use and the language of public discourse.
I wonder if the retreat of economics into higher- and higher-level mathematics has done damage to democracy. Although there was a near-consensus among macro-economists in Britain that first austerity and then Brexit were bad policies, the government received popular support for both. The problem was that the macro-economists could say what they believed, but they couldn’t really explain why they believed it. The official argument rested on some of the most complex mathematics in the world, and there was no convincing ‘entry-level’ version.
Effectively, macro-economists have to ask the public to trust their expertise, even though we can’t see into their black boxes. It was easy for the media to portray the economic experts as elites with hidden agendas and vested interests. Normally the way to fend off that sort of ad hominem argument is to say, “Never mind me or my motives, just look at my argument”. But you can’t do that when the simplest compelling version of your argument consists of hundreds of differential equations.
I think this is a major problem. There is no bridge between the concepts of academic economics and the concepts we use to think about our day-to-day lives. Politics happens in the domain of the everyday concepts.
Jacobsen: What do you think of neuroeconomics?
Douglas: Neuroeconomics is very interesting and something I know little about. Philosophically, it raises more ‘conceptual bridge’ puzzles, this time between the scientific study of brain-events causing behaviour and the ordinary explanations we give for human actions. Some philosophers call this “folk psychology”. There are a range of opinions on this. The most extreme , “eliminative materialism”, suggests that our ordinary explanations, e.g. “Jane crossed the road because she prefers to walk in the sun”, are simply wrong and will one day be entirely replaced by explanations at the physiological/neurological level: Jane’s body moved in such-and-such a way because such-and-such events occurred in her brain. Standard choice theory in economics is, in my view, a regimented version of “folk psychology”. So one interesting question is whether the end game for neuro – economics is to entirely replace standard economics or whether it can somehow be fitted into the existing paradigm.
Jacobsen: What is the healthy perspective – the accurate view – on human economic decisions? What drives us?
Douglas: I’m not convinced that the individual economic agent is the right starting point. You can start instead at the sub-personal level, as the eliminative materialists propose. You can also start with institutions, which have their own ways of behaving that sometimes seem independent of the agents composing them. J.K. Galbraith’s entertaining book, The New Industrial State, is full of plausible-sounding claims about how committees, boards, and so on have their own strange ways of making decisions, which differ from the ways that individual people make decisions. His book on the 1929 stock market crash contains equally plausible descriptions of crowd behaviour, which can be very unlike the behaviour of individuals on their own.
Academic economists are beginning to study institutions in more formal and rigorous ways. The ‘New Institutionalists’ build models to explain why (rational) individuals might submit to the authority of an institution in order to avoid the transaction costs that accompany free exchange in the market. Economists like Herbert Gintis use models from evolutionary biology and game theory to model social norms and other emergent properties of social systems (properties that can’t be explained in terms of facts about the individual agents).
I’m sometimes tempted towards a much more radical view. There is philosophical literature that emerged from the work of the later Wittgenstein, concerning the nature of rule-following behaviour. One central claim is that rules can’t exist for an individual on her own; they can only exist for a whole community. Another is that the relation between a rule and the behaviour it governs can’t be captured by any causal relation – it is not the case, for instance, that knowledge of a rule causes behaviour in accordance with that rule. Rather, the relation is more akin to a logical connection: the rule and the behaviour stand in a similar relation to that of the premise and conclusion in an argument. I believe that preferences are effectively rules: a preference for A over B is a rule: choose A over B. This theory of preferences-as-rules, combined with the Wittgensteinian ideas about rules, suggests to me that both methodological individualism and the search for causal explanations of choice-guided behaviour might be mistakes. If so, much of modern economics would rest upon a mistake.
Jacobsen: Can you imagine a future with ubiquitous artificial intelligence where mathematical models and algorithms could accurately predict all human behaviour?
Douglas: To the extent that the physical world is determinate then there should in principle be a system of equations that could accurately predict all human behaviour. Of course, the physical world might not be determinate. And even if it is, the finding of the relevant equations might be beyond not only our cognitive capacities but those of any cognitive system capable of existing.
Moreover, there is no reason to expect that any workable model will look anything like the choice theory used by economists. The perfect explanation of human behaviour might make no reference to choices at all; again, it might just track the motion of particles around the human brain and body, or it might track patterns at the institutional level. We don’t know what sorts of causes the perfect model would quantify over. Thus you don’t have to believe that there’s a perfect mathematical model of individual choice, even if you think there’s guaranteed to be a perfect causal model that explains and predicts all observable human behaviour.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Waleed Al-Husseini founded the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. He escaped from the Palestinian Authority to Jordan and then to France, after torture and imprisonment in Palestine. He is an ex-Muslim and an atheist. In this educational series, we talk about the situation of ex-Muslims in France.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: To begin with, what inspired you to start the foundation for ex-muslims in France in the first place?
Waleed Al-Husseini: You know, if I want to speak about the inspiration, it will be from the things I have been through. I mean my story, what we explained in the last interview, because it makes me feel that there are a lot of us, and that we need to be united. We need to be united in our voice to speak about us and our problems, to make others feel not alone, and also to demonstrate to Europe and the United States that there are people who leave Islam.
All of these things were reasons and inspiration. Then the work of Maryam Namazie, who is the founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain. We chose the date of chevalier de la barre, the young French nobleman who got killed for blasphemy here in France during the Dark Ages, to show that we are all chevalier de la barre, but from a Muslim background instead of Christian. These are the things that inspired me.
Jacobsen: What are the main social, political, and educational, initiatives of the organization?
Al-Husseini: We are a group of atheists and non-believers who have faced threats and restrictions in our personal lives. Many of us have been arrested for blasphemy.
The Council of Ex-Muslims of France has the following aims:
- We call for universal rights and full equality and oppose tolerance of inhuman beliefs, discrimination and ill-treatment in the name of respecting religion and culture.
- Freedom to criticise religion. Prohibition of restrictions on unconditional freedom of criticism and expression using so-called religious ‘sanctities’.
- Freedom of religion and atheism.
- Separation of religion from the state and the educational and legal system.
- Prohibition of religious customs, rules, ceremonies or activities that are incompatible with or infringe people’s rights and freedoms.
- Abolition of all restrictive and repressive cultural and religious customs which hinder and contradict woman’s independence, free will and equality. Prohibition of segregation of sexes.
- Prohibition of interference by any authority, family members or relatives, or official authorities in the private lives of women and men and their personal, emotional and sexual relationships and sexuality.
- Protection of children from manipulation and abuse by religion and religious institutions.
- Prohibition of any kind of financial, material or moral support by the state or state institutions to religion and religious activities and institutions.
- Prohibition of all forms of religious intimidation and threats.
Jacobsen: More to the central discussion, for ex-Muslims – whether atheist, agnostic, another religion, secular humanist, and so on – in France, what is the general day-to-day situation for them?
Al-Husseini: They are in danger not only from governments, but more from the people. Many of us get killed simply because of the usage of some liberal words – for example – look at what happened in Pakistan a few weeks ago or what happened to the bloggers in Bangladesh last year. Or in Saudi Arabia and Mauritania for example, where people have gone to the streets asking the government to kill the apostates. So those in our situation know that we will get killed. Even here in France I am in the same situation. I’m in danger.
Jacobsen: If any, what percentage of ex-Muslims would you say undergo severe discrimination in France? And if so, what are the forms of the discrimination?
Al-Husseini: Here in France, many avoid saying anything because they will be attacked at their work, or perhaps fired if the owner of the company is Muslim. Many of them will not say anything because they are living in areas with many Muslims, who will attack them. Some of us can’t even give talks at universities, as you must have seen with what happened to Maryam Namazie last year. When they use the term “Islamophobia,” which hasn’t as a label before by the way, it is just used to shut us up. This word is used to protect Muslims. It is what I call the modern fatwa.
Jacobsen: What is the one of the biggest misconceptions that French Muslims have about French ex-Muslims?
Al-Husseini: It is the same everywhere, they think that ex-Muslims are Zionists, or that they are working with them to destroy Islam. It’s always the same. They never think that it’s a free choice.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Dr. Stephen Law is Reader in Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. He is also the editor of THINK: Philosophy for Everyone, a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy (published by Cambridge University Press). Stephen has published numerous books on philosophy, including The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking (on which an Oxford University online course has since been based) and The Philosophy Files (aimed at children 12+). Stephen is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. He was previously a Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford, and holds B.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. He has a blog at www.stephenlaw.org. Stephen Law was Provost of CFI UK from July 2008-January 2017 taking on overall responsibility for the organisation, and particular responsibility for putting on talks and other educational events and programmes.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In Q&A on Philosophy with Dr. Stephen Law – Session 1, we talked about the desperate move in debates called ‘Going Nuclear;’ faith schools in the United Kingdom (UK); and early education in critical thinking. These bring another question to mind: how should religion be taught in the UK?
Dr. Stephen Law: I think it is important for young people to be taught about religion. Religion has hugely shaped, and continues to shape, our world.
What I am opposed to is what I call (in my book The War For Children’s Minds) the ‘Authoritarian’ teaching of religion – in which young people are supposed to accept, more or less uncritically, what they are told about religion by some supposed authority – whether that authority be a priest, a rabbi, an imam, or their local atheist communist-party official. Authoritarian religious schools are such a part of our traditional cultural landscape that they benefit from the anaesthetic of familiarity. We think they’re harmless, perhaps even socially necessary.
In order to see just how pernicious many really are, consider this analogy. Suppose authoritarian political schools started opening up around the country. A conservative school opens in Swindon, and is followed by a communist school in Slough for instance. In these schools, portraits of political leaders beam serenely down from classroom walls. Each day begins with the collective singing of a political anthem. Pupils are expected to defer, more or less unquestioningly, to their school’s political authority and its revered political texts. Rarely are children exposed to alternative political view points, except, perhaps, in a caricatured form, so they can be sweepingly dismissed.
What would be the public’s reaction to such schools? Outrage. These schools would be accused of stunting children – of forcing their minds into politically pre-approved moulds.
My question is: if such authoritarian political schools are utterly beyond the pale, why are so many of us prepared to tolerate their religious equivalents? The answer, I suspect, is inertia. Authoritarian political schools would be a shocking new development. But there have always been authoritarian religious schools, thus familiarity, and perhaps a sense of inevitability, has blunted the sense of outrage we might otherwise feel. I think it is time we got that sense of outrage back.
Jacobsen: How can we move things in that direction in the UK educational system?
Law: It seems to me that all schools should meet certain minimum standards when it comes to religious teaching – (i) every child should be encouraged to think for themselves and make up their own minds about what religion to accept, if any. It is very important that they are reminded that they are entirely free to accept or reject atheism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, etc., (ii) every child should be exposed to a range of views about religion, including atheism and humanism, preferably explained by those who actually hold them. Unfortunately, many schools, including many state-funded schools, fail to meet these standards. Children are told not to befriend those of other faiths. Children are told that they have no choice – that they are followers of Islam, or Judaism, or Roman Catholicism, and will pray, and engage in devotional activities, and recite creeds, like it or not.
Children are often also given little exposure to say, atheist, humanist, or other religious points of view, except perhaps in a rather caricatured form. As a result, we have a situation in which, for example, roughly a third of young British Muslims leave school believing that the appropriate penalty for any Muslim that leaves the faith is death. We have young British folk leaving our education system having never heard such views questioned or challenged, thinking that they have no choice but to accept a particular religious faith.
Jacobsen: Currently, ‘philosophy’ as a term seems to have expanded, and now includes the natural sciences. Natural scientists, whether knowingly or not, are teaching natural philosophy. So while philosophy is still relevant, but this branch (natural philosophy) is currently enjoying most of the success and recognition. What’s your view on the contemporary importance of philosophy?
Law: Well, the term ‘philosophy’ now tends to be reserved for a sort of armchair intellectual activity – not the sort of thing that empirical scientists engage in (they perform observations, engage in experiments, etc.; while philosophers can work while sitting in a comfy chair with their eyes closed).
I think a lot of people are suspicious of philosophy, and even consider it a grand waste of time, because they think: ‘Well, if we want knowledge of how things really are – of the reality as it really is – then we need to engage in the observation of reality. We need to apply scientific methods, pull out our microscopes and telescopes, and so on. We are not going to get far just sitting in a comfy chair and relying on pure reason and philosophical intuition alone. Indeed, aren’t our philosophical intuitions about what reality must be like (about the nature of space, or matter, say) notoriously unreliable?’
Now, I actually have a lot of sympathy with that criticism of philosophy. I think philosophy is actually pretty useless when it comes to uncovering the fundamental characters of reality. But that’s not to say that philosophy is without value. I still think philosophy is immensely valuable actually. For what philosophy can do is, for example:
(i) reveal that our theories about reality cannot be true because they involve or generate logical contradictions. So, for example, if someone claims to have discovered a four-sided triangle in the rainforests of Brazil, mathematicians won’t bother mounting an expensive expedition to find out if that’s true. They can know, from the comfort of their armchairs, that no such triangle exists out there. Not all contradictions are quite as obvious as that – sometimes we need to engage in some pretty deep thinking to excavate them. That is a job for armchair philosophy, not empirical science.
(ii) reveal that, say, our fundamental moral commitments have consequences we had not recognised. For example, we may discover, through armchair reflection, that our moral commitments require that we treat women, or other races, or other species, very differently from the way they’ve traditionally been treated. By means of armchair philosophical reflection, great moral progress can, and has, been made.
(iii) solve conceptual puzzles. Many traditional philosophical puzzles, such as the mind/body problem, appear to be essentially conceptual in nature. For example, it seems that mind must be material in order for it to have any physical effects; yet, on the other hand, it seems to many that there’s some sort of conceptual obstacle to identifying mind and brain, or mental states, or events with neurophysical states or events. Whether there really is such a conceptual obstacle will require, not empirical science, but armchair conceptual methods to figure out.
Philosophy may be useless at revealing how reality fundamentally works, and I believe that the traditional metaphysical role associated with philosophy should actually be left to the natural sciences, but philosophy, nevertheless, remains hugely important.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/01
Phil Zuckerman is a Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies at Pitzer College. He wrote a number of books including, most recently, The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies. Here we discuss secular studies from the personal, and expert, perspective of Professor Zuckerman.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I appreciate you giving us your time today. Your specialty is in secularism. Was secularism always a topic of interest for you? Were people in your family a major influence? Or was this simply the natural trajectory of a curious mind reasoning things out?
Professor Phil Zuckerman: I am a third generation atheist. All four of my grandparents were non-believers. My father’s folks were very poor Jews who grew up in the ghettos of Warsaw, Poland. As teenagers, they took to socialism as the best route to make the world a better place; they saw religion as hindering human progress and keeping the poor duped and pacified. My mother’s parents were upper-middle class Jews from Bohemia who found literature, art, theatre, cinema, music, and hiking much more satisfying to the soul than religion. So my Dad was a clear-cut atheist and my mom was more of an agnostic or apatheist (just didn’t care or think much about god, either way). My folks weren’t anti-religious, per se. In fact, we were fairly involved with our local Jewish community when I was growing up – but much more in an ethnic/cultural sense: celebrating holidays, eating certain foods, socializing with people from a similar background, etc. Our involvement with the Jewish community was never about God or prayer or anything supernatural. It was about heritage, history, etc. I grew up in a coastal suburb of Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s and religion just wasn’t a big thing. Most of my friends and neighbours were irreligious. No kids in my neighbourhood went to church. I never saw any family pray around the dinner table. But then, when I was 15, I had my first serious girlfriend. She was the daughter of an Evangelical preacher. She believed in Jesus. I was totally flabbergasted by her and her family’s beliefs. They seemed utterly insane. Yet, she and her family weren’t insane; they were kind and thoughtful people. But they believed in crazy shit. I became obsessed with understanding religious faith: how can rational people believe the utterly absurd? I’m still trying to figure this out. Sure, I’ve gained a lot of good insight throughout the course of my studying of religion, but as for really intelligent, well-educated people who are strong believers — I remain truly baffled. And in that state of confusion, I’ve turned to research on and writings about atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and secularism because they all help me articulate my own worldview which is critical of religious faith and supportive of reason, empiricism, scepticism, human rights, women’s rights, true morality, etc.
Jacobsen: How did this interest in secular studies grow into a life long specialization?
Zuckerman: First, it dawned on me about ten or fifteen years ago that no one was studying secular people or secular cultures, specifically. The social sciences are all about studying humans: what they do, what they believe, how they behave, how they act, etc. And while the social sciences have been studying religion since their inceptions, lived secularity has gone almost completely un-studied. How secular people live, think, celebrate, love, raise kids, deal with death, vote, sleep, eat, etc., etc. has been virtually ignored. And yet secular people constitute a significant chunk of humanity. Irreligion, anti-religion, atheism, agnosticism, humanism, indifference, etc. – these orientations and identifications are growing, and they capture the world-views and life-ways of hundreds of millions of people. We need to study them and understand them. Second, when I was teaching classes on religion, such as The Sociology of Religion, I was often deconstructing religion. Taking a critical/sceptical approach. One day, a student said that she had wanted to learn about religion in the world, and not just about debunking religion. She felt like my religion class was falsely titled. And she was right. So I decided to re-tool that class, and make it truly about religion in society (without too much debunking), and then I created a whole new class called “Scepticism, Secularism, and Irreligion.” In that class, I just looked at religion critically, head-on, and examined various sceptical approaches to religion, from the ancient Greeks and ancient Indians up through Freud and Russell and into the New Atheists. The course was hugely popular. Clearly, students were craving courses that debunked religion. From there, other new courses were created, such as courses on secularism as a political force in various nations around the world, courses on the Secularism and Morality, just to name a few.
Jacobsen: From a historical perspective, what are the origins of secularism? Who was its first adherent or proponent?
Zuckerman: That’s nearly impossible to say for sure. After all, what does one mean by “secularism”? As I see it, “secularism” can and does mean numerous things. For example, we can talk of political secularism, which is basically about the separation of church and state and government abeyance or neutrality concerning matters of religion. The most notable modern articulations of this would be found in the First Amendment of the US Constitution for instance, or article 20 of the 1947 Constitution of Japan.
But there is also what we could call philosophical or sceptical secularism, which is about critiquing religion, debunking religious claims, and attempting to disabuse people of their religious beliefs. Evidence for this form of secularism goes way, way back: there was the Carvaka/Lokoyata, who lived in India during the 7th century B.C.E, were a group of materialist thinkers who rejected the supernaturalism of ancient Hindu religion and were vociferous in their mockery of religious authorities. They were essentially atheists who saw no evidence for the existence of god or karma or any afterlife whatsoever. There was the Jewish philosopher known as Kohelet of ancient Israel (3rd century BCE), the presumed author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, who suggested that all life is ultimately meaningless and that there is no life after death. Emergent agnosticism, anti-religiosity, and an all-around debunking orientation are also very well-represented among the ancient Greeks and Romans of the classical age (Lucretius, Epicurus, Democritus, etc). These individuals criticized the claims of religion and articulated a very secular and this-worldly ethos. From within the Islamic world, there was Muhammad Al-Warraq (9th century C.E.), who doubted the existence of Allah and was skeptical of religious prophets; there is also the freethinking, anti-religious assertions of Muhammad al-Razi (10th century C.E.), and Omar Khayyam (11th century C.E.).
Finally, there is what we might call socio-cultural secularism, which entails the weakening or diminishing of religion in society, in day-to-day life. We’re talking things like more stores being open on Sundays, time spent on the internet replacing Bible study, television shows or Broadway musicals making fun of religion with little backlash, etc. At root, socio-cultural secularism is both a socio-historical and demographic phenomenon whereby a growing number people start caring less and less about religion. It involves greater numbers of people in a given society living their lives in a decidedly secular manner, utterly oblivious or indifferent to supernatural things like God, sin, salvation, heaven, hell, etc., baldly disinterested in religious rituals and activities, and less inclined to include or consider religion as a significant or even marginal component of their identity.
Your question is huge – where do these various forms of secularism originate? – and I simply don’t have the time (or expertise!) to delve into it at length. I’d suggest starting with Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt: A History. Or perhaps Calum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain.
Jacobsen: How do societies get worse and better with more secularism rather than less?
Zuckerman: First off, it depends if that secularism is forced or not. By “forced” I mean, in the 20th century, we’ve seen quite a few secular dictatorships take over a country and force/impose their dogmatic version of secularism on a captive population. These have often been violent, repressive regimes that tried their hardest to suppress religion by jailing and torturing religious leaders, killing religious people, bulldozing churches and mosques, etc. Communist Albania was one such nightmare – the corrupt and insane atheist dictatorship there even made it illegal to name your baby a Biblical name! So I would say that societies get worse when secularism is being forced by a dictatorship with no respect for personal freedom, freedom of conscience, or basic human rights. But, on the other extreme, when secularism is organic – that is – it emerges freely, in democratic societies, things tend to get better. Of course, this is just a correlation. But we know that the most highly secularized societies tend to be among the best in the world, at least according to standard sociological measures. The best countries in which to be a mother, the most peaceful countries, those countries with the lowest murder rates – their populations generally tend to be quite secular. And this correlation holds true for nearly every measure of societal well-being imaginable, such as levels of corruption in business and government, sexually transmitted disease rates, teen pregnancy rates, quality of hospital care, environmental degradation, access to clean drinking water, etc. We can even look at various studies which measure subjective happiness; year after year, nations like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – the least religious countries in the western world — report the highest levels of happiness among their populations, while countries like Benin, Togo, and Burundi – among the most religious nations on earth – are the least happy.
One scholar who has researched this matter extensively is Gregory S. Paul. He created the “Successful Societies Scale”, in which he tries to objectively measure a whole array of variables that are indicative of societal goodness and well-being. When he measures such factors as life satisfaction, incarceration rates, alcohol consumption rates, inequality, employment rates, etc., and correlates them with religiosity/secularity, his findings are unambiguously clear: aside from the important but exceedingly outlying exception of suicide — religious societies have significantly lower suicide rates than more secular societies — on just about every other single measure of societal-goodness, the least religious nations fare markedly better than the more religious nations. But again, it is a correlation only. And it very well may go the other way: it may be that as societies improved, they become more secular – not the other way around. Norris and Inglehart’s book Sacred and Secular is a great, data-rich source for this line of thinking.
Jacobsen: Is secularism beneficial or harmful for women‘s rights and human rights?
Zuckerman: No question here: wherever religion weakens, the status, freedom, and power of women improves. Wherever secularism is strong – even when forced, oddly enough – women’s health, occupational opportunities, electoral access, etc. improve. Not only are women’s status, power, wealth, and life choices stronger/better in the most secular societies on earth today, and weaker/poorer in the most religious, but secular men and women are – on average – more likely to support women’s rights and equality than their religious peers. As for human rights, well, as I said above, in situations of forced secularism under Communist dictatorships, human rights suffer terribly. But in situations of organic secularism, where people simply stop being religious of their own free will, human rights tend to thrive. And as for political secularism – the separation of church and state – things most definitely improve for the minority religions, and for the non-religious as well. In the contemporary world, where most societies have a situation of religious pluralism (more than one religion existing), then political secularism is the only viable option because to privilege one particular religion over another, or over non-religion, inevitably leads to inequality and injustice.
Jacobsen: I assume, based on some observations in my personal and professional life, that the irreligious are thought to be less trustworthy and more immoral than the religious. Does the data back this up?
Zuckerman: Yes, religious people in America view the non-religious as immoral and less trust-worthy (lots of data showing this, particularly from the work of Psychology Professor Will Gervais), and no, research shows that they are in fact not less moral or trustworthy. Catherine Caldwell-Harris, professor of psychology at Boston University, found that there exists no differences between atheists and theists in terms of levels of compassion or empathy. And studies from both the United States and the United Kingdom have reported that atheists are under-represented in prisons. Additional studies have shown that atheists and agnostics, on average, exhibit lower levels of racism and prejudice than their more God-believing peers, as well as lower levels of nationalism and militarism, and greater levels of tolerance for those they disagree with. Or consider research that specifically illustrates atheist morality in action: a recent international study looked at children and their likelihood of being generous or selfish in six different countries. Some of the kids had been raised Christian, some had been raised Muslim, and some had been raised without religion. The non-religious kids were the most generous – giving away, on average, a higher number of their stickers to kids they didn’t know– than the Muslim or Christian kids, who tended to be more selfish. Sure, it was just one study involving kids and stickers. But it effectively points to a much larger and important reality: that the vast majority of atheists of the world are decent and humane.
Jacobsen: If you had to have an elevator pitch in support of secularism, or those in support of a theocratic society or a government tending towards the theocratic, what would your elevator pitch be in support of secularism?
Zuckerman: First, I would sing “Imagine” by John Lennon. Then I would sing “Dear God” by XTC. Then I would say: morality should be based on empathy and compassion, not obedience to an invisible magic being – that’s moral outsourcing. Additionally, it is always better to base your beliefs on evidence rather than faith. Furthermore, scientific research has done far more to cure illness and alleviate suffering in the world than prayer. Additionally, the most secularized democracies today are doing much better than the most religious, and finally, if you find personal comfort, affirmation, and security in your religious faith, so be it – I don’t want to take that away from you. But please keep it out of our government and our public schools, and understand that no one has the right to impose their religious faith on others.
Jacobsen: What are perennial threats to secularism? What are the immediate, big issues surrounding secularism and its implementation?
Zuckerman: Well, which secularism are you referring to? The biggest threat to political secularism comes from religious fundamentalists/theocrats who wants to force their religion on the rest of society. The biggest threat to philosophical or sceptical secularism is when people live insecure, unsafe, precarious lives – in such situations, they understandably turn to religious faith for comfort. That is, when life is harsh and hard – when people don’t have access to health care, education, jobs and society is riddled with corruption and crime, then people will turn to religious fantasies to help them cope. They simply will not care about reason, rationality, empiricism, etc. And the biggest threat to socio-cultural secularism? There isn’t one. It is marching on, undeterred. The internet is a huge player in this.
Jacobsen: Thank you for your time today, Professor Zuckerman.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/29
Dr. Sven van de Wetering has just stepped down as head of psychology at the University of the Fraser Valley, and is a now an associate professor in the same department. He is on the Advisory Board of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal. Dr. van de Wetering earned his BSc in Biology at The University of British Columbia, and Bachelors of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University, Master of Arts, and PhD in Psychology from Simon Fraser University. His research interest lies in “conservation psychology, lay conceptions of evil, relationships between personality variables and political attitudes.” Here we explore, as an educational series, the philosophical foundations of psychology.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Dr. Sven van de Wetering, thank you for agreeing to do this again. We first did an interview a few years ago, and this time, I would like to dig deeper into our conversation on the philosophical foundations of psychology. So let us start with what is psychology?
Dr. Sven van de Wetering: Psychology is the attempt to apply the same high epistemological criteria that have made the natural sciences such a success to a set of questions that preoccupy almost everyone, namely, why our fellow humans think, feel, and act the way they do. Because psychology asks an enormous range of questions, its various subfields have relatively little in common with each other, aside from the strive for epistemological rigour.
SJ:Psychology seems to create epistemological issues, which, in turn, make for ontological issues.Could you please further discuss the place of epistemology in psychology. And what are some of the more hotly debated issues surrounding it?
SW: Every undergraduate programme in psychology that I know of teaches two lower-level courses that deal almost entirely with epistemology. One of these is a course in statistics, and the second is a course in research methods. Between them, these courses introduce the fundamentals of methodology in psychology.
These courses are difficult to teach. Perhaps because so many psychology students are terrified of math. A frequent response of students being forced to take their first course in psychological statistics is to get very focused on the details of conducting the statistical analyses, and lose sight of the worldview on which those psychological statistics are based. Essentially, the idea is that the human world is a very complex place, and that the common western intuition that single causes give rise to single effects is not helpful in trying to figure out what is going on. Instead, a human being is subject to many influences at any given time, some internal, some external, and some with their roots in the individual’s distant past. Many of these influences are practically invisible, and even if we went to the trouble of attempting to make ourselves aware of every single one of those influences, we still would not know how all those different factors interact. To cope with the uncertainty induced by this overwhelming complexity, we create the simplifying fiction of random variation.
Instead of seeing causes and effects as being tightly coupled in human affairs, we see influences that increase or decrease the probability of certain human behaviours within that allegedly random matrix of behavioural possibility. Thus, we partition this blooming, buzzing confusion of human behaviour into two components: a portion that we think we can attribute to a small group of influences we are currently examining, and another portion that we attribute to the much larger group of influences we are not currently studying, and that we thus dismiss as error variance. Statistics is therefore used to separate the signal from the noise in this framework, and research methods are a set of techniques we use to amplify the signal so that the statistical techniques can be picked out more easily.
One thing that has always bemused me about psychological research is the extent to which we can typically only explain a few percent of the variances for any given phenomenon. This is due to nothing more than the fact that picking up the signal is hard. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but the focus on the signal is so intense that I think we often lose sight of the fact that the noise is also human behaviour. I would love to see psychological discourse focus a little more on the variances we cannot explain, not so much as a lesson in humility, but just as a way of cultivating an awareness of what incredibly complicated creatures human beings are.
SJ: What was the first tacit epistemology in psychological research? In other words, who can be considered the first psychologist? And what was their approach to psychology?
SW: At the risk of sounding very boring and conventional, I am going to say Wilhelm Wundt. He called his approach “physiological” (what we now call experimental). What he meant by this is that he would attempt to present people with highly controlled stimuli in order to evoke a tightly circumscribed set of responses. This actually does not make him that much different from some people that came before him, such as Fechner. His really big innovation however was to create a group of researchers (i.e. graduate students). Wundt recognized that science is a fundamentally social enterprise, and that the proverbial mad scientist in the tower in the thunderstorm is an object of suspicion and derision not because he is mad, but because he is socially isolated.
Communicating one’s findings with other scientists (Wundt also created the first psychology journal) and training other young scientists in one’s techniques is not a peripheral enterprise. The essence of science is that it is self-correcting, but for various psychological reasons, individuals are not very good at correcting themselves. It is only by subjecting their work to the scrutiny of other scientists that any given scientist can obtain the benefits of this self-correcting aspect of the scientific method. It is for this reason that I consider the hype surrounding Wilhelm Wundt completely justified.
SJ: What are some of the major sub-fields, and their fundamental philosophical disagreements, of the discipline?
SW: The number of subfields in psychology is very large, but I would have to say that the major tension within psychology is between people who emphasize the epistemological rigour discussed above and the people who focus on real-world relevance. Few psychologists want to discard either rigour or relevance, but there is sometimes a bit of a trade-off between the two.
Experiments that allow researchers to establish tight linkages between causes and effects often make use of highly controlled laboratory tasks that are quite unlike the sort of situations most people face in their day-to-day lives. Real-world relevance, on the other hand, may come when we try to conduct therapy on someone with real psychological problems. Because the client is often in the midst of a highly complex life situation, strict experimental control is likely to be difficult or impossible to implement, and opportunities for rigour are greatly diminished.
As I said, most of us want both rigour and relevance, but we often have to trade them off against each other. Some people are willing to give up relatively little rigour in the name of relevance, and stay in their laboratories. Others prize relevance above all else, and will sacrifice a great deal of rigour for the sake of having a fighting chance of being useful to people in need.
I think part of the reason this creates so much tension is exactly because psychologists value both rigour and relevance. The ones who, to many outside observers, seem pretty irrelevant, tend to justify themselves by claiming to be more relevant than most other people think they are. Similarly, the relevant practitioners often think they are more epistemologically rigorous than they really are. Thus, much of the tension comes not from differences in opinion about what to give up for the sake of what, but rather anger at the other group for disputing their self-perceptions as both rigorous and relevant.
SJ: Thank you for your time Dr. Sven van de Wetering. It is always a pleasure talking to you.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Conatus News/Uncommon Ground Media Inc.
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/05/22
Marie Alena Castle is the communications director for Atheists for Human Rights. Raised Roman Catholic she became an atheist later in life. She has since been an important figure within the atheist movement through her involvement with Minnesota Atheists, The Moral Atheist, National Organization of Women, and wrote Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013). She has a lifetime of knowledge and activist experience, explored and crystallised in an educational series. The first part of this series can be found here – Session 1
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: With your four decades of experience in activism for atheism, human rights, and women’s rights, you earlier described the victory for women’s right to vote and pursue careers and for reproductive rights. Who has formed the main resistance to the massive pro-life lobby from Catholic and other Christian religious groups?
Alena Castle: Groups such as NARAL and NOW and Planned Parenthood have been the most publicly visible opponents of the Catholic/Protestant fundamentalist assaults on reproductive health care. However, the most effective has been the political organising within the Democratic party. I was extensively involved in getting the Democratic party platform to support abortion rights and in getting pro-choice candidates endorsed and elected. Having a major political party oppose the Republican party’s misogynistic position was key to holding the line against them.
Jacobsen: In the current battleground over abortion, reproductive health and rights, modern attacks on Margaret Sanger’s character have been launched to indirectly take down abortion activists and clinics, and argue against such rights for women. What can best protect abortion access and Sanger’s legacy and work?
Alena Castle: The attacks on Sanger amount to “alternative facts” and seriously distorted history. Women’s rights leaders of the past, including Sanger as well as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are sometimes quoted in opposition to abortion – but their concern was that so many women died from abortions that were either self induced or done by incompetent quacks or because of the inadequate medical knowledge of the time.
Sanger has been accused of favouring eugenics (birth control to prevent the birth of genetically defective babies). These views have been deliberately misconstrued regarding their intent when in fact they were intended to save women’s lives and help ensure a better life for the babies they gave birth to. Today the anti-abortionists are still making up fake horror stories about foetal development and abortion and its effect on women that are outright lies. Nothing will stop this dishonest distortion of history and the absurd lies but more should be done to assert, often and vigorously, the actual medical facts about abortion and the moral rightness and integrity of Sanger’s and other feminists’ views and of the women who have abortions.
Jacobsen: What would you say has been most effective as a preventive mechanism against the encroachment on the rights of women from the hyper-religious Right, or the religious Right?
Alena Castle: Political activism! That is the only thing that will work. We need to focus on putting a majority of elected officials in office at all levels who support women’s rights and the rights of the nonreligious. You can’t make changes by just talking about them – it takes laws and their enforcement. Only politicians make laws – not NARAL or NOW or atheist organisations or people who march in the streets.
Jacobsen: As an atheist and feminist, what have been the most educational experiences in your personal or professional life as to the objectives of the anti-atheist and anti-feminist movements in North America and, indeed, across the world?
Alena Castle: I have personally experiencing the effect of the religious right’s political agenda on my life and on the lives of others. The first funeral I went to was when I was 10 years old. Our lovely 22-year-old neighbour had died of a botched illegal abortion. (At the time, such deaths were listed as “obstruction of the bowels” to save the family’s embarrassment and I only learned several years later what the true cause was). And then there were the funerals of good friends who were gay and died of AIDS while the religious right did everything to hinder medical research for treatment. And almost worse was seeing the total lack of compassion by advocates for that agenda for the harm it causes. Example:
I had a discussion with a very nice, polite woman about a news report of how an 11-year-old girl, somewhat retarded, had been raped by her father, was pregnant, begged for an abortion, and was denied by a court order. Soon after she had the baby, she was back in court on a charge of being an unfit mother. I asked this nice woman if she thought that girl should have been allowed to have an abortion. She said no, that forcing her to continue the pregnancy was the right and moral thing to do. Her religious beliefs had hardened her heart and I told her so.
How do we talk to people with such a warped sense of morality? This woman also believed in personhood from the moment of conception. At that “moment,” her “person” is a microscopic fertilised egg undifferentiated at the cellular level, and no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. The anti-abortion people put up billboards with a picture of a year-old real baby and a statement that the baby’s heartbeat is detected at a foetal age of a few weeks. They don’t explain that it is then a two-chambered heart at the lizard level of development. (The adorable – always white – baby on the billboard has the fully developed four-chambered heart). Abortion never kills a baby; it just keeps one from forming. The religious right thinks preserving that development outweighs any harm it is causing the women. We have the words of the Pope and the Protestant reformers to thank for this inhumanity. Martin Luther’s associate, Philip Melancthon said, “If a woman weary of bearing children, it matters not. Let her only die from bearing; she is there to do it.” Pope Pius XI said, “However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperilled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent.”
There is no baby, biologically speaking until the beginning of the third trimester – the rhetoric about innocence skips that convenient fact. After that, it’s a medical emergency affecting the woman, the fetus or both, that requires removal of the fetus. If these anti-abortion hard-hearts have a problem with this, they should go ahead and die from bearing if they find themselves in such a situation, but leave the rest of us alone.
Thank you for your time, Ms. Alena Castle! Your words and experiences are of even greater relevance at this time with women’s lives under attack again.
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/05/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, do you think that we’re going to see a level of debauchery in the post-Covid world, as we saw in the 1970s?
Rick Rosner: All right. So, before we get to now, we have to talk about America and European countries, too. So, the traditional wisdom is that the Disco Era was a hedonistic reaction to the end of a couple of tough eras in America, the end of the Vietnam War, which had been percolating along from the early 60s until the troops were pulled out in ’73.
But there was a token presence until Saigon fell. South Vietnam fell in 1975. Nixon had been president since ‘69, left office in mid-‘74, I think, and then after a few months, Gerald Ford pardoned him from being charged with.
That was the end of the Nixon Era, the end of the Vietnam Era. Gerald Ford, at least, Saturday Night Live presented him as a buffoon. But he was really a caretaker president. He was the first appointed president.
Nixon named him the vice president to replace Spiro Agnew. He had to leave because of a tax scandal and then Nixon resigned. Ford became president. So, he was the only president who wasn’t elected in some capacity. Every other president who took over had been, I believe, elected vice president, anyway. He supposedly relieved a nation, just wanted to kick back and go to discos and fuck each other indiscriminately for a few years.
Of course, a vanguard, the segment with the fraction of people who signify the era was always just a small fry. Most people were still doing what they normally did, which was go to work and have families and whatever else.
But there were things besides the end of Vietnam and Nixon that probably facilitated a lot of sex or the idea that sex is what you wanted to have. I think Stonewall was 1961. So, it took a few years for a promiscuous gay culture to arise because it was illegal in a lot of places, just completely clamped down until Stonewall.
Jacobsen: What was Stonewall?
Rosner: Stonewall was, I believe, a bar in lower Manhattan where there was a gay bar. The people in there just did finally had enough of being harassed by police and they rioted because it was illegal, I think, for guys to dance with guys in bars.
Cops would come in and just like brutalize the gay guys who just wanted to party with each other. So, there was a big riot, which led and marked the beginning of a lot of history of gay lib and throughout the 70s bathhouse culture.
Jacobsen: I’m asking for those who do not work in North America.
Rosner: Disco is something that probably began in the gay world and moved into this straight world. Now, there’s this digressing too much good to all that took place during the 70s that arose and gay disco fun turned into a straight disco on the pill.
I think it was released to the public, I think, in 1960. That probably took a long time to shift people’s attitudes about what good girls did. Guys were always down to fuck, but girls were very protective of the reputation.
Jacobsen: Do they get somewhere? Do you think it’s somewhat similar to now, too?
Rosner: What’s going on now? I think quite different, which we’ll get to; I think it also took a while to the idea that women could really enjoy the heck out of sex. I think that, outside of marriage, that took a long time to percolate into the culture. The pill made it possible for women to have sex with a very low risk of getting pregnant.
Jacobsen: What about reputational protection? Is that still the same?
Rosner: Nobody right now reasonably thinks that you’re a whore if you have sex outside of marriage. There’s not even a stigma now about getting pregnant before you get married. If you’re living with somebody, and if you get pregnant, and if you get married when you’re five months pregnant, there’s no scandal with that at all.
Jacobsen: Whereas in the 70s, it was a scandal.
Rosner: We have people who lied about it. But anyway, so, why was a big cultural focus on singles bars in the 70s, into the early 80s? People going to clubs to dance with each other, and hit on each other.
Then the end of it was over a herpes epidemic at the end of the 70s. Then in the early 80s, you had the rise of AIDS, and those two things put a big damper on the era. There was also a backlash against disco because it was very gay and glam and the opposite of manly rock, ZZ Top or not even that’s right.
But just like Leonard Skinner, Led Zeppelin, the guys who drove cameras. Disco Era lasted not even a decade. I missed most of it. I didn’t lose my virginity until 1980. I wish I had just gotten in New York a few years earlier, when Studio 54 was still operating, just gotten to a town with a lot of Jews in it where I wouldn’t have stood out as I did in Boulder.
It is like ethnic and also nerdy. I feel like I would have had a shot in New York to get laid a little earlier and there are lots of talks now about how people are going to go sex crazy when life really opens up again when the masks come off and Covid numbers make it safe to go out.
But for everybody who says, “Yes, we’re just going to go crazy.” There are people who say, “No, I’m just going to keep on staying home. I’m comfortable with that. I don’t need them, going out going crazy.”
Jacobsen: Do you think would you put yourself in that category?
Rosner: Well, I was when the Disco Era started. I was a teenager. Now, I’m sixty-one. I’ve been married for 30 years. We’re not swingers. So, there’s nothing. My situation has changed. I think there will be some hooking up.
But the culture is less sex-positive and less sex-obsessed when in the 70s people thought sex was the best thing you could do if you were lucky enough to do it. It wasn’t a wrong attitude because, as I’ve said a million times before, everything else in the 70s sucked.
Most entertainment was mostly bad. There were no video games. Food was bad. Clothing was bad. Everything sucked.
Now, there’s awesome entertainment wherever you turn and personalized distraction, personalized social media feeds. As we’ve talked about a bunch before, people are having less sex than they did in previous generations because there’s more to do; there’s more to distract you from sex.
Sex isn’t as big a deal compared to everything else as it used to be. There are a couple of other things going on. There wasn’t much porn available compared to now in the 70s. The Internet didn’t begin for most people until the mid-90s, but now there’s just porn everywhere on the Internet.
So, when people spent 14 months inside with Covid, there was a lot of jacking off going on from just an endless flood of porn available for anybody who wants to consume it and a cornucopia of porn reduces people’s desperation to hook up.
So there’s that, there’s MeToo, and just the overall reconsideration of the rapey-ness of eras like the 70s, where everybody assumed that you should just go along with that you’re a stick in the mud, a nerd, a loser.
If you didn’t, if you weren’t down for sex, which also meant being down for being hit on, the Disco Era was only five years after the Mad Men Era. So, there was a lot of harassment and a lot of people, women, maybe, mentally rolling their eyes.
They can all right. ‘This is, maybe, not what I want, but I’ll go along with it.’ This seems to be what’s expected. That whole thing has been re-examined where people are reconsidering the easy sexuality without knowing because most people who are out trying to hook up, or not, don’t remember the 70s.
But still, there’s been a reconsideration of behavior as it was in the 70s when you lived through it or not. Also, people’s bodies are different. We didn’t have an obesity problem in the 70s.
Jacobsen: Are you referring to what this has been called the obesity epidemic?
Rosner: Well, 70% of adult Americans are over their ideal weight. Now, you can say, “Well, yes who’s saying what’s ideal?” But, in any case like that, if you go by BMI, one-third of Americans are overweight and another one-third are overweight enough to be obese.
Jacobsen: And that’s also related to sex, though. Sex drive, like being fit, actually induces a healthy sex drive.
Rosner: No, I don’t think so. I think you can still be you can be fat and horny. If there were a lot of unhealthy reasons, there were unhealthy reasons. People were skinnier in the 70s. Food wasn’t this delicious. I think one major reason that people are overweight now is that food is delicious and cheap and plentiful.
It’s just hard to resist. In the 70s, jogging became popular, not all of America was jogging. It was exercise. Exercise became a thing. Cocaine was passed or again, not that much, but maybe 5%, 10%. I don’t know what percent of the population was doing coke, but the 70s were a skinny Asclepius era where the focus was on braless skinny, super skinny blondes, Charlie’s Angels.
So, now, people look different. The barriers for having sex with people have been down since the 70s.
Few people feel shame at having sexual relationships outside of marriage. That’s just long gone. How hot you need to be to have sex has fallen away in the 70s, the sex belongs to the hot people. It’s less so now. There are plenty of ways to arrange sex: Tinder and Grindr and Bumble and a gazillion ways from the most superficial aspects to relationships with the intent to marry somebody.
You don’t have to present as much of a front as you did in the Disco Era where you can arrange to hook up. You still have to put together enough of a front to put together an attractive Tinder account. But you don’t have to get your shit all together to look super good to go to the disco.
So, there’s casual sex, but along with sex, being casual is that people are casual about having sex. But they’re also casual about wanting sex. People are just not as desperate as my friends and I were 40 years ago.
Jacobsen: Do you think it’s a positive thing or a negative?
Rosner: You’re asking if this is a positive or a negative thing?
Jacobsen: Yes, sir.
Rosner: I think it’s probably a net positive. In that, as I’ve said, the sex ceremonies were coercive. People ended up doing a lot of shit they probably didn’t want to do at the same time. Maybe, it wasn’t that bad for most people because people who went ahead and tried stuff might have had fun doing it.
But still, people are more cognizant of the power structures around sex now, which is not a bad thing. Sex is not this way of keeping it less of a way of keeping score or keeping track of yours or affirming your status.
So, yes, overall, sex is more a thing you do when it makes sense to do it rather than the things that you’re culturally prodded to do. So, yes, that overall is a healthier thing. Also, I think there are a lot of shitty things going on in the world, especially politically, but in terms of how the world is to live in, the world is just a lot more entertaining and interesting.
We know a lot more. We have access to more information and all that is an improvement over the 70s. So, yes, people will b hooking up, but it won’t be the insane year after year of disco hooking up in the 70s.
Then you had a related question, which is, “Are we going to see a creative renaissance when everything opens up?” With the idea, people have been working on projects. During Covid, they are suddenly going to be a flood of new ideas into the entertainment marketplace.
Jacobsen: For our working relationship, it hasn’t changed any of that. We still do what we do.
Rosner: Yes, we’ve always been working on Skype for the most part. On Twitter, there’s a lot of talk of people saying, “Yes, I got absolutely nothing done during Covid,” just a few people saying they completed projects and other people saying don’t beat yourself up for not getting anything done during Covid.
Getting through Covid itself is an accomplishment, so, I don’t know. I think there will have to be a flood of new stuff because everybody watched everything, binged on everything, while they were locked up.
So, yes, I think we will see a bunch of new stuff, but I don’t think it will be an absolute avalanche. I think, and we still don’t know, what will happen with movies that there hasn’t been a movie, yet.
Where, people absolutely have to go see in a theater. There are movies that have been held back to see if they can be blockbusters in a theater. The James Bond movie has been held back for probably close to a year and a half now.
There are probably some other movies, but, somehow, the model for releasing movies just streaming on people’s TVs hasn’t been a complete disaster. So, I don’t know. I’ve got a project I’ve been slowly working on that should be ready to show to my agent if I still have an agent in a month or two.
But I’ve been saying a month or two for a year. So, who fucking knows? So, the amount of new entertainment, the possible renaissance will, I think, be anywhere from the levels that it has been rolling. The new stuff rolling out will be anywhere from 100% of current levels to 150%.
I don’t think it’s just going to be an absolute, like I said, avalanche. Then there’s one more area where did we lose a year of scientific research in progress, and technological progress. I really don’t know.
I can’t really comment on that except to ask the question because I don’t know how much somebody will figure out how much I should worry about technological progress. I want to live longer thanks to advances in medical science.
So, it really bummed me out if we lost a year’s worth of progress in medicine to people being locked down. I don’t think we lost totally unqualified to talk about it, but, maybe, we lost the equivalent of six or eight months.
People were working at half speed and being shut out of their labs. I don’t know other than that, except to say one more thing. In L.A. County, we’re down to like 200 cases, new confirmed cases a day, out of a population of 10 million
Which if that were the worst for the whole nation, that would be like seven thousand new cases in the US today, where, right now, we’re in the low 20s or a 3 to 31/2 times the L.A. County rate. That’s great for L.A. County and on the way to not being terrible for new cases down by 90% average across the U.S.
But only 5% of the world has been fully vaccinated. Only 9% has received even one dose of vaccine and almost no one in the 125 poorest countries on Earth has received the vaccine. So, the world isn’t done with Covid, and depending on how what happens with Covid variants, the Western world may not be done with it either. All right, the end.
Jacobsen: Okay.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So old school science, science fiction from the golden age, at least what we think about it, my prime example is a little bit post-golden age. I’m talking about original Star Trek. But anyway, science fiction like that totally misses the foolishness of the future.
Right now, we live in what was the future to the golden age of science fiction. People writing science fiction in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Believe that, 2021 fairly science fictional world that it would be familiar in some way.
With largely, the same human bodies and human wants. Some of those golden age writers wrote about altered humans of the future. But now, 2021 was, maybe, too soon for that. But 2021 is a scene from 1950. People are still doing human stuff. But we’ve all got all sorts of science fiction shit to deal with.
We might be taking ourselves to Mars and the moon and the other moons and planets of the Solar System. We might have orbiting structures in space. We’d have some of the computational devices.
Ray Bradbury in his short stories imagines and, I think, Fahrenheit 451 imagined an end to reading, and it’s being replaced with just full on entertainment walls. But Bradbury didn’t picture the entertainment of most of the people.
Maybe, I’m just not remembering Fahrenheit 451 in enough detail. But I don’t remember Fahrenheit 451 presenting a lot of foolishness. That, even though, the people of the future are being stupid by entertainment, we don’t get to see any of the entertainment.
It’s a deadly serious book about the end of books. The science fiction golden age has a certain seriousness that leaves out the foolishness that we’re living in now. We’re surrounded by high tech.
We use it to an extent that the golden age science fiction probably hinted at, but missed the extent that we are surrounded by powerful computational technology. But they knew it was coming and they fell short of how powerful it is pervasive.
But what they really missed is just the goofy crap that is spit out by our stuff. It’s not until the science fiction of some of the 60s and 70s that you start seeing foolishness sneak in. But really not with old school like Star Trek. The original series is very spare.
The sets are spare. There’s no advertising anywhere. The original Star Trek looks cheap and uncluttered and everybody’s upstanding. It’s the USS Enterprise, which is exploring. Its mission is to discover new stuff. It’s altruistic. It’s not market driven.
Everybody except for the bad guys, you have to be confronted in most episodes. Everybody’s pulling in the same altruistic direction. Logic itself is personified by the second in command, Spock. I’ve always found Star Trek annoying because it’s so clean.
Then it’s not really until Blade Runner that you get a fairly thoroughly rendered dirty future. It’s rainy, it’s overpopulated, and everything’s scummy. I mean, there’s been scummy stuff in the future before, but it’s still stripped down like brave new world, is under populated by foolishness and sleaze. the brave new world is about people being genetically designed to serve the various roles in society from menial work to executive level and how shitty that is.
It’s a critique of that system. At the same time, it leaves out the nobody until the 60s and then only a little bit, nobody anticipated that we would live in a world of pervasive porn, a billion pages of porn available on everybody’s personal device.
So, we could talk about why old school science fiction missed the superficial, the sleazy, the circusy aspect of the future and why the future is sleazy and circusy. one reason the future is sleazy and circusy is information analytics, analysis explores every aspect.
That’s a good thing about information, the human drive for information. You could even say the capitalism of information, the commoditization of information, the looking the striving to find a new area of information to stake your claim on it.
I’ve been listening to Carole who has satellite radio. There are like five or six comedy channels. So, I’ve been listening to those. a good comedy routine is like an SAT reading comprehension section. You haven’t taken the SAT, have you?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No.
Rosner: For most Americans, they know the SAT reading comp section, which is just a short passage, maybe five hundred words. You analyze it. You get half a dozen questions after this short passage about what it’s about, what the thesis is, what its supporting arguments are, ‘the author would most likely agree with which of these statements.’
It’s just taking a piece of writing and seeing your ability to understand and analyze. It’s usually a piece of nonfiction. It’s usually a short passage, either explaining an event or a scientific phenomenon or a sociological phenomenon.
It’s usually making an argument saying this is this is the right way to think about something. This as opposed to its just being able to understand the written argument. A good standup routine does the same thing as a short essay that you might be trying to analyze on the S.A.T.
It has a thesis statement with the most cliched one being, “What’s up? Why is airline food so shitty?” That’s the biggest cliche in standup comedy. So, that’s your thesis statement, airplane food shitty. Then you have examples.
Then I have some other stuff you might see in an essay, like counterexample. It doesn’t have to be this way. On Virgin Airways, they serve… whatever. But it’s a little self-contained bit of a novel analysis. Find an angle on the world, other people haven’t explored adequately.
But that will be immediately familiar and analyze it, lay it out, people will laugh because it being noted as new. But it’s also familiar because people have experienced it. So, stand up is to some extent the business of finding new relatable observations about the world, about making new relatable observations and what we’ve seen now on NBC Prime Time.
On prime time US TV, they will make jokes about butt sex. They’ll make jokes about blowjobs, handjobs. They won’t explicitly say handjob or blowjob, but sitcoms will make jokes about kinds of sex that people didn’t talk about before the 70s.
Now, we have a gazillion channels. I think there are something like 800 scripted TV series on U.S. TV. So, people are making entertainment. They are desperate to find new things to analyze. This includes the whole realm of things that are taboo that used to be taboo.
In fact, those things are more valuable to analyze, as seen by the success of a comedy that analyzes these things because the information is more hidden – because it’s taboo. But the basic principle is that with humans; basically, we make our living off of information.
We find, we look, for regularities in the world that we can exploit. Regularities in the world are information. Chaos doesn’t contain information, regularities contain information. So, information is going to colonize everything. We’re going to analyze everything.
We’re going to bring it to light, even, and especially, the goofy stuff, because there are advantages to be had in doing that. There are livings to be made and just information is going to go everywhere.
It’s the Minority World that’s annoyingly packed with personalized advertisements wherever you go in public. You’ve seen Minority Report, right?
Jacobsen: Way back in the day.
Rosner: All right. So, Tom Cruise is walking through like some public space. He’s just being harassed by personalized holograms directed at him. So, information is just going to proliferate like that expanding foam insulation.
That leaves the question as to why 1950s science fiction missed it. It could be because we were just coming off of being the good guys in a war that we won against truly bad guys using technology.
You could guess that there was a pervasive optimism that technology would lead to good and good values and that good would proliferate. We’ve talked about goodness and order that we perceive as good things that preserve order.
We want to live in a world that allows us not to be killed at random. So, the 50s was an era of believing in the good, believing that the good would prevail. And also believing that the good, it was a very narrow view of good.
They didn’t admit to the perversity that we now accept and embrace. Because the narrow 50s, there was only room for so much exploration within the narrow confines; that left out a more perverse, bigger world that was eventually going to be exploited for entertainment and for information. Did that hang together? Was that a coherent argument?
Jacobsen: I would say you bought a blanket that’s a little old.
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: I said you bought a blanket that’s a little old. The thread is still there though.
Rosner: OK.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There’s a fella named Graham Priest. He deals with a contradiction to contradictions, dialetheia. He, basically, drove that entire field. Anyway, the New York Times, Gulalai and the Ismail family has been featuredtwo or three or four times in the last couple of years.
She’s from Pakistan and is fighting for women’s rights and issues. She is one the leading global thinkers of 2013 for Foreign Policy. She won the Anna Politkovskaya award and a bunch of other things.
She’s like 16 with her sister, Saba. They founded a girls and women’s rights and empowerment organization in Pakistan, Aware Girls. There’s like 150 countries that have been ranked. It’s like third from the bottom or something for the status of women and girls (Pakistan). So, yes, it’s military dictatorships, secular plus Islamic theocracy is the worst of both fundamentalist religious and fundamentalist atheism.
Rick Rosner: It’s an acid in your face country.
Jacobsen: Well, Malala Yousafzai, right? Yes, so, interesting thing, get this, they found Aware Girls. That’s where Malala got her start. That’s where she got these ‘radical’ gender equality ideas, literally.
So, Gulalai Ismail is the inspiration for Malala. Literally, they were in her school. They knew her personally. They’re very proud of her. They’re in the humanist community. They have been part of it for a while.
Anyway, I was thinking about bullet points to maths about. Where if I bring up various principles or scientific constructs in physics, and then we take an informational cosmological version of this translated, does that make a little sense? What would be your immediate objections to that, if any?
Rosner: But I haven’t been caught flat footed or that I’ve got no good answer.
Jacobsen: Do you need to give a couple of concepts to me, come back in a bit and we do it?
Rosner: Sure.
Jacobsen: What areas of physics are you most comfortable in, quantum mechanics?
Rosner: No, I mean anything, but whether I can translate them to informational stuff is questionable.
Jacobsen: Ok, could you give us just, historically, the four fundamental forces, or could simply force and mass and acceleration? What do those represent informationally? That sort of thing.
Rosner: We can start with fundamental forces.
Jacobsen: Ok, so, you want to come back after thinking about it a bit or you jump into it?
Rosner: No, we can jump in.
Jacobsen: Ok, so, where’s the record button? We’re already recording. That’s hilarious.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, Carole and I have been looking at where we might move at some point in our lives, obviously towards our older years because we’re already fucking older. I’m 61 and Carole turns 57 in two months.
That urge to find someplace else to live was to add some urgency under Trump and then under Biden. It seems more relaxed, but that’s not it. But things could still go back if the midterm elections in 2022 go to the Republicans.
But by getting elected, it, basically, bought us four years to get out if we need to get out. Because even if the Republicans win the House, the Senate, in 2022, we won’t have the presidency and they won’t be able to fuck things up too fast.
We’ll have the two years from 2022 to 2024 to deal with Trump as President with that a little bit like Germany in 1932, 33, 34. It’s a situation with Hitler just coming to power, but things aren’t so crazily fucked up, yet.
But people who are skittish or smart started to leave early. I mean Hitler started doing shitty stuff, but the shitty stuff ramped up in ‘35, ‘36. I want to say ‘37. If you were smart and prudent, you might have started to get out of Germany if you were Jewish or some other undesirable thing by ‘35.
With the statistics under Trump, it felt like Germany in the early 30s. Now under Biden, it doesn’t feel like that. But if the clock starts ticking again, if the Republicans win the House or if they don’t, and if the Democrats can pass a voter rights law, federal voting rights law, to replace the voting rights and bad rulings against the Supreme Court.
A few years ago, the Supreme Court said that we could get rid of voting rights mandates in the southern states if they cleaned up their act. John Roberts led a court in determining voting rights. So, voting rights protections went away.
Now, there’s new legislation that the Democrats are sponsoring to try to get it back. If they managed to get that passed, that’s a lot of protection. But historically, the Republicans over the past 80 years have only been more popular than Democrats in terms of people calling themselves Republicans or Democrats.
Only 2 out of the past 80 years. The Republicans have shitty ideas. They don’t govern for the people. When they win, based on built-in things like the Electoral College, they have built in advantages that the smaller states have more power and bigger states.
I don’t want to go into all that. But Republicans have built in electoral advantages. They have a built in disadvantage in that everybody fucking hates the Republicans. if everybody is allowed to vote, if voting is easy, Republicans don’t win.
So, we need the voting legislation. If the Voting Rights Act passes and isn’t thrown out by the Supreme Court, then America is in reasonably good shape. If it isn’t, if it doesn’t pass, and if the Republicans take over part of the government, then I start looking more concertedly at that move.
Carol’s mom is 88, my mom is 87. It’s tough to move because of them and all because you have to sell everything and leave the country you’ve lived in.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/05/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is more off the cuff, so it’s not fair. Because it’s requiring long term knowledge, but what are the pluses, minuses, differences between former President Trump when he was in his first four months and current president Biden in his first term?
Rick Rosner: Yes, today is May 22nd, Biden became president on January 20th. So, it’s been a third of a year, so his presidency is one-twelfth over, assuming he’s just president for four years. Well, one thing I want to talk about before we get to that, which is six months after the election, more than six and a half months.
So, it was November. Yes, there are tens of millions of lunatics who refuse to believe that Trump wasn’t elected and that massive fraud got Biden into the White House. The main argument I have against this is just common sense, which is that we spent four years watching Trump be an obviously shitty president and shitty human being, and a majority of Americans saw that and voted against him.
And that’s shown by an election where one hundred and sixty million Americans voted, not only the highest number of people who voted in an American election ever by more than 10 million, but the highest percentage of Americans to ever vote in an election.
Because if you take it, I’m pretty sure it was the highest percentage ever because of vote by mail, which was made fairly easy. I might be wrong about that, but one of the highest percentages ever. If you go back 100 years, only men are voting.
So, there may have been elections in the 80s, 90s where I have a higher percentage of eligible voters voted, but only half the country was eligible to vote just based on gender anyway. A huge number of people voted.
The margin of Biden’s victory was huge, seven million. It would have taken tens of thousands of people engaging in complicated fraud to establish that margin. Then all the Trump people would say, “Well, you didn’t need that. You just needed margins of ten thousand in critical states.”
But still, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of people in a conspiracy, which is itself impossibly unlikely. But you have the evidence of the votes, so you have the evidence of Trump being a piece of shit very visible for years on end.
You have the country wrecked. Then you have polling, where there was a poll of Trump’s approval nearly every day for four years. He was president and also for a year leading up to his presidency.
So, you’re looking at over 1,200 polls of Trump. Now, you’re looking at polls of Biden. There are hundreds of those in the time leading up to his election. In the one hundred and twenty-some days he’s been president, you’re looking at, roughly, at least, 1,500 polls, almost all of which show that Biden is much more popular than Trump.
Biden’s popularity has been steady approval, steady at 53%, where Trump’s approval was steady at between the upper 30s and low 40s, between 39% and 44%, but most of the time tighter than that. So, you have this incredible stack of statistical evidence that would have to be denied.
You’d have to explain away 1,500 polls. That they’ve all been crooked. And there’s nothing reasonable about the idea that Trump got the votes. All right, so, that’s the end of Biden, who, as I said, Biden’s approval is 10 points higher than Trump’s.
At the same points in their presidency, and if people weren’t so polarized, Biden’s approval would be even higher. Under Biden, half the country has been vaccinated. We went from being one of the shittiest countries in the world at dealing with poverty to being one of the most vaccinated countries in the world in just the four months.
The vice president, the number of new cases, average daily cases of Covid has decreased by 5% since Biden became president. The number of daily deaths on average has declined by 75% to 80%. Now, that might be a little too high, but by, at least, two-thirds.
So, in terms of Covid, we’re doing much better. Trump had the twenty-one largest point drop of the Dow Jones Industrial stock average in his four years as president. Biden hasn’t had one of those yet, which doesn’t mean that he won’t. He probably will.
You always have in the course of a presidency. The stock market will decline hugely from time to time. But Trump, and Trump’s early days, the stock market went up because his business thought he would throw out regularly.
They’d be able to read more and then later he kept interest rates low to try to stem the damage of Coke. So, the stock market had a bunch of good days and a terrible year. 2020 was the deadliest year in U.S. history by 17.6%, according to early numbers out of the CDC.
A huge jump in the mortality rate. The mortality rate of 15.9%. Trump presided over the deadliest year where in 2019 roughly 2.9 million Americans died. That number from 2019 to 2020 jumped from 2.9 Million to 3.94 million, which is the greatest percent jump and the greatest jump in just bodies in a year ever.
The death rate had already been going up under Trump’s previous years. Trump was the deadliest president in U.S. history, and only a third of the jump in deaths was due to an increase in population as the U.S. population increases by less than one percent a year.
So if the population were wildly increasing, we might expect more deaths because there are more people who are alive with the potential to die. But that wasn’t something close to a million more people who died in four years under Trump than four years under any other president and only a few hundred thousand of that is due to increased population.
Not all of it’s due to Trump, but a lot of the Covid deaths are due to his utter mismanagement with other people participating in that. But there are other things that he didn’t address. You can argue that, maybe, it’s not his job, but, as you said, he did the deal. He didn’t stop the opioid crisis.
He didn’t do jack shit. That kills a lot of people. He didn’t do anything about obesity. He didn’t do anything about despair. It was just the deadliest time in modern history. 2021 is going to have a shitload of deaths, too, because the biggest number of deaths from Covid in the US, happened from October through February.
This giant third wave. There were 370,000 people under control. Now, the official number is pushing 600,000. You’re looking at a couple of hundred thousand Covid deaths under Biden and they’re not stopping. We’re still losing an average of six to seven hundred Americans to cover it every day.
If that persists for over a year, you’re stuck. You’re looking at a quarter-million people right there. The 600,000 official deaths isn’t accurate and statisticians say that the true number of US Covid deaths is probably somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000.
By the time it’s over, it’s already arguably the deadliest event in US history. By the time it’s over, it will absolutely be the deadliest event in U.S. history, but deaths are coming down on everybody.
As school gets out, it’s reasonable to hope that more and more people get vaccinated. Even with vaccine resistance, that will start to drop under five hundred US deaths on average. I haven’t seen a count of the number of lives Biden has told versus how many Trump told as president.
But I think Trump’s total was close to 20,000 public lies. Trump and Biden don’t talk to the media as much. Trump would often tweet and Biden doesn’t tweet as much. 4 years is something like 14 public lies a day.
The number of lies he told went up every year of his presidency. By the last year of his presidency, when he was holding all the rallies, he was averaging more than two dozen public lies every day.
And you’re not getting that out of the Biden one. To some extent, there’s more of a national calmness because the nation doesn’t have to be on alert every day for crazy shit happening out of the White House.
Although, we’re not as calm as we could be because Trump’s followers and the Republicans in the Senate, the House, are denying that we had an insurrection on January 6th when Trump gave the speech that prompted his followers to storm the Capital.
Initially, a bunch of Republicans applaud the attack on the Capitol, but lately, they’ve been denying. They’re trying to stop the US from having a commission, the House and Senate, for having a commission looking into the events of January 6th.
Everybody on Twitter, it’s like they had thirty-three hearings into the four deaths of the guys in Libya. And the Republicans aren’t even going to allow us to have one hearing into the attack on the Capitol. That makes a lot of people nervous.
The voter suppression legislation, Americans are afraid. Americans who aren’t Trump accomplices are afraid that if the Republicans gain/regain a majority in the House or Senate in 2022, they will pass a bunch of legislation that will make it so.
That might mean the end of democracy, but it might make it impossible for a Democrat to be certified as president ever again, even if they get many more votes. It’s super crazy and creepy what the Republicans are up to, but Biden has the Republicans trying to portray him as sleepy Joe.
They say he’s not even president; that it’s Kamala Harris who’s running the country. They just say a bunch of crap that’s ridiculous. He’s proven to be coherent, reasonable, energetic. He’s a normal, pretty good president, regardless of how the Trump cultists characterize it. It’s a relief. Jobs are recovering to some extent.
We’ve got the $1.9 billion relief bill passed. One of the big issues that will determine whether his presidency is successful is whether enough Democratic senators can be persuaded to do away with the filibuster, which basically requires 60 votes out of 100 senators to pass most legislation.
The Democrats in the Senate have only a majority of 50 votes is about a tiebreaker. So, to get much done, they’re going to need them to get rid of the filibuster for which they’ll need all of these Democratic senators to vote against the filibuster, which will be tough because there are two very conservative senators, Krysten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin.
Because they often vote as if they’re Republicans. No Republicans vote as if they’re Democrats. So, in the minds of some people, maybe, sometimes in democracy, itself, is all the things that are much more normal.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/01/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are the sports in a pandemic in America?
Rick Rosner: I want to agree that it’s fucking ridiculous to have sports in a pandemic. America’s behavior has been… we’re not alone in dumb behavior among the nations of the world during the coronavirus pandemic.
But we might be the biggest nation in the world to be behaving so fucking stupidly, though it’s hard to tell because India is much bigger. I assume there’s plenty of stupidity out of India because they’re a big, diverse country with four times the US’s population.
And that gives them lots of room for dumbness to happen. India’s just like just a fucking extravaganza of just different stuff. Including horrible, they have horrible parts of the country, maybe the whole country. They’ve got a bad rape problem.
They’ve got corruption in parts. I assume that there’s plenty of room in India for bad Covid behavior that we may not even know about, if they’re also bad at reportage. Because what we found in America out of the Trumpy states is that you can hide a lot of Covid carnage if the governor is a Trumpy asshole, like the governor of Florida, who not only fired the state’s statistician for publishing accurate Covid statistics, but has had her arrested twice.
She persisted. He fired her and then she persisted now as a private citizen in releasing accurate numbers. So, he had the Florida Bureau of Investigation raid her house and take and pulled guns on her husband and kids.
I don’t know if they issued charges there. I think that dropped because they were ridiculous or they’re on hold. But now, she’s been arrested again because the governor of Florida is a fucking asshole. He’s one of the worst.
He’s killed a lot of his own people with his approach to Covid, which is, yes, just fucking no masks, no fucking anything, Disneyworld is open. Though Disneyworld does a pretty good job, they require masks. They’ve done OK. But the whole state run by this asshole, it’s overall not done greatly.
But anyway, the U.S., parts of the U.S. have just done really shitty and have a really cavalier attitude towards Covid precautions, which means that sports in the southern Trumpy states, the Republican states, there’s the PAC 12 football conference, a college football conference.
And most of the teams in the PAC 12 in normal season have like 12 games for a big college football team. Most of the teams in the PAC 12 played fewer than seven games because they kept getting canceled because of Covid.
But fucking all the teams in the shitty Trumpy states, they just went ahead and fucking played FSU, Florida, Georgia Tech, they all played their full ten or eleven or twelve game seasons. Fuck it if a bunch of people got Covid going to their games, some of their athletes got Covid.
So, some other sports, the NBA did really well. I don’t think they played. They shut down their season when Covid started. Then they came back like two months later in what they called the bubble, which is a plate of all the NBA teams moved to Orlando, Florida, to Disney World.
And they all played the rest of the season and the playoffs as one big group. Nobody traveled anywhere except to Disneyland. They just played every game in the bubble. You just played until you were eliminated in the playoffs, then you went home.
I think like halfway through the playoffs; they let the teams who’d been in quarantine now for two and a half months. They lost family members once they’d been tested visit. But the whole thing was done really well and they didn’t have a major Covid outbreak in the bubble.
The Major League Baseball, they played a super short season, a normal season is 162 games. They played 60 games with empty stadiums and they got pretty lucky. They had very few Covid outbreaks. The NFL has been doing reasonably well, very few games were canceled or postponed.
Now, we’re almost a couple of weeks away from the Super Bowl. So, teams have managed to play sports reasonably safely. That may be because there are billions of dollars in sports revenue involved. All that money at stake, maybe, made the owners really committed to keeping shit safe as opposed to all these other yahoos in America who don’t have a billion dollars at stake keeping Covid at bay.
It’s ridiculous to put people at risk for just sports at the same time. This has been a miserable fucking year and people get a lot of pleasure and a lot of distraction out of sports. Many teams have managed to do it safely.
So, it’s really stupid. It’s extra stupid in those parts of America that are stupid about it. But at the same time, it’s nice to have fucking sports and they’ve done a good job for the most part.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/31
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, what are your plans or wishes for 2021?
Rick Rosner: Well, there is a fade somewhat, that trump and his people are prosecuted. In that, we’ve tried the partnering route before. Letting bygones be bygones in the name of healing, that seems like that would only encourage more malfeasance, especially given the current atmosphere.
Back in 1975-74, Gerald Ford pre-emptively pardoned Nixon from being prosecuted for anything he did while in office. That caused a lot of anger back then. I think it would. Biden says that he will leave the Justice Department to make its own decisions about what to do about Trump and his people.
Trump still has 20 more days left in office. People expect him to try to pardon, maybe his family, maybe himself, but he can only pardon himself from federal crimes. State crimes and crimes that that he did that was illegal according to state laws like the state of New York.
You can’t give yourself a presidential pardon for those crimes. I’m hoping that he’s prosecuted. I’m hoping that Fox News, and the other conservative outlets like OAN, Newsmax, will have less power over the lunacy of 70 million Americans.
But I don’t see that going away, really. I hope the Democratic candidates in the Georgia Senate runoff win giving the Senate a 50/50 split between the Republicans and the Democrats. With the vice president being the tie breaking vote, the oddsmakers give that about a one in three chance of happening.
So, probably, Mitch McConnell, the Republicans will probably retain like a one-person lead in this majority in the Senate, which is bad because Mitch McConnell is a terrible person. So, anyway, those are my hopes.
I hope that they come up with a reasonable, under Biden, and a more effective distribution of vaccines. Only two million vaccines have actually been administered this month. Trump promised 100 million doses would be administered by this point a few months ago.
He promised that. Then last month, he promised us 20 million doses would be administered. Now, we’re, maybe, at two and a half million. It’s just one more fuck up on his way out of office. I hope that Biden can lower rates, get people to comply with masking.
Yesterday was the worst day ever for U.S coronavirus deaths at about 3,900, breaking the previous day, record of 3,780. We still don’t have the wave from Christmas get togethers to hit, yet.
It takes two or three weeks. I hope that in general, that more and more Americans realize what a fucking disaster of the past years and the last four years have been. That we figure out some legislation to prevent a recurrence.
Scott: Are you still writing professionally in comedy?
Rosner: Not for money. I mean, I tweet every day and some of the tweets are jokey. Well, I also hope that the last year of shutdown didn’t cost us a year of technological progress.
Scott: What are your odds of thinking that it didn’t do that? What if it was like nine months, but it was a year of slowdown’s? A functional nine months in one year of slowdown rather than a complete halt?
Rosner: It’d still be bad. I’m hoping to enjoy years of added life due to advances in medicine. I don’t want to have give up years of future life because advances weren’t made because everybody was locked down.
We’re on the cusp of huge advances in medicine by 2040. But if everything gets pushed, I’ll be 80 in 2040. If everything gets pushed, I mean, what? I’m in my 70s. The push of a year is a big deal. I had stage one cancer last year. My kidney’s since have been free, have been clean, clear.
But I’m putting a lot of hope in medicine, in medicine getting better. What do I think? I think that it didn’t cost us a year of advances, but it didn’t cost us nothing either. Also, I hope we can clean up America’s image in the world.
So, we continue to attract smart people from around the world. The US only has less than five percent of the world’s population. We’ve benefited for the past 50 years in being a place that smart people want to come to do research and get educated and build businesses.
The Trump era has been terrible for that. It had made us look like a nation of racist idiots. So, I’m sure we’ve lost smart people to China.
Scott: You’ve lost them to Canada.
Rosner: Or Canada.
Scott: Basically, when that stuff was flaring up, the prime minister of Canada went up and said, ‘You have a place welcome here.;
Rosner: Yes, that’s true. I mean, you guys are smart. We’ve been run by the worst president, the stupidest, the most incompetent, the most corrupt president in history. So, that’s it. Those are my hopes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A lot of things we thought were pretty secure in the findings, probably not unfounded, but less founded than we thought things were on personality and things like this. But other things we have found are consistent through the decades have been things like studies on general intelligence, so things like Spearman’s g. That is a controversial subject.
Rick Rosner: We should say Spearman’s g is the idea that there is a generalized intelligence. For example, if in an army, it’ll serve a purpose. The person who possesses this lower intelligence shouldn’t do well in wherever that person is on tasks that require intelligence.
Jacobsen: Yes, it seems like a pervasive aspect of the deep, fast, and comprehensive level of comprehension. Conscious discrimination in all things that require that they’re going to be pervaded by g to some degree that seems to be the case.
Rosner: Yes, and people probably talk about one end of it, which is, “Does g exist in somebody’s brain?” But the other end, “Is the universe arranged such that it’s amenable to figuring shit out?” And the success of science over the past 400 years shows that for whatever reason, the universe is amenable to logic and an explanation and figuring stuff out.
Jacobsen: And so, it’s almost self-evidently so and evidently so later on, just like the Discourses on the Method deal, where by thinking about it, you can derive a self-consistent argument for some information processing going on.
But then if you develop a methodology like science, then things become evident, so you don’t need your own experience of being in the world, knowing that things in the world and exist in the world.
So, anyway, g came into this conversation. It is one of the things that is pretty consistent in the findings. So, we can talk about that spectrum. Is it something that is just an artifact of statistics, or, on the other hand, is it something that’s actually based in the brain? I would argue, or I say, “Both.”
Rosner: Also, as I said, it’s based in the universe. We’ve talked a lot about how the things that tend to persist in the universe are consistent and as simple as they can be with the Einstein quote. We’ve talked about that where he says, ‘the universe is complicated, but not perversely complicated, no more complicated than it needs to be.’
So, there’s another quote about one of the most amazing things about the universe is how amenable to math it is; when you look at the structures that underlie that game, which we find out more and more about because they’re mostly just neural net feedback systems.
The wiring of the brain is wildly complicated with 10,000 connections from every neuron to 10,000 other neurons.
Jacobsen: It’s really, really astonishing.
Rosner: Yes, times ten to the tenth neurons with these connections constantly forming and then atrophying. But the wiring, even though, the wiring is wildly complicated, the wiring scheme is pretty freaking simple that the neural net stuff is pretty basic.
I say that having never having taken a course and even reading a textbook. But still, these are simple. It is these pretty basic feedback loops repeated a gazillion times. That’s what it takes to have the mental fluidity and capacity to figure out the universe.
It also means that there’s another implication, which is that there are easy pickings. Things that are easy to figure out and then more complicated. Anyway, we’re getting away from the idea of g. Basically, g is some measure of mental resources.
We still don’t know enough about the brain to be able to go from the brains to look at some aspect of the brain’s anatomy and conclusively state that this will result in higher or lower intelligence they tried to look at Einstein’s brain, which was preserved.
I know they decided it wasn’t any bigger than normal, but it had a lot more connections. But any conclusions like that seems primitive and premature, so we should talk about the connection between IQ at least as it’s measured, and intelligence.
Jacobsen: Looking at what is being done and what has been commonly stated in people who spend their professional lives on this stuff is the actual adult intelligence scale or the WAIS is the gold standard. So, if you have a score on that test, that’s likely where your IQ stands.
Rosner: All right. Well, there’s no finding your true IQ because even the best IQ tests have a standard error measurement of at least half a standard deviation. The whole process is inherently just filled with opportunities for sloppiness and accuracy beyond the sloppiness and inaccuracy of the idea of IQ itself.
But when you mean the Wechsler is the gold standard, you mean it has been around for 100 years. This is the Wechsler you’re talking about. So, this is the fourth iteration. You have said that they’re working on the fifth generation, but each iteration has been tested on thousands of people and confirmed on thousands more and then constantly re-normed every few years.
So, it’s got a long history of being used to measure IQ and being as well evaluated for its ability to do that as any test, right?
Jacobsen: Yes. Which leads to another aspect of this paper and pencil tests are the way that they’re typically done are on electronic screens, but they’re generally the same format of just giving questions. Are there multiple-choice, true-false, or just arrange things in order?
You name it. Regardless, it’s still the fact that people were writing 10,000 years ago, so they could have made these things up. They may have been China on their civil service examinations four thousand years ago. So, it’s not like an original form of thinking. It’s pretty primitive.
Rosner: The idea is that IQ tests are still used. It strikes me as weird, at least in most aspects of the adult world. I can see kids being given IQ tests just to see if they need what academic help or enrichment they might need.
But even there, I just don’t see. For instance, my wife works at a high school and various kids do really well and other kids fucked up. I don’t see anybody here and nobody at that school. It’s a very liberal school, but I feel like they’re representative of schools in general.
At least by the time you get to high school, nobody is running to look at your IQ to see why you might be having problems with general school work. People just don’t think of that as a diagnostic or a source of information about somebody’s academic performance.
There’s still a lot of anxiety about tests like the SAT and the ACT, which can stand in for IQ tests. But nobody uses it like that. They’re just a credential to get to the college of your choice, you hope. Nobody looks at you when you get to thirty-four out of thirty-six on the ACT and says that’s the most important thing about that kid.
They’ll say a couple of things. One is, “That’ll help him or her get into college.” Then you think, “Yes, that kid’s pretty smart.” But the first thought is not, “We need to figure out how smart people are and that this test tells us that.”
So, Carole and I just started watching the show called Industry, which is about a bunch of interns at a trading house, financial enterprise, like a Lehman Brothers or a Goldman Sachs. One character is having her entry interview.
An interviewer says I’ve never seen anybody list their IQ on their resume before. And that’s just a quick little moment. But that line is in there to show that that kid is a heck of rube, like in over her head in terms of sophistication that anybody with any degree of sophistication would be able to know that her IQ doesn’t matter.
Nobody or no employer would give a shit about their IQ and no one would put it on a resume in a billion years. It’s not just past that point. Using IQ in the adult world is suspicious, it discredits. It’s like bragging about your cock size in mixed company.
But I could make the argument that that is a moral and a more helpful brag because somebody might believe you. That you would want that person to actually see your cock, where it’s a very rare person who could hear somebody brag about their IQ and want to see that IQ and have evidence of it.
Jacobsen: Is that in your experience?
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: Has that been your experience? Generally, people don’t care about your IQ?
Rosner: I had one girlfriend who liked me, perhaps specifically, because I was smart. She was a lunatic. Now, Carole likes that I’m smart, but not in an IQ-type way, she finds me goofy. Well, it’s a mixed thing. But she’s not blown away by my IQ.
She’s benefited from my confidence. My being able to stay and keep a job, a well-paying job in late night for 11 and a half years. She benefits from my understanding finance, but I find her unnecessarily skeptical of how smart I am.
I think she should be more impressed and should be less skeptical of what I say on a daily basis. It’s frustrating to me how much corroboration she needs for what I say, what I know is correct. I never hear the end of it when I say something that turns out not to be correct.
For instance, I said that to sell my mother-in-law’s house to pay for her care when she moves into senior living. What I didn’t know is that you get a stepped-up basis when a spouse dies, the surviving spouse receives the house tax-free at the value of what its value is when their spouse dies.
So, I thought you paid taxes on your original purchase price of the house 35, 40 years ago, 40 grand, but you only pay taxes on – my father-in-law died like 2010 and houses were already really expensive by then.
So, you have the stepped-up tax basis, which made it possible to sell the house and make enough money to take care of my mother-in-law. I got a lot of shit about – well not shit, but like Carole was basically saying, “See, it’s good that I don’t just take your word for it because shit like this would happen.”
Een though, by the time it was time to make the decision, we’d already learned about the stepped-up tax basis. We didn’t come close to making a bad decision. We had a lot of talks in the years before based on my bad understanding.
But it never became even close to a huge mistake anyway. Yes, IQ, it’s gotten some articles written about me, but they’re not adoring articles for the most part. They’re mostly the mix of “Yes, he’s really smart. He’s a weirdo.”
There’s a lot of schadenfreude in articles about high IQ people. They like an attractive angle for the writers. The natural angle is to show how fucked up people with the high IQs are.
Jacobsen: Salacious schadenfreude? Bit more of a salacious version of schadenfreude.
Rosner: It’s not exactly schadenfreude. It’s just happy with what you have because if you have this other thing, you think you might want this being a really smart thing. Look at this guy, he’s really smart and it hasn’t gotten him anything that you, the reader, would value.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, I’ve seen your American deceased artist, Bob Ross. He seems like a generous, warm, and kind person. Other people in your country are shitheads. So, what’s the benefit of a life lived as a generous, kind, and warm person compared to being a shithead?
Rick Rosner: First, I want to recommend a book on what makes somebody a shithead. There’s a book called Assholes: A Theory, I don’t know. It was written about 10 years ago. I think the guy – I don’t remember his name – wrote a sequel. I think also had assholes in the title.
But anyway, if you find Assholes: A Theory, you can also find the sequel, which deals specifically with Trump. According to this guy’s theory of assholes, which I agree with, an asshole is somebody who claims privileges that other people are decent enough not to claim.
Before everybody started learning how to use cell phones with good manners, back when everybody talked on cell phones instead of texting, assholes are people who would talk loudly on their phones in public after the time when most people would learn not to do that.
They’re taking the public space and occupying it with their loud voice. Exercising not a privilege, but they’re doing something that other people hesitate to do out of decency, cutting in line, getting into the ten items or less line with twenty five items, stealing a taxi from somebody when somebody else hails a taxi, then you run up and get in before they came.
All these are asshole moves. These are moves that most people don’t do because everybody likes living in a little Golden Rule world. We like the Golden Rule because it just seems to be the basis of so much ethical behavior.
There’s the big Golden Rule, which says, “Don’t kill people, don’t rape people, don’t steal all their shit.”
But I’d say that the little Golden Rule, because you wouldn’t like that. The little Golden Rule says, “Don’t even do a bunch of minor annoying things because you also wouldn’t like that.” So, everybody likes living in a world in which people aren’t total fucking assholes all the time.
It’s nice for everybody, but it leaves everybody vulnerable to assholes. Nobody knew how to fight Trump. We still don’t know how to fight Trump because he’s this rare person who stops at nothing.
We were soft targets of this behavior because you don’t find this level of indecency very often. Then fucking Trump, he exercised his huge indecency at the same time the Republicans as a whole party decided, “Well, it looks like we can get away with acting without decency.”
Even tens of millions of Evangelicals whose religion is based on decency decided that we can be bad in defense of a few moral stances that we think are paramount, like fighting abortion, getting judges in there that will fight abortion, that will overturn Roe v Wade, so, now, America is steeped in anxiety and misery.
The reason is that decent people engage in the big and little Golden Rule. That it’s nicer for everybody when everybody isn’t a fucking prick. So, anyway, your original question was, “What’s the benefit of being a decent person?”
One benefit is when everybody is a pretty decent person within reason. Everybody is fallible. Everybody fucks up. But when everybody strives to be decent and tries to minimize the amount of shittiness they’re engaged in, it’s nicer for everyone.
It’s probably not a zero sum game, where a world in which everybody is pretty decent probably feels better. The aggregate amount of happiness is probably higher than if some people were motherfuckers and got happiness from that at the expense of happiness in other people.
I’d say a utilitarian framework probably has people being pretty decent, up to the point where it gets ridiculous, where you don’t want to be like the Jains who walk around with like masks over their mouths, so they don’t accidentally kill insects by breathing them in.
Jacobsen: Yes. Cheesecloth.
Rosner: What?
Jacobsen: Cheesecloth.
Rosner: So, anyway, up to a point, probably, short of that point, so, that’s a huge benefit. Being able to go about your life, we’ve had decent presidents for the most part. Obama was too decent. He got played by the Republicans. But you didn’t have to follow politics every day to see what fucking new scary thing happened.
Unless, you’re a racist motherfucker, Obama’s presidency was a calming time. There were causes for anxiety under Bush, too. The collapse of the housing, the real estate bubble collapse, and the collapse of the economy caused a lot of misery.
That, he plus Cheney, he had them lying us into the Iraq war, which caused a lot of misery. But the man himself is a guy. It’ famously said he’s a guy you’d enjoy having a beer with, a friendly happy guy you’d like to be pals with.
So his presidency, even though it caused a lot of misery, it didn’t cause the fucking rancorous misery of Trump. Before Bush, Clinton, a very affable guy and not dangerous. Unless, you’re an intern. Then he might jizz on you.
Fucking before that George Bush Sr. was a very decent guy. Reagan started this whole wave of Republicans turning into the most horrible major U.S. political party in history. But the man himself was very charming and very comforting to have as well not comforting the liberals because we saw what he was up to.
But he was a very much a warm presence in the Oval Office. Even as he planted the seeds for the dismantling of democracy, we, usually, have a decent person in the White House. We, usually, have decent, at least until recently, near majority of conscientious political leaders.
There were always the racist fuckers down south, the George Wallace’s, but there were people, fucking Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior; Lyndon Johnson, was a prick. He was really good at playing power games.
But after the assassination of Kennedy and becoming president, he decided to play power games to usher in all of the Civil Rights Era. This motherfucker from the southern state decided to fucking lay it all on the line and passed Civil Rights legislation, which cost the Democrats the entire South.
Democrats used to be a casual and, maybe, not so casually racist political party that owned the South. I just saw the election map from 1960 when Kennedy narrowly beat Nixon and the entire fucking south, except for Florida, went to the Democrats.
That hasn’t happened since probably 1964 when the South said, “Fuck you, you just empowered… you just gave civil rights to all these black people.” They lost. The Democrats rarely win southern states ever since.
While Obama did pretty well in the whole country, he probably picked up some Southern states. I don’t know. But anyway, like basic human, widespread basic human, decency makes everybody feel good, it provides stability, safety.
Otherwise, you get the Purge. Purge is a series of thrillers/horror movies where a hellish America of the near future has said that like one day a year, for 12 hours, anything goes, nothing is illegal.
They figured this would get rid of a bunch of bad guys because you could just kill over something. I’ve never seen one of the movies, but I think that was the rationale behind the plot. But it’s nicer when shit isn’t the Purge. So, that’s where you get your decency back.
You get the decency you invest and more back when everybody is decent. It’s like the fucking universe. The more matter there is, the more information matter can exchange and the more precisely defined matter is.
It’s no coincidence that in a universe with ten to the 80th or 85th particles, gravitation is like 1/10 to the 40th, as strong as the other forces. Like the precision with which matter is defined is on a scale of one part in 10 to the 40th, which is the square root of the number of particles in the universe.
The more particles you have, the more precisely the interactions among all these particles can define all the matter in the universe. And you need precisely defined matter for shit like us, for order to emerge out of chaos. Similarly, the more people you have or decent, the more decency there is to go around and the more you can build from this order and stability. The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck both started in Good Will Hunting.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Time out. So, I want to talk about his celebrity wife. He had a quote about her. It’s one paragraph. So he goes, “We ended up at a bar where my wife was the bartender. I literally saw her across a crowded room and eight years and four kids later, that’s my life. I don’t know how else our paths would have crossed if that didn’t happen. The moral is that when you’re tired, suck it up and go to the bar because you might meet your wife.”
Rosner: I think because his wife is lovely. I wasn’t meaning to insult Matt Damon’s wife, daring to compare my wife to his wife. He just happened to be having to go pee at the same time that my wife did. I just didn’t want him to get hit by the shrapnel of me comparing like my wife to his celebrity wife. I mean, I don’t see how he would have been reasonably insulted, but I didn’t like the situation.
Jacobsen: Yes, it’s not like he’s famous…
Rosner: One time, I got caught saying shit about Robert Redford by Robert Redford. What happened was back in the 80s, I worked in a hotel. I was a bouncer in a bar disco that was in a hotel in Boulder, Colorado.
Redford’s kid, his daughter went to the University of Colorado. It was well known at the university that his daughter lived at Spanish Towers, which was one of the fancier apartments for students in Boulder.
Some shit happened where her roommate or her boyfriend was murdered. This other bouncer and I, it was late at night. The bar, it was hit. The bar had gotten slow and whenever it got slow. We would sometimes go to the kitchen, the hotel kitchen and see what food was available to be pilfered.
Like the bread things, those bread-ready things that go along with beef wellington. We would get those. So anyway, we’re walking through the hotel. We’re discussing that we’ve heard that Redford is staying at the hotel and we’re talking.
We’re like, “Why would he stay at this shitty hotel? This hotel is a shithole where he could stay at his daughter’s place, which is very nice. It’s Spanish Towers.” Just as we were walking down, we walked through the lobby.
Now, we’re walking down a hall to the kitchen and behind us somebody yells at us, “How does it feel? Caught you red handed!” We look back. We walk by a guy, just a regular guy wearing glasses. Now, the guy has opened up the doorway, stuck his head in, and is now making fun of us.
We realize; we just walked past Robert Redford while talking about Robert Redford, which made him very amused. He is like busting our balls about it. Oh, it’s hysterical. So, I have several dumb stories about saying dumb shit around celebrities.
Okay, so, we were talking about Good Will Hunting.
So, I like Good Will Hunting because Matt Damon, his character Will Hunting, is a world class smart guy, a native genius who’s a janitor at Harvard because he’s from South Boston, which is just this fucked up part of Boston.
Somehow, he uses his genius. He’s just so fucking smart that he uses it to get Minnie Driver, whom I love. She’s really cute. She’s got those super wide set of jaw bones. If Batman were a girl, she’d make a great Batman.
It’s one of the things that can make that during her era, could make you a star. This giant jaw line reads really well on camera. I think she’s super cute. Matt Damon got to get with her in the movie just from being smart.
There’s another movie, Real Genius, where geniuses at MIT and Caltech, some of them get to get with really cute girls or ladies just for being smart. I like that. Even though, it doesn’t really line up much with my experience.
I’ve got you with, maybe, one cute lady from being smart. Maybe, but she was also a lunatic, she was a runner. She would go running for about five miles. She’d come back all sweaty where I’d be waiting for her. She liked having sex all sweaty. I was okay with this because it was sex, but it was weird.
She got in a fight with my ex-stepsister, this girl, the sweaty girl. She wasn’t always sweaty. She was like 5’11”. My sisters is like 5’2”, but my sister’s like really good at fighting. So, eventually, there was a fight that ensued. They were roommates, I think. Anyway, the cops came.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with anything except that I don’t think Minnie Driver would get in a fight with my sister and the cops would have to be called. Nor would Minnie Driver want to have sex while covered with cold, cold sweat.
Anyway, my experience being really smart and getting with girls is that it’s just not as if I never got to get with Minnie Driver. So, I don’t find the movies that realistic. But I like them because I’d like to get all sorts of shit because I’m really smart.
But really smart, just doesn’t get you that much; unless, you do a lot of work to go with the really smart. Really smart, the applicability of my really smartness is limited in what I’ve done with it. For 12 years, I wrote jokes for Jimmy Kimmel, where everybody else was also really smart and funny.
My being the very smartest person at Jimmy Kimmel in terms of IQ did not translate into me being the very funniest person among the writers, say there are 12 writers. I’m about in the 35th percentile on a comedy writing standard, which still makes me world class in terms of being funny.
Because you have to be really fucking good to get one of those staff positions. But I know one of the things that probably pissed off my boss is that I described my skill level on a writing staff is equivalent to, maybe, Manu Ginóbili, who was a pretty, I think, durable sixth man in the NBA.
The sixth man is the guy who doesn’t start the game, but comes off the bench and gets you, maybe, 12 points, who isn’t the best, but is a reliable performer. But I don’t know basketball. So, I may have been overrating myself because the man had a long career.
Maybe, he was better than I thought he was. So, if my boss read that he would have been like, “Fuck you.” You’re more like a Kiki Vandeweghe. But who knows? But anyway, I was reliable, but not the very best. Not good for fucking Kobe or Michael Jordan or LeBron. When it comes to jokes.
So, I don’t know. I mean, it’s like in some ways being really smart is like being really pretty, and then going to Hollywood to try to build a career out of being really pretty. You find out that when everybody who’s really pretty comes to one town to make a career out of it.
That you’re fucking really pretty. You better have some other shit going on besides just that. I had just enough comedy shit going on in addition to the really smart and also just working really hard.
I’m not letting myself go home for the night until I turned in ten pages of material, which is an insane amount of fucking writing. You’re a fucking machine cranking out material. So, anyway, the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve talked about portrayals of genius, Matt Damon actually graduated from Harvard and he portrayed someone in Good Will Hunting.
Rick Rosner: Genius, who’s a janitor at Harvard. All right. First, let’s start with a Matt Damon story. I’ve never told before. Okay, so, my wife and I are at a very fancy wedding that’s just chock full of celebrities.
My wife, I’m walking with her to the bathroom. She’s in one of those boots like Biden has right now because she had surgery on some tendons in her ankle because she hikes a lot. So, she’s clumping along.
We’re in our wedding finery on the way to the bathroom. I say to my wife, “I’d give her a compliment.” I go. You see all these famous people here. I see their spouses. You compare quite favorably to these celebrity spouses. They’re not so hot. I’m just giving her a compliment.
My wife is pretty good looking. Then I turn around. I just happen to look behind me. I’m like, “Six feet behind us is Matt Damon, also walking to the bathroom”. I’m like, “Oh, fuck.” I’m like, “Jesus Christ. I hope I haven’t insulted Matt Damon because he’s a celebrity. He has a wife. here I am saying my wife compares favorably to the celebrity wives.”
I was freaking out or trying to figure out if my voice would have carried enough for Matt Damon to have heard, like me comparing a regular wife to celebrity wives. I felt bad about it. Yes, that’s the message. It’s not very good.
Jacobsen: It’s a terrible story. It’s hilarious.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No, I’m starting now. So, what do you think of a high range testing in so far as it measures intelligence?
Rick Rosner: Well, you just told me that a guy with a gripe against high range testing revealed the answers to like two dozen tests, or his answers at least. Two dozen or so high range tests as a protest to what he considers IQ inflation.
It’s just that in itself seems like an asshole move that developing a high range test and then sending it out into the world, and scoring it, and norming it, taking the scores of dozens of people and comparing that to their scores on other tests.
So, you get a good idea of what your test is. All that can take hundreds of hours and this guy just scuttles all that work. So, just because he doesn’t agree with this, he thinks – this guy you told me about – that the scores people get on high range tests or he thinks they’re too easy for the scores they give.
But if you take one of these tests, do well, and you score 170, this guy says, “Well, that’s not really a 170, maybe, you’re at 160 or 150. Therefore, I’m going to fuck up all these dozens of tests. Thousands of hours and people’s work.” That guy just seems like a fucking dick.
People might be more eccentric, but I don’t know if that would be the case. But you could also argue that in Aspergery people, they don’t follow norms or have many social graces. Maybe, this is an expression of social gracelessness.
But I don’t know. I don’t know if I buy that either. I don’t think that high IQ people are necessarily, on average, more dickish than not super high IQ people. But this guy is certainly a fucking dick about this issue.
These high range tests of which I’ve taken. I have three dozen give you inflated scores. I’d say that in general not. With regard to the practice effect, maybe, if you go in cold taking one of these high range tests, I don’t think it’s going to give you an inflated score because you really don’t know what you’re stepping into if you’ve never taken one of these tests before.
They’re hard. Now if you’ve taken a bunch of them, as I have, what it takes in terms of effort, a lot of people will take a look at the high range test that might have 30 problems. Say that I’ve done pretty well on a regular range IQ test, you’re pretty decent, maybe score a 140 on it, on a test you were given as a kid.
You might be good at puzzles. So, you see one of these thirty item high range IQ tests, let’s say, measures, or claims to measure, from 140 to 170.
So, you go through it once. Right off the bat, you think the answers to three of the early problems, because most of these tests are arranged from easier problems to the hardest problems. So, you get three off the bat. It takes like ten minutes and then you’re like, “Okay, maybe, I should try this test.”
You sit down for half an hour, 40 minutes, maybe get five others. You’re pretty confident about the answers to five other problems. Then, maybe, that encourages you to spend another two hours and, maybe, get the answers to four other problems.
Now, you’re up to, maybe, 12 items correct, or you think you have the answers to 12 items, I assume. You spend another three or four hours across a couple of days, a couple evenings. Maybe, you work out what you think are plausible, what you think are plausible answers, to, maybe, two or three more problems and then just the rest of it.
It’s just you. You’re like, “Well, I’ve spent almost 10 hours on this test so far.” You spend another couple hours taking wild guesses, so you get half an idea what the problem is about. And if it’s multiple choice, you’re just going to go ahead and take a wild guess at the other 16 problems that you haven’t figured out the answer to, for sure.
If it’s not multiple choice, you’re still going to get sick of it. After a dozen hours, you are going to take wild guesses. You’re going to be confident in your answers to maybe a dozen problems. You’re going to take educated guesses on another few problems, maybe wild guesses on the field.
After spending 14, 15 hours at the most on it, you turn it in and you get your score back. You get like eleven problems correct. That gets you a high score at 151, 152. It’s not unreasonable. What you don’t know as a one time pretty smart test taker is what it would take to get instead of eleven out of thirty to get twenty-four out of thirty, which would be another fucking sixty hours, at least, of sitting there trying different angles on these problems, maybe, it’s a reference heavy book.
A heavy IQ test looking up obscure definitions of some of the words and trying to match up the most obscure definitions. It would take a lot of work.
Let’s say, you’ve got a decent job, where you’ve got a good job. You make $3,000 a week. You take home in the low six figures. Maybe, you’re a lawyer. Maybe, you’re an engineer. You make like $140,000 a year.
It would seem weird to you to spend 60 hours or 70 hours, almost two full weeks of work on this test. If you spend two full weeks of work, at work, you earn $5,500, and here you are doing all this work for free, so, a lot of competent people are going to not know it takes that effort.
It is really minimizing the effort it takes on some of these tests. The test I’m working on currently I’ve been a little lazy with it, but I’d say that I’ve got pushing a hundred hours on it. Really, to do the very best job, which should be, at least, another twenty hours more, I don’t know if I’ll do that because it has got a deadline.
But given the situation with these tests, for most people, it’s going to give a pretty reasonable IQ score to the extent that you believe in IQ at all for people like me who know what it takes. On some of these tests, I’ve probably spent close to two hundred hours, which is crazy.
But knowing that that’s what you have to do, to do really well, and having the confidence that if you think of these problems long enough, you might get the answers to some of these things that; you could argue that by virtue of spending so much time on these tests that I’m outperforming my natural, what you might think would be my natural, I.Q.
It is just by sheer waste, just force of spending time and coming up with 100 different angles on a problem, until you find one that works, you can make the argument. Yes, there’s a practice effect like that.
I’ve learned that it takes a huge amount of effort. I’ve learned the tropes, the areas that plague some of these tests go into. It’s not uncommon to find items on these tests that do something with Pi because Pi is an endless succession of digits.
To some extent you can argue that they’re random, so, you can do something with a set of random digits. That’s also a famous number. So, Pi shows up not rarely on these tests. I know that from having taken a bunch of these tests.
Also, by figuring how the people who write the tests are thinking, you think, “Well, all right, Pi is a famous irrational number. What are some other famous irrational numbers? Square root of 2. 1/Pi. Pi divided by four. What else?”
If you look around, you can probably find sequences on a lot of these tests that fit the bill that way. I know that. So, I have some background in this where I have some things I can try if there’s a sequence problem on a test.
And to that extent, I’ve got knowledge that, maybe, lets me play above my ability level to some extent. Does that mean because there are eight guys in the world who might get a 190 on a test, will they only deserve a 179? That this fucker should wreck everybody’s work?
It’s a harmless thing. I mean, what’s the harm? The societal harm in me saying that I’ve got an IQ in the 190s based on scores I’ve been given on these tests, but that, maybe, I only have a score in the 180s. Why does this fucking V for Vendetta vigilante guy get to wreck everybody’s work?
He’s addressing a societal ill that just doesn’t exist. Even if there were a bunch of people going around and there, might be a few hundred people going around saying their IQ is such and such on based on some high range test they took, there’s no societal ill, except for, maybe, the people who took the tests and are bragging about their scores because they’re not going to get laid out of this, which is what some of them want.
They’re just going to creep a bunch of people out. But they have this credential that they’re compelled to share with people in the hopes that somebody will be impressed and nobody’s going to be impressed. They’ll just think they’re a fucking creepy weirdo.
So, the harm is in the creepy. It’s the creepy weirdos who are being harmed, not society. So, with that, I think we can wrap this up. I mean, not everybody is a creepy weirdo. A lot of people might be sad weirdos, lonely weirdos.
Some people might be like super gifted, like non-weirdos who are just grew up in the Appalachians and weren’t exposed enough to normal society. Maybe, they grew up in a Hillbilly Elegy situation.
They happened to be super smart. They don’t realize that it’s creepy to be interested in IQ. They just like taking the test because they like solving puzzles. So, it’s possible to just be a naive bragger about one’s own IQ without being a weirdo about it just because you haven’t learned any better. Fucking Good Will Hunting, growing up in South Boston, getting in fights, picking up Harvard girls, doesn’t know any better, he’s a janitor at Harvard.
He solves the problem, slept on the blackboards at night in between cleaning toilets. Not a real character by the way. It’s fucking a bad thing. But he won an Oscar along with a fucking Affleck for writing a screenplay. So, good job for everybody.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: It’s the worst day ever again.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, is it at 9/11 levels, yet?
Rosner: Yes, we have a 9/11 every day.
Jacobsen: What’s the conservative reaction to it?
Rosner: They think we’re babies for wearing masks and being concerned and opening up the schools. They think it’s tyranny to make people not do stuff and to shut stuff down.
Jacobsen: For almost 3,000 people that have died every day…
Rosner: Who’ve died from it?
Jacobsen: What’s the number of people who have had some physical or mental decline from it?
Rosner: So what, 15 million Americans are known to have or confirmed to have had it and in estimates what the multiplier for the number of people who’ve actually had it is. Like Trump was bragging that, maybe, 15% of the population has had it, he’s thinking that that’s some achievement.
But anyway, conservatively, say 20 million Americans have had it, which is certainly an underestimate. 20 percent of people are who’ve had it. 20% is the number they think might suffer lasting mental debilitation. So, that’s 4 million Americans who might have their brains fucked up from it, which is 1.2% of the whole population.
Jacobsen: How rich is the denial over there?
Rosner: Well, it’s huge. So, nobody puts it in the right perspective, which is roughly one American in a thousand has died from it. Right now, it’s the leading cause of death. But 3,000 people, close to 3,000 people a day might be dying from it.
But 5,000 people die from other stuff every day. The other stuff is the end of life stuff, the cancers and the heart disease and all of that. So, both sides could probably use some perspective, but certainly the denier side is much more stupid and inaccurate in its denial of what’s going on.
The deal is, it’s a deadly thing. It will certainly overtake a World War Two to become the third leading, third deadliest event, in U.S. history. But the other deadliest events, the Spanish Flu and the Civil War, happened when the US population was a lot smaller.
So, the percent killed by the other events was much higher. I’m thinking, the population under Spanish Flu was probably a third of what America is today and probably in the Civil War, it was the fourth or fifth.
So, you’re looking at more than one percent of the population being killed in each case or at least in the Civil War. then almost a percent dying in Spanish Flu. Two thirds compared to, by the time we’re done with this will be, as many as one fifth of one percent, which is a lot, and probably one in 100 seniors killed by it, which is just some horrible shit.
But certainly not as devastating as 1918. But neither should be as devastating as 1918. It’s one hundred years later, lifespans are double what they were in 1918. We shouldn’t have one percent of the population die and losing half a million people to this.
It isn’t acceptable. It’s a staggering number of U.S. dead compared to 553 Covid dead in South Korea. They have 1/80th the per capita death rate. It’s almost entirely because they have competent leadership. We have Trump, who’s just one of the most stupid and evil guys in history.
Jacobsen: What is the state of affairs in terms of white Evangelical America? What is this disease? It’s a virus. What is the reaction to it?
Rosner: The white Evangelicals have been tenderized for forty years, have been mobilized and fed bullshit both from their media and from their leaders, from their pastors and from their communities that has left them belligerent, uninformed, and stupid.
They’ve been preyed on and they’ve allowed themselves to be preyed on. They’ve allowed themselves to embrace denial of reality in the service of some political agenda. The anti-abortion stuff that they’ve allowed themselves to be told of outweighs everything else.
So, they’re both the perpetrators, victims of their horribleness. They should be the most charitable to fellow human beings in America because of the obligations of their religion. Instead, they’re some of the biggest assholes in America.
That won’t be fixable until, at the very least, we fix our media and until enough time goes by that this generation of horrible Evangelicals is supplanted by, one would hope, their kids, who are to a large extent, one would hope, are just as disgusted with the hypocrisy of their parents as the rest of America is.
I’m sure it’s not maybe 40% of their kids are disgusted and won’t embrace their religion or their flavor of denial.
Jacobsen: Do you think fundamentally their whole theology is just untenable? The way they live their lives, the way they preach, the way that they have this male worship of their pastor, things like this.
Rosner: Well, I mean, in the longer term, all of us lie on the ash heap of history. We all die. We all become immaterial. History doesn’t care about us. Our ideals may or may not be carried forward. Certainly, their ideals won’t be carried forward because, yes, what they believe and how they act is too contradictory. But that becomes true for us all a little, just becomes true or faster for those assholes.
Jacobsen: The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the most ridiculous thing you have done, a single thing, not necessarily repeatedly?
Rick Rosner: Going back to high school at age 26 and spending a full year as a high school senior to have a place to think, that that would be a good place to think about the universe. That’s pretty stupid. In retrospect, suing Who Wants to be a Millionaire? was pretty pointless. Though, at the time, I really wanted to prevail.
But having the thinking that I had a chance to prevail, well, I did have a chance to prevail. But the chance was much smaller than I thought. At every step of the process, I thought I had, maybe, a one third chance of things going my way.
But given the decisions that went against me, I’d say that the aggregate probability or the individual probability of any of those decisions going my way must have been lower. If there were five separate points in which I had a one third chance of prevailing, then my chances of not prevailing at some point would have been 32 over 343, which meant that I would have only a one in seven and a half chance of not eventually getting quiz show justice, which I did not.
So my odds of prevailing must have been much lower. Maybe like one seventh or one eighth of each point. If I’d played it differently, maybe, I could have prevailed. For instance, the millionaire only received one letter complaining from a viewer complaining that my question was flawed.
If I’d realized, and if I thought about, I could have contacted a bunch of people to write in so that they would have received, maybe, 15 letters from all across the country saying the question was factually flawed, which, maybe, they would have felt was more persuasive.
That was, maybe, the main thing that I didn’t do right. If I threatened them with a legal action from the word “go,” maybe, because I started off being very nice with them, thanking them for having me on their show, who cares?
I still do this, but I don’t care to talk about it further to waste your time at this point. Anyway, that turned out to be pretty pointless.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When you imagine a good president, one of the greats, a good president, what is decorum for them? What should be their behaviour?
Rick Rosner: All right. You’ve asked… there’s an assumption in there that there’s ever been a good president. If you really look at the presidents one by one, even the best presidents, they had huge fucking flaws.
Washington owned a shitload of slaves. Didn’t none of the early presidents do anything to fix the slavery situation? Lincoln, while one of our emotionally deepest presidents, presided over the greatest slaughter of Americans in history.
I don’t think anybody wouldn’t argue that he had no choice. But still, he was president while 650,000 Americans were killed in the war. FDR, he got us out of the Depression kinda because what really got us out of the depression was World War Two.
He ignored that the Jews were being slaughtered in Germany. I mean even the best presidents are shitty in a lot of ways. Obama has been our most decorous president, perhaps in my lifetime, but that’s wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him to be.
He should have been more feisty and combative because he got played for years by the Republicans. He kept wanting to make deals with them and work with them, and they just wanted to fuck him up whenever they could.
So, he didn’t get as much done as a more angry, confrontational president would have. He let us just slide straight into Trump. He didn’t announce that Trump was being investigated for the Russians who were all over the election of helping Trump.
He didn’t announce this. If Obama did turn it into a partisan issue, and Obama didn’t because everybody thought that Hillary would get elected… anyway, what was the question? What makes a good president?
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: Obama is known for his empathy. I think that’s probably the biggest element of decorum. Once you get to a basic level of just non-animal behavior like Trump, occasionally, less so as President, in his past, he had Elvis moments where somebody would come to him with a charitable request.
Trump would occasionally say, “Okay, somebody whose plight would strike my fancy.” But that doesn’t really add to any greatness to him as president, because he’s an asshole 24/7, regardless of the occasional acts of mercy.
He pardoned some deserving people at the behest of Kanye and Kim Kardashian. But that small gesture does nothing to clean him up as president. So, you need to start with a basic decency. And then beyond that, you achieve greatness in emotional areas by actually and clearly feeling empathy for people.
There are all sorts of instances of Obama convincingly demonstrating sympathy and empathy. You get that same feeling from Lincoln that he was really suffering along with the country. You get the idea, JFK from certain photos, and I don’t know what else, but you get the idea that JFK really, really took the presidency to heart, that he really agonized over the responsibilities of president.
Now, at the same time, he had a fuck room in the basement of the White House for banging people he wasn’t married to. Also, he was all jacked up on drugs because he was super sick. So, he was on this. For a while, he was on speed.
He was getting injected with by this doctor nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, who is, basically, just shooting people full of speed. B vitamins, but the B vitamins didn’t make you feel good. That’s what he told you made you feel good, but it was really the fucking meth.
But really the ability to demonstrate empathy, sympathy, kindness is what it takes, Jimmy Carter was a very unpopular president and is still loved by a lot of hyper conservatives, but is also beloved and is pretty much regarded as the president who’s had the greatest ever post-presidency.
Because he’s just behaved with decency and charity. He was a fairly young man when he left the presidency. So, he’s like 93 or 94 now. So, that means he was born in 1926 and he left the presidency in 1980. So, he was around 54 years old.
For 40 years, for one thing, most presidents don’t live 40 years after they leave office, but he’s lived for 40 years and he spent that those 40 years being just an example of a charitable decent, Sunday school teacher, the builder of homes for humanity.
Even he’s there, all these pictures of him, like beat to shit by the bike, by being a carpenter, at fucking 94 years old, being a construction worker isn’t for somebody in his 90s. He’ll give himself a bullet. He’ll get hit with something he’s working with and will give him a massive black eye. He doesn’t give a fuck. He just keeps working. That makes him saintly. So, there you go.
Bush too, you have to think back, remember what an asshole he was, a disaster he was as president because he’s just kept very quiet in the 12 years since he’s been president. He’s painted cute pup paint. He paints doggies.
So, not being an asshole goes a long way. Most presidents are rehabilitated in the public’s mind as they forget what pissed them off about them as president. That’s happened probably with every single president.
I’m hoping it won’t happen with Trump because he’ll just keep reminding everybody what a fucking asshole he is. I mean, eventually, he’ll die and then people may forget. I mean, he did so much terrible stuff, but nobody can keep it all in their minds at once.
Some day, some historians will enumerate every single act of dickedness and every lie and every scam. He’s already at 25,000 public lies while being president. When everything is tallied, everything he did, it could amount to close to 50,000 acts of shittyness.
Jacobsen: So there you go. Wow.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Rational and irrational, but all rooted in economic and psychological considerations that all, whether there square or not, they can explain why we do what we do.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And so, what’s the separation?
Rosner: Drained by biology and sentimentality and economics. But all that is gonna change in terms of consciousness. When consciousness becomes possible to replicate, preserve consciousness outside of a biological body or create consciousness, it is something that didn’t start biological.
Really, that’s all I have to say in this segment is that everything changes when consciousness itself becomes an independently existing thing. It opens up a bunch of questions. Some of these questions are being addressed and have been addressed, mostly stupidly and superficially by science fiction. But it is possible to have a reasonable discussion about what is going to happen.
It will become possible to assign value both to society, in terms of dollars to consciousness of various types, various magnitudes of consciousness. It also becomes highly likely that consciousness will be cheapened. That once it becomes commodified, then it’ll be easier to think of it in certain contexts as garbage. That’s it. That’s our segment for right now.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m looking at this as Canadian overall. Trump, basically, is just losing day after day after day.
Rick Rosner: Here’s what everybody has concluded: Nobody believes he has any chance of winning. But he’s a prick, can’t stand losing, and also he’s made a sixth of a billion dollars in contributions since the election from his followers whom he’s telling that he needs their money to fight to remain president for another four years.
This is just a cynical means of exploiting the followers, when you donate to him, for him, to fight to overturn the election results. The fine print says he can spend the money how ever he wants including personal expenses. So, it is just a scam to suck money out of people.
And as more and more people realize that he’s got no chance of winning, the only people still making noise about it is just what’s that same principle that the worse he gets, the worse the cause gets, the lower the bar is for people deserting the cause.
This is leaving only people under the lower and lower bar that the greasy scum at the bottom of the barrel. So, now ,you only have the craziest and slimiest people fighting for Trump. You got this Sydney. What’s her name.
Jacobsen: Powell?
Rosner: That’s an actor. Powell, yes. She’s a crazy piece of crap. Whatever her name is, Ellis and Rudy Giuliani. They’re all just super confident and just keeping the grift going for as long as possible. But it is bad because they keep drifting; the longer they keep tens of millions of yahoos agitated and in a state of thinking that Trump is going to prevail.
Trump’s people threaten violence against people who dare to question him. One of Trump’s lawyers, the guy who headed the US cyber security agency, whom Trump fired after the guy said the election was clean.
One of Trump’s lawyers said that guy should be drawn and quartered, and then hanged. Just execute and shit like that, it just leads to just rancour. His people continuing to be dangerous assholes. But we only have less than 50 days.
There’s been news that somebody out of the White House is trying, was trying, to sell presidential pardons for money. It looks like he’s going to be as shitty as he could possibly be. He’s not going to behave with any grace or decency.
In the last 50 days, the best hope for him is that he’s just so sick of being president that he doesn’t work very hard at doing the shitty things that he could do. He doesn’t do any of the presidential things he could do.
He hasn’t really addressed COVID except for trying to take credit for the vaccine. He hasn’t held a COVID briefing in nearly six months. Even though, today was the worst day ever for U.S. COVID deaths.
The second worst day ever for new cases. So, it is continuing to explode, but he couldn’t give a shit. That’s about it.
Biden doesn’t have to. Biden’s behaving strategically in looking like appointing or announcing, who his new cabinet’s going to be and just behaving like a president should behave. But Trump is making it easy for Biden to do that by behaving like the biggest asshole ever. All Biden has to do is just do shit that any reasonable confident person in his position would do.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, I’m in the tub today. Under lockdown, baths in the tub are still something you can take. My wife takes a lot of baths, and then I use the water before it cools down. I was thinking about how in America we tend to warehouse our old, which has been part of the Covid problem.
Because when Covid gets loose in a senior living center then it devastates roughly 80 percent of the US Covid deaths have been among people 65 and older. I was thinking about how other cultures treat their old differently. Treatment of old people varies widely.
But in the US, if we have the money or if the grandparents have the money, enough money to get stuck in senior living, then that’s probably where they’ll go. I was thinking about, is this a selfishness problem among people who aren’t old?
Because old people they take a lot of attending. They’re not as young; they can’t deal with the tech and they don’t. Anyway, my theory is – I ran it by Carol, who said, “It’s so obvious as to not be a theory.” But she says that about a lot of my shit.
I’ll tell her like most of my jokes are just, “Meh.” Sometimes, I’ll come up with a pretty good one and I’ll run it by her. Often, I’ll get from Carol, “Yes, but anybody could have come up with that joke.” That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad joke.
Not everybody or anybody did, I came up with it. Just because it is made up of familiar components doesn’t mean that it’s not a good joke, so, anyway, my idea is that now compared to 50 years ago. We all suffer from a time crunch because ‘me time’ has become so much more precious than ‘we time.’
Deal is, now, everything’s awesome. Entertainment is awesome. Personalized information feed via social media is awesome. It takes up a lot of time and it’s great, relatively. We want to spend as much time as possible doing that instead of anything else.
So, anything like dealing with an oldie that takes away from that. This is resented, makes us feel time pressure. You look back at the 70s when pretty much everything sucked, except for sex. Back then, sex was only for cool people.
So, people had all these hours of sex. So, it was when your life is filled with just sitting around vaguely bored and resentful. It might be possible for you to be more altruistic because the time you’re sacrificing isn’t worth as much.
And that’s the theory. I threw it up on Twitter and there actually only one guy who called me out saying, “No.” Because if your theory were true, it would be true across all nations, since all nations have the same tech and the US is more selfish than a lot of other nations. I go, “Okay, yes, I acknowledged that there are other reasons.”
He threw some of those reasons. We’ve talked about these reasons. The American mythos of rugged individualism. I was thinking about the Evangelicals, the politicization of Evangelicals, which has been going on for 40 years. The deal is, in order to make Evangelicals a useful political tool, you have to divorce Christians from Christian values.
And the way it has been done is to tie political action to Christian things that are made to seem as if they overwhelm anything else, that if the whole nation is going to hell, then the ends justify the means. You can elect the most godless president we’ve ever had if he’s doing things in the service of saving the country from going to hell and also saving America from aborted babies.
The United States is sinking into depravity and abortion means that any normal everyday morality or everyday moral considerations have to take a backseat to fighting those things politically. That’s the jujitsu that’s been done on Evangelicals.
That you have to forget any moral qualms you have. It has been freeing that you can go ahead and be a fucking immoral dick if you’re working for a greater or a more desperate morality.
There’s that, there’s the fear, the selling of the idea that any collective action is socialism or communism or is opening the door to such that anything other than unfettered capitalism, that unfettered capitalism allows all Americans to discover their greatness through capitalistic struggle and entrepreneurial struggle.
Anything that eases Americans away is fucking socialism and is stealing my tax dollars for people who don’t deserve it because they don’t have gumption. It’s an old tune, but it’s been played very successfully, recently.
To underpin the thesis of this thing, which is that Americans are fucking selfish now, I would say that more Americans than ever before, more people voted for Trump. Seventy-four million people that have ever voted for any other candidate who has lost a presidential election by probably 10 million votes.
A lot of people voted for a guy who’s obviously a corrupt, do nothing, incompetent, lying asshole. That speaks to an America that’s willing to be lied to, manipulated. Because it somehow aligns with they’ve been taught to believe is their self-interest.
That’s pretty much it beyond the things like the ongoing eroding of the institutions that were more collective, that had more focus than even industry. Corporations back in the 1950s when CEOs made only 20 times what the average worker as opposed to a thousand times.
But the head of Disney making 12 million bucks per year. Corporations used to exist for the betterment of or used to care about their workers. Used to, I thought they were bringing good products for the improvement of life, American life in general.
I’m sure there was always some craven capitalistic considerations. But they weren’t as the shift has been away from workers and towards management owners and stockholders. We’ve talked about that. I mean, everybody knows that.
The loss of religion is something that you could look to for daily guidance, moral guidance. The loss of things like the Boy Scouts to cynicism and there being better things to do and more entertaining things to do as a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old than going on camp-outs. Also, the molestation there. We’ve talked about that. Anyway, all that we’ve talked about before.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, they’re in like a lawsuit that may lead to bankruptcy, too.
Rosner: Yes. I was a Boy Scout for half a second. I was a Webelos, which is in between Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts for like two years. I regret that I didn’t stick it out and become a fucking Eagle Scout. There’s still merit in being guided through a multi-year program of developing some knowledge and expertise in a number of different fields, which is really what the Boy Scouts are about.
They picked a bunch of meritorious areas to learn. Every time you learn enough or do enough in that area, then you get a patch to put on your sash. When you get enough patches for your sash, you can become an Eagle Scout. Some excellent people have been Eagle Scouts. I know more. I mean, maybe, it’s still going in some areas, but, I think, it would be a rare and a weird thing to be an Eagle Scout. Age 17 now, that’s all I got on this.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think the end point, the eventual end point, is, at some point, going to be the death of theology? Because it seems like we’re seeing that in real time.
Rick Rosner: The end point of theology, do you think that science will always just kill theology dead? Is that what you’re asking?
Jacobsen: Asymptotically kill it.
Rosner: Yes. I would, in the manner of presidential candidates at a debate. We are not going to exactly answer that question when I answer a different question, which is: I don’t think that science will kill humanity dead, kill human values. In fact, you’ve been working on this yourself.
We’ve been working on it together. But under IC consciousness is an unavoidable, not uncommon thing. It is going to arise; unless, it is specially constrained. Statistically, it is going to arise. At this point, we only know linear consciousness.
That is, consciousness that exists in a being. We can imagine it existing in an engineered being, though we’ve only seen it so far in evolved beings. But regardless whether evolved or engineered in a being who exists, who lives across linear time for us, one-dimensional time, it is possible to speculate that you could at least engineer universes, designer universes. that have other than three spatial dimensions.
You need causality, which tends to really lock into a linear time. But it is possible to imagine you could develop other kinds of causality. For instance, there’s a pretty good science fiction comedy called Galaxy Quest, have you seen it?
Jacobsen: What is it called?
Rosner: Galaxy Quest.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: All right. So, if you haven’t seen it, it is, for people who might be listening or reading this, who haven’t seen it. It is about the cast of a show exactly like Star Trek.
Jacobsen: This is with Tim Allen.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: I love that show.
Rosner: And it is like 10 or 15 years old, you’ve seen it, right?
Jacobsen: Yes. It is a decent and funny show.
Rosner: It is a great to good movie. I, personally, don’t like Star Trek very much, but I love this movie. It is the cast of Star Trek. It is like 15 years after Star Trek has been canceled and the cast pretty much subsists on going to Comic-Con to fan-cons, signing autographs for 5 bucks an autograph and shit like that. They end up being basically kidnapped by an alien race that’s in a war with a more powerful alien race. The alien race that grabs the Star Trek crew has intercepted broadcasts of Star Trek and misunderstood those broadcasts to be the truth instead of fiction, and has grabbed this crew to pilot their ship against this great enemy. Shit ensues from there. The whole point of it is, because I’ve now forgotten the point I was trying to make… but yes, they’ve got a device, the aliens have this device that has like an eight-second reset.
But if you deploy this little time bomb, it’ll take you back to eight seconds in the past. So, anything that’s disastrous; if it took less than eight seconds, you have a shot at rectifying it. I could imagine that you could engineer a world that has an eight-second reset. So, time wouldn’t be perfectly linear because you’d always be able to like simulate, if you can reset eight seconds back into the past whenever you want. Basically, you’re pushing forward a simulation and checking out different little eight second futures. It doesn’t become set in stone. Until, you let it become. So, I’m reading another book by Lisa Barrett, who wrote How Emotions Are Made, called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain. Her area is brain science.
Maybe, it is that the brain is just mostly predicted. The brain helps your body get ready for what happens next, both near next and slightly more later next. But if what’s going to happen, you can budget your bottle your physical resources better down to knowing how traffic life works, not to step in front of a car. You’ve managed your body better than somebody who steps in front of a car. But it is possible to imagine a type of a resettable simulation always running a simulated future. Until, you let that future become an actual thing that happens based on having your brain or your information processor having better and better predictive ability, a better ability to model and simulate the future. So, it is possible to imagine that taken to an extreme, that such an extreme that the time doesn’t work the way we experience it now.
I don’t know how hard it would be to work out how living in a flexible future would really work. But if you thought about it, and if you could have a novelist could figure it out, obviously, we don’t have that power over our world. You could certainly engineer a world like that within a video game, where you’ve got that constant eight-second reset. So, time would function somewhat differently. But anyway, that was a long digression to get back to. It is hard to imagine a time like on other planets where conscious beings have evolved working in universes that aren’t engineered and planets where shit it engineered. It seems unlikely that you’d get creatures, conscious beings that don’t have the same existential issues that we do.
They live linearly. They have all the issues of being evolved beings or as technology gets there, being engineered beings with all the issues that we have with mortality, scarcity, morality. So, it is possible to imagine entire galaxies and universes where most of the beings within that universe are dealing with the same root existential philosophical moral issues. Because everybody’s pretty much made of the same shit, existing under the same physical constraints created by the same evolutionary and then engineered forces. So, as people who want to look up the shit we’ve talked about, we’ve talked about how morality is inescapable in an existent world. By tautology, an existent world is a world that can exist. So, you’re going to have morality, which you can also call humanity, though the simple practice of morality in the future will be less and less human.
But the issues behind existence will still be there. We’ll need address a lot of instances via a moral system, which, as we’ve discussed, are entwined with the preservation of order. The freedom to go about your life in a world that has enough stability that you’re not constantly struggling to survive or struggling not to die, constantly cowering in fear of death. To get back to the original question, will theology survive? Well, it survives less well than – well, it depends on what you call theology. But we could call it the creation of explanations for why the world is. The imagining of divine beings and divine forces with these imaginings being imagined before humanity or whatever other species is doing it, has the science to explain the world. It makes sense that theology generally predates science.
And then once science comes along, it really strips theology bare. You’re left with having to link the remains of theology to arguments about morality that arise consistent with the principles of existence. That morality is tied to order, tied to the collective good, the right that the conscious beings have to go about their business unmolested by overwhelming chaos, the right to order, basically. That’s an end place. Though you can take it a little farther and you can always look for theology at the very edges of what you’ve talked about with the God of the gaps, where God is left, where the possibility of God still exists – where science has not got to yet.
Jacobsen: Yes. I would take it as a closing window or door that never entirely can close. But as you get the evidence to kind of substantiate hypotheses and theories, to get mathematical principles, you close that door by bigger and bigger motions while never entirely closing it. Yet as that door closes, the holding of that position becomes less and less reasonable at a faster and faster pace.
Rosner: Except that there’s no such thing as absolute proof in the world. I mean, some people might argue that we will eventually find absolute proof. But most people don’t believe that. Especially most people who are kind of scientifically and mathematically educated, everybody without necessarily understanding mathematical or logical proofs or understand that they prove that you can’t prove shit, basically. Well, that’s the lesson of math and science. In the near future, we’ll come up with pretty decent arguments. I think you and I already have some of them on why existence has to exist. But those aren’t bullet proof arguments that can exist in a self contained way, and then in an absolutely irrefutable way. That still leaves room well, less and less room, but still always some room for the kindness of existence. There are many aspects of existence that are unkind.
The necessarily finite length of existence is like a bummer. But you can argue that the nature of things down to the very fucking… however deep you can go into the nature of things that this nature of things allows for any existence, which in turn allows for the existence of universes of any possible size, is a kindness that’s built into existence and even some tricky metaphysics beyond existence. If that metaphysics can even exist or that may be a spurious thing, that you need existence for… you can’t have the metaphysics without the existence. That’s a long standing, I would think, argument. Things like numbers with their platonic, perfect existence to those things. Are those things more existing than the everyday world and its sloppiness? And I’d argue that, “No, those perfect numbers are an artifact of existence rather than the other way around.” But at this point, I realize I’m talking shit and I reached the point where I’ve confused myself. Unless, you’ve got questions or things to add.
Jacobsen: Yes. When I think about it, I mean the idea of numbers and even colors and presentation as some other place with qualities and being platonic. If you think about it a bit more the argument is basically for some other metaphysical realm, that represents them either as kind of a mini map or is out there, and then you make your axis.
Rosner: Just waiting to be explored by like fleshy beings.
Jacobsen: Now, the people who tend to argue this way… So, taking a step back before taking a position, people who argue this way they are typically arguing either for Heidegger’s being or the transcendent in some way in kind of a traditional religious sense or the neo Platonists. that they’re making the same kind of arguments with mathematical objects or objects out there. Yet, they would be the individuals who would probably try to make human beings special in some way. We have this ability to access the space. Aren’t we special? And it seems the basis that we had with this whole issue that animals don’t have souls. So the justifying animal cruelty. I think about it a bit more, the implication would be that computers that do or are able to produce color and representation computation, to have no sense even.
They would be arguing what they are doing; that is, in and of itself, having a qualia in modern computers and, basically, somehow, being metaphysical not necessarily objects, but metaphysical and their operations as well. Yet, they probably wouldn’t want to make that kind of claim. But that’s the implication. Because basically, you just have a natural material object through time producing representations of both the world that it happens to be in or even imaginary things. They’re based out of those base elements that are already present from that experience. So, nothing’s ever truly evidence less. So, I would probably make the argument that it is the negation of this whole idea of some other transcendent realm, because the things that are being processed about the world are merely contained in the world. It is not jumping outside of it. If we’re assuming that about computers, we can assume about ourselves because we are built in it. Similarly, your remarks about the finitude of things, the finitude of math, of numbers that are given.
Rosner: Numbers to have infinities. Like the counting numbers that that like three point zero with an infinity of zeros. When we think we can imagine things that have infinite precision and we can do operations with numbers that have infinite precision doesn’t mean that there are actual infinities. It just means that we can come up with logical mathematical systems that assume infinity.
Jacobsen: So I would argue this is a relativity thing. In that, the infinity’s that we see; they’re more likely going to be apparent infinity. So, there’s a property of appearance to being a subjective object in the universe, an object with subjectivity. So, I would make the argument that, generally speaking, being a subject in a universe, processing through time; there’s no metaphysical extra property either being accessed or being derived about the universe. But you’re, basically, dealing with various forms of principles and relationships in and amongst the kind of objects that you have evolved and constructed over time. High levels of those get called mathematical principles or laws of nature, something like this.
Rosner: Yes. There are systems that there are self consistent systems that tend to crop up all over the place. Like number able objects and the mathematics behind just arithmetic pops up commonly in existing systems because their self consistency means they’re very existence.
Jacobsen: So I think you can make the argument there. So, what people have been claiming is a metaphysical can be inverted.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You mentioned the personality of Trump with two more fundamental questions of personality. Why the inconstancy from day to day, moment to moment?
Rick Rosner: I don’t know. Like, he’s a compulsive liar and a compulsive bull shitter. He’s gotten whatever he wants throughout life. Nobody ever really was able to control. There’s a story about how he punched his second grade music teacher in her face because he thought she was a bad teacher and eventually he was sent away to military school because nobody could control it. He’s had the resources and the shamelessness to just get away with whatever he wants. He’s been involved with more than 4,000 lawsuits, either filing them or having them filed against him. So, with lawyers, he’s just been able to hold people off from everything, bullshitting. He has stiffed creditors out of more than a billion dollars. The government out of half a billion dollars in estate taxes through fraud and banks won’t lend the money he’s stiffed out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Like, I think you stiffed people on a building of his in Chicago that was underperforming. He just renegotiated the deals with these banks, costing them hundreds of millions. They renegotiate because they hope to get, if they loaned him four hundred million, maybe one hundred and fifty million back instead of losing everything. He’s stiffed people. He just he hires people to do stuff. Then he says, ‘I’m just not going to pay you for what I said I was going to pay you and I’ll pay you this.’ Maybe, it is a third of what he said he was going to pay. You can either take him to court or it might just be cheaper to take. He’s driven small contractors out of business by not paying. He just gets away with whatever he wants. He’s that rare; I don’t know whether it is sociopath or psychopath that people aren’t ready for.
And so, they don’t have their defenses up and they fall for his bullshit. He just keeps rolling onward from failure to failure that he’s cushioned from because he isn’t made to pay for any failure. He doesn’t have to. He’s told – I don’t know, I think, twenty-five thousand lies, public lies, as president now. He faces no consequences, no immediate consequences. He’s lost the election, but nobody’s forced him to draw a line from his horribleness to his loss as president, so he’s never been forced to have any consistency, and that includes consistency of thought. He’s got no moral system. He doesn’t bother to keep track of what he believes from moment to moment.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who’s going to win?
Rick Rosner: I think Biden will pull it out. I’m very confident that he’ll do better than Hillary, even in the Electoral College. He’ll do better than Hillary. That still leaves the zone where he does better than Hillary and still loses the Electoral College. The Republican challenges to the vote will largely be ineffective at disqualifying a large number of voters. So, there’s still the possibility in the cheaty states like Georgia and Florida that there will be Election Day fucking over of Democratic voters in poorer neighborhoods. That generally happens; that they have fewer voting machines. They get broken voting machines. Where whitey can just show up and stand in the zero line or a line that takes 10 minutes, while black people can stand in line up to eight hours, that’ll probably go on. But people are pissed enough. They’ll put up with it to get their votes and so on.
And so, Biden will, very sure, do better. Then I’m as sure as the poll aggregators are. I mean, it would be, I guess, even more shocking for him to lose than it was for Hillary. They will definitely retain the House of Representatives. The polls give the aggregate Democrats a 75% or 74% chance of taking the Senate. I’m pretty sure that those predictions are reasonable. I might even be a little more confident than that in Democrats taking the Senate, giving help, given how pissed everybody is and how many people have voted early on and just how shitty the Republican senators are. Martha McSally in Arizona, Susan Collins in Maine and Joni Ernst, maybe; I mean, she’s shitty, but she’s got her races. She probably will win, even though she’s shitty. Kelly Lynn Loeffler in Georgia, this appointed Senator married to the head of the New York Stock Exchange worth five hundred million dollars.
Took what she learned about Covid in February and sold all her stocks and bought stocks in shit that was going to go up, if Covid got really bad, she did insider trading, though. She may not be at a limit. I think she’ll lose, but she may not lose by enough to avoid a runoff.
If Democrats get to 50/50 in the Senate, then the vice president becomes the tie breaking vote. So, Democrats currently have 46 or 47 senators. So, we need to get the presidency and four seats out of twelve Republican Senate seats, maybe more that are up for grabs. Anyway, I’d say, “I don’t know.” 78 to 80% confidence. We get the Senate, the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/11/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the chances that Trump and Biden or Biden winning now, and what are the chances of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump winning in the 2016 election, how it is comparable or not?
Rick Rosner: So, I think at the last moment, last time in 2016, everybody turned to The New York Times probability needle and away from 538.com. But I think at the last moment for 538.com, it gave her a 69% chance of winning.
Jacobsen: How much?
Rosner: 69. Bill and Ted’s number, a nice number, gave Trump a 31% chance of winning. that was the highest for Trump during the entire lead up to the election. It was because of what Comey did with 11 days to go, which caused Hillary Clinton about 2 percent, which was early enough. It doesn’t get said enough. But if Comey had done what he did and Hillary eked out a narrow win, the last four years would have still been pretty fucked up because the Senate would still be the same, still being run by Mitch McConnell. But at least, we would have had a Democratic president and a confrontational one. Obama was non-confrontational and he gave the Republicans endless opportunities to compromise with him, and they never did. Had Hillary become president, whether in 2005 or 2012 I’m sorry, 2005. I’m sorry.
Whether in 2009 or 2017 she would have been already pissed off and she would have had no illusions about working with the Republicans. That could have been a good thing. Because even now the Democrats play the long game, they kind of sit back and aren’t scorched earth confrontation and they wait for the Republicans to go too far. We’re hoping that tomorrow is the day we finally see the results of Republicans having gone way, way too far. Anyway, Trump was given three times as big a chance by 538.com, as they’re giving him now back in 2016, giving him a 10% chance of winning. Another aggregator, The Economist, is giving him a 4% chance. If you look at the voting, 98.8 million early votes have been registered. By the time they’re done registering early and vote by mail votes, that number will probably swell to 103 million or more.
Because ballots in a third of the states, maybe more are allowed, if you postmark them before, on or before Election Day, they’re allowed to be counted. Even the 98.8 is more than twice as many early and vote by mail votes as were whatever voted in 2016, the vote by mail votes heavily favored by all those early votes, which included the vote by mail votes. Biden has among the roughly one third of those votes that were the state where they were voted; the state to release the party affiliation of the voter. That party affiliation gives Democrats a seven million vote lead, which doesn’t include Independents. It doesn’t give any indication of Republicans who may have crossed over. According to pretty good polls, Trump may have lost 12% of the people who voted for him in 2016 and only gained 4% crossover from people who voted for Hillary in 2016.
So few Democrats, maybe around 1%, will have voted for Trump, but it may be 5% of Republicans have voted for Biden. We won’t know until everything’s done. Then there are 20 million Independents who voted and Biden may have a 10% advantage among them. So, overall, the early vote may give Biden a 15 million vote advantage, which ought to be enough to hold off the day of voters. We’ve talked about this. They will vote heavily Trump or maybe not. As enough people may be just so pissed off at what has been going; in that, Trump’s day of advantage may not be that strong or Trump’s continuing to be just an awful dick. Infected people, particularly old people, may discourage some, especially older Trump voters, but people feel more confident. It is a weird week. People felt confident in the polls 2016, but they felt stupidly confident.
And now people feel confident that the polls, feel confident in better polling this time around. So, people feel like they were foolishly confident in 2016. They feel like they’re cautiously optimistic this time around, but with the emphasis on the cautious because we got burned badly in 2016. But the methodology seems to be better. The raw numbers, the early voting numbers seem to be cause for optimism. We’ve never had this kind of turnout before. 137 or 138 million people voted in 2016, I think that was an all time high. But now people are predicting like 160 million votes, which will be the biggest jump both in raw numbers of votes and, I think, in terms of percentage turnout in history. That kind of turnout makes it a little bit unpredictable. But it still is cause for optimism because Trump becoming more and more of a lawless asshole really hasn’t expanded his appeal beyond the base.
And that’s what he’s still just appealing to the base in an abusive way for the past like 4 nights. His campaign hasn’t paid for buses to take people back. So, hundreds and possibly thousands of people, many of them old, are stranded in the cold, two or three miles away from where they parked. They have to walk to their vehicles. It is just like a “fuck you.” Trump never pays the bills for the venues he uses for these events. So, there are dozens of rallies that haven’t been paid. They just don’t pay for it. I don’t know why cities haven’t figured this out and have refused to host his bullshit. Also, Stanford did a study of 18 of his rallies held between June and September and found that those rallies based on increased incidence of Covid in the weeks after the rallies in the communities where they were held.
They did the math and they found that these 18 rallies caused a total of or led to a total of 30,000 more cases of Covid and more or less 700 dead, which is appalling. If you believe that most people don’t believe this shit, they’ve been manipulated by their curated media. Media that picks and chooses the stories it tells and then mixes that in with just a healthy binder where you find crab cakes; you take the crab and then you mix it with breadcrumbs to hold the whole thing together. Also, so, you don’t have to spend too much on crab. So, fucking, what people who watch the conservative media, they get little bits of stories, crab cake mixed in with just pure shit, which is the bread crumbs that hold them together.
Anyhow, Trump didn’t hold just 18 super secret rallies, those were just the 18 studied by Stanford. Trump now held 17 Covid era super spreader rallies. If you extrapolate the numbers from the 18 that were studied, you get Trump has Trump rallies that have led to or will lead to in the next several weeks, 100,000 new cases of Covid and more than 2,500 dead. So, just by holding his fucking rallies, Trump may be responsible for 1% of the Covid cases and 1% of the deaths in America, which is just fucking crazy. He is just dumb, lazy Hitler. So, we have less than 22 hours now until polls close in California, which pretty much marks the end of the voting season. Because Alaska and Hawaii, Alaska goes Republican, Hawaii goes Democratic. They both have small populations. So, nobody cares about their one or two electoral votes.
Each state has its own law about when they can start counting votes. Every state and start counting votes that were cast on Election Day once the polls close or maybe even before. then states can release those voting results after the polls closed. But every state has its own custom rules about when they can start counting votes cast early or by mail. So, we don’t really know what the state of counting will be in the states that count like Texas, Florida, all these swing states, battleground states. So, we don’t know if there will be clear returns out of the states that matter after the polls close. We also don’t know what the Republicans will do. Republicans have been filing lawsuits in a number of states to try to get votes thrown out.
And it is expected that the Republicans will file dozens of lawsuits in various states tomorrow to try to invalidate some of the vote. So, nobody knows what’s going to happen, whether how long it will take for all this to get straightened out. There is cause for limited optimism and again; I think I already said this like a couple of days ago. I was talking to you that the Supreme Court looks like it will engage in outright stealing the election for Trump, but it has to be close. As it was in the year 2000, and I think Bush and Gore only differ by like one half of 1% of the popular vote and the conservatives on the Supreme Court threw it to Bush. If Trump loses by millions and millions of votes or is trailing by, the Supreme Court isn’t going to throw out the votes of entire states. So, that’s where we stand. Everybody’s nervous. Everybody on Twitter, at least the people I follow on Twitter and probably mostly everybody. I get there maybe like MAGA Twitter where they’re just like, “I don’t know,” they’re probably nervous too. Everybody I follow on Twitter is shitting themselves.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/31
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what’s going off the election?
Rosner: All right. So, the whole country, we’ve got 80 hours to go until the polls close in California. Then we probably have a couple of days to go until we get it clear. It is not clear at this point that we’ll have a clear picture of who won within a few hours, because right now we’re more than 90 million early ballots cast. We could get to one hundred million. By law, most states can’t count early ballots until the polls close. So, it is more complicated. You’d think that everybody getting their votes in early would mean for early counting, that the stupid laws of most states would lead to the opposite. That they can’t count anybody’s vote until the polls are closed. And all the early ballots are harder to count than the ballots cast into voting machines. So, we won’t know immediately, probably.
So, we’ve got 80 hours plus another day or two probably of anxiety and, maybe, four years of anxiety if Trump wins. But it doesn’t look like I’ve been watching the numbers, the poll aggregators, the sites, the websites, look at all the polls and rank them and adjust them for reliability and bias and come up with because looking at any one poll is not good. It is much better to look at five dozen aggregated polls. So one poll aggregator, 538.com, gives Trump a 10% chance of winning. Another aggregator, The Economist, gives Trump a 4% chance of winning. One polling company captured what people were thinking last time shows much more solid numbers for Biden this time compared to Clinton the last time.
So, we’re anxious, and there’s more reason in terms of the political climate, which is much more Nazi-ish this time around. Nobody really knew exactly how shitty Trump would turn out to be. Nobody thought the guy would be jacked up on steroids and having these super spreaders, none of this was easily predicted in 2016, when he got elected. But it has now been calculated that his rallies have caused 30 thousand or have led to 30 thousand Covid cases and 700 deaths. He’s not stopping. He’s continuing to have rallies. He’ll probably keep having rallies even after Election Day. In Texas, Kamala Harris’s the tour bus was pretty much run off the road by a 50 truck Trumper attack force, just one that forced her off the road, forced her to cancel all the rest of her Texas appearances.
And the cops refused to do anything. So, all that feels more dire than any shit that happened in 2016, the potential for more violence. We’ll have some violence over the next week or so. It won’t be nationwide. It won’t be a civil war, but there will probably be a dozen incidents of fisticuffs and, maybe, guns being brandished at polling places. So, things feel ugly. Nevertheless, the numbers give cause for optimism, 90 million early votes cast. I think I already said, which will double the number of early votes cast in 2016, which were only 47 million. Biden, has a healthy lead; I’m guessing maybe as much as 15% among the early votes, which will be roughly 60% of the votes cast this time around. Day of votes, Trump will have a healthy lead maybe out of 60 million votes cast.
Trump will have a margin of 6 to 9 million votes. But overall, you’re looking at Biden having a 7 to 11 million vote margin of victory. Unless, there’s severe fucking with the vote. But this whole next week is going to be just ugly and nervous making. You mentioned that the Trump will claim victory regardless of what the results are and most outlets this time, most legitimate news outlets this time, will exercise restraint about prematurely announcing states that have been won because the nature of vote counting this time around won’t give you immediate results. There’s just this huge potential to be wrong.
So it is like right wing sites like OAN and Breitbart, and just all these fringe right wing sites will announce that Trump won and Trump himself will announce that he’s won and that anything diverging from that is a lie. He’ll run to the courts to prevent this fraud that he says is happening. And so, all this stuff is going to play out immediately after the election. But when the dust clears, we’re all hoping, fairly optimistic, that Trump is done. He still has 77 days left as president, even if he loses. People expect him to do a bunch of horrible shit. So, anyway, that’s what we’re at now.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your gripe with game shows? There’s a lot of context here.
Rick Rosner: So I’ve worked on more than half a dozen game shows. I was co-creator of a game show. I’ve been a contestant on quiz shows. Five of which include running through a contestant. pseudo quiz show. I’m booked to be in the contestant pool for a quiz show next week. If they’re doing it very Covid compliant, I’m going to go get tested for Covid. Then I’ve got a day in the studio where everybody is just in masks and distancing, the prize for this thing is three contestants and the winner get a thousand dollars and gets the chance to compete in the grand prize round to potentially turn the one thousand dollars into ten thousand dollars. To me, this is just bullshit. There’s a show on all the time on the cooking channel. They give people baskets of weirdly assorted ingredients and force them to make dishes out of them.
Anyway, so, I spent about four hours on just getting ready to be on a quiz show today until they kicked me out because I knew too many of the people working on the show, which is something they can’t allow because it is left over from the quiz show scandals of the 50s that they want to avoid any kind of appearance of impropriety. So, I got a free Subway sandwich out of it. But my general gripe is the exploitativeness owners of competition shows have, where most people leave with nothing. On the run of the mill shows like Chopped, for instance, it is a cooking competition show that’s on all the time on the Food Network and they have four chefs on, and three of them leave with nothing and one leaves with ten grand. The overall budget for an episode of that show is $100,000. Then you have these shows like Wipeout or whatever, which was replaced. I guess this is kind of a violent golfing show called Holey Moley. These shows people go on like – we’ve got to go back in time, 15 years – Fear Factor. I think probably started out with every episode you start out with 15, 18 contestants. Put them through hellacious tortures.
And I don’t know. I think the only person left standing at the end got any money and I’m sure relative to the show budget it was a pittance. It is bullshit that the prize budget should be less than 5% of the show’s overall budget. It just seems like bullshit that they’re getting away with exploiting people. These people are exploitable in the name of being on TV. It is a little like what collegiate athletics is like. The players in the big sports, football, basketball make millions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars every season for their schools, what they get are shitty and incomplete educations and injuries and their bells rung. So, maybe 20 years down the line, they have CTE, brain damage. It is just bullshit.
These shows where people bake a cake or who can bake the best Halloween cake and they’re in there working on this shit for twelve hours building this fucking cake that’s twelve feet tall competing for twelve grand. I know it is cool to be on TV. Maybe, it helps some of their businesses, just the being on TV. But I don’t know. It just seems contrary to the promises being made; people don’t do the math, including myself, so few people know I was on Jeopardy! And I didn’t do the math on how few people actually win on Jeopardy! during the months and months that Ken Jennings was on Jeopardy!. Only one person, one person on Jeopardy!, fucking Ken Jennings wiping out like 174 other contestants. At least now, Jeopardy! gives third place a thousand bucks and second place two thousand dollars. Just go kind of chintzy, but it is better than nothing. That’s it. That’s just my gripe. A lot of TV is both being on TV and working on TV and entertainment industry in general is there are a lot of jobs that are exploitative at the bottom or middle or even towards the middle upper of the pyramid. You hang in there because you want to, maybe, eventually, be one of the people who rakes in all the bucks at the top of the home.
We call the Disney company a bad name, because Disney it is known for working people really hard for, maybe, not the best rewards, except as you climb the ladder until you’re in the position of Bob Iger, who makes fifty million dollars a year. I’m sure his lieutenants, the VP’s of Disney make four hundred and fifty thousand dollars or something. There are plenty of jobs low level at Disney with really shit pay. Anyway where you’re working for the love of the company and a double minimum wage.
Jacobsen: Okay.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: So, we lost the signal yesterday when I was saying that in Trump’s four years in office, three quarters of a million more Americans will have died under four years, under any other president. Only a third of that population is slightly bigger now than under any other president. So, half a million more Americans will have died under Trump, not because of population reasons, but because of Covid, because of opioids, because of suicide, because of the consequences of obesity. It is a miserable time in America. Trump promised to fix a lot of these things. He’s done virtually nothing. His lies about fixing everything aside. But to put it in proper perspective, about three million Americans, a little less than three million Americans die every year just from everything. Cancer, heart disease, accidents, because a little less than 1% of the nation passes away every year.
So that extra seven hundred and fifty thousand dead under Trump represents about a 6% higher death rate than under previous presidents, which is bad. I mean 6, a several % reduction in life expectancy. It is all bad, though. Life expectancy has been heading downwards for probably about the past four years. This year, it was picked up by a tenth of a year. But it was unheard of until started ticking downwards at all. I don’t think it had done it in America at all in the past 30 years. Though, I haven’t looked at the statistics. But, generally, you expect lifespans to be increasing and it is an indicator of the misery in America now.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is part of this, due to an increase in suicides among white middle aged men?
Rosner: Yes, and not just middle aged, but younger than middle aged. You’ve got a lot of military and ex-military suicides. You’ve got deaths that may or may not be suicide among people who have opioid issues.
Jacobsen: There should be one caveat there. Individuals who enter the army or are coerced into the army are disproportionately of minority ethnic groups or poor whites?
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: Those in poverty across the board have less access to mental healthcare and just general care for mental health.
Rosner: It should be available.
Jacobsen: Well, it is not.
Rosner: Carole and I have gone to couples counseling for 27 years and are ensuring once a month because we’re not really fighting all the time. It’s like doing relationship push ups. You do the work.
Jacobsen: It is maintenance.
Rosner: But our insurance paid for fucking 27 years of therapy, which is insane. I mean, it is not insane for a sophisticated country with a good medical system, an insane perk. But most Americans don’t have it. Most Americans should have it. Other countries have it. But we’re among the lucky few, I’m as a TV writer. I’m represented by a great and powerful union. So, I have stuff that other Americans don’t have. It just shows that the dark shitty access to medicine is reflected in our lower life expectancies. Other things that reflect that we’re more obese than almost every other developed country. But our medical access, countries like Japan, I think the expected lifespan is like five years longer than ours. I, personally, know of two people who are facing life threatening diseases and in one case died of a life threatening disease because they had to wait until Medicare kicked in at age 65. They had serious problems that they didn’t want to take to the doctor until they had medical coverage. In the case of one guy, it killed him. So, maybe, having Biden in there, and possibly winning back the Senate, it won’t fix everything or even maybe much of anything.
We got to get Trump out of there with the Republicans. In 2009, the Democrats more or less had the Senate, the House, and the presidency. The only thing that got done in terms of big changes was Obamacare. Republicans have spent the last decade voting to kill it every month or two. They’ve voted to kill it 70 times or the lawsuits to kill it will hit the Supreme Court in early November. If Amy Coney Barrett gets confirmed, it is likely that the Supreme Court will kill Obamacare after ten years of Republicans trying to kill it for no good reason, except that Republicans are wildly corrupt and in the pockets of rich donors and rich donors get to hold on to more money, apparently.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/10/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is America so beholden to herd immunity right now, so much of America, just idea?
Rick Rosner: It’s Trump’s latest idea. He’s losing badly in the polls. His brain is full of steroids. He’s just crazy. Aapparently, he’s got an idiot in charge of this. The guy is not an epidemiologist. He’s a radiologist. I think he’s been disavowed by the school he works at. Anyway, somehow, they’ve decided that America should just go for herd immunity, which is having enough people who’ve gotten the virus, they can’t get it anymore. So if maybe 75% of the population has had it, then it’ll be harder to pass it on to the remaining 25%. Because it has to go from person to person, and if three quarters of the people you encounter. You can’t, infect, because they’ve already been infected and then recovered, then might be enough to have it to extinguish it in the general population.
Jacobsen: How many people will die in such a scenario by the time that happens?
Rosner: Now we do the math.
Jacobsen: OK, do the math Mr. Math.
Rosner: All right. So in America, we have 8 million confirmed cases out of about 330 million people round that up to 10 million or more to include cases that just didn’t get caught because we’re bad at test. So we’re at about 3% of the population having it now or having recovered from it. That means we have to multiply that by about 25 to get to 75%. And then if you multiply the number of dead so far by 25, you get more than 5 million dead, which would be an unprecedented catastrophe in American history, where the most deadly incidents in history, are the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, AIDS if you want to throw that in there, which killed about two thirds of a million people. So you’re talking killing more than seven times as many Americans as the deadliest other thing, killing more people than the top 10 deadliest events in American history combined.
Even if you optimistically say that the mortality, we can get it down to 1% among people who catch it because we have more drugs to treat it with now. That still means 1% of 320 million Americans still means over three million dead Americans, which is, again, five times the worst thing in American history. It’s not genocide, but it’s death on a genocidal scale. Hitler famously killed 6 million Jews and another 5 million other people he sent to their deaths in the camps. And we’re killing, if we want for herd immunity, we’d be killing at least half as many of that as Hitler’s 6 million, which would make Trump a criminal on Hitler’s scale. He’s already done his shitty job on Covid, which has already killed at least 220,000 Americans and probably closer to 300,000. So, he’s already 5% of his way to Hitler and the Jews. He’s already one of the worst killers in US history. And going for herd immunity, it would multiply his incompetence and his crime at least tenfold.
Jacobsen: Are there any other comparable people than Hitler for this, for instance, Pol Pot, Mao, Stalin, those individuals who are typically associated to mass murder?
Rosner: Okay, so, if you add up all the deaths that you can attribute to Hitler, which was pretty much the European theater in World War Two. I’ve heard estimates of 30 million, including all the soldiers killed on both sides and all the civilians killed. So, 30 million for Hitler. 40 million for Stalin. 50 million for Mao in China. I don’t know how many Pol Pot killed, probably on the scale of a million or two I don’t know. But yes, Trump is in the six figures for the shit he’s done with just Covid. By the time his four years are up, three quarters of a million more Americans will have died under Trump than under any other president in four years. Only one third of the three quarters of a million more people who’ve died under Trump have died just due to America being bigger now than it has been in the past. So half a million people are dying from.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/08/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had some thoughts about risk. Can you set the context here?
Rick Rosner: Part of the risk in talking about coronavirus in the U.S., depending on your politics, the idea of what you consider acceptable risk is different. The basic structure of the debate is that Trump catastrophically fucked up the response and in the U.S. in early August, as we speak, has nearly 163,000 Covid dead.
Which is 8th in per capita deaths in the world, it is terrible for a country as developed as we are; it is the shittiest developed countries in the world or the countries unlucky enough to get hit early that have the highest per capita death rates.
Number 2 in deaths is, I think, Brazil, which has a dumbshit semi-dictator. Number 3 is India, which has bad government. Trump fucked up the response, so Republicans are trying to prop up Trump by arguing that what has happened with the U.S. with Covid is no big deal. That we would have had a lot of deaths from flu, giving a bunch of excuses.
South Korea with about 2/11ths of our population has 301 deaths so far. They got hit the same time we did. We have more than 5 times as many deaths and more than 85 times per capita deaths as South Korea. So, Republicans are in the business of saying, “It is no big deal. People have to die.” They are ignoring the tragedy of it and denying the risk of it.
They want America opened up. They present people who want masks all the time as babies. Liberals, Democrats, are saying, “This is an ongoing horror. We need to keep taking reasonable precautions. We don’t need to sacrifice more than another 100,000 more people to this.”
I mean, that frames what is happening with risk right now in America, but there are some longer term trends in America and the rest of the world.
Jacobsen: What does this say about human cognition and flaws just built in?
Rosner: It says humans are bad at evaluating certain types of risk. Humans are good at spotting immediate risk. Risk that’s tangible. Humans are good at crossing the street for the most part, at understanding traffic signals. We have two dogs. I don’t think either dog is smart enough to not run out into the street. I don’t think either is smart enough to know what would happen if they got hit by a car. Some dogs are smart enough, but these dogs are not.
Humans are smart enough and are smart about some types of risk. But when it comes to risks that take statistical analysis, we are bad at it. We are motivated by feelings of fear rather than the understanding risk probabilities. For instance, I will drive like an asshole, but I’m terrified of flying. Even though, I’m putting more risk on myself by my driving than I’m assuming by getting on a plane.
Even there, it is hardtop properly analyze because one way of analyzing risk that you hear a lot is “risk per mile” on a plane versus in a car. But the deal is, if you are going on a plane, you are going, at least, 300 miles. If you are going in a car, then you might be going half of a mile. So, it is not a fair comparison.
In general, people who watch certain types of TV, have different ideas about crime. Crime has been steadily declining in the U.S. for the past 30 years. But because the news industry has exploded and more news is available than it was 30 years ago, most people don’t know crime has gone down because crime is a staple of news and so people are always hearing about crime.
Somebody did a study. The more Hannity you watch, the more you will underestimate the risk of Covid and the less that you are going to wear a mask. There are plenty of reasons why we are bad at evaluating risk. One reason is that we are bad at math in general. That and also back to what we needed to know in our pre-history. We like salty, sweet, and fatty.
Because those things were great to find before we had civilization and food was scarce. We were motivated to kill stuff and eat it all up. It has been bad for us since McDonald’s is readily available. The same deal is, we didn’t need to know that much risk math in our prehistory.
People had an average lifespan on the savannah in the early 30s. Under a high likelihood that you’ll be dead young, life is cheaper. That is one of the overall frames of risk. How we approach risk now versus a hundred years ago, 100 years ago, the average lifespan in America was early 40s.
If you took out child mortality, it was higher. It was probably early 60s. But if you made it to 15 years old, the odds are you would live to an average of 62, 63. But now, if you make it, there’s less infant mortality; if you make it to 8 years old, you’re likely to make it into your 80s.
Right now, we don’t know how far you’ll make it, because that means you’re not going to be 80 by the end of the century. By then, biomedical technology will be dropping extra decades on people like it is nothing. The upshot is life is less cheap.
People shorter lives, shittier lives, and there were more sources of death short of old age 100 years ago than there are now. So, we, now, are less willing to throw our lives away unnecessarily. Unless, we listen to too much Fox News and have been brainwashed into thinking that certain kinds of risk are patriotic.
But that’s not an overall attitude. You can find different strains of risk tolerance. Probably among conservatives, the risk tolerance that would lead you to enlist in the military might be higher. On the other hand, there’s a strain of draft avoidance among Republican leaders, among all political leaders.
The last president to serve in the military, I think, was G.W. Bush. And he served in the National Guard, so he didn’t have to go and he ditched out on his service. He pulled strings to avoid any significant or super dangerous service. So, the last president to put his life on the line; Kennedy was in battle.
George H.W. Bush was a war hero. He was the last one. His term ended almost 28 years ago. So, anyway, we’re less risk tolerant. I think you could probably make a car. If you get in a wreck and your air bags go off, it is $200 to replace or reset all your airbags, which means, to me, a car without air bags.
It used to be every car. When I was growing up, zero cars had air bags. I think it wasn’t until the late ‘80s. You shouldn’t be able to get a car with air bags for $2,000 less than a car with air bags. There are no people up in arms that that choice has been taken away from consumers. Nobody is bitching that seat belts are mandatory.
Maybe, there are, because there are campaigns to make sure people buckle their seatbelts. But nobody is mad or there aren’t big campaigns to resist seatbelts. We are mostly okay with the shit that has happened that is a part of our lives that lowers our mortality and lowers our risk. That’s the entire point.
We embrace reductions in risk, especially if we, more or less, understand them. This will continue – our tolerance of risk – to shrink as we get more and more years of life. Life becomes more precious. Throughout Covid, there have been plenty of Republican politicians saying that there are plenty of old people ready to sacrifice themselves to save the American economy.
Everybody is like, “Fuck you! We’re not ready to sacrifice those people.” And old people are like, “Fuck you! We didn’t sign up for that.” People want to keep on living. There used to be this idea from Freud of the death wish that, at some point, people longed for death. Along with everything else for Freud, people don’t discuss that much anymore.
Sure, if you are in pain from disease, you might wish for relief. But somebody who is 85 years old doesn’t have a death wish that I’m aware of, the average 85 year old. Even though, their quality of life is much less than the quality of life of a 55 year old. That idea was, at least, part of common awareness in the first half of the 20th century and most of the second half.
But when you compare the life of a 65 year old in 1910 to the life of a 65 year old now, certainly, the 65 year old now has much higher quality of life, probably a greater average health, maybe greater average fitness, though people in 1910 were skinny. 65 year olds now, probably ¾ of them are fat, but there are more things to do now. Entertainment is better.
Even if everything sucks as your age now, at 65, you can, at least, watch really good T.V. and movies compared to the person in 1910, who could only read. All these trends.
Anyway, the end, fucking – the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was the Kissing Booth? This was when Carole was calling you “Loudy.”
Rick Rosner: You’re going to be reading a transcript of this. When I am very interested in a subject [Laughing], I get louder and was shouty discussing high school.
Jacobsen: I can confirm this. This is true. It is not angry yelling. It is John Mulaney punch-liney telling a joke.
Rosner: If only I could be as funny and talented as John Mulaney, Kissing Booth, anyway, conformed to my stereotype of a high school movie, which is a de-emphasis on social media. Only using it so the characters can know where one another are or can suspect one another of cheating based on messages on a cell phone and stuff like that.
That all of the important moments take place face-to-face, as in old school life. Everything centres on the activities of the high school. Namely, the main story and a couple of the sub-plots, maybe not the main story, were resolved in the Kissing Booth.
It was at the high school. But there is one thing I also noticed, which is that compared to the high school movies of yore. The characters are leading much more adult lives. In that, the main character in this one drinks under-age without hesitation.
Even though, her age is unspecified. It is pretty clear that she is a high school senior, but has sex with her boyfriend who is a college freshman. Nobody worries about the legal implications or anything. It is something people do when they are dating. They have sex.
This is something. Carole and I don’t want CW much, but Riverdale is based on Archie comics with Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead, which, for 60 or 70 years, was a painfully wholesome comic about a high school guy divided in his affections between the blonde Betty and the brunette Veronica.
It was also known for every sentence in the comics that didn’t end in a question mark ended in an exclamation mark. It was wholesome to the point of being unreadable. It was in a way Richie Rich was to anybody older than 8.
But the characters in Archie comics have been reimagined as noir characters in the benighted drugs ridden and gang ridden town of Riverdale. Apparently, the deadliest city in the state where they live.
All of the characters, even though, they are in high school; they are leading adult lives. Veronica is running a bar, a full-on bar. It serves alcohol, but it is in the style of a speak-easy. One character who lives with her lesbian girlfriend at the girlfriends’ house/mansion who has had the sinister mom thrown in prison; and now, the daughter is in charge of the mansion.
They both live in it. I think they’re both cheerleaders. The entire school is hip to the relationship. Archie carries a gun from time to time. Archie had to go on a journey where he fought a bear. His shirt comes off once per episode, at least, because he has nice abs.
He is boning the heck out Veronica. Jughead has come out as asexual in the comic books who has only affection for hamburgers. But in the TV show, he is boning Betty. In the first episode, Betty and Veronica dress up at dominatrices to execute part of a plot, because Betty is also a private eye.
Betty also has serial killer genes, which makes her worry that she will sometime become uncontrollably homicidal. Anyway, it is no longer a comic book meant for 12-year-olds. Veronica’s dad is a crime lord. It’s all that kind of stuff.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the Auschwitz Memorial?
Rick Rosner: I’ve started following the Auschwitz Memorial on Twitter. Most of what the Auschwitz Memorial does is show a picture and say, “Here is so and so,” when they were born, sent to Auschwitz, and when they usually died at Auschwitz, because not many people made it out.
But the pictures are edifying because I can be a Jew and be aware of everybody’s tendency to need to be educated out of some form of racism, but the deal is: The pictures of the people sent to Auschwitz.
It is amazing. Even though, I should be beyond thinking like this. It is amazing how perfectly good looking so many of these people were. The Jews were presented by the Nazis to Germany as being these ugly, inferior people.
Frickin’, all of these Jews that got sent looked perfectly normal and most of the time better than average. They don’t look “inferior.” They are good looking people who fell victim to, basically, a criminal government that wanted to take all of their shit and kill the fuck out of them.
Jacobsen: These are perfectly good. They’re dusty, but yes.
Rosner: Some people looked dusty and bad. Because they have been processed and wearing the striped prisoner outfits and all of their hair has been shaved. The whole German argument was psychotic.
Jacobsen: I brought this up to a German and a Belgian friend. The German friend is ashamed of that national history.
Rosner: But there are so few people still alive who had any agency during World War Two. I read a headline of what is being called the last trial of a Nazi concentration camp guard ever to be held.
Jacobsen: When?
Rosner: Now! I have been reading the Drudge Report because it used to be the standard conservative “fuck you” to liberals, a collection of news stories. Now, it is closer to a centrist news page and its discontent with Trump becomes more and more apparent.
I found this on Drudge. I didn’t read the story. But it is probably about a guy who is like 98 -years-old, born in 1922, becomes a guard when 21 in 1943. There’s almost nobody left who did evil or, on the other hand, did good from World War Two.
The youngest person who joined World War Two and the military by lying about their age was born in 1928, so they are 92-years-old. That’s the youngest World War Two veteran. There are still people.
I don’t know if there was someone who joined at 16 and is still alive, but there are veterans who are 94 and 97, and still get trotted out for stuff. That person who joined at 16 was a hypothetical person. There are plenty of people who did it, whether any of those liars are still around; I don’t know how many of them there were in the first place.
German guilt: The point is, I am trying to say there is almost no one left alive in the world; I’m sure there are, maybe – I don’ know – 1,000 old Nazi still tucked away in old age homes. Not concentration camp guards, but members of the Nazi Party who had viable beliefs and even, maybe, acted on their beliefs to some extent.
But they are in their late 90s. It would be bad if all Germans felt this national guilty. We are 75 years past the end of World War Two with 3 or 4 generations of Germans since who came after the Nazis.
Jacobsen: What do you think of this history of IQ and race mixed up in history?
Rosner: IQ is a terrible, racist idea. Statistics itself grew up or was brought to fruition by a bunch of racist motherfuckers. Probably not everybody who worked in the field of IQ or everybody who developed the mathematical discipline of statistics was a racist, but the guy who came up with the correlation coefficient, Pearson.
Apparently, that guy was a racist. But racists have been everywhere. The guy, William Shockley, got two Nobel Prizes. He was a huge ass racist. He was the only Nobel Prize winner to donate his jizz to the genius sperm bank established in the ‘70s.
It was a sperm bank in California founded in the ‘70s as a place to store genius or purported genius jizz. And if you wanted a genius kid, that’s where you went to get your jizz.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is 15 weeks until the election. What is the deal now?
Rick Rosner: Trump has gone from 45.8% approval to 40.3%. That’s the difference between making it a close election and it being not close. So, I look at those approval numbers several times a day. Carole and I are seriously considering…
If Trump won, depending on the circumstances of him winning, and if he stays behind and wins due to outside interference, then it might be a good time or prudent to look at moving out of the country because things are seriously broken.
But Trump’s approval rating has been the smallest range of approval ratings of any president since they started polling approval 80 years ago. But even so, he has had, for him, some big swings in fairly short amount of time.
With 15 weeks to ago, it starts being very statistically unlikely that he can climb back up to 45% approval in only 15 weeks. Although, he could still do it. There’s a thing called an October surprise where opposition tries to drop crazy bad shit in the week before the election.
For Hillary Clinton, it happened in November 8 days before voting began when Comey said she was under investigation by the F.B.I. again for her emails. Beyond that, outside of some October surprise, it will be tough for him to move his approval more than a couple percent in the time that is left. As it gets tighter and tighter, and as more people vote early by mail, his electoral destiny becomes more cemented.
So, it is the beginning of the end of the time that he can do anything to help himself, which is why he is holding Covid press conferences. Including today, except excusing a child rapist and wishing her well, he was actually pretty well behaved at his press conference.
He stuck to his pre-written speech and notes and talked about the great things he is doing to save the country from coronavirus, which, if you know anything about what he has done, is stupid. It is stupid people who vote for him and it may have sounded kind of okay to stupid people.
His approval numbers hit the highest when he was having daily Covid briefings. But that was 140,000 Covid deaths ago. He may not be able to help himself with the daily briefings as he was able to help himself 3 months ago. At this point, we’re counting the days and hoping his assholery stays clear to a pretty big majority of the nation.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’ve had some pretty ongoing severe cases in the United States. It is not doing well alongside Brazil, India Russia.
Rick Rosner: There’s that Anna Karenina, where it starts with every happy family is happy in the same way and every miserable family is sad in a different way. Every fucked upcountry has a diferrent set of reasons why they are fucked up. Although, the U.S. and Britain, in terms of Covid, are run by morons. At least, they’re getting their shit together.
Russia is used to hiding information, who knows what is going on there. If you go on Twitter, you will occasionally see people say, “Coronavirus is an IQ test for people and nations.” There is a big amount of stupidity in our national leaders wanting all schools, in general, to open up in August.
Today was the worst day ever for new Covid cases in the U.S. It broke almost 62,000, breaking 60,000 for the first time. Fauci, a non-diot, thinks we might be moving to 100,000 new cases in a day, but he has been pushed to the side because he is more likely to tell the truth than anybody in the administration.
You’ve got three people behind the push to open the schools. You’ve got Pence/the Vice President, his wife. They’re both super Christy and she teaches at a Christian school where you can’t be gay and work there.
‘She knows schools and we should open up the schools.’ To the extent that there is logic and there isn’t, it is that not many young people die from Covid. 80% of the people who die are over 60. The schools are 10% or more people who aren’t kids.
They are at risk. Also, every kid goes home to someone who is older than the kid and the kids can catch it, not die from it, and the disease is new enough that we don’t know the permanent effects enough if you don’t die. Betsy DeVos wants to open up the schools.
She is our Secretary of Education; she is a terrible person. She is an Amway billionaire, has ten yachts and two helicopters in the family, hates public schools, wants all schools privatized or charter schools because it makes the schools easier to be Christy. She is dumb as hell, has her own agenda.
Then you’ve got Trump who just wants to get re-elected. He thinks that if he gets lucky that things will look normal enough, long enough, for him to get re-elected. He is dumb, lies to everybody including himself, so he has this Hail Mary that opening the schools will somehow be something that he can use for propaganda and, maybe, the dying from the schools opening up.
Opening up the schools means you have 400 people for every grade, it means for kindergarten through high school: 50,000,000 kids going back to school. Also, he got ICE to pass a deal. If you’re a foreign student here studying, you have to go home studying.
Unless, you are in a school live and in class, in person. You can’t go to a college that offers classes by Zoom or Skype, which seems to be punitive bullshit forcing people to show up to college too.
This is what happens when you have the worst president in history and none of the people in charge have a science background or really believe in science (do not believe in science). They resent science more than believe in it.
Science is telling them to do stuff, so they do it reluctantly. They believe in wishful thinking. My wife’s best friend is a teacher. I believe that if they force them to open; there may be some nationwide teacher strike or in certain states, maybe.
All of the biggest states, Florida, California, Texas, are having their worst cases for new cases and new deaths. We’ve got about 118 days left until the election. It is a countdown to when we have a chance to kick the super corrupt idiots out of office.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of reform in the United States, what governance needs restructuring?
Rick Rosner: Right now, in America, the focus is on fixing the police Although, the latest thing is on Trump. But what I think needs to be reformed is the news, the engine for 40% of the country to continue to support Trump.
It said that it was a mystery. Except, it is not a mystery. Conservative media, particularly Fox News, not because it lies more than other conservative media, like OANN or Alex Jones, but because it has the most viewership.
The stuff that presents itself as news shouldn’t be allowed to misrepresent itself, shouldn’t be allowed to bullshit at Americans for 4 prime time hours, for example, every night on Fox. I don’t know exactly what can be done about it. Take away the “news” designation?
They are an entertainment network, but are allowed to have “news” in their name. That doesn’t seem right. If they are allowed to have “news” in their name, they should have a third scrolling chyron that fact-checks what is said.
It can apply to the other news networks, too – CNN, MSNBC, and whatever else. You shouldn’t be allowed to pump propaganda into people’s heads and call it news. After WWII in Germany, there was de-Nazi-ification.
I don’t know how it worked. They had to unbrainwash the population. I’m not sure anything like that can be done with Trump supporters. They are isolated in an information bubble. It’s a cliché. They don’t know about a lot of stuff that is happening.
They believe a lot of stuff that’s not true. To a lesser extent, that applies to MSNBC and CNN because they don’t cover enough stories. They will stick to the most popular stories. The Malaysian airline went missing. It was about that all day and it squeezed out all other news.
There should be a rule and the government can do this. New stations can’t spend more than 10 hours on any one story.
Jacobsen: I mention in the context of governance and not individual people.
Rosner: Fix the news via legislation. Two, get money out of politics, which is almost impossible, get some legislation to overturn Citizens United. But the supreme court ruling there argued that money is speech.
That restricting money in politics is restricting free speech. That’s just horrible bullshit. So, that needs to be legislated against if possible. Then fixing gerrymandering, we have just had a census. Every time you have a census every ten years in American, yo redraw districts.
They have tried to legislate fair district boundaries. It is really tough to do. It is easy to set it up to give the dominant party in a state more political representation than they should get proportionately.
The way you do it is concentrate. Say you’re a Republican, you concentrate. You have four districts, as an example. You get four congresspeople. You concentrate all the Democrats into one district. In that district, a Democrat will always win because it is 90% Democratic.
Then you spread out the Republicans across every other district, so they have an unbeatable but lesser majority because they’re spread out. So, Democrats into one district with 90% and then 3 or 5 district where the Republicans are spread out to win all the other districts with a 5% or a 60% majority.
So if you put the Democrats in a ghetto, and spread out the Republicans, so they have a decent majority, you can get Republicans having 45% of the vote and 65% of the elected representatives. That needs to be fixed. Will it be fixed? I don’t know.
Those are three areas.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How bad is Trump?
Rick Rosner: The people on Twitter have been asking each other a lot, “Would Trump be this bad?” Some were saying, “Yes, he would get us into nuclear war.” Others said, “Yes, we didn’t know the form.” I am and others are saying, “No, this is worse than we imagined, though we imagined Trump was bad.”
One of the surprising things about Trump is how he manages to consistently outdo himself in new and worse ways on how to be terrible with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress. He is, by far, the worst president in history.
The latest horrible thing that has come out and has been verified by a number of sources, including the U.S. intelligence agencies. He has denied it, but the White House hasn’t denied it. It has been known since 2016 that Putin has been paying a bounty of up to $100,000 per dead American for Taliban fighters to kill Americans.
Even while the Taliban is supposed to be fighting a peace treaty with the U.S., Putin is paying the Taliban for a bounty on U.S. fighters. He has issued a number of excuses, even though he’s gotten a debriefing as early as more than a year ago. He seeks excuses.
Like, he got the debriefing and said that he got it on paper, but he doesn’t read paper. So, his Press Secretary had to say that he does read. It is bad. The Republicans in Congress had dozens of hearings on Bengazi, where four Americans were killed in Libya.
They were trying to hang it on Hillary Clinton. Even with all the hearings, they could find no direct culpability. With Trump doing nothing about Russia paying for the death of our soldiers, they aren’t doing anything about that.
It looks bad for Trump. It looks bad for the Republicans. America hit 50,000 new Covid cases for the first time ever today. The number of cases are going up every day rather than declining in 45 out of 50 states.
Trump said he expects it to go away. He said he might wear a mask. He’s okay with wearing a mask; it makes him ‘look like the Lone Ranger.’ He is doing nothing to stop the virus. The most people unemployed in U.S. history.
There’s no area of the U.S. presidency where you could say Trump has done even an adequate job at. His poll numbers are slowly dropping. He peaked at 45.8% approval, which was the highest approval he’d ever had since the ever first week of his presidency in April when he was having daily press briefings about Covid.
Since then, he has lost 12% of his approval. He’s down to 40.3%/40.5%, which puts him squarely in the range of the fairly rare group of presidents who were not re-elected out of 20 presidents since the beginning of the century, only five ran for a second term and were not re-elected.
He’s clearly shitty. People still don’t know whether he is demented or just some kind of psychopath who has had his bluff called too many times. We have 124 days until election day. He is falling into a hole versus Biden, which is very statistically unlikely that he can get out of to win the election.
Unless, there is cheating in the election. Which there may still be, because the Republicans have not instituted measures to prevent cheating or allow nationwide vote-by-mail, it is up to individual states.
I think people who hate Trump, which is a majority, hope that the worse he gets, then the more incompetent he shows himself to be. That’s pretty much where we stand. People like to call him a cult. But that doesn’t tell you anything.
Other people take stabs at their support as the sunk cost fallacy. That they’ve invested so much in him. That they just can’t let go, even as it becomes apparent that he is awful. Some people stick by him thinking that he was appointed as a warrior for God. That he was chosen by God.
Some people stick by him because he in combination with Mitch McConnell are very effective at getting very rightwing and often unqualified judges confirmed, which will fuck up the courts for decades to come.
It’s as inexplicable as what happened in Germany, where so many people went along with an increasingly atrocious regime. Although, he is losing support. You hope, normally, his support resorts to its usual levels of approval, which are in the 40s.
He’s not recovering as much. You’d think the different between 40% approval and 42% approval isn’t that big a deal, but it is because of the Electoral College and because each state is winner take all.
Those couple percent can determine the outcome of the election. That’s about it.
Jacobsen: Do you think America is finished?
Rosner: No, I think Trump will get beaten and it is possible the Republicans lose the Senate. The last time the Democrats had control of all three legislative and executive bodies was after the election of 2008 when Obama came in.
They have the Senate, the House, and the presidency. It was kind of a terrible time because the world was recovering from the crash of 2007/08. It took a while to recover, years, but the Democrats presided over that.
For a little while, once Al Franken joined the Senate, it took an extra six months, maybe 8 months, because – his election – it was so close. They kept challenging the results of the election. When he was finally seated, the Democrats had 60 senators, which gave them a supermajority to be able to do a bunch of stuff.
People say Obama squandered the majority, except in passing ObamaCare. People liked to rethink or second guess stuff say that he, maybe, could have achieved a greater number of things if he hadn’t put all his eggs in the ObamaCare basket.
But if the Democrats take back the Senate, keep the House, and take the presidency, they could do a lot towards fixing some of the stuff that has gotten all fucked up. Although, the Democrats tend to be conciliatory and tend to make a point like they are governing for all Americans. They are not as ruthless as the Republicans.
If they do that, then it is bad for America now. It has always been bad to have one political party more ruthless than the other in America. But it would be particularly bad. For instance, it is possible to imagine the Democrats being conciliatory and not prosecuting any of his people.
Even though, they have been guilty of serious crimes. In the past, after WaterGate, Nixon’s Republican replacement pardoned Nixon. Nixon could have been prosecuted, but his successor pardoned him. It was Ford. It pissed off much of the country and was a major reason for Ford not being re-elected in the country.
You’d hope to see some people prosecuted and investigations of Trump and his people to continue after he is out of office. That’s all. Unless, you have more questions.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You live in a place with a lot of famous people. What is it like living in a place like that?
Rick Rosner: For a long time, I worked for a famous guy who kind of got famous as I worked for him. He was a teeny bit famous when I worked for him and got a lot famous as I worked for him. Working on his show, more famous guests came in.
I didn’t seek out guests to meet them, because it turned out awkwardly – ugh. But on the show I worked on, the writers I worked with were part of the production team when working with guests. So, I worked with quite a few famous people.
You try not to act weird around them. It is fine. Everybody does their job. I was not allowed to meet… I wrote a bit that ended up in a Cruise bit. My bosses decided I was too weird and shouldn’t be allowed to interact with Tom Cruise.
I semi-met him on the red carpet. We sent one of the interviewers down to the red carpet, a movie premiere, generally. Our interviewer would yell at people on the carpet trying to get them to come over and answer questions.
One time one of the people was Tom Cruise. The gimmick our show used was a not good interviewer. This interviewer went on and on at Tom Cruise and not allowing Tom Cruise to say anything. He made eye contact with me like “this is the bit?” My eye contact said back, “Yes, this is the bit,” back to him.
He did hold a silicone model of my foot, I found, later. I have a grotesque foot. Somebody made a copy of it and made it an ashtray. Apparently, when Tom Cruise was over at my boss’s house, he held it up.
Jacobsen: What did he say?
Rosner: I don’t know. They sent Tom Hanks. He was personally nice. They sent someone with me to Tom Hanks because they thought I’d be weird alone. I didn’t say much. I was just there. Hollywood is a place for people some of the best social skills in the world.
If you’ve got really good social skills, then you might be tempted to gravitate to entertainment and to live in L.A. The people with the best social skills do really well. My social skills aren’t terrible. They’re probably even better than average at this point.
But they are, certainly, not on a scale with some famous people I have met who radiate charisma. Even if they are famous, you’d be like, “Wow, this person is weirdly charismatic.” Then you meet real famous person like that, and you’re like, “Wow, that person is really nice.”
The bar for famous people is lower. One of the bosses pointed out that if a famous person is regularly nice; people talk about them as if they are the nicest person in the world because you don’t expect someone famous to be regularly nice.
Jacobsen: What is the social expectation there as people become more famous from the point of non-famous people, normal people?
Rosner: There is a deal with attractive women in New York City. You have to have a closed face. You can’t look like you would be approachable. Because then people will approach you. So, women in New York City learn to move fast and to have a look on their face like, “You don’t want to try looking at me.” A similar one may be resting bitch face.
My wife has a fairly open face. People would fuck with her, not that often, but, sometimes, in New York. One guy jacked off in front of her. He had his hand in his pants. He wanted her to see he was working his junk right in front of her.
She had other stuff that would happen to her on the subway. It, maybe, happened elsewhere. It was a small sample set. She only lived there 2.5 years. Anyway, celebrities, when they go out, have to develop some distancing skills or they will be approached in the same way a sexy lady might be approached if you don’t have distancing skills, or if you just don’t go out that much.
Really famous people a) don’t go out that much, b) have security, and c) don’t come in the front door, most people who become celebrities, on average – there are idiots who become famous, are at least somewhat smart, because it is helpful not to be an idiot.
It helps to be an actor if you aren’t dumb because good acting is correlated with smartness. You can be an idiot and be an intuitive actor, a good actor, but you are more likely to be a competent actor if you are smart.
So, I don’t know. Everybody who is not famous and probably a lot of people who aren’t famous in L.A. act like they are not excited to see or thrilled to see famous people. They don’t bug them, don’t make a fuss, but inside they’re excited.
It is a known thing. To see a famous person and pretend like you are seeing a selfie, and swing around as if the celebrity is coming into the back, there is a guy called Cole Sprouse who is on Riverdale. He loves to take pictures of people, catching them sneaking pictures of him.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That’d be a fun game.
Rosner: I’ve always wanted to be famous enough to be able to interact with famous people as a semi-famous person myself, but I haven’t reached that point, yet. We’ve gone. My wife and I have gone to places. We went to the Emmys a couple of years.
We went to post-Emmys parties and stuff. We rode in an elevator with Ellen DeGeneres and her wife. We knew enough not to make conversation with them. Celebrities feel a little exalted. One time, Colin Farrell, the Irish actor.
I was on Hollywood Boulevard. He was looking at me. I get recognized very occasionally because there is a bunch of video of me up. He was looking at me as if he’d seen videos of me, then there I am, the guy he has seen videos of me.
I know somebody has shown Conan O’Brien the Errol Morris documentary. He said it made him scared and nervous. That’s a talk show host reaction. Obviously, he is not really scared and nervous. His reaction would be that is a bizarre guy who makes me nervous.
This Colin guy recognized me. This is the one time a famous person recognized me…
He was driving a big, white fancy pickup truck and looking at me, but not in a gay way. He was so straight he had a sex tape scandal, maybe more than one, where beautiful women were banging him.
Back in the day, he used to be a party guy. Anyway, my writing partner’s brother’s wife, I think, worked on Conan and Conan ended up being shown the Errol Morris documentary because it is such an entertaining documentary because I am such a weirdo.
He said ‘he is a scary guy,’ because I am such a weirdo. If you’re a late night guy, you’re going to give a glib reaction.
Jacobsen: Who else has recognized you?
Rosner: Among famous people, that’s it. I get recognized three times a year by non-famous people. They come up to me and say, “You’re Rick Rosner. Are you?” I say, “Yes,” usually at the gym, then we will talk for a little bit.
Jacobsen: What do you talk about?
Rosner: It is occasionally about being ‘that guy’ or occasionally talking about smart stuff. They go and do stuff on machines and then I go and do stuff on other machines.
Jacobsen: Are you dying for that attention?
Rosner: As a young person, I think, but less now. But we’ve been in lockdown for three fucking months [Laughing]. I just want my neighbours to stop partying so much.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Are you turning into an old man?
Rosner: I have no reason to go out. I have only gone out to the gym for three times. People aren’t wearing masks or aren’t wearing them right. I had kidney surgery. I work out all the time. I’m 60 years old. I don’t want to get the Covid. I’m not in the demographic that, apparently, gets it without much in the way of symptoms.
I could get really sick. I don’t even want to get a little sick. If I had a job that I had to go to every day, I might take the risk of going to the job and being okay with the possibility of getting sick, because I could be over it and do whatever I wanted.
Unless, the studies they’ve done prove to be true and you only stay immune for a few months, which would suck. Given that there is no reason for me to leave the house, why should I run the risk. I will leave the house, but I’m going to take maximum precautions.
I wrap a scarf around my lower face. Then I put a mask on on top of it. Since I have a beard, the mask doesn’t fit on entirely anyway. I have double protection with the mask not fitting tightly, but the scarf fits all the way around the beard and the mask fits on top of it.
I get what is effectively a tighter fit, which may or may not matter because the mask is primarily to stop me from infecting other people. But it does have to fit to keep me from infecting other people, since I got this double, triple layer deal.
I think I do still want to be famous. Even though, the main thing that I wanted to be famous is being famous young to get laid a lot. That’s now very off the table for a number of reasons, including I am married and don’t want to fuck that up. And I am old, and several other reasons.
The fucking beautiful women is off the table, besides my wife.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You are really into mosaics. When we met years ago, you had a bunch.
Rick Rosner: Micromosaics, Carole decided she likes micromosaics. These are very, very, sometimes incredibly, small mosaic is showing flowers, which are for poor tourists who can spend $10 or the 1920 equivalent of $10 showing costume jewellery.
Then there are those showing Roman ruins for richer tourists. They are nor more than 2 inches across, some of them. Some have thousands of shards of glass in tiny mosaics. I have been busted ones, cheap, repairing them, and giving them to Carole.
Every once in a while, I’ll go to Etsy or larger, regular-ish ones. But they almost all suck. They’re just not good because, in America, making good mosaics is not a thing. What happened is paint by numbers kits, you’re probably too old.
Paint by numbers, in the ‘50s, and into the ‘60s, there was this drive for people to create art; it’s probably less now, because there are other things to do and you can create better stuff on your computer. You can use computer graphics to make decent looking stuff.
People were limited before and people made paint by numbers. You get a board. You get a set of a dozen colors and a little paint brush. The little tubs of paint half of an inch across would be labelled with a number.
There would be a number and with an outline. It told you what colour, what number, to paint on that board. When you were done, you had a not great looking little painting that you painted by yourself by numbers, similarly, there were mosaic kits.
It allowed people to make mosaics with tiles. They weren’t great looking because you were taking the little square tiles, gluing them down, grouting them, and then you’d end up with a primitive thing that you use as a trivet or can hang on your wall.
They were popular in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and maybe into the ‘70s. They weren’t artistically sophisticated. Then American got the idea that these are what mosaics are, not great. A fancy person, unless they were into retro-kitch, a low of these mosaics now, from the ‘50s, might sell for $50 to $100 if you can find them on eBay.
They are kitchy, but not super great art. When I look around for decent mosaics, there aren’t that many. Sometimes, one will showup out of the Vatican mosaic factory because the Vatican was the originator of the post-ancient Roman decent mosaic because in the 15th or 16th century; the Pope decided to replace a bunch of frescoes across the Vatican City with mosaics because the frescoes were getting wrecked by the moisture of tens of thousands of tourists breathes. He hired a bunch of craftsmen to get trained to make mosaics that are so good looking and so precise.
You can’t tell that they’re not paintings. Unless, you’re standing a couple of feet away from them. It led to the mosaic workshop, the Vatican mosaic workshop, which is still in business. They made, maybe, 9,000 mosaics that can be sold to people who can afford them in the 300 years since they became a commercial enterprise.
Every once in a while, those will go for auction and sell for a couple of thousand bucks. At least those very decent mosaics are out there, but there aren’t that many of them, looking around a few days ago on Etsy, I came across people making decent mosaics out of St. Petersburg, Russia, where, in Russia, I still think people make decent mosaics.
I don’t think the reputation of mosaics was wrecked by a bunch of crappy mosaics as they were in America. Obviously, there are still people in Russia making decent mosaics without a lot of grout showing and close to photorealistic and look like somebody made and effort and look like what they portray.
My wife likes flowers. There are mosaics of flowers that look like somebody worked from a detailed photo of flowers and turned it into micromosaics and looks pretty close to what must have been the original photo.
They are cool. I am using Google Translate to talk to these people in Russia. So, the F.B.I. probably already have a dossier on me because I am a weirdo who tweets a lot. This should be in such a file because I am communicating in Russia with a couple people in Russia via Google Translate.
Eventually, I might end up owning, and might get one of these for several hundred bucks, which is a good deal for a competent mosaic compared to $3,000 for one that came out of the Vatican factory. Here is a tip if you are using Google Translate, which gets better and better, it has been around since 2007.
It has a bunch of languages now. The languages are pretty decent. You’d think there’s no way to tell because you don’t speak the language you’re translating into it. There is one way. Copy and paste or cut and paste the set, set it aside, but then they have these reverse arrows that take the translation and translate it back into English, then you can read the message as Google Translate translated the Russian back into English, so, you can proof it to see if it makes sense, if it isn’t saying anything inadvertently offensive.
You still don’t know what it says in Russian, but you do have Google’s translation of Russian back into English. It will not be exactly what you wrote in English. But how close it is to what you originally wrote in English is an indication of how decent the translation is, it is a nice way to check your work to make sure you’re not saying something incomprehensible or offensive to the Russian.
There is a game that you can play back and forth. You can do it back and forth multiple times. It can begin to sound really weird. Anyway, the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Are things better in terms of people’s knowledge of sex and sexual behaviour compared to when you were growing up in the ‘70s?
Rick Rosner: Yes, I think with MeToo and with knowledge in general. Things are generally better, but the whole culture is more perverse. Carole and I were just watching a documentary on the sexual abuse scandal in American gymnastics.
Where hundreds of girls were molested, one guy in particular. He was probably the most celebrated doctor, but there were others who were molesting these girls. Girls who were abused in a whole bunch of other ways too.
The model for gymnastics since Bella Caroli came over from Romania in the ‘80s has been to be really mean and punitive. That is the way it is thought to win gold medals. On the document, it was hundreds getting abused.
Just looking at the rest of the Netflix and HBO lineup, the stories we watch now are all fucked up.
Jacobsen: Is it SNAFU central?
Rosner: Just the perverse and the dark, and embracing all the nasty details of life, where compare what we watch now to Magnum P.I. or Starsky and Hutch, or the Partridge Family, the nasty realities of life were kept hidden from T.V. and in life.
People had no idea as to the level of rapey and abusive behaviour that went on and people were more tolerant of sexually abusive and harassing behaviour. We made a deal where it is the Garden of Eden.
We made a deal to know more, which brings a measure of improvement in people’s lives because it is harder for abusers to get away with stuff. Because people are more aware of the potential for abuse and are less willing to hide it.
But the other half of the deal is that we’re less innocent. We accept that everything and everybody are fucked up. That’s all I have to say. It makes for better stories, more entertaining stories. It’s still possible for a shitty production team to make a shitty show.
There are plenty of shitty shows that are gritty and employ all the nasty details of humanity. I stopped watching this one show called Marcella out of England. It is hacky because it makes everybody the worst person possible.
You know the worst thing that can happen, will happen. There was a kid in the show who has a bunch of pet mice. I figured at some point in the story that the kid would crush one of the mice because it is that type of show. He did. I decided that show had nothing original to say and decided to stop watching.
Anyway, we live in a fallen world, which is, to some extent, the price of knowledge.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
Share this:
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s your deal around micromosaics and surveillance?
Rick Rosner: We’ve talked about it. My wife likes micromosaics, which are these very small mosaic pieces, mostly jewellery where the sliver of glass can be less than a millimetre in length and width.
We’ve collected quite a few of these little things. I’ll buy broken ones and fix them. It ties in with my natural ability, or my ability to see super up close. I am nearsighted enough that I don’t need magnifying lenses to do super close work. I was thinking.
My wife likes micromosaics. I should see if there are any other mosaics that aren’t shitty, and larger. I usually don’t find shitty ones. Most full-size mosaics, anything over a few inches on a side; most are amateurish and crappy.
I was poking around on Etsy. I found some from St. Petersburg, Russia, that were professional and gorgeous and achieving the effects of water in a clear container with refraction, just really nice.
I ended up got Google Translate to send a couple emails to Russia to inquire into buying these. It turns out. The guy never completed his Etsy store. I was trying to track him down. I don’t know if the U.S. government is paying attention to Russian web addresses/email addresses in Russia.
They may have a dossier on me. Although, they may have one on me, after all the angry tweets about how terrible Trump is. For what it is worth, the difference between an average to shitty mosaic and a really good one is the tightness of he joints.
There should be barely any space between the pieces. People think that since it is a mosaic there should be a space or some grout, but the best pieces have almost no grout and have almost no space. It makes for a much more legible image and abetter looking image.
That’s all I got about it. We’ll see what it is like to do business with Russia if that is even possible. I feel like it might be possible to get a decent deal on this stuff depending on what I would expect is that it is not the exchange rate; it is the cost of stuff in Russia.
I am expecting Russia is economically depressed enough that the necessities of life are cheaper there than here, which means the luxury of life may also be cheaper. Where I wouldn’t be able to get these pieces if they were made by Americans, this may be the case in Russia.
That’s about it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: If Trump loses the conservative media propping him up, there are always one or two people at Fox News who are ot afraid to praise him, but the primetime news lineup supports him. Although, Laura Ingraham has criticized him for being a wimp about stuff, not Trumpy enough.
Ingraham, Hannity, Carlson, and Jeanine, are the most convincing Fox News voices. If he starts losing any of those people, I think that would be about the only way to erode his support below 39%.
Also, you have to look at Republican senators who may speak out against him more, figuring that they will lose if they remain strongly attached to Trump in purple states or states that have a strong Democratic demographic.
That might happen. But I am not sure that will erode his support much.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Trump’s situation now?
Rick Rosner: It is 19 weeks until the election. There have been 123,000 confirmed U.S. coronavirus deaths are a rally last week; Trump said that he has been trying to slow down coronavirus testing in the U.S. because he doesn’t want so many people coming back positive with it.
His people said he’s joking. He went back and said that he is not. He is a terrible guy. He promised to build the wall. The border between the U.S. and Mexico is 1,950 miles. He has only put up 210 miles of wall, so only slightly more than 10% of the border.
Of those 210 miles, only 3 miles are walls in places where there was no previous border. So, his great wall is a piece of shit. He’s got the most corrupt administration in history. He owns the 19 largest point drops on the DOW-Jones industrial average in history.
He’s increased the deficit by trillions. 675,000 people or so have died – more people – under Trump in 41-months than in 41 months under any other president. Only 1/3rd is due to increased population.
It’s hard to really defend him in any way. He’s down to Biden in the polls by roughly 10 points. Although, Hillary up on Trump by similar margins, even later in the election cycle. But the world odds, you can’t bet on politics in the U.S. but can in England.
Odds in England have gone from more than 50% to less than 50% of Trump winning. It does a little good if Trump loses and the Republicans hold the Senate because Mitch McConnell is as bas for the country as Trump.
But every who doesn’t like Trump, which is the majority of the country, is cheering for him to fall apart. His rally to open up his campaign after no rallies was puked by Gen Z people. People in TikTok and who like K-Pop.
They ordered a millions tickets to te Arizona rally. People expected overflow crowds. They only filled a 1/3rd of this 19,000 person area. So, it looked really bad for him. But it is still too early. He is at 40% aggregate approval if you combine the polls compared to a 45.8% two months ago when he was doing daily press briefings about coronavirus.
So, he has lost little more than 10% of the people who approve of him in 2 months. He’s given up on coronavirus. There is not a push to increase testing. There’s not a push for much contact tracing.
If you combine both of things, you could get a handle on the virus in the U.S. The way other countries have done and push it down to negligible numbers. South Korea has had only 280 deaths from coronavirus.
They still have an average of 1 or 2 a week, where we average 5,000 a week and have more than 400 times as many deaths as South Korea has had. Our curve of new cases never came close to zero. It dropped from highs of 30,000 per day to roughly 20,000 a day for a month or a month and a half.
Since the country is being opened, 4 out of the past 5 days, we have been back above 30,000 new confirmed cases a day. I am guessing within the next 2 weeks; we will break our all-time record for most new cases in a day.
For states in denial about it, Texas, Arizona, and Florida, the hospitals are starting to overflow in Arizona and Texas. They may get harder than they are getting hit now. Tis may be the thing that erodes Trump’s support even further, but who knows.
His support has been the steadiest of any president since they started polling under FDR more than 80 years ago. His range of approval and disapproval, if you don’t count the first polls because people want to give the new president the benefit of the doubt, since the first week has ranged between 45.8% and 37%.
It is a tight margin compared to every other president. It may not be possible to get his support to drop much below 39%. Because those weeks of him in the 37s were 2.5 years ago, 3 years ago, before people got used to that he was going to be an asshole for his entire presidency.
They got used to it after the initial shock. It may not be possible. There may be some gradual erosion to 40 or into the 39s, then there will be the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The candidates, usually, get a bump for a couple percent from their conventions.
So, I don’t know. I expect the week of the election; he will be around 40% approval. The week of the election will have about 200,000 coronavirus dead or more. The country will probably have had to shut down more again.
But there are millions of people who will not admit to pollsters that they will vote for Trump because they find it embarrassing. There is a chance that he will still win. That’s where we are at now. He looks or the country looks worse than ever.
There is an all-time low for the number of Americans who say they are happy, which is 14%. I think the previous low was 29%. So, most of the country thinks he is a monster. 40% still stands by him.
The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The best model of consciousness now, if we simplify that to a definition in one sentence, what is it in plain English?
Rick Rosner: It is high-information flow, sharing information among a bunch of different analytic nodes, and a bunch of different sensory analytic nodes. You get high-density information, detailed information about the world coming in through several senses, merging with analytic information produced by your brain about what is coming in, and the analytic information is associative.
What is in the conscious arena brings up associations from memory, and creates new associations, so, it’s a function of varied, shared information. All about the world under consideration by the thing that is conscious.
In other words, everything is looking at roughly the same stuff, the world that the consciousness is trying to model and analyze. It is not like somebody sitting, like a stock broker sitting at 17 different screens looking at information flows about 17 different things. It is not parallel processing those – no.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Some more stuff on IBM – yada-yada. You wanted to talk about it some more. Go ahead.
Rick Rosner: I don’t remember where we exactly left off because I took a nap. We should look at old hand-wavey models of consciousness. There is a trend calling whatever something humans can do and animals can’t “consciousness” with an in-built assumption that animals aren’t conscious and humans are, which I don’t believe.
To this train of thinking, you should find things human can do like have language, recognize oneself in the mirror, having a sense of self which comes with seeing oneself in a mirror, and whatever this one thing was that people thought human beings can do; they argue this is what consciousness is.
Having language means you’re conscious, seeing yourself and recognizing yourself in a mirror means you’re conscious, it is not a good reason. At the same time, some of this stuff does help flesh out what we feel as conscious humans.
Language, certainly, facilitates some aspects of consciousness if you can assign a term or a shorthand for everything that may come up in your awareness; that’s helpful. Anyway.
Jacobsen: What about metaphors of consciousness like levers, gears, pumps, vacuum tubes?
Rosner: Up through the 50s and the 60s, there was the Dr. Frankenstein model of biology, where once medicine started making some headway and able to do stuff and understand the body. This got tied in with the mechanical-physical models that people had at the time.
With the novel Frankenstein being the first major work to discuss humans as machinery that could be repaired and resurrected, so, I feel like all those models of pumps that you mentioned get tangled in 19th century Frankenstein and then crappy horror movies of the 1950s, where scientists are always resurrecting people to bad effect.
But I’m sure that machinery model, probably, got tangled up in other models of consciousness and, in fact, there are still ideas of flow when discussing consciousness. Some of those models or ideas are not illegitimate. That bandwidth, the amount of information flowing through a system per unit time is not inapplicable to consciousness.
You could model consciousness as a game played on a board. If you set it up based on whatever the rules of consciousness are, you could animate modes of consciousness by moving pieces around on some board. But in practice, you need a flow rate of real-time of having a lot of cognitive and sensory information flowing through the system.
To get back to Watson and Google Translate, though, you could argue that they have an awareness of something at some really low level because the amount of information flowing through them and the number of things, the graininess, and the paucity of inputs means that whatever awareness they have is nothing like our awareness, and, furthermore, they’re not like awareness because they don’t have so many of the things that may not be necessary for consciousness; we associate them with consciousness.
Even though, Google Translate is about language. Google Translate does not have language like we have language because words in it do not have as much in them as us, or each meta-word. People argue that Google Translate has developed an internal efficiency with a meta-language, where each word in every actual human language is associated with the concept of that word in a synthetic language within Google Translate.
It has a landscape of the relationship among words. This landscape generally doesn’t use the specific words in the landscape, but some representation of the words in the landscape meaning “bread” in the different languages. But I haven’t read that much about it, though. So, I don’t know.
[Dog barking]
Jacobsen: We have guest speakers.
Rosner: Yes, the word or meta-word for “bread” doesn’t represent bread the way we represent it because Google Translate doesn’t have the sensory library to have the imagery associated with the bread.
[Dog barking]
Rosner: Damn it.
[Pause, swearing]
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, you wanted to talk about IBM’s Watson and Google Translate and their level of consciousness.
Rick Rosner: My question is if they are conscious and to what degree. For this era, they are sophisticated and closest to conscious.
Jacobsen: What is the separation of conscious and not conscious here?
Rosner: Everyone knows what consciousness is within living in consciousness. We all know what consciousness feels like. That is a good enough start, I believe. The question could be, “How close to feeling human-type consciousness could these association engines come?” I started reading an article, ‘What does it feel like to be Watson?’ in a journal.
It veered quickly into “What does it mean to be human?” It went into behaviourism, as the basis of the journal.
Jacobsen: That is a joke in and of itself.
Rosner: Yes, behaviourism comes from a time when it was very hard to look inside the brain. We are only going to look at human and animal behaviours. It was people throwing up their arms and giving up. I was surprised people are still doing behaviourism when we have all these tools to look into human brains.
It is like the journal of rotary phones or buggy whips, sorry behaviourists, but jeez.
Jacobsen: When I was working in psychology, there was advancements. We were between cognitive science and neuroscience marrying together with the looking at the general processing of information in humanistic terms, providing narratives around things, e.g., false memories, where neuroscience is more clinical and looking at the chemistry and architectural of the brain at macro scales and micro scales.
That’s one marriage. That cognitive revolution was a revolution on the cognitive revolution by marrying cognitive science and neuroscience, but cognitive was an advancement on behaviourism because, as you were saying, the brain was see as a black box.
We might see a marriage between cognitive neuroscience and behaviourism now.
Rosner: You see this in all the hard sciences, chemistry and biology and physics. The things that some scientists strive for is to try to turn everything into physics because science is the basic, ground floor for all physical processes. Everything in biology and chemistry must ultimately be traced back to the particles involved with the chemical and biological systems.
To a huge extent, that has been done. Angela Merkel, the head of Germany or very competent leader of Germany, started off in Quantum Chemistry. You can compare that to our President who struggles with double digit mathematics of addition.
You don’t have to take everything in chemistry or biology down to its basic physics foundation. Every day, you could do it, and it would all hold up. Similarly, everything in cognitive science and neuroscience at some point in the future should be built up from the basic physics of the matter in your brain and nervous system.
Anyway, the behaviourism article was annoying. You do want to take a look at what makes human consciousness. What are the elements of it? A couple big ones are that it is judge-y. Everything that impinges on your consciousness is judged according to a bunch of criteria that are themselves part of consciousness, whether they are good for you, good for your safety, for your health, whether it makes you horny or scared.
Everything is evaluated multi-dimensionally, which is to say among a bunch of different scales. That’s one thing. Another thing is pleasure in pain. Everything in consciousness is in consciousness because it is in an associative net. Everything that enters your conscious arena because it triggers associations with other stuff. Your brain is just a rolling cascade of associations.
It makes it weird to talk about pleasure and pain because pleasure and pain seem more association free than other stuff. Food has flavours that you associate with a specific food. Pleasure and pain, though they come in different flavours too, with the stomach ache versus slicing a finger with a knife.
The pleasure seem to exist as pleasure and pain more than flavours exist independent on other stuff. I would guess stuff can’t be in consciousness. Unless, it triggers associations. Pain exists to alert you to a problem and get you to do stuff with regard to issues with that problem. Something is fucking up your body.
Pain tells you to isolate that part of your body or to go away from that thing, aversive behaviours. Pain pushes you away from stuff. Pleasure tells you everything is okay. When you have an orgasm, including me, orgasm makes you sleepy, “Yes, you’re not going to worry about anything right now. You’re going to drift off into a nice little nap.”
So, in rough terms, though they don’t immediately seem to be, they are associative. They want you to do stuff or feel good to not have to do stuff. With regard to judginess regarding pleasure and pain, can you o withou them? I say, “Yes.” But a consciousness without that stuff would not feel like human consciousness to us. Then we can circle back to Watson and Google Translate.
With Watson, questions are entered into it. The words and grammatical relationships in the words are looked at and given a bunch of associations without a deep understanding of the question; it just knows that these words set out in this sequence generate this set of possible answers.
Each with a probability of being correct. If a rule breaks some or hits some threshold of being correct, say 85% or 90%, then Watson rings in and answers the question. I think Watson has been sold to clients looking for machine learning association engines.
I don’t know what specific Watson tasks there are, assume you can sell Watson to a hospital. Someone presents this kind of symptoms. Watson generates a set of possible diseases. Each with a probability of fitting those criteria. You can probably use this kind of thing for social media brainwashing. You enter characteristics of somebody’s voting behaviour that you want to influence.
You enter what is available about this person and then Watson generates a set of messages that are ranked by probability in influencing this voter in the way you want, which is the way, I assume, Cambridge Analytica worked. It was used by Republicans in 2016 to make people crazy in the way they wanted to make them crazy.
So, there is association going on. You could argue there is a certain degree of awareness. It is not broadband at all. In that, our consciousness, we get information from a number of or along a number of different cognitive and sensory pathways. We have nodes of specialist systems that add their two cents on what they are seeing like the horniness node.
This thing I am seeing. How does it make me feel sexually? Every knows that node is overactive and will find some things to see as sexual even in contexts where nothing sexual is happening. You can see certain curves. They remind you of a butt.
Everyone is familiar with the feeling of seeing butts and getting horny or for no reason after seeing something curvaceous. That horny node is always going and evaluating. We have hundreds of those nodes large and small. Watson and Google Translate don’t have as many nodes. They really don’t have many pathways for input.
Obviously, you can type stuff into Google Translate and into Watson. That’s primarily how you are filling them with information. I would guess with Google being a sinister high-tech company is experimenting with ways of entering information into a system that isn’t just words, like Google Images. I assume working with Google Video and trying to build associative structures.
So, it is reasonable to think that Watson and Google Translate don’t really understand the words that are entered into it. They only understand what those words are associated with. That if you enter “bread” into Google Translate; that you’ll get a bunch of words that mean “bread” in other languages.
Words in this associative net will reflect that bread in something you cook, that you eat, that you buy, that you might find in a kitchen or a restaurant, without Google Translate knowing what any of these terms mean. We can also assume Google is trying to build, if not Google Translate, how bread would work, including these ingredients and knowing what “mix” means and could call up videos of bread mixing.
But none of this gives you consciousness, but all of this gets you closer to consciousness. The question becomes, “How close does this get you to consciousness, whether human consciousness or even grasshopper consciousness?” They have a consciousness, grasshoppers, and they have an experience of the world moment-to-moment.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, you wanted to talk about IBM’s Watson and Google Translate. What about them?
Rick Rosner: Both of them are machine learning – which is another term for A.I. – associational engines. Watson get a Jeopardy question entered into him/typed into him. Based on the words and the relationships of the words in the questions generates in a fraction of a second, a set of possible answers wih each one ranked in terms of probability of being correct.
If one of them hits above some threshold, maybe 80/90% of being correct, Watson will ring in with that answer. All this happened not too long ago. Since then, Watson has been sold to IBM’s clients as some kind of search engine or association engine.
My question, “How conscious, if at all, are machine learning, association engines like these?” I started reading an article that was from a journal titled something like ‘What is it like to be Watson?’ I started reading it.
The article turned out to be crap. The discussion focused on, “What is it to be human?” I am interested in what it is to be conscious. I looked up the name of the journal. It is the ‘American Journal of Behaviourism’ or something. It shocked me.
Behaviourism is some movement in psychology from the 1930s that it was too hard to figure out what is actually going on in the brain, so that movement decided to just look at thought and animals and humans in terms of behaviours. “We’ll leave the brain as a black box.”
It was the scientific equivalent of throwing up your hands and saying, “Fuck it!” It is surprising as we have increasingly advanced tools to look inside the brain on a fraction of a second basis. So, that was a garbage article.
But you can ask in a more legitimate way, ‘What makes consciousness conscious?’
Jacobsen: Also, what makes the non-conscious crucial to the conscious?
Rosner: Yes. Consciousness is built out of non-conscious building blocks. It’s got a physical basis. That is the processes that go on in the brain and some people like to argue that consciousness resides within certain structures within neurons. I find that to be a garbage theory.
Anyway. You look at human consciousness. Human consciousness is judge-y. That is, the events that happen o human consciousness and sensory input is judged according to a bunch of criteria, but, maybe, most importantly whether what is going on is good or bad for the human and whether the human being likes it.
So, there’s judging, pleasure, and pain. I find those hard to incorporate into consciousness. But I think the key for everything in consciousness is to see how it works associatively because you’re not conscious of anything.
Unless, it enters into an associative arena, where it can trigger a sensory event.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/06/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what is going on in America with Fox News? You had some thoughts.
Rick Rosner: I am just dib-sing the term “non-sense engine.” Right now, roughly a third of American adults support Trump to some extent, which means you support nonsense and bullshit to some extent. There’s the media constantly pumping bullshit into people’s brain and calling it truth.
You can’t fix people who believe ridiculous shit. Unless, you remove the source of ridiculous shit. So, in this country, we are trying to fix the cops. After we fix the cops, we got to fix the news. I have some ideas for doing it, for example, like requiring channels that claim to be running the news to have a sidebar that runs simultaneously that fact checks bullshit.
Although, for good fixes to happen, non-Republicans would have to get a very large majority. Even then, they would fuck it up. All I want to do here is dibs the term non-sense engine. It is an engine because it powers the ongoing political dysfunction that is facilitated by people believing stupid untrue shit.
Jacobsen: What about a “sense navigator” – how you find your way through the muck with an engine? What is your sensible astrolabe?
Rosner: Consensus facts instead of crazy bullshit conspiracy theories. The best science, unless somebody is sufficiently educated in science that they can handle the subtleties. For instance, there are a bunch of people in America who won’t wear masks because it will make you sick, because you breathe in carbon monoxide. It’s just stupid.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Its disproven every day by medical professionals who wear them for 12, 13 hours a day all day several days a week. But if you are going to argue some masks are more effective than others, then you should be able to believe that shit if you have read the science on that.
I was listening to an expert on the pandemic and diseases, infectious diseases, saying that the latest evidence is that it is hard to catch Covid on surfaces. So, he stopped worrying about surfaces as it relates to Covid.
So, if somebody is scientifically informed and literate enough to have some alternative views, fine, but you can’t just believe straight up bullshit, I was thinking about how I am writing this book based on the future.
I was thinking one way to enforce the rule of truth, which is a little coercive, but, maybe, the entertainment and news industries form consortiums/consortia. Where you don’t get to have your face and your voice amplified by working in entertainment or news, unless, you agree to believe facts in pretty the way I’ve been talking about.
Where, it is fine to be a little bit informed, but the informed you are should be based on legitimate consensus knowledge. That coronavirus is a thing. There are millions in America who believe it is a Bill Gates conspiracy.
Maybe, if you have that belief, you don’t get acting jobs or writing jobs. If that is what it takes to get us back on track to combat nonsense/bullshit engines, then, maybe, that’s one. I only just thought about it, so there are probably some shitty aspects to it.
Also, I don’t know if anybody will have the balls to do it. People have argued for billionaires to buy Fox News. You could buy it for several tens of billions of dollars. So if you took 200 billionaires, and if they each pitched in a quarter billion, that’s $50 billion for a hostile take over of Fox to make it not Fox.
Maybe, the investors may make some money off it, because it is still a news organizations with profit in it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is there such innumeracy? What are the social and political implications of this?
Rick Rosner: 15 years ago, people talked about the perfect storm based on the movie The Perfect Storm, which is about the confluence of factors coming together to make something particularly horrible. This is where we are roughly May, 2020.
We are having more than 2,000 fatalities a day the past few weeks due to coronavirus. But this is the week that people have become impatient and people are partially opening up 42 states after things were shut down for a while
There is a way to do it based on extensive testing and contact tracing. You test everybody and find those who have been positive and ask who they have been in contact with and ask them to quarantine. That isn’t being done.
Testing remains horrible largely due to Trump’s incompetence, large due to he and his people thinking that if they don’t produce horrible numbers produced by wider testing, then it wouldn’t look so bad for his re-election.
I will confine discussion to much of this happening to people having no grasp of math whatsoever. People who have a decent grasp of mathematics and statistics and understand the relative risks and outworks the spread of the disease and how it works, and that testing is inadequate.
Right now, we are testing just over 1/20th of 1% of the U.S. population per day. We have tested a total of roughly 2% of the entire population. If we could get it up to roughly a third of 1% of the population per day, say a million tests a day, in a month, we could get 10% of the population tested.
That might be enough to open up a lot of offices, open up some communities, once you find out who needs to not be open, who needs to be quarantined, in a community. But the current level of testing does not allow this.
But it does allow the virus to be passed on enough to, at least, maintain a, more or less, steady rate of 2,000 more dead people per day. If that rate holds until the end of the year, we’re looking at more than half of a million Americans dead, which puts it in the top 5 deadliest events in U.S. history up there with the Civil War, the Spanish Flu, and World War Two.
Even if we get lucky, get more testing, and can drop the number of dad per day to just a thousand per day, still by Election Day in early November, we’re at a quarter million U.S. dead, which makes it the fifth deadliest event in U.S. history.
But enough of the country doesn’t even bother to understand the math to the point where they might understand that opening up the country now will add another 100,000 to 150,000 fatalities and will make the rate of the number of cases and the number of deaths rise to the point where we might have to close everything down again.
Or if enough assholes have their way, there is a thing being said, ‘Some people have to die.’ We might rise to 3,000 to 4,000 deaths per day and still have lots of states where people refuse to close things down again.
Jacobsen: Is this related to the amount of illiteracy in the United States as well?
Rosner: The engine for people not bothering to understand are shitty arguments cynically targeted at dumb people by conservative news organizations and conservative news pundits. That we have to open up the country and sure we’re going to take reasonable precautions, but people are going to die.
When that argument is made, there is little discussion as to what reasonable precautions are. When you understand math, you understand the reasonable precautions are having enough testing and contact tracing to understand who still needs to be quarantined and what communities still need to be quarantined.
A month ago, when they talked about what the criteria should be for opening up the country, there were four including 14 days of declining numbers of cases in the area where people are discussing opening. No part of the country has that.
Many of the places opening up have hit their highest numbers in the past couple of days. So, people try to sound reasonable and say, “We’re going to take reasonable precautions,” but the people making those arguments either don’t understand or don’t care about reasonable precautions.
Because if you understand math, then you understand what reasonable criteria are. Unless, we are lucky enough that higher Summer temperatures or different Summer behaviours – more people outside in groups rather than inside in groups, unless that knocks it down; we will continue to have 1,500 to 2,500 U.S. deaths a day.
So within a week, this will be the deadliest year for respiratory diseases since 1969. With two weeks, it will be the worst year for it since the Spanish Flu, where the worst month in U.S. history for communicable disease deaths was October, 1919, when 195,000 people died of the Spanish Flu.
Last month, about 60,000 people died of coronavirus, this month, it looks like it will be about the same. Unless, we are lucky. We could hit 100,000 deaths in a month.
Alright, the end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I’m just thinking about this a little more with ongoing crisis pandemic, because we have a lot of people dying in a short amount of time. So there’s also almost 8 billion people alive in the world. So that just makes me think about, “Okay, so, what are we going to do when people have either expired prematurely or have died by natural causes, other natural causes?”
So, the question is: “What is going to be the future of dealing with bodies when they’ve had their use, basically, when the person’s life is over?” Is the demographic of this going to change from mostly burial to more cremation and things like that?
Rosner: I do not know. The bio mass of the dead is negligible compared to all other forms of waste. You die once and you leave 150 pounds of person behind, but, the thing, most people in America probably generate, five or 10 pounds of trash a day.
So, it is not like dead bodies add much to wherever they’re put. The only problem is that as land becomes more scarce, people have to do stuff about cemeteries, either turn them in mausoleums, but it is not a big deal. If you want to talk about the number of people dying from coronavirus, it doesn’t even put a dent on average, worldwide human mortality at this point.
It is the leading cause of death in the United States or it had been for about a month. It was the leading cause of death with more than 2,000 people dying a day which is slightly more than people who die from cancer and who die from heart disease a day.
But the last few days it is been under 2000. So, it is not the leading cause of death. On an average day, about 7,000 people die in America. So even during the worst today of the virus, it was only kicking daily mortality up by 30 something, maybe 40%. In a worldwide, it is probably not even kicking worldwide mortality more than a percent or two.
Jacobsen: What happens to bodies when we can do more to rejuvenate old people?
Rosner: That just means we’ll keep old people longer, but the era of keeping the body you were born with going for 200 years, well, either that keeps going or, enough different technologies will develop around living for a long time, that some people want to hold onto the body they’re born with.
We’re talking like 200 years from now. Some people will put it in storage. Some people will rent new bodies. We’ve talked about all this before, but not in terms of what to do with the bodies, but it won’t be that much of an issue because we’ll have mastered the technology of keeping for as long as it is practical for growing new bodies, if you want, or we’ll have other vessels or people will live virtually.
Then there will continue to be people who want to dispose of the bodies of the dead or the disposed bodies, if they’re not necessarily dead, in various ways. So people still get buried or cremated. Just a whole lot of different stuff will happen.
A whole lot of different stuff will happen with humanity in general, where people will embrace lives of different degrees of traditional-ness. There will be, I do not know; “clans” is not quite the right word.
There will be populations who live in different ways and some of these ways will be tied to religion. Some of them will be tied to geography but there will be increasing uncertainty and debate for much of the population in lifestyle and how modified humans should be. But we’ve talked about all this before.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen. What do you think? Just for sake of asking. What do you think of libertarians in the United States?
Rick Rosner: Right now, it is as corrupt as Republicans, as being a Republican. It is just another like slight variation on being a Republican. It is part of a wave of thinking that began in Republican think tanks in the 70s and 80s, which was the idea of limited government.
And to strip away what they thought was too much governance, too much regulation. What it has turned into is trying to strip away governance and regulation for the rich people who were the major donors to Republicans. Yes, Trump has gotten rid of a lot of regulations.
But he got rid of them because he hates Obama and a lot of them. He associates them with Obama and because his rich friends want their industries to be less regulated, so they can make more money. There’s no honest philosophical motivation for a limited government that these people say they want.
Jacobsen: What do you mean by that?
Rosner: The whole deal since the 80s has been to say that Republicans say that government is the problem, the government is broken. Then they get elected and they do their best to make government not work. So people are pissed at government, which drives down voting rates, which again helps the Republicans.
And Republicans do not want regulation. They do not want money. Rich people do not want money for the most part. At least rich people who are exercising political clout, they want to keep the money. They do not want money to go to anybody but themselves. The way they’ve been doing that is via fucking up government.
Jacobsen: What are substantive ways in which they’re “fucking up government”?
Rosner: Well, they’re trying to get rid of what they call the welfare state, which began.
Jacobsen: What is that euphemism for “welfare state,” by the way?
Rosner: It is the social safety nets that were created under FDR during the Depression, Social Security. They wanted to really cut down on things like welfare, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare and stuff that takes money that they’ve taken from people, taxpayers.
And distributes that money to pay for stuff for the public. Republicans do not like that they want to keep the money. For instance, in L.A., in the state of California in 1978, there’s this thing called Prop 13 that was passed, which limits how much property taxes can be increased per year.
Which keeps a one percent maximum increase, which keeps property taxes really low because property values increase every year. So the property taxes we are paying on our house are less than one half of one percent of the value of the house.
Warren Buffett says he pays less in taxes on his L.A. mansion than he does on his little bungalow in Omaha. We’ve got super low property taxes. That impacts the schools because schools are funded from property taxes. But rich people do not give a fuck because they do not send their kids to public schools.
So rich people are fine with fucking over the schools and paying less in taxes. Because they’ll be OK using their own resources. They’re willing to let everybody else fuck off.
And the philosophy of libertarianism and Republicanism is that if you just get the government out of people’s business, private efforts will make everything OK for everybody, that the churches will take care of their people and that somebody will figure out how to make money running schools.
So that schools should all be privatized or turned into charter schools. Republicans for decades have been trying to scuttle the post office and replace it with more privatized companies. Because they figure they can make money doing it.
And anyway, it is a bogus philosophy. It is not designed to help people. It is designed for rich people to keep more of their money. Right now, we have more income inequality than at any time since the beginning of the 20th century.
You had the Gilded Age in the 1880s. What we’re talking about is the percent of all private assets owned by the upper echelons, the wealthiest people. The fraction of all wealth owned by the wealthiest people is at its highest ever.
It matches the rates of just before the Great Depression and at various times from the 1880s until the end of the 1920s. It is bad for the country. Even though, the productivity has increased. It is kind of steadily upwards. Yet lower class wages haven’t have remained proportional in real terms.
Middle class people on average haven’t gotten a raise in forty years. Eighty percent of the increases in compensation have gone to the top couple percent.
Jacobsen: To return to the original line of thought. What is the libertarian line of reasoning for justification of it?
Rosner: If you let markets be free, and if you let people be free, everybody will get what they want. Because people will find solutions for stuff that do not require government intervention. it is a stupid idea. It is a fallacious stance.
It is just rich people wanting to hold on to more money. At the expense of reasonable functioning of government. We have a country with three hundred and twenty-eight/twenty-seven million people. A big complicated society with publicly funded stuff that’s always been publicly funded or at least has been publicly funded for the last hundred and forty years.
Schools, public schools, libraries, roads, police, firefighters have all largely been publicly funded. But then you have assholes on the right and among libertarians who say taxation is theft. But giving any money to the government is stealing their hard earned money. It is bullshit.
Obama one time got in trouble when he was giving a speech and told some people, ‘You didn’t build this.’ He told a bunch of entrepreneurs and he kind of misspoke. What he was trying to say is you didn’t build this alone, the success of your business requires having employees.
Those employees having a reasonable standard of living. People having access to your products and services via the mail and via public roads. Advertising your stuff on public airwaves that you cannot have a functioning economy that’s constantly fucking over all but the richest people.
But Republicans and libertarians have been successfully arguing this for forty years. they’ve gotten a lot of political leverage and they’ve gotten people to vote against their best. I said this yesterday against their best interests. we have a government right now that is not doing what most people want it to do.
It is doing what the richest people want it to do. So I do not need to keep going on because I’ve already said all this stuff.
Jacobsen: What about the derivative effects of this on social life in America?
Rosner: Well, right now, we’re super polarized. We have media. Conservative media is cynically designed to spread bullshit among low information voters, which is a euphemism for stupid people – to get them to believe a bunch of stuff that’s not true and to vote against their best interests.
And to make them think that everybody but the conservative media are lying to them. So we’re super polarized. Even before Covid the standard for the first time in history, I believe, except maybe during wartime, life expectancy during the past three years went down.
Because income inequality and the opioid crisis and obesity, suicide, farm failures are making people die earlier, contributing to decreasing quality of life.
Jacobsen: If someone is Type I or Type II obese, an American, blue collar, and white, what is their life expectancy?
Rosner: I do not know, but it is obviously less than somebody who’s not obese. I do not know what the different degrees of obesity you are talking about are. But you’re subject to a whole slew of diseases, heart disease, type two diabetes.
I’d think probably somebody who’s obese has a life expectancy that it is at least three years less than somebody who is not. I’m just being conservative. But again, I do not need to explain that everybody fucking knows that if you’re fat and you’re borderline diabetic, you’re going to die soon.
Jacobsen: How are the liberal wing and the Democratic wing of United States functioning in this environment? Are they fractured in confidence?
Rosner: The Democrats have for decades and generations have been accused of being incompetent. Because they’re wimpy and they tend to try to play fair. For instance, right now, there’s this thing going on. Where a very not credible woman named Tara Reid says that in a deserted hallway in Congress, Joe Biden jammed his fingers into her vagina in 1993.
And she has changed her story a bunch of times. There’s a bunch of angst among Democrats in that we’re supposed to believe all women and people are saying Biden has to drop out or we need to investigate this fully, though, as people are getting more and more annoyed with this.
Because there’s a thing on Twitter, where it is like an own goal. You fuck yourself up. Democrats are accused of trying to be too fair and not being as ruthless as the Republicans and in trying to give this woman a fair hearing.
Even though there are lots of indications that she is full of shit, that we’re fucking over our candidate compared to Trump, who has fairly credible accusations of sexual harassment and sexual abuse from at least twenty-five women.
And depending on how you count the accusations as many as sixty women, the Republicans do not give a shit about that he raped his first wife. She gave a sworn deposition that I find entirely believable because of the details. He says that he raped her when they were married in the 80s.
Because he was pissed at her because she recommended a hair transplant surgeon when he got a procedure done and it made his head hurt and he came home all pissed off and he ripped her hair out and he raped her. She said this in sworn testimony during their divorce.
And I find it believable, having had a bunch of procedures done on my fucking scalp. But the Republicans do not give a shit about all the women that Trump allegedly attacked. But they want us to scuttle Biden because this woman claims that Biden stuck his fingers in her.
Though there are lots of things that she is, she has changed her story a bunch of times. I do not need to go into the details of her. But I can choose not to believe her and fuck it if it makes me a hypocrite. Franken, Al Franken was pressured to leave the Senate because of a joke picture he took where he is pretending to grab a woman’s boobs on a military transport plane.
It is obviously a joke picture. It is fairly obvious that he is not even touching her boobs. This was the center, this was the smoking gun in allegations that he is a sexual harasser and he quit the Senate. That’s just bullshit. So anyway, again, I do not need to go much into this because all this is shit people already know.
Jacobsen: The end.
Rosner: Yes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How much wealth inequality is required for wealth inequality in a state to become bad?
Rick Rosner: All right, so right now, what we have, I’ve called Trump the little end of the world before the big end of the world. But when I started calling him that, I didn’t realize that he would bring on the end of the world for like a quarter million Americans.
We’re at seventy-seven thousand dead and another two thousand dead every day. So by Election Day, six months away, we’re going to be at least a quarter million dead, unless some miracle happens. Probably closer to three hundred fifty thousand US dead from coronavirus.
Which will put it in the top five deadliest events in U.S. history. Right behind World War 2. So what we’re seeing is life inequality with the virus that I’m not sure, I haven’t verified the statistic. But it may be that more black people have died in the US from this fucking virus than any other race. Black people are only approximately, maybe, 12 percent of America
Jacobsen: They’ve died far more disproportionately than any other population.
Rosner: They certainly have died at a higher rate than any other. So poor people and minorities are dying more from this shit more than the rich people. That’s a little preview of what increasingly income inequality may do as medical technology gets better.
It is already somewhat the case in America. But it hasn’t really been explicitly noticed by most people. Because there’s so much other shit going on, even with regard to wealth inequality, that people really haven’t started getting pissed about differential health and mortality outcomes between rich and poor.
But that’s going to get a lot more attention as this stuff plays out, as medicine gets better over the next 10, 20 years. That’s the biggest and most obvious place where wealth inequality and income inequality show up; the unethical situation that you have to die 20 years sooner.
You and everybody have to die 20 years sooner than rich people. Just because you do not have money. You live a less healthy life and then you’re dead in your 60s, then rich people are living healthy lives into their 80s and making it well into their 90s.
So that’s super unethical. There is a demographic remedy for income inequality, which is there are more poor people than rich people. So poor people use the political power of their bigger numbers to vote in policies that favor them over rich people.
But what is happening, what has been going on in the US is that, that dynamic has been subverted more horribly than at any time in the past hundred and thirty years where rich people have captured the levers of government. There’s the Citizens United Supreme Court decision which says that corporations are people.
And that political contributions, that money is speech. That putting limits on what people and corporations can donate is limiting free speech. It is a horrible decision and it is going to need legislation to fix it.
But since that decision was handed down, Democrats who represent the non-rich to some extent haven’t had enough political power to do anything about it. So on the one hand, you’ve got political power in the hands of rich people, the politicians they’ve bought.
And on the other hand, you have propaganda, Fox News and OANN tricking poor people into voting again against their best interests. So it has been a terrible time for the past 10 years in the U.S. because poor people have been on average stymied.
And rich, shitty people have just grabbed all the wealth. So those are two areas that are obviously ethically shitty, deplorable; that much longer lifespans and no access to political power.
Jacobsen: What do you think of these arguments that people are opposing and have been for a long time around inequality being some kind of law of nature and that’s innate with people who do not have a talent, not having a talent, not having work ethic, etc.?
Rosner: Yes, that’s just bullshit. Where some level of income inequality is fine. There have been times. There’s a harsh view of the US that says there have never been good times. The US has never been a good nation. That there’s been riot consistently right below the surface.
But contrary to that, there have been times when America has been good for a large proportion of its population. They have been shitty; there have always been shitty things going on. But America made it possible for a lot of people to live good lives by the standards of the time.
It is not right now. We’re all either hunkering down, trying not to get sick and unemployed, or defiantly and stupidly trying to reopen the country. Because we’ve been brainwashed by conservative bullshit.
But at other times in the US, capitalism plus democracy to the extent that we had each made it possible for people to move up economic ladders and make own enough stuff to have good lives and pay for their educations, their kids’ educations.
But there are limits on it. We’ve reached those limits in the disastrous loss of the years under Trump and the years leading up to Trump.
Well, that’s it for that.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Here, so, two points.
Rick Rosner: Let me say one point, then you say two points. My one point is the future is inherently sinister. Because we are, the project of the future is to dismantle and analyze and reconstitute humanity. Now, you go.
Jacobsen: Apart from those concerns focusing on ethics and wealth from the time-based perspective, in two ways. One, Individuals who were poor and made it rich by luck or work or talent or something else.
Two, those who were born into wealth without work ethic, talent, intelligence or anything else. It was simply luck and nepotism. What are the ethics that are behind those? What does it do to someone psychologically? Probably, it is pretty clear.
Rosner: We’ve seen this with famous people and with powerful people. It is really like the 60s, which I lived through, were a time of celebrity downfall to drugs, usually. There are a lot of people who died from drugs in the 60s. People have continued to do so.
But that was really kind of a trademark celebrity death of the 60s. Choke on your own vomit, just whatever. I’d say more recently, celebrity downfalls are really putting yourself in such a position that you’re impervious, you’re completely resistant to input, to reasonable, sensible input from other people.
But nobody can tell you “no.” You surround yourself with “yes” people. You are in a kingdom of your own. Michael Jackson, Trump, to some extent, Prince, Elvis, although he died in ’75. But the inability to take good counsel is maybe the major deficit of the untalented, rich and powerful.
Because I do not know somebody who’s untalented and rich and powerful, but not so full of hubris that they listen to competent people, that person can do OK and that person can do good. I do not know, Reagan. As a liberal, I do not think he was a good president.
But he was a pretty effective president and he surrounded himself while not being that dumb, but he was not a genius. In the last few years of his presidency, he was probably becoming less smart. But he surrounded himself with somewhat competent or somewhat effective conservatives.
And he got stuff done. He had what conservatives consider a successful presidency. Even though, his major skills were a folksiness and a handsomeness and a distrust of government. Bush, good guy on a personal level, not a genius, overly subject to manipulation, surrounded himself with some rotten guys.
Some of them left over from Reagan. They dragged him into the worst trouble that US has gotten into until now. Then Trump, not a smart guy, surrounds himself with pure shit. The competent people who accidentally end up around him. He doesn’t listen to him and they leave.
And now he is a shithead surrounded by other shitheads. Yes, and so on. So he is the downfall of untalented wealth and power. He is about the purest example and most tragic example, not just for himself, but for the country in the world that you could possibly think of.
Jacobsen: Did Errol Morris do a clip of various celebrities telling their favorite movies years and years ago?
Rosner: And it ran before the Oscars? Yes, I think.
Jacobsen: Do you remember the one Trump stated as the favorite movie for him, the iconic one?
Rosner: I didn’t know he was part of that reel.
Jacobsen: It was in ‘a stately dome decree.’
Rosner: Oh, it is fucking Citizen Kane.
Jacobsen: And so that summarizes everything because that represents him.
Rosner: Yes, that makes sense. I’ve argued that the Trump of 30 years ago would be somewhat appalled at the asshole he has become. He wasn’t always as terrible as he is now. He is a monster now. 30 years ago, he was an affable blowhard who liked to have sex with pretty women.
And brag about his accomplishments. He was – unless you were a creditor of his trying to get paid or an investor in one of his businesses – fairly harmless. But now, of course, his bullshit is killing thousands of Americans every day. But that he likes Citizen Kane.
Jacobsen: It is his favorite movie.
Rosner: It shows some near insight. Because, it is not a happy movie, it is about a rich asshole, a rich, unhappy asshole.
Jacobsen: He becomes completely isolated in the end.
Rosner: Yes, and maybe he was enough of an asshole back then to misunderstand the movie. He only saw the trappings of wealth and power. He was like, “Yes, that’s me.” Who fucking knows? That’s interesting, though.
Jacobsen: The end.
Rosner: The end.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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ON BY RICKR
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/05/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen. So, is wealth in and of itself a bad thing?
Rick Rosner: Well, OK, here’s the deal. I’m working on a book. A novel starts about now and goes about 15 years into the future.
Jacobsen: When do you start working on this book?
Rosner: A year ago, maybe or a little less. I’ve been lazy about it the last couple of months, three, four. But I’ve almost got enough maybe to send out to see if I still have a literary agent. But I want this last chapter that I write before I send it to him to see if he thinks it is a thing to be about rich people in the future coincidentally.
Well, when we first started talking about six years ago, basically. Nobody very much was worried about AI or thought very much about how the world was going to change. Because of tech, people eagerly embraced new devices, especially smartphones but nobody really considered the implications of smartphones and what happens is they get smarter and better and more intimately connected to us.
But in that six years, shit has changed and people think about it quite a bit. Now with coronavirus, everybody has been forced to realize that the world is changing and will change. Probably throughout this one that subsides, people will be more receptive to picturing change, a changed world.
Various people will have various levels of receptivity to the changes themselves. But most people won’t have to be persuaded that the world will change and has changed. I’ve been watching this show. You know Hank Azaria?
Jacobsen: Sure.
Rosner: He got a show called Brockmire, which is about this degenerate alcoholic, drug abusing baseball announcer. Apparently Azaria has had this announcer radio voice that he developed, that he has done for fun for 20, 30 years, has developed a whole character around it.
And this last season of the show I just started watching, the season finale takes place in 2033 and 2034, roughly at the same time as where my book ends up. Brockmire, the last season, he ends up being the commissioner of baseball.
And in this world, so, he is fairly powerful and he is dealing with powerful interests. One of the interests, one of the players in this new world is a super sophisticated Alexa device. A personal digital assistant called Limon. Everybody wears a little Limon.
You have a Limon, a yellow plastic Limon, in your house, and you talk to it. You also wear a little brooch in the shape of a lemon on your lapel and it gives you advice, does stuff for you. I haven’t seen the whole episode yet.
But apparently, according to the episode guide, Limon, I guess, makes attempts to take over the world during this series finale. So this is a show about a degenerate baseball announcer and even it is moving into the future and looking at the implications of A.I.
So it is there. Once we’re done with coronavirus, people will have a lot of time and a lot of willingness to re-examine the world. Handshakes may go away. Everybody’s going to know how to do Zoom meetings.
Everybody’s going to know how to work from home to teleconference to telecommute. In the last chapter that I’m working on or getting ready to work on market forces personified by consumers and by the people making a fuck load of money off of the new devices.
And the downtrodden barely getting by, but still almost entirely are plugged in to the world as people who aren’t poor people. We are all going to be confronting this new world. So like the rich people, the dog that I’m writing about works as the public face of a company that is working on cutting edge brain information processing interfaces.
And the book so far, I’m calling it “Mach.” Because if you’re committed enough to go to the technology, you have your skull opened up or at least a hole is drilled into your skull. They’re not going to open it all the way up.
They’ll drill a hole, or they’ll stick, or they’ll jam a scroll, a metal mesh scroll and unroll it across the top of your brain. It is like two square inches. A one-by-two-inch grid of iron or maybe three, four or five wires per millimeter.
So a grid of, maybe, two hundred wires by one hundred wires forming twenty thousand nodes, which can provide a more easily addressable interface between your brain and these cubes that are the external information processors. So this is one thing the companies working on.
They’re working on a bunch of other stuff, genetic stuff, too. They start off being affiliated with UCLA and then they kind of get too big and they want their own destiny. But they poach, poach from universities. This becomes a very rich and powerful company doing all sorts of questionable shit, a lot of which they’re able to get away with.
Because they’re having a dog. A talking dog is the face of your company, makes the company seem less sinister than they might otherwise. One of the main sources of income is in certain areas, for certain departments of the company, are very rich people, who feel free to say which of this stuff sounds right and which of it doesn’t sound right or whatever.
So the people, the rich people that this company is dealing with come in various flavors. There are the people who have a bunch of money. It is not correlated with any particular cleverness, royal families inherited wealth on second generation, third generation, billionaires.
Just kind of people with regular abilities who just have a butt load of money. Then you have the same self-made rich people. Those come in a couple flavors. You have the tech people and then you have the people, the non-tech self-made rich people, who could be criminals, who could be corrupt politicians, who could be non-tech industrialists.
I do not know even people, somebody who came up with a really nice microwaveable cookie, celebrities. Each flavor of rich, and also you’ve got the stubborn, dumb rich who do not listen to their advisers. Then you’ve got the smart, the non-tech rich who are smart enough to listen to their advisers.
And there’s a whole range of things that the various flavors of rich people want. But mainly what this company is selling is if everything goes well, extra decades of life. Because one of the big end games is to replicate consciousness enough that you can go on living once your brain and your body are kaput.
So they’re working on a range of technologies. Some of which are would be considered acceptable. The things they’re working on have a range of sinisterness and acceptability. People with Parkinson’s can already get a pacemaker implanted in their brains in the real world right now.
And then they’ve been able to do this for, I do not know, probably 10 years, that sends out signals that keeps your brain ticking over where one of the problems with Parkinson’s is an inability to initiate action. You lose Will. Once you’re walking, you can keep walking.
But getting yourself to start walking is a problem with Parkinson’s. I guess this pacemaker somehow keeps goosing your brain. So you’re able to do more stuff than most people with Parkinson’s. People have cochlear implants, little computer information processors implanted in their ears, that process sound.
And in a way that a deaf person can learn to understand the signals as sound. there are various shitty attempts at providing some simulacrum of sight for blind people. So people already have shit implanted in their brains and nobody has a problem with them.
So a mesh implant in your brain for a failing brain that helps an aging Alzheimer brain continue to think competently. Few people would have a problem with that. There would be issues if it is only available for rich people. But that really, I do not know that we can talk about that.
But that’s not necessarily a huge problem with tech. I’m just thinking this out. Now tech makes its money not from charging a few super rich people a shitload of money. But from making their products cheap enough to sell them to everybody.
So there will be those kind of standard business model products this company is trying to come out with. At the same time, there will be cutting edge, experimental and morally questionable products and treatments that they’ll want to keep secret.
They want to keep sequestered from the rest of the company. They’ll want to charge people like a billion dollars for. Like an unethical approach might be that a rich guy as a kid and he meshes himself up and he messes up his baby so that they’re both smashed to a cube. I forget what I call the cube. Cube is not a good name.
Think it is the big box or something like, I do not know. It is the big block. So anyway, the dad and the baby, the infant are both linked to the big block information processor. They’re sharing thoughts through this.
So basically the old rich dad is trying to train the infant’s brain over a period of years to share thoughts with him. So they’re basically extensions of the same thinking entity. So when the old guy dies, he keeps on in the body of the kid who may be a teenager or young adult by then.
And whose thoughts have been shaped for decades by being linked. So if it works right, you’ve got a three-year-old whose sharing thoughts with a 58-year-old, billionaire. So it is a three-year-old who is only 18 months into not shitting himself at this but who at the same time has a deep understanding of the adult world.
Because he has been part of an entity that is thinking the rich guys’ thoughts and he has been part of an information feed his whole life. That seems pretty hinky, like you’ve created some kind of monster there. Rich people are going to want what rich people want.
And not every rich person is inherently evil in wanting what their money can buy. A lot of this arsenal of sinister shit will lead to widely applied products and treatment that will in the long run be beneficial for what we become.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: And they had become business people. My grandpa on my dad’s side worked in retail his whole life as a salesman and he may have owned a store at some point. My step dad and his family are in retail, their friends, also Jewish, were in retail.
I do not know where all that comes from, except that America has been called a nation of merchants and plenty of people go into retail. Though not late lately, it has been, with the rise of the Internet retailers, it is not something you want to go into. That’s about it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Ask A Genius 544 – Ashkenazim: Smarts, Escaping the Nazis, and Genetic Diversity even in Homogeneity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: My various people, my stepdad’s family came from Germany, they got out long before the Nazis came into power.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: And at one part, if I may, and I do not mean to be rude, but just for those reading this later on you, all the family is Ashkenazi. So this is coming out of Germany and that kind of contact is very serious.
Rosner: Yes, so they got out, though, some branches of the family didn’t get out. Of my step family, my step dad side. Of my genetic parents, grandparents came out of Eastern and Northern Europe. Latvia, may be Lithuania, Romania. The kind of hinterlands of Europe, not the central countries that everybody knows, but some of the smaller or poorer countries.
My kid did 23-and-me came out like 99.7 percent Ashkenazi Jew, which surprised me because, the point three percent was North Africa and somebody out of Libya, or who knows, like three centuries ago or something.
So, I was surprised at the high percentage of Ashkenazi because I figure if you were Jewish in countries that abutted Russia 200-300 years ago. I thought it’d be likely, your people would likely get raped by Cossacks occasionally, but apparently that didn’t happen.
So we were pretty, I guess, lucky not to be raped. Also among genetic and whatever you call it, subsets, enclaves, or whatever, we’re lucky in the Ashkenazi, even though they maintained a pretty strict genetic lineage of having enough genetic diversity; we’re not completely inbred.
There are some genetic diseases that pop up among the Ashkenazi. Tay-Sachs disease where you’ve got to get screened for that if you’re Jewish. And if you’re Jewish and married to non-Jew, you have to get screened.
With two Jews, you have to get screened because any fetus with Tay-Sachs, you do not want to be born because that child will only live for two years. It is a devastating and catastrophic disease. The Ashkenazi are renowned for being smart.
Intelligence is, I guess you might know, different, one of the least pinned down genetic traits. Probably, if there’s statistical evidence that intelligence has a genetic basis, at least to some extent. But I do not think anybody’s ever hung it on a specific group of genes.
And there’s a lot of evidence that intelligence is cultural, that the Jews have prided themselves on academic achievement and hard work and hard academic work. Jobs that take a lot of training. Part of this may come from the racist policies in Europe where Jews worked in some countries in Europe.
Jews weren’t allowed to go into most businesses. I should be better informed on this, but this pushed us into mathy fields like accounting. So I know that’s about all I know about my people, genetically.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes, this is like a phase change in American society and one-way; the first note of vulnerability or that the sense of invincibility being destroyed or corroded in American society was 9/11. That was a big one. Another one is the coronavirus.
Americans do not feel invulnerable anymore. So this is an important marker in early 21st century history for Americans because this corrodes the idea of not being harmed in any substantial way by outside forces who are people in 9/11 or by microscopic, seemingly invisible forces.
Rick Rosner: Yes, though, like you have to connect it to larger trends or tendencies in society. One of the larger trends, maybe not just for America, but certainly for America, is increasing selfishness. The sense of World War Two and then post-World War Two America, at least the public face of Americans, was that we were in stuff together and that we would thrive together.
Now, of course, there was plenty of racism and sexism that was built in, and that was part of our assumptions. So that all togetherness included some sort of exclusionary behaviors and institutions.
But we felt rich enough, powerful enough and righteous enough there, and also that there were these righteous institutions, e.g., scouting, religion, patriotism, standing together against the Nazis, the Soviet Union, and so on.
All these people were and it just made us less, unscrupulously greedy. The ratio of CEO salaries to the average worker salary is more like 30:1 instead of 300:1. So in a more selfish society, it doesn’t matter if we all thrive, if you’re looking at trying to excuse your selfish behavior because there’s not enough to go around.
So, this is stuff like this is part of a more Dog-Eat-Dog selfish orientation. The various amateur, gun toting morons, hitting state houses to protest the lockdown. Where the lockdown, it is a sacrifice, but it is nowhere near like near some of the sacrifices of the past, people getting killed in war.
So, it is the mark of an increasingly rinky dink country, a country that no longer feels like it is the paragon of world.
Jacobsen: Ok, let’s pause there.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: The Spanish Flu pandemic, where Republicans are also going crazy, saying that it is wrecking, saying that the shutdown, the lockdown, or stay at home is wrecking the economy, we have to open up.
When you look back in 1918, 1919, when they opened up again after a summer that gave up something of a respite a little bit, it meant a second wave that was about as bad as the first.
Maybe the second wave wasn’t as bad as the first with the Spanish Flu, but it was worse. That’s with one of the pandemics. One of the other two big pandemics of either 1957 or the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69; we opened back up and just got hammered.
So we’re set up to have that happen again, particularly in the Trumpy southeastern states, the old Confederacy, where there is Georgia and Florida opening up probably faster than they should. All right. That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, the American response. Jared Kushner was proclaiming about the virus that it was more or less mission accomplished. The best statement that I heard about that was, 60,000 people were not available for comment.
Rick Rosner: Yes, we’re at sixty-three thousand.
Jacobsen: Good old Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air died today.
Rosner: Really?
Jacobsen: Yes. He died today.
Rosner: It is all pretty sad.
Jacobsen: I do not know if he died from the virus.
Rosner: Any discussion of the response in the US with a discussion of Republicans who dominate our national government and many of our state governments. So the deal is that, as Reagan was the first modern Republican president in the 70s and 80s, conservative think tanks realized that there are tens of millions of dumb people in the US that they can more easily politically exploit.
And they started making themselves into the party that leverages angry, dumb people. They get people angry about issues like abortion or gun control, and then they bring them under this big, angry umbrella.
Then 30 years ago, Fox News began, which is a constant outrage engine for its viewers. You are constantly getting them worked up about the issues they’ve been taught to care about.
And two more things about the Republicans. One is they are under demographic pressure. The Republicans are a white people’s party and an old people’s party and as their members gets old and age out of being voters, as the country gets browner; they’re under pressure because they’re losing numbers.
So are the Democrats, the independents are growing at a higher rate. The Democrats are holding up a little better. That can vary month to month.
Jacobsen: What are the percentage of the independents now?
Rosner: The last time I looked, it was, 26 or no, 27 percent Republican, 31 percent Democrat and the rest independent. But the month before they were straight up tied. Republicans and Democrats with this coronavirus thing has cost them a few percentage points.
The last thing is that since they’re under demographic pressure, they have to do all sorts of anti-democratic stuff to maintain their political advantage. With the main two of the main tools being, voter suppression and gerrymandering. We do not have to go into the specifics of that.
We do have one thing is that given that we may still be under quarantine for the general election, the Republicans are trying to stand firm against vote by mail because vote by mail is more Democratic. if everybody was able to vote by mail, the Republicans would be wiped out politically. Because if everybody votes, Republicans are destroyed.
So there is a very terrible part in there. They hold the presidency and they hold the Senate and they have a lot of sway in the courts. The Republican President Trump blew off responding to the virus in any effective way for roughly 10 weeks after he learned of it.
People started getting inklings of it in November. But that was really kind of way too soon to expect national governments to do anything about it. It was just fairly on the rise. A really, really good, national government might start paying attention in December and then any competent national government would have started paying sharp attention in early January.
Trump didn’t do anything effective until March. He did one ineffective thing around January 29th or 30th, which is a travel ban for people from China, which was really sterilely porous. Anybody who’s a U.S. citizen coming back from China maybe got their temperature taken, that was prohibited from entering the country.
So since the China traveling to the talks about how that saved America, which it obviously hasn’t. Since we have two and a half times as many deaths as any other country and one third of all the confirmed cases in the world and more than one quarter of all the deaths. Obviously, our response wasn’t adequate.
Banning Chinese travelers didn’t do much because by the time he did that, the virus was already across Europe and it was European travelers; and it was already here. It was European travelers who were bringing it as opposed to just Chinese travelers.
So the ban, even though, that was the one thing that might have been a little effective that he did. So he talks about how that is a hugely important thing that he did. But really, it didn’t do much. What would have done much better was testing, but he didn’t do any testing until March.
Then the CDC testing was just pathetic. We’re one week into March, at the time, and the CDC processed a total of 77 tests, 11 on average, of 11 tests a day. Testing is still wildly inadequate for three weeks. Testing averaged 150,000 a day until this last week. 150,000 is roughly 0.042% of the US population.
Now that’s increased to roughly 210,000 a day or roughly – Oh, I do not know – 0.62 percent of the population. We’re still not at 2 percent of the population being tested. So testing has been awful. We have a million, 1.08 million, confirmed cases.
We probably have at least a million unconfirmed cases because testing sucks, maybe as many as 2 or 3 million unconfirmed cases. Or if you look at the antibody testing, it could be wildly higher, many millions.
But the antibody tests, which measure if you were exposed to it at some point, those tests are all super shitty and they give a number of false positives. So the number of false positives might outweigh the number of actual positives for the antibody tests.
OK, so constantly, there’s a whole timeline of Trump and his people saying that the virus is no big deal and it is going away. Yesterday, the US had 2400 confirmed coronavirus deaths. As we’ve talked about, a lot of deaths get missed either intentionally or unintentionally.
And if you compare the number of the average mortality per month in the US or per week in the US, it is apparent that many more people are dying than are being counted as official coronavirus deaths. It might be as many as 54 percent more.
So we’re still losing thousands of people a day to coronavirus and even just 2,000 people a day. If that continues for a year, you’re looking at 736,000 deaths, which would make that the deadliest pandemic in US history, even more so than the Spanish Flu, which killed, estimates vary wildly. But, the last number I saw was 675,000 people in a year and a half in 1918-19.
This also means that Republicans who are doing anything they can to deflect blame of use per capita arguments, that it is really not so bad on a per capita basis. The deal is, it is still fucking bad. We’re number one in deaths and cases on a non-per-capita basis.
On a per capita basis, we might be 9th or 10th. That’s still shitty because we’re a developed country. We prided ourselves on doing shit and we shouldn’t be in the top 10 most fucked up countries, developed countries, first world countries, because of this. So that’s pretty much it.
And it looks like it is going to continue. There have been hopes that summer would make it drop back some. It is still kind of early to tell. But we’re still racking up, as I said, thousands of deaths a day. Also, Republicans keep grasping at a cure at that.
There is the big thing about hydroxychloroquine, which looks like it is just not very good. It is a little bit killy, the heart arrhythmias.
There is the new thing that’s being touted. It seems as if it is anti-biotic, I guess, antiviral. It is an anti-something that even a set of tests reduce the recovery time from on average 15 days to 11 days. This is typical of antiviral treatments that they do not just keep.
They do not cure things magically. They only reduce the severity. Because viruses are far simpler, infectious machines than bacteria. Bacteria are alive. If you kill them, they become noninfectious.
Viruses aren’t alive. They’re just little fricking spring-loaded machines that inject RNA into cells. They do not live. They just exist. They do not breathe, because they’re simpler and because there are no biological processes, like breathing or eating or whatever to interrupt.
They’re harder to wipe out. So antivirals are much less effective than antibacterials. So this new thing reduces the recovery time by 30 percent, according to one test, and it may reduce mortality by 11 percent versus 8 percent for other treatments, but which is a non-statistically significant result.
So you’ll probably hear if you’re listening to American media, there’s assholes like, Fox News; Laura Ingraham and company are still touting hydroxychloroquine and saying there’s a conspiracy.
They like to say stuff like there’s a conspiracy to make Trump look bad because it is his cure by not using it and letting more people die. This is his horse. This is just complete horseshit. So they’ll keep pushing chloroquine and they may talk about this new ‘cure,’ if that’s what you call it, in super glowing terms, when it is really just one of a whole bunch of antivirals that offer very mediocre results. That’s pretty much it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is Tara Reid important to consider in this moment with Joe Biden as a contender against Trump in the next election?
Rick Rosner: All right, so, there’s Joe Biden. Well, they’re trying to hit the Republicans who are morally bankrupt at this point, the worst incarnation of a major US political party, probably ever, but at least since the Civil War.
They are just, as we’ve talked about the factors that have turned it into this monstrous thing before. But they’re just bad. They’re all ends justify the means and holding on to power at any price and not caring about fairness.
So it tried to hit Biden with various things. One is that he is old, senile. But if you listen to his interviews, I do not listen to him every day. But I’ve heard him interviewed a few times and he seems perfectly clear. He is got a lifelong stutter.
So I guess not all of his sentences are perfectly smooth, but he seems fine to me. Even though he is 100 years old, he is like fucking 78, which is ridiculous that the two major political parties, the two candidates for president, one’s 74 and the other 78. Which is just ridiculous.
So hit him with old and senile, which I think is bullshit. If he was Hunter Biden, that his kid was making these sweet deals. This kid did have some sweet deals on the board of an oil company in Ukraine, but Biden didn’t have anything to do with it.
They’re trying to twist the facts to make it like Biden was doing favors, political favors; some of which didn’t really happen. Oh, the son is kind of a fucker. So anyway, those things, I’m sure they’ll come back in force as it gets closer to the general election.
We’re still six months away, but this other thing is surface. Tara Reid is a woman who has accused Biden of cornering her and jamming his hand up her dress and stuffing his fingers into her vagina.
Then she slapped him away. She says that he said, “I heard you liked me.” It is a problematic thing because we’re in the middle of MeToo, and “believe all women.” You have to at least hear her out.
It is also problematic because this is one, and the only, allegation of sexual assault against Biden. Though various women have said that he is a little touchy, like a good hand on shoulders and stuff. Nobody’s accused him of doing anything in a sexual manner except this woman.
Some women have said that he has been in the past, putting hands on people and like that. On the other hand, the other guy, Trump, has been accused of sexual assault by at least 22 women. It is, depending on how you score things, it is closer to 60 women.
Some women have taken him to court. It is like he is super rapey and he is being caught talking about it. So anyway, I choose not to believe Tara Reid. Maybe it makes me a hypocrite who doesn’t believe all women.
But I would urge people who are curious or concerned to Google her and to read, two, three, five articles about the whole thing, that list why you should believe or why you shouldn’t believe her. You won’t necessarily get everything in just one article.
The alleged incident happened 27 years ago in 1993. She didn’t come forward with it until a month ago, even though she is praised Biden for the intervening 25 years. She did say that some of the shoulder touching made her uneasy. But the finger jamming didn’t come up until a month ago.
And he has had, as I said, no other accusations of sexual abuse or assault or harassment, assuming no other allegations from other women come forward. One of the measures I use is the number of women who come forward, like with Trump and with Bill Cosby. Why? When it becomes dozens of women, then I tend to totally believe it.
Jacobsen: The End.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: More than ever this fucking virus has underlined that the US states are each kind of a different place. That we live in a loosened place, that our national agglomeration of states is looser than maybe I imagined before. Its increasing polarization between conservatives and liberals has also loosened ties among the states.
There’s a lot of antagonism between red states and blue states, but also just the approach to the pandemic, varies by state wildly. You’ve got the dump states, like Florida and Georgia with their corrupt and stupid governors who just decided to just open them up and then probably lie about not just probably they’ve been caught like suppressing some other coronavirus numbers.
Then you have California where we shut down early. The mayor of L.A. the governor of the state, or on TV every day, told people just to stand pat. That we’ll get through it, that it is not time to open up again though, some beaches have been opened up a little bit. But every state is a different motherfucking place here.
I hope when all this is over, I hope that the silver lining of this is that this getting Trump out of there and maybe healing some national wounds, becoming more of a nation rather than a bunch of states that are pissed at each other.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what are some of the points you want to make around Covid-19?
Rick Rosner: Just two quick points, to the end of April, the number of official US coronavirus deaths just surpassed the number of American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. 61,000 corona deaths officially and 58,000 US soldiers died in 10 years of Vietnam. So two months of Corona versus 10 years of Vietnam.
It is a lot; two thousand people are dying a day here officially. But people demographers, people who deal with population numbers, had been looking at the average number of deaths at this point in the year, historically for the past five, 10, 15 years in America. They say based on the amount of deaths we’ve had so far this year; we’ve underestimated the official coronavirus death count by more than 50 percent.
So we’re looking at somewhere in the 90,000s. Though, all these numbers, they never really entirely settled down, but they’re certainly not. But people, maybe, get a better idea of them, once things start to subside and there’s time to actually analyze them. So the numbers are never going to be known for sure, but eventually, we’ll probably get a better idea how many people have been killed by it.
Also, people are saying that more people are dying from other causes because, somebody has chest pains, they decided not to go to the hospital because they do not want to get infected. Then, maybe, they die at home from just a heart attack or even at the hospital too, or whatever. But people are dying. Coronavirus has been the US’s number one cause of death for three weeks now, maybe more. That’s what is going on with that.
Also, my conservative buddy likes to say, ‘It is just like a bad year of flu. It is like no big deal.’ To my mind, of course, two years ago, 60,000 people did die of the flu in America. It was the worst year since probably the 70s for flu. But it makes me ask, why should we put up with tens of thousands of deaths per year from flu?
When what we’ve learned now, because right now is a pretty good year for flu, because people are staying home, but in the future, I’m thinking we could reduce flu deaths if handshakes go away; and handshakes are ridiculous. If handshakes were killing thousands of people a year, we can make do without handshakes. If people wash their hands more, and if they stay home when they’re sick, because I’ve noticed over the past 10 years, people used to get credit for showing up at work sick.
Say before 2010, show up when you got a runny nose, people are like, “Oh, good for you. You’re sick, but you still made it in to do your job. Only the office lunatic would be able to get out of here with a runny nose.” But that’s changed. Now, everybody, most people are in an office or get the fuck home. No, we do not want to get sick from you. So if that’s a permanent shift, a serious shift where people just stay the fuck home or wash their hands, do not handshake, and maybe we can knock down the annual number of flu deaths by 50 percent.
Anyway, this year 24,000 people died of the flu. If you have the 24,000 from the flu to the 61,000 from coronavirus, that gives you 85,000 deaths this year from respiratory disease, which is the worst year since 1969. In 1968-69 Hong Kong flu and we’re about ten days away from surpassing that death toll. So people who say it is just another, it is just like flu and get over are an assholes would be foolish in.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/04/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is Hydroxychloroquine?
Rick Rosner: Hydroxychloroquine and another drug, which is just chloroquine, are two different drugs. Hyodroxy has some Oxygen and Hydrogen molecule attached to it or something. These drugs have promoted in combination as potential miracle cures for coronavirus by people who don’t know a lot about science, including Trump.
If you catch a grasshopper or a skunk or any number of animals, they will spit out a noxious substance to try to get away from you. That’s pretty much Trump. To avoid being found culpable in fucking up the coronavirus response, he throws out all sorts of shit to distract, including this chloroquine thing as a miracle cure to make it better for everybody.
First off, it is much harder to have a miracle cure for a virus than for a bacterium. Because viruses are pretty much not alive. They are little mechanisms that shoot snippets or strips of genetic material into cells.
The genetic material tells cells to make more of the virus. The viruses don’t live. They don’t breathe. They don’t shit. Most of the things that living things do, viruses don’t. Bacteria are alive. There are more ways to fuck up a bacterium to kill it fucking dead.
When a bacterium is dead, I don’t think it is able to reproduce and infect. You’re too young for this. When I was a kid, when you got strep throat, you go to the doctor. The doctor would fill a syringe with penicillin and shoot this in your butt. The strep would be dead in 12 hours, the bacteria.
With viruses, since they are not alive, you can’t kill them. It is harder to make them non-infectious. The chloroquine helps block the immune response. Because the coronavirus, in the many ways in it kills you, is it makes you drown. It is partly an immune response or immune over-response.
So, there’s no miracle cure. At best, you might have a spectrum of anti-virals that, maybe, decrease the fatality rate by half. Nobody knows what the fatality rate is for coronavirus anyway because it is so new and so many different circumstances and demographics.
But it is most likely that the chloroquine or the hydroxychloroquine and some other stuff in combination will reduce the fatality rate. The idea of a miracle cure is bullshitty. It is easy to declare that it is a miracle cure if you work with a small sample set of patients.
Because the fatality rate for coronavirus is anywhere from 1% to 5%, which idiots on conservative TV have been arguing: A fatality of 2% makes it worth it to open up the country because you’re only going to lose 2% of the infected population, and you’re going to save the economy.
It is a terrible argument. Because if 10% of America gets infected, and that’s 33,000,000, then 2% dying is as many dying as our deadliest event in the Civil War, which was over a 4 year period. This was over a 6-, 8- or 10-month period.
The devastation from 2,000,000 dead would be equal to the economic devastation of keeping th country locked down. So, it’s a bad argument. But if you’re testing 10 people on some ‘miracle’ cure, the expected death rate is 2% of 10 people, which is 0.2 people.
4 times out of 5 with a 2% death rate; your ‘miracle’ cure will result in zero people dead, even if your drug doesn’t do anything. It is stupid math. It will probably turn out to be somewhat helpful like a dozen other drugs being deployed against coronavirus.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If the President of the United States was trying, would he still be in over his head?
Rick Rosner: Yes, he is bad at learning things. The best thing he could do is throw up his hands and say, “Look, I am not going to have anything to with this thing anymore. Even that is not doable, because he doesn’t have a bunch of competent people around him,” Fauci is competent.
If he said to Fauci, “I am appointing you as czar of all this shit. You have authority over anybody else in the nation when it comes to this stuff.” Then, maybe. But that’s not what is happening.
Jacobsen: Do you think America has the resolve to build something like a Manhattan Project for bacteria and viruses that are currently known lethal to human beings like Covid-19 or potentially on 2,000 years of recorded history and medical history done?
Rosner: Not now, not with the current leadership, I think with this disease and its killing and its affect on the stock market and economy. If all of that means Trump doesn’t get re-elected and the Republicans don’t control the Senate, I think there’ll be some national resolve to do something to make sure something like this won’t happen again.
How long that resolve lasts and if it is enough to overcome Republican obstruction? I don’t know. Because if you look at 2009 with Obama coming in with a mandate to fix the country in the middle of a recession, even then, there was only a short period of time where democrats had enough control to get anything done.
Where democrats for a lot of stuff in the Senate, you need a supermajority to get stuff passed. It took nearly a year to get Al Franken seated because there were counts and recounts with the vote so close.
It was only from when Franken was seated until the elections two years later that democrats had an effective supermajority. They spent most of that time on getting healthcare passed. We won’t get a supermajority in the Senate this time. The numbers aren’t good. We will be lucky to get a majority in the Senate, and the presidency.
Then there will be a will to do a Manhattan Project type thing to get things moving on it. I was reading an article on how the CDC used to have 47 people working in China to monitor what was happening there to be helpful if shit happens because a lot of stuff happens with diseases because of their wet market.
Trump fired 70% of those people bringing the CDC down from 47 to 14. China tried to sit on it for a few weeks. Had we had more people in China, we may have found out about it and done something about it sooner if we had willing politicians.
All of that personnel and staff infrastructure will have to be reconstituted after Trump if we’re lucky enough to have 2021 to be after Trump. Plus, by the time the next presidential administration begins, we may not be done with it.
We were not done with Swine Flu. Even though, it wasn’t very killy, for a year and a half.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What could happen? There may be half of a million deaths between mid-June and mid-September.
Rick Rosner: It may happen. We may get lucky. The disease may get less virulent and less easily spread in the Summer. Some viruses aren’t as effective as spreading in warm weather. We may get a little miracle there.
Or a number of competent leaders below the national level may arise and educate each other and share resources, even in the absence of competent national leadership or national leadership may just somehow go around Trump and start doing what needs to be done and ignore him.
Some news stations – CNN, NBC – already decided not to carry most of his daily brief conferences because what he says is dangerous, not accurate, or both.
Jacobsen: How is the Christian Right taking advantage of this? Their mass radio shows and followings, etc.
Rosner: People like Jim Bakker have been taking advantage of it. For the last 40 years(!) has been selling bullshit products, he has been told by some agency. It is against the law to sell the shit he is selling and saying that stuff about that he is selling.
Others say to give them money and they will pray you to safety. Jerry Falwell, Jr.’s Liberty University said people can go back to class. So, there might be some temporary political advantage, but it’s reasonable to think that they’ll get their asses kicked eventually as people get sick from the shit in numbers that are too big for people to ignore them for political reasons.
I don’t know what those numbers have to be because the numbers aren’t big enough, yet. Conservatives rightwing lunatics are still saying all sorts of denialistic shit. Everybody should go back to work. It’s better for a few people to die than for the economy to die.
They spread conspiracy theories about where the virus comes from and who it is targeted at. Eventually, if it gets bad enough, people will listen to regular news, even those who do not listen to the news and trust it – out of desperation to save themselves and their families.
I don’t know how bad it’ll have to get.
Jacobsen: I think New York will be the first test case.
Rosner: Yes, but New York is a fairly big state. By acreage, most of New York is conservative, but still it’s not southern conservative. Florida is going to be your test case where the infections are going to go crazy and the governor is shitty.
We will see what it is like with a failed state shitty response.
Jacobsen: How many countries could become failed states because of this?
Rosner: You already have failed states before this like Libya. I don’t know how many failed states there are in the world now, e.g., Eritrea, Somalia, parts of Congo, etc. I don’t know. There are parts of Africa where we are not getting any information because there aren’t any agencies to share any information.
So, I don’t know. You probably have at least 8 states or nation that are already failed states already. Figure that some of the failed states border states that are nearly failed states. Some whole regions are just a complete mess.
For every failed state that we have now, an adjacent state will be tipped into somewhat failedness, maybe 12, 15, 16, failed states by the time this is over. I don’t know that a state that fails because of this is as dangerous to the rest of the world as a failed state where there is genocide, or whether a state that is rife with the virus is more dangerous than one that is genocidal.
I think there will be failed states. The national guard may have to go in there. Although, I don’t know exactly that will work because we have a very incompetent national government, where Trump is interested in covering his ass and Trump may not send.
He has already implied threats or is threatening that he will not give you the shit you need in your state to address the virus if doesn’t like you. We are already seeing underreporting. There continues to be a shortage of tests. It is getting better.
We still have less than one quarter the number of tests per capita as South Korea. Even testing at the same proportion as South Korea won’t do it, they tested like crazy and contained it. Even people who die, they aren’t necessarily being added to the death rolls because even in death they don’t get tested.
Then their deaths are attributed to pneumonia. Nobody has the time or the resources to test them.
Jacobsen: There could be an easy solution there. People could tally the average trendline before this and then subtract between 2020 and 2021.
Rosner: Right, Trump is not going to embrace them. He wants them to be as low as possible.
Jacobsen: Do you think he’s in over his head?
Rosner: Even before his presidency, nobody made any money investing in Trump. He’s never really made money from competence. He’s always been a huckster and a bullshit artist and somebody who skips out on debts via lawsuits, defaulting on loans, and getting new loans to pay for the loans he defaulted on.
He’s never been good at anything legitimate. He’s always been a blowhardy dipshit with only a certain craven interestingness that got him the TV gig. So, he’s been in over his head, as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, and then as president. He’s never been president. He’s uncurious.
He’s got a short attention span. He’s unwilling to learn. He goes with his gut. He goes for things that bring him money or status at the expense of other people. He has none of the qualities that he would need to address the current situation.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/03/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How many people will die? Is it possible for 100,000,000 people to cease living based on current numbers?
Rick Rosner: 100,000,000 people aren’t going to die. It is still early enough in the history of the disease. We don’t know the mortality of the disease. 2% is a reasonable guess. For 100,000,000 to die, it would mean 5,000,000,000 would need to get it.
I think even the most pessimistic views of the virus don’t have 60% of the world getting it. Looking back on the 20th century, the unit measurement of all the really bad shit that happened is 10,000,000. WWI killed 20,000,000. Spanish Flu 20,000,000 to 30,000,00; WWII at 30,000,000 to 40,000,000. Mao killed 50,000,000 Chinese. Stalin killed 40,000,000 of his own people.
If this gets reasonably out of control, then it could take out those kinds of numbers, which would mean 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 death. It could become a catastrophe on the scale of the huge catastrophes of the 20th century.
We don’t know what happens in countries where they don’t get an immediate handle on it, e.g., the US. Where, we have 65,000 cases so far. We’re in the realm of 13,000 to 15,000 cases a day with it double every six or seven days.
So, it is hard to know whether we’ll get a handle on it before it affects a significant percent of the population. If it hits 10% of the US population, it gives you 33,000,000 cases times 2%, which gives you 600,000 dead.
That’s probably a little pessimistic. We may be able to get out of this with 200,000 dead. It is hard to know what fraction of the world’s population belongs to… we know that 1.5 billion people roughly live in countries that can get a handle on it.
China has 1.4 billion and they can apparently get a handle on it, plus some incidental countries, which can get a handle on it. The remaining 6 billion on Earth. We don’t know how many can get a handle on it before complete capitulation and herd immunity after a shitload of people already having it.
Let’s say 3,000,000,000 people in countries that will get a handle on it, and 10% of everybody get it, so 300,000,000 people get it times 2%, gives you 6,000,000 dead in those countries. Then you’ve got another 3,000,000,000 living in countries that will completely botch it.
Where 1/3rd of everybody will get it, it means 1,000,000,000 people getting it, means 20,000,000 dead, which, added to people from other countries that half stopped it, gives you around 25,000,000 dead.
So, I guess, that’s my estimate, but it can be off by a factor of 3 on the high side and 10 on the low side. We might get lucky and only a couple of million people die worldwide, which seems unlikely.
In that, I think the Swine Flu killed roughly 570,000 people worldwide. And it was a very unkilly flu killing only like 1/40th of 1% of everybody who got it. So, a reasonable estimate will be that when this thing finally subsides/has a vaccine a year to 15 months from now; it’s not unreasonable to think 10,000,000 people, at least, will be killed by it, putting it on the scale of the middling mass killer diseases of history.
Jacobsen: If we look at the United States case, it’ll start with big cities, metropolitan centers like New York. What do you think will be the case when the coastlines are infused and then it enters the center of America?
Rosner: California is fairly good shape because the governor and mayor of Los Angeles, and the mayors of the other big cities, have asked everybody to shelter in place. So, the number of cases coming out California right now is not a terrible number. So, California may get away with 1% of the population getting it.
That’s probably overly optimistic. California has only 40,000,000 people. Let’s say a little less than 1% of the population gets it before a vaccination comes along because we manage to avoid infecting people at a huge rate, say 900,000 in California plus 2% mortality or less.
It would be 1.5% times 900,000 or 13,500 people, which is still a lot of people. New York City is not necessarily the size of the cities in the various states. The very biggest cities will get hit the worst. It might be the dumbness of the leaders like Florida governor Ron DeSantis still doesn’t want people to shelter in place.
Even though, Florida might be the most infected state besides New York, except for early spikes in temperature. There are a lot of people in Florida running fevers now. New Orleans is a fucking mess generating cases per capita at the highest rate, maybe in the world or in America, because Mardi Gras meant mass infection.
The Civil War starts – Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi – have these redneck dumbshit governors who don’t think bad things will happen to them. Ditto with Texas. One of the governors, was Mississippi, some local city councils ordered their populations to shelter in place like Tupelo, Mississippi.
Not a huge town, maybe 200,000, I don’t know, but the fucking governor passed an edict or issued an edict that says, ‘Individuals cities aren’t allowed to tell their citizens to shelter in place, stay at home.’
So, people in Tupelo, where the governor overruled, are forcing people to go back to work. It is obviously, fatally stupid. Places like that may have outbreaks in middling population cities and smaller towns because their leaders have convinced them deep in Trump land that a) they arenot going to get it and b) the economy is more important than a few cases, and c) it won’t be so bad if they get it.
The US with its population of 330,000,000 in 50 states is like a bunch of little countries in the way that people are approaching the disease. So, it’s hard to say how it is going to play out. It could be that states where it goes wild, e.g., Florida, may have people fleeing to nearby states just to get a hospital bed because beds are going to overflow.
According to some estimates, by June, up to 15 people who need a bed for every bed available, people will hop in cars and make sweaty, barely able to breathe, drives up to Georgia and up to Alabama.
Anyway, people will flee centers of infection and invade states that have lesser levels of infection. It is going to be grim in many places. You’re lucky enough to live pretty far inland and, maybe, enough North of America that you won’t get too badly invaded. I live on the California coast, which gives us a 200 mile, 300 mile, buffer between us and, maybe, some stupider states.
Nevada may close down all the casinos. I don’t know what they do. Maybe, they are being reasonable, maybe Arizona. Their government is Republican. I don’t know how stupid they’re being. North of us is Oregon, which is, I think, democratic governance.
So, they probably have somewhat of a handle on it. I’m hoping that we won’t get invaded by states that have been sloppier with their handling of this. But there will be states in the South where shit gets ugly.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/02/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, so, there’s a phenomenon of Sōshoku(-kei) danshi in Japan, bamboccioni in Italy. These are basically shut-ins…
Rick Rosner: You mentioned a place up near you, which is a retirement community. I do not consider myself a retired person. I am considering starting to take my pensions. A place with a lot of people my age and older doesn’t matter because I don’t really need young women to stare at.
Jacobsen: Also, a) you have a daughter to set an example for, b) Carole would not like that, and c), you’re a decent person.
Rosner: My daughter is 6,000 miles away.
Jacobsen: You are semi-famous and talk about these things.
Rosner: Yes, also, when I’m out at the gym, Carole doesn’t see what butts I look at. In general, I don’t look at butts. Unless, they are just ridiculous because it is creepy. I can go home and look at butts on the internet.
Jacobsen: That’s more of a guys’ problem than a women’s problem.
Rosner: Yes, guys are more visual and also more sexually harass-y. I would also make the claim…
Jacobsen: …It may be down to socio-emotional deficits in men…
Rosner: …Guys consider themselves hornier than women. There may be some biological substantiation for that. But guys are more likely to engage in sexually stimulating behaviour, including looking at butts, in their daily lives than women.
Jacobsen: Even if the women do, in my observations, they tend to be more subtle about it.
Rosner: In my experience, not beating off to the internet, it is not an older guy thing. It is old school. All of the famous MeToo rapists, or almost all of the most famous ones, e.g., Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump – not all rapists but sexual assaulter/abuser. Louis CK can be there too.
Not a lot of young guys there, a lot of reasonable young guys – and it won’t ever go away entirely, obviously – and women have more social pressure. There’ll be more self-policing and people calling it out.
But I think reasonable horny younger men will decide to take care of it by looking at porno on the internet. There’s some indication, though not entirely clear, that sex in general or between people is in decline in a demographic compared to decades ago, say teenagers.
I think that reasonable people have a cornucopia of porn to use. Adam Carolla comments on this being a new thing. He said his grandpa had to just lie on his back and wait for sexy shaped clouds to drop by.
So, anyway, I can move to a place where people are in their 60s and 70s.
Jacobsen: And say, “Eh.”
Rosner: I will gladly embrace a place where people say, “Eh.” I will love all of that. Even if I have to double up on my statin drugs, I will become an eager eater of poutine.
Jacobsen: There’s a colleague of mine from the UK. We discovered the stereotype of British people is a cockney English, “Ello Govna.” For Canada, we found it is a little like New Foundland or a Newfie accent.
It is kind of like Iceland to Europe. Many Europeans see them as out there, autonomous, and weird.
Rosner: We had a clip when I worked on a clipped show. It was a clip of a beached whale that you tried to blow it up to render it into smaller chunks to deal with it. Then there was this only whaler who grizzled and said, “We’re going to blow up the whale.”
Another was Pepperidge Farms old guy with a raspy voice, “Pepperidge Farm remembers.” It is a kind of older, raspy-voiced guy. Maybe, a cranberry farmer meeting a lobster farmer.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/31
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why do we get to live in such a good time? Ironically, there’s climate change, nuclear catastrophe, etc. Non-ironically, technology, science, knowledge of the world, health, wealth, and happiness at good rates.
Rick Rosner: There’s a form of demographic inference. It’s a very weak form of inference. That says, “You’re most likely living at the most populace time in human history.” That is, if you’re going to roll the dice or throw or dart, or whatever, you’re a human and up in heaven and about to be sent down into a human body.
Probabilistically, where would you end up? You’d end up, probably, at the most populace time in human history because that’s where more people are. There are more people alive today. You can infer there would be fewer people alive in the future. It is a dumb, weak ass argument.
To put it in more reasonable terms, we’re living at the end of the world. We got so lucky because humans’ dominion over technology and the planet has led to a huge population explosion. So, it’s very likely that among all the times that we can live; we are living in a time that there are 8 billion humans than 20,000 years ago when there ere 50,000 humans.
So, we’re lucky and unlucky enough to be living in a time when technological domination has made it possible for there to be so many humans. In fact, the number of humans in a century or two will decline not quite precipitously, but steadily as the beings of the future decide to make themselves into beings that aren’t really quite human anymore.
They’ll be augmented. The people of the future will live in ways… we’ve been living the same way for thousands of years. We come together in agriculture, in communities. We form pair bonds for economic benefit and to raise children.
We live human lives. The people of the future will live lives that are radically difference than the lives we’re living. This is one of the last times on Earth when all humans are living human lives. As opposed to 100 years from now, hundreds of millions and billions will be living in what are now being called post-human lives.
Post-human comes from the same lexicon as Singularity – post-human, trans-human. If you wanted a less high-falootin’ term, then you could go with “augmented human.” Because all technology, by the time it trickles down to people, has been commercialized.
It has lost its purity. So, post-human, transhuman is a little too grandiose, but augmented human. I am writing a novel of the near future right now. Not to give too much away, but a product of the near future is little cellphone like things that ride you instead of having it in hand; the thing takes responsibility for being attached to you.
It is able to crawl. There’s another version of Star Trek that comes out soon. The Borg is back. Without ever having watched whatever version of Star Trek had the Borg, they were evil augmented humans who took over human beings.
There’s one sexy Borg in one of them. We’re going to start looking like that. The Borg in Star Trek have circuit boards glued to their foreheads. We don’t look exactly like that. Sexy Borg lady helped make Obama president.
It was an actress named Jerry Ryan. She was married to a scumbag Republican politician in the state of Illinois. They got divorced for, among other reason, wanting to have sex in public with his wife. He had this hot wife and wanted to engage in pervy shit with her.
He wanted to go to night clubs and fuck her right there in the middle of the night clubs. He was running for senator or some shit, or something. He was running in an election where one of the candidates would eventually be Obama. I don’t now if it was for state office or for a national office.
This shit came out. Why he got divorced, he wanted to have sex in public with sexy Borg actress. This came out right before the election. He had to dropout. Obama won the election because pervy husband of Borg lady.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/01/31
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the political situation today?
Rick Rosner: We used to think we were fighting wars to make the world safe for democracy, WWI. WWII was fought to fight against fascism. We had the Greatest Generation. Now, you have conservative organizations led by Fox News who are telling people for many hours every day that being a good brave American means being kind of a motherfucker.
Jacobsen: When does this switch from idealistic stuff to not-so idealistic stuff?
Rosner: In the 70s and 80s, conservative thinktanks, one that comes to mind is the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, supported by super-rich ultra-conservatives, like the Koch brothers, came to realize based on research that dumb people are an exploitable and mobilizable and manipulatable demographic.
One offshoot of this was the creation of Fox News. I don’t know if Rupert Murdoch saw the studies or it happens to coincide with his political beliefs. But Fox News probably celebrated its 30th anniversary or so recently.
Reagan appalled people, non-conservatives at the time. But he was the charming less scary wedge of the new style of conservatism that distrusts government and wants to break government and wants to get people to vote out of anger for people who will further fuck up government.
It is hard to say whether the country can be salvaged and how long it will take the country to be salvaged from the current crop of awful Republican politicians. People have been predicting that the Republicans for decades. They have been predicting it.
Right now, Republicans are only about 28% of the voting population, so are democrats and independents are in the 40s. But there are trends against the Republicans. They are an aging population. The older you are, the more likely you are Republican.
There should be a Republican die-off. They tend to be white. As the Republicans become less white, all this should shrink the party. Also, there should be increasing number of Republicans who are more brutal in their attacks with voter suppression.
Back in 2016, they denied the democratic president, not even allowing him to nominate or hold hearings into voting on the Supreme Court. So, they stole a Supreme Court justice. It is hard to know whether American will get increasingly – the easier term for it is – fascist.
Everybody continues to live lives that are similar to the lives they lived under Obama. We don’t have to fear being arrested for our tweets. But there are whiffs of this all over the place. And there are aspects of life not necessarily unassociated with and not necessarily associated with current terrible politics like the opioid crisis.
Pharmaceutical companies have been allowed to overprescribe opioids for a decade. We have more people dying of opioid overdoses at any time before in history. For three years, the average life expectancy in America dropped for the first time in history.
That was due in great part to the opioid crisis and also to the obesity epidemic. You can’t blame Republicans for all of that. At the same time, it is part of the zeitgeist. You’ve got angry and scared – economic uncertainty is the phrase. It is the phrase used by pundits who want to excuse the behaviour.
They’re afraid that they’ll have enough money to retire. Uncertainty is a euphemism for not wanting immigrants to come in and other stuff.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the political situation today?
Rick Rosner: What is going on in America, it is weird to me; that you don’t know everything going on in America since you touch America along a 3,000-mile border. The deal with impeachment is it is being conducted gingerly.
The democrats’ idea, what they’re trying to do, is to make everybody aware of how criminal and his associates are without making people who’ve liked Trump even more committed to Trump. The model that they want to follow is the Nixon model.
As more and more information came out about Nixon’s badness, Nixon lost followers. What they don’t want is the Clinton model, where Clinton was impeached for lying about blowjobs from his intern, people who liked Clinton or people who were democrats thought the process was such bullshit that a guy would be impeached for saying that he didn’t have sex when he got a few BJs.
They though the Republicans were over-reaching themselves. They probably felt a lot of sympathy for Monica Lewinsky who was fucked by who she thought was her friend, Linda Tripp, who seemed gross and vindictive, ugly inside and out.
Linda Tripp is the one who found the dress with the jizz on it and was the one to rat to Ken Starr who’d been after the Clintons for years. The thing he finally found was the blowjobs and the lying about the blowjobs.
The whole thing seemed so unfair to more than half the country that Clinton was even more popular after he was impeached. They voted him not guilty in the Senate. The democrats don’t want Trump to become more popular because people feel like he is being persecuted.
It is tricky. Because the Republicans now have a tame news media. In Nixon’s time and even somewhat in Clinton’s time, there was Fox New just being born while Clinton was president. It wasn’t as big or as insidious as it is now.
The conservative news media now continually pump out misinformation. So if you only listen o conservative news media, you can get a fairly consistent narrative that is not true but hangs together. It says everyone but this brave crusader, this shaker-upper, this swamp-drainer, Trump is corrupt.
Trump is the hero of all this and is being unfairly persecuted. What everybody agree will happen is even given the huge criminality of what Trump did, which is trying to extort stuff from the Ukrainians to fuck over Joe Biden, Trump thinks is likely to be his opponent in the election.
It is entirely criminal and worse than what Nixon did. But that doesn’t matter. Once the House votes to impeach Trump and there is a trial in the Senate, the Senate with a Republican majority will vote to not find Trump guilty.
Also, you need a 2/3rds vote for impeachment. You need 67 senators out of 100 to vote Trump guilty on at least one article of impeachment. People think it will be, at least, 2 or 3. But that there are 47 democratic senators, which means they’ll need 20 Republican senators voting to impeach Trump.
People think that is an impossibility. The fear is: everybody agrees on both sides; Trump will survive an impeachment vote. But what people don’t know or people disagree about and what can’t be anticipated, whether the impeachment trial will Trump more popular or less popular, although, my guess would be that his approval ratings will probably stay where they have been for the entire three years of his presidency, except for the very first week.
The very first week, we almost reached 50% approval. For the past almost 3 years, he’s been in the high 30s or low 30s. His approval rating has been the steadiest among presidents since they starting polling for approval.
His approval at the beginning of the impeachment process dropped by roughly 1% from 42% to 41%. Since then, they’ve had two weeks of hearings. It has crept back up to 41.9%. While approval for impeachment, a majority of Americans disapproved for the past year.
In the past three months, approval of impeachment climbed over 50%. In the past 2 weeks, it dropped to about 47%. It is less than a percent ahead of people who disapprove of impeachment. So, that’s what is going on.
Everybody on the left says Trump approval is a cult because people love him. The people who love him, love him regardless of what he does. It seems to be increasingly true as his people are increasingly desperate and shitty. It doesn’t matter.
My hope is, to wrap this up, that even if his approval stays steady; that it won’t be enough for him to get re-elected. That the 47% or 48% of people who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt in the first week of his presidency, and then the percentage dropped to 41%.
I am hoping that losing the 7% of the people and the 15% of Trump voters who are now disgusted with him are now enough to make it so he doesn’t get re-elected. Even if that is so, the Republicans will fuck with the mechanics of our voting, even more than they did in 2016.
Everybody, our intelligence agencies know it, but the Republicans control the Senate. They have refused to do anything to protect us against Russian election interference. So, the fighting of the interference has to go on at the state level.
Then there are some states that welcome it. I believe that if votes were counted fairly; that Trump will not be re-elected, but votes may not be counted fairly.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/11/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you’re trying to buy stuff other people want, how can you do it? What should you expect?
Rick Rosner: I think it is crazy, if you don’t know what to expect, to not come up with the highest amount that you’re willing to pay while punching that price in with 4 seconds to go before bidding ends.
The way eBay and other auction site works: If nobody gets close to the amount you’re willing to pay, then you only pay a little more than the price anybody else is willing to pay. Let’s say you’re willing to pay 60 bucks for something.
So, you punch 60 bucks 4 minutes before the auction ends. The strategy being that you don’t want people to have time to get in there and enter new bids to drive the price up. You want to come up with your highest possible price and hope people don’t come in.
Say the highest bid with 4 seconds to go is someone bidding 24 bucks, you enter 70 bucks. The minimum bid increment is a buck. If nobody else punches in a bid, you’re not paying 70 bucks. You’re paying 24 bucks plus the increment or the buck increase, so much less than you were willing to pay for it.
I think it’s called swooping in. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t do that. Because if you enter your price earlier, and most things are on eBay for a week, why would you give somebody a day or an hour to think about it and make the decision to spend more than they decided previously?
So, I am a swooper. If it is a thing in demand, a reasonable expectation, though not a good expectation – in that, they are wide variations in what happens. The price is likely to triple in the half-hour before the end of bidding.
It won’t always triple. It depends on the kind of bidding behaviour other people have and how many other people are interested in the thing. I had a thing. I lost out on a thing for three days until the last minute; the price was sitting at 22 British pounds.
Then in the last four seconds, I bid 64 pounds. Somebody else bid 62 pounds, and someone bid something else. But the winning bid was 66 pounds, so anywhere between 66 pounds and higher. But because I was the only higher bidder. They beat my bid by 2 pounds.
So, I bid 64. They got it at 66, which is exactly three times the price that it was sitting up to the days leading up to the last few seconds. It often goes something like that. Although, another thing I lost out on was sitting at 5 dollars for four days and then 7.50 for three days.
Then in the last few seconds, it topped out at 39 bucks. I put in a bid of 38 bucks, which was the highest bid I’d be willing to pay. Somebody else put in some bid that was higher than that. They had to pay my 38 plus a buck and got it for 39 bucks.
So, that price went up more than 5-fold in the last few seconds. If it’s something in demand or something with a few bids for it, or seems to be a neat item, or had a bunch of watchers, because often eBay will tell you how many people are watching it, then the price will jump up.
It will more than double within the last few seconds, which might be a way to tell you to not waste your time. The thing that I lost out on that was 7.50 for a long time. I had a reasonable chance of getting it for 20 bucks, 25 bucks.
Because it was sitting at 7.50 and didn’t have that many bids. Turns out, I didn’t get it because many people were swooping in, but I had a good chance to get it. But if the highest price I was willing to pay 38 bucks, and it was sitting at 32 bucks the day before, then I may have decided to not get so excited and would not have paid that much attention.
Because if a few bids made it to 32 bucks, then it would go beyond 38 bucks at the last minute, which was beyond the highest I was willing to pay. There are two ways to be lucky. The shitty way to be lucky is that thing I was looking at goes to 40 bucks with 5 days to go.
I was only willing to pay 38 bucks. Because I would have spent 5 days tracking it. The luckiest way to go is put in this bid for 38 and is at 7.50 and then I get it for 9 bucks. Because the highest the other person was willing to go was 8.50 and there were no other bidders.
The slightly less lucky way to go is to bid 38 and then I get it at 37.80 because the highest any other bidder to go was right under my highest bid. So, there you go. That’s, at least, I think bidding works.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What religion and community in America?
Rick Rosner: Okay, so, you were mentioning other aspects of religion that might be important in a world dominated by scientism. I mentioned my weekly argument with Lance. Bullshit conservatives are trying to argue mass slaughters on people not going to church anymore.
More than 40% of Americans go to church, which is a lot more than dozens and dozens of countries where people are godless and do not go to church at all or very little. They don’t have mass slaughters.
But what they might have in places in Finland is a sense of community, say in the 1950s in America, which was reinforced by patriotism, the Boy Scouts, and everybody going to church. So, one thing that religion can provide or that is important about religion is a sense of community, and a sense of framework, of people fitting in, and a framework of values.
But you can get those same frameworks even in godless societies. If you figure out ways of structuring your society that put people into communities, I suspect that there will be, if we are lucky, the emergence of more communal structures in America and the rest of the world, even as religion dwindles.
Jacobsen: So, you were mentioning spirituality a few sessions ago. What about the social ethics that are tied to those more fundamental ethics or emergent processes like persistence and order? What are some of the derivatives there?
Rosner: We are more connected informationally than ever before. A lot of the information that we share seems stupid and our behaviour with regard to this information seems stupid. LA is full of zombie cars now or cars that are stopped on the street for no reason, except the person driving the car has decided to stop and use their phone.
It is crazy how many people are stopped at a light or on a side street where they won’t create a hazard. They are just looking at their shit.
Jacobsen: That is crazily rude by Canadian standards.
Rosner: It is super nuts. I honked at like 4, 5, 6 people driving 3 miles from my house to the gym today. They were all people who were only half-driving.
Jacobsen: For those who don’t know, you suffer from road rage, real road rage.
Rosner: Yes, I’m a pissy driver. But if you don’t have a pissy driver, traffic drives to a halt. Most people assume people stopped are stopped because there is a traffic reason. But if you actually look at the cars that are stopped, often, incredibly often in LA, they stopped at a stop sign or whatever because a person decided it was okay for them to take a minute or two to take a look at their screen. It’s fucking crazy! It’s insane.
It may be only cured 5, 10, 15 years from now as more cars become automatically driven. So, people are free to look at their shit all the time. We look at our shit all the time. Optimistically, you can predict that people might form effective communities out of being so connected informationally.
This constant sharing of information among people may build communities. Let me give a very optimistic example, America is in the middle of a homelessness crisis. LA has, at least, 30,000 homeless people.
Most other big cities have a bunch of homeless people. I’m sure there were homeless people in smaller communities across the US too. At least, some of this is caused by automation, reducing the number of hours that people need to work.
If automation is not a serious cause of this, and I think it is, people would rather accuse other things like Mexicans of causing underemployment or whatever. It will be increasingly in the future.
When people don’t have enough work, they can’t support themselves and get in bad situations, but the possible future good is that the less work people have, then the more time they have to support each other.
I’ve been learning about homelessness because it is a big deal in our community and because I am on the Studio City Council now. It is probably the biggest concern among the Studio City Council people.
One of things about homelessness is if you are going to get people off the street or get them into better situations at all. You have to approach them at the concierge level, whether cops or somebody else and ask, “What’s your deal? What do you need?”
You have to get them involved in wanting to improve their situation and then hook them up with ways to improve their situation. One way to get some people off the streets is to reconnect them with their families, and get them to want to embrace their families and their families to embrace them.
That is an incredible manpower, person-power consuming process. This concierge stuff, when you’re talking about the mentally ill, who might be 1/3rd of those who are homeless. You have to take them to a place where can be diagnosed and put on meds. You have to keep them on meds long enough for them to work.
Then you have to keep them on meds, even after they feel sane again. What happens to people who feel sane again, they think they don’t need the meds anymore and then they stop taking them, and then the mental illness comes back.
This takes a lot of human hours, human contact. One could optimistically hope that as the future unfolds and the need for human labour in the world to produce stuff dwindle. That humans can devote the resulting spare time to each other, which also implies a need to pay people for doing less work.
If there is less work for people in general, then you still need a functioning economy based on people having money to spend. Conservatives call anything that involves paying people for anything but work socialism.
But it’s obvious that the world of the future is going to have solutions that have people caring for each other in ways that today’s super shitty American conservatives are loathe.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/08/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, there’s no governor anywhere. There are principles guiding things.
Rick Rosner: The principles are emergent, whatever does not contradict itself can exist, but all these principles are not necessarily pre-existing. They’re embodied in the worlds that incorporate them.
It was a circular statement. I’m not sure if there is a metaphysical ground. I’m not even sure you could say anything pre-exists anything. In that, worlds that can exist in this hypothetical set of worlds that can exist come with their own histories, having a history is part of existing.
Having a worldline is part of being a thing that can exist, so pre-existing is something that needs to be defined or hemmed in.
Jacobsen: If you take any point of time in a worldline, and if you say, “Existing apart from that,” any object with dimensions and none of the dimensions are time.
Rosner: A moment, and you don’t really have a moment; what you have, a manifestation or a perception of a world that can exist. We have an incomplete perception of the entire universe. But our perception of the universe indicates that the universe is self-consistent to a fantastically high degree.
Within that self-consistency is an implied deep, deep history, and deep extent in space, all this stuff is implied. Like, I am sitting here in my TV room. The farthest that I can really see if like 30 feet into another room towards the other end of the house.
So, I can’t see into the universe across 14 billion light years. But everything I have learned and know implies that the universe is at least that old and that wide. All that stuff. It implies vast time and vast space, and a bunch of principles of self-consistency and related principles.
But these principles somehow have an existence independent of the world. It is something that needs to be chased down and pinned down.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we’ve had massive heatwaves. Places like Greenland and elsewhere are set for records.
Rick Rosner: It has been apparent that anybody who is denying it is either a paid shill or is an idiot. What we’ll have is a slow-rolling apocalypse, in that, if you go on Twitter where I spend most of my time, you have people saying, “It is the end of the world, end of the planet.”
It’s not. It is going to be a touch century with surplus deaths and some small wars and the loss of some species, and the loss of ecosystems. But it will play out across many, many decades; and there won’t be catastrophes that wipe out more than 100,000 people at once.
Instead, it’ll be slow stuff where the aggregate displacements and deaths, and such, can be tallied up, but, on a daily basis, won’t feel like an apocalypse. It won’t wipe out a billion people, even over the aggregate of over a century.
Stuff will happen and will be addressed with varying degrees of efficacy. Sea walls will go up along the coast of Florida. Something will have to be done about New Orleans and Houston, probably more sea walls, also along Lower Manhattan.
Companies that build sea walls will make billions of dollars. There will be lots of devastation, but at sufficiently slow rate. That it won’t change the complexion of daily human life any more than any of the other technological displacements that are coming.
So, it’s always the end of the world for somebody. This will be the 21st century’s end of the world. The 20th century was good for genocide. You had Hitler killing roughly 30 million people and Stalin killing 40 million people, and Mao killing roughly 50 million people.
We can hope that we’ll avoid that in the 21st century. We can hope that Ebola won’t kill millions of people at once. But there is an Ebola vaccine. Even if Ebola gets nasty, we may be able to hold it off.
But the wholesale horror movie devastation of climate change won’t look like that. It will look like a whole bunch of what we’re already seeing with powerful storms that wipe out, temporarily, whole cities or islands disappearing.
But the rate at which all this happens while disturbing won’t be catastrophic for the human species. It won’t feel like a disaster is presented in 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow where you lose half or all of America overnight.
The devastation of climate change will take out hundreds, maybe thousands, of people during various mini-disasters.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we’re looking at social media saturation, how does this erode moral standards?
Rick Rosner: Instead of starting from there, I will start from where I started from. I, and other people, will occasionally look at porn. Carole went out of town. I looked at more porn than I usually look at. I noticed the base level of porn; if you could catalogue porn, I would say there is an increasing perversity.
There is an increasing average level of perversity in porn. Certainly, now, compared to the Playboy Magazine of the 1960s that didn’t even show pubic hair when people had pubic hair. You’re too young to know about the war between Playboy and Penthouse.
Playboy ran the show forever. Then Penthouse comes in and said, “We’re going to be dirtier than Playboy.” Then Hustler comes in early to mid 70s, they say, “We’re going to show pubes, labia, and open labia.”
So, I would say porn gets on average more perverse. I was connecting this to an idea. Americans right now are on average scummier than they have been in the past. Americans are more comfortable being douchebags than Americans of the Greatest Generation, which indicaes, to me, there’s more stuff in the environment, the information environment, telling Americans that they’re douchebags and not telling Americans that they’re noble, say during the Greatest Generation.
Being a war, or a nation at war, or being a war at least considered being good against evil like World War II probably convinced an entire generation or two, that they were brave, decent, and self-sacrificing, and good. Then there were institutions that helped reinforced it.
Unsullied patriotism, the Church, Boy Scouts, the YMCA, the comprehensive high school everyone went to, wholesome entertainment, TV was wholesome to the point of being fucking awful for its first 2 or 3 decades.
Now, we live in an environment. We look at perverse porn. We play videos where we are engaging in bullshit. Not only do we feel like assholes for wasting many hours on bullshit, but within the games; we’re doing things that doesn’t convince us of our bravery. How could they?
A video game, nothing is at stake. The institutions that have told Americans that they are not scumbags have become suspected of being corrupt or obsolete. There is reality show culture where the media figures in the past; fame seemed to be more of a meritocracy than now.
Once reality show kicked in, any old scumbag could become famous if they were outrageous enough in their douchebaggery. That seems to erase the stories of who we tell ourselves we are. I was suing a quiz show one time.
In the late 1950s cheating scandal in quiz shows, some people were being given the answers. People who were more photogenic. Games shows wee huge in the 1950s. Everybody who had a television watched one of these shows.
It was found out that they were fixed. There was huge outrage up to President Eisenhower who spoke out about how disappointed he was. Imagine a president today. Although, Trump weighs in on all sorts of stupid shit.
Imagine people expecting fairness of TV competitions, there is some legitimacy in shows expected like Jeopardy. Imagine a reality television show where you’re expected to solve tasks to form alliances and manipulate people.
When I was suing Millionaire, a contestant was suing – back in 2000 – Survivor saying they cooked the competition and manipulated the contestants, saying she got kicked off. Her suit didn’t go far. Neither did mine.
But the idea 19 years later of someone suing a TV competition is laughable because the fairness expected on most of these competitions now seems ridiculous. Our expectations of ourselves have declined and aren’t being reinforced by what we see around us, expect on a daily basis from information and entertainment, and from the events of the world.
In another session, I could talk briefly. I haven’t talked about how Evangelicals are so comfortable being scumbags now. But that is probably worth a session.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was Einstein’s great misfortune?
Rick Rosner: He got the U.S. going on the atomic bomb and wrote the letter to F.D.R. Leo Szilard. “We have to beat them to the bomb.” Now, we, and a bunch of other people, have the bombs. It has been dropped twice. 200,000 or more people died.
Now, it is sad that his theory leads to this. People prompted to think, “Hey, we can make a bomb out of that.” Einstein was not a violent man, not an asshole. Although, he did like to bang, but he did not do that much extracurricular banging.
He, at least, went out of his not trying to not be perceived as being a prick, but he got associated with one of the nastiest weapons ever to exist.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What were the personal limitations of Einstein?
Rick Rosner: Einstein spent the second half of his life trying to come up with the Unified Field Theory to bring all the forces of nature into one simple theory. He might have done better at it if he lived 50 years later. He didn’t know all the particles, which we’ve found. There are more powerful mathematical techniques, e.g., Membrane Theory, String Theory, Group Theory, and so on.
On the other hand, String Theory has been 30 years of wheel spinning. Einstein who was born in 1949 instead of 1879 would have been just as fucked in trying to come up with a Unified Field Theory. Maybe not, he may have looked at the decades of additional observations and would have been able to make something out of them.
But after his General Relativity, he may have been able to focus on less grand theories, to use his mind attacking more limited problems than the entire structure of space-time. Still, he was looking for one more huge hit, one more theory. The pursuit of his theory cost him decades of fruitless labour.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Who do you think is the worst leader in history?
Rick Rosner: The 20th century had three of the worst leaders in history based on raw body count. Mao may have been responsible for 50 million deaths of his own citizens. Stalin responsible for 40 million deaths of his own citizens. Hitler for 30 million deaths overall with the wars, the camps where people were slaughtered. People talk about the 6 million Jews, but the 5 million other people Hitler didn’t like.
Of course, when you’re killing this many people, it is hard to get an accurate number in the middle of the carnage. There are those who didn’t get the chance to kill more like Pol Pot. There have been leaders who killed. Hitler is the one who comes to mind. But when you look at Germany now, a progressive, successful country and one of the best economies in Europe.
The stain he left on Germany is still there. But Germany rose with the help of America and the Marshall Plan and our realizing after World War Two; that you don’t fuck over the countries that you fought. You help them recover because at the end of World War One; the Allies, the victors, fucking hammered Germany for its role in World War One and for being the loser in the war.
The strife and the anger that arose from that lead directly to World War Two. Anyway, Germany is a great country now. You could argue Stalin was, maybe, the worst because Russia is a super fucked up country, even 70 years after the end of Stalin. He killed everybody competent in the country. He purged them. More people died in Russia from World War Two in battle and associated causes than in any other country. Russia lost 25 million people.
I assume a competent historian could argue that they would have done better in World War Two if Stalin hadn’t killed all the competent military people before World War Two started. I don’t know for sure. But he killed everybody competent in his country. Russia, not just because of him remains one of the most fucked up semi-developed countries in the world.
Putin is currently winning international politics because he developed sophisticated techniques to fuck over the politics of other countries. That doesn’t make Russia any less fucked up. I guess I would go, “Stalin number one as shittiest leader in history.”
One caveat, the countries lead by these people – Germany, Russia, not the Soviet Union, and China – still exist. So, as leaders, they weren’t so disastrous for their countries that their countries ceased to exist. You can probably find other leaders who were so shitty as leaders that their countries no longer exist. An argument can be made for Gaddafi.
You can’t say he was the worst leader in history because his crimes were comparatively small potatoes. You could argue he was shitty. In that, Libya doesn’t exist or is a failed state now. I don’t know what the other failed states are currently. That’s got to count heavily against a leader: Their country is no longer a country.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can you apply the Sunk Cost Fallacy to the political landscape of the United States now?
Rick Rosner: Trump’s base gets more and more entrenched. The more he shows himself to be an incompetent leader and a terrible person, and a racist; the bigger a hole he digs for himself. The more his base invests in him. The more he costs in terms of integrity and dignity among his base, then the more he costs them. He keeps violating norms.
You have to work harder and harder to rationalize his bullshit to yourself. It is a huge investment. Paradoxically, it brings his base closer. To anyone looking at Trump objectively, in terms of the most objective evidence about him, he generates more and more fairly objective evidence. He is what he seems to be, which is a megalomaniacal scumbag who is 73-years-old in not good shape.
He used to be a not stupid man because his hardware is slowly decaying. He’s the worst president in American history, by far, and the question to ask and the question I am going to ask Lance tomorrow, “Has a leader like in history ever proven himself to be of benefit to his nation by being this way?”
I can think of a bunch of bad examples off the top of my head, e.g., the terrible, super corrupt emperors of Rome. The previous most corrupt U.S. president, Harding, or Hitler, Mussolini, Berlusconi. There have been plenty of corrupt, arrogant, and asshole leaders throughout history. But I can’t think of an example in which an asshole leader has been of clear benefit to his country.
Lance knows more history than me. Maybe, he can think of somebody who was a benefit or was a secondary import to the good things that they did for their country. This is all I have on this. I would hard-pressed to see where a crazy asshole has ever saved his country.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/14
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If we’re taking changes in ethical norms, what ones are in flux now?
Rick Rosner: The deal is, 40% of the adult population of America supports Trump to some extent. Much of that base is Evangelical Christians. People who don’t support Trump find that cruel and racist. What has happened is that the conservative news industry has found it profitable as an industry to erode America’s ethical norms, rich people, apart from Fox News and the other conservative outlets make money off appealing to the Trump base, support this stuff because tax relief for rich people helps them immensely.
The richest guy behind Trump’s election is a guy named Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer. They are the ones who gave money to Cambridge Analytica, which figured out how to target and spread propaganda via social media. I read an article last night saying Robert Mercer – Mercer’s company – defrauded the federal government out of $7 billion dollars (USD). His hedge fund was using a tax write-off or a tax scheme ruled illegitimate.
His company was the only company to ever try this scheme. The IRS ruled that he failed to pay $7 billion dollars in taxes on a company with a net worth of $97 billion. So, this guy and other rich guys who don’t want to pay taxes have been meeting with Trump to see if they can get around it. Some rich people are just libertarians. But they mostly don’t care about getting rid of immigrants or any of the “America First” semi-racist stuff.
But that is what it takes to support the base. Then they’ll support whatever garbage it takes if they end up getting tax relief. The question becomes, “Can this breach of ethical norms, this rupture of Americans’ idea of what we stand for as Americans – can this spackled over or repaired?” I would say, “Yes.” Because people believe the stories they are told about themselves and their country.
We have a long tradition of America standing for fairness, for the melting pot, for being a country of immigrants, for all the stuff that the liberals try to bring up. So, if most of the stories that people hear support the ethical views that America has generally held, then the contrary views – the racist views, the xenophobic views have always been a minority view in America and restrained (e.g., anti-German sentiment around the world wars, anti-Italian/anti-swarthy southern European sentiment around the same time) – flared up during the first half of the 20th century.
It usually gets tamped down. But it is at its strongest now since World War Two. The two with tamping it down is that now; there is a lot of money in telling racist xenophobic stories and expressing those points of view to Americans. Fox News is the most successful 24-hour news channel, which is slightly deceptive. The other news channels have, at least, as many viewers combined. But since Fox is the one major conservative channel, and MSNBC and CNN get the liberal viewers and the middle of the road viewers.
Fox News has been around since 1996. I don’t see how you can make it go away. It has been forced to not call itself “news” in some countries. But that’s not going to happen in America. The only way to get rid of Fox News would be for some rich liberals to get together and then to buy the whole company to change its direction. But that just means another conservative organization will pop up.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/07/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is the American experiment waning?
Rick Rosner: By “American experiment,” you mean the democratic experiment for the last 23 years.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: It is not entirely the right question to ask because the human experiment or human life, in general, about to just go haywire. The texture of daily life is going to be completely revised over the next 50 years. I assume it will continue to shift, and shift, and shift.
What results after all of these shifts will not be human-based anymore, it will be based on augmented humanity and AI. I call the Trump Administration the little end of the world before the big end of the world because a lot of the disruptions that will completely revise our lives are in their early forms largely responsible for Trump getting elected.
Job losses to automation. People not being resistant to information or bullshit they receive over the internet. Active psychological warfare by Russia and other bad actors using social media. This was the first AI election (2016). So, it is messier than asking whether Trump and his apparent impunity, the difficulty with which he and other anti-democratic/semi-fascist corruptocrats, can be expelled from politics.
I think they can. I am hopeful, slightly more than slightly hopeful; that the democrats can back control of government in 2020, in the election of 2020. But this won’t stop the corruption or the erosion of government because we won’t be able to get rid of the corruptocrats entirely. There will still be close to half of the Senate. Even if the democrats do really well, they will still be more than 40% of the House.
The larger technologically based disruption will be ongoing. So, democracy, as we knew it, as late as the turn of the century, is gone. But what might happen after the election of 2020, it might be the restoration of some democratic norms and standard, and filtered through a world becoming increasingly weird.
My guess is that politics will find it hard, in general, to keep up with technological change. Among the things that we can hope for is that national governments lose power and with the power going to mostly benign new forms of human and post-human aggregation. We’ve got a new census in 2020, which means that congressional maps will be redrawn in all the states in America except the few states with such small populations; that they only get one representative in Congress.
Gerrymandering is one of the main causes of political polarization because people running in safe districts – districts safe for one party – produce winning candidates who are extremist, whether to the left or mostly to the right, because the person who wins the primary is guaranteed to win the district. The new census and the redrawing of maps might reduce gerrymandering, which might reduce political polarization.
Although, the polarization is fed by politics as entertainment as presented by the profit for news. Any reduction in political polarization will be helpful in restoring politics, where you don’t have to watch and worry about every single day. It won’t be completely eradicated. To wrap up, we will have to look for alliances among large groups of people that aren’t based on state or national boundaries.
To see models of that, you can see Cory Doctorow who has written a lot about what some of the new alliances might be in his fiction, The Rapture of the Nerds. The books are a couple decades old. He has a new series, Radicalized, which is fun to read. But it is not that helpful in that it doesn’t portray new large-scale alliances. His previous book really went into a near future with rejiggered alliances.
Although, it’s not an overly happy book. In that, there’s so much disruption. Some characters win victories for themselves or their side, but there’s so much devastation. The optimism in the book only barely wins out over the pessimism They are worth reading to get a sense of what people might be thinking in terms of new alliances.
I am sure there are other authors poking in that direction.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the current Trump deal?
Rick Rosner: During the campaign trail, he said that his people – his base – is so solidly behind him. That he could shoot somebody in the middle of 5th Avenue and no one would drop him.
Then, in fact, he did indirectly kill somebody on 5th Avenue. They did not drop him. He was too cheap to put sprinklers in Trump Tower. There was a fire in one of the units. Somebody died. No one cared in particular.
People on Twitter who hate Trump said, “That a-hole,” but nothing happened. His popularity has remained remarkably steady. He probably has the flattest approval curve of any president since they started taking approval polls.
Jacobsen: Why?
Rosner: Maybe, his analysis is correct that his base is his base and they love him regardless of what he does. There is an industry that makes it their job to justify and rationalize anything that he does.
That his actions often seem like some overall plan. According to the Washington Post, he is at thousands of lies and representations of fact in hundreds of days in office. His lies are often not systematic. He often contradicts himself from hour to hour.
His actions and statements are – his sentiments and prejudices are somewhat consistent – are inconsistent. They tend not to be part of some overreaching grand plan. He hates China messing with America.
He tries to mess back. He thinks the tariffs are helpful. Even though, he doesn’t understand how they really work. He hates immigrants. So, some of his stuff has an overarching set of sentiments behind them.
But the actions and statements that he makes in service to those sentiments are spur of the moment. Anyway, he is kind of random. The conservative media try to take what he does and have it make sense, and try to present him as a guy who actually knows what he is doing.
Even though, it is obvious that he is incurious. He cannot be bothered to read the briefings that people prepare for him. He is a mess. He is all over the place. But the conservative media, depending on who you go to for news, will probably not expose the audience to exactly how messed up he is.
That helps stabilize his approval. But his fans are getting their news from sources that present him as a more consistent leader than he actually is. Some non-conservative commentators have a theory that a lot of his people like him because he hates the same people they do.
They care less about whether what he does is in their interest. So, Trump’s approval is remarkably steady. It has been between 37 and 4 percent for all but the first week of his presidency.
For the past six months, it has been oscillating back and forth between 41 and 42 percent on the aggregate of all polls. Individual polls, they’re remarkably consistent too. But they, obviously, can vary more than the aggregate polls.
It looks like Trump’s behaviour gets more and more concerning to people who do not like Trump. He said last week that he would accept information about candidates running against him from a foreign government. It doesn’t seem to bug his people.
The camps are established. The people who hate him. Their approval is remarkably steady too. People decided. It is harder to get people to change their minds about this president than any other president since FDR in the late 1930s.
We are talking 80 years of presidential approval surveys.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Abortion is an ongoing topic in the United States and around the world.
Rick Rosner: There is a bunch of legislation happening in the United States that is crazy. It tries to give women the death penalty for getting abortions after 6 weeks. Not that this passed or will pass. Several passed these “heartbeat” laws that make it illegal for women to get abortions after they even know that they are pregnant.
At 6 weeks, you are only late for your period for 2 or 3 weeks. A lot of women will not realize that they are pregnant until after that. Basically, they are abortion bans. Ohio, Georgia, a couple of other states.
In the past, it has made me sad that we haven’t come to a consensus about abortion. But now, I kind of think that we’re going to face in the next century so many new controversies around AI and around extended lifespans – thanks to vastly improved medicine.
There will be controversies about who counts as human. If somebody has gradually replaced his or her failing brain with new stuff, does that mean the heirs will challenge that person saying, “That person is not a person anymore”? Because the person has been replaced by biomechanical circuitry.
It may not happen for a while. It may not happen entirely. There will be all sorts of issues around new technology and new medicine. We haven’t resolved some of the most basic old ethical issues.
It makes me sad. Because none of these issues will be cleaned up. They will all continue to be used for political leverage. At various times, abortion has been a thing that people have done for thousands of years.
Across those thousands of years, there have been times when it has been more or less politicized – and depending on the country. Over the past 50 years, it has been increasingly politicized in America partially because of legitimate religious concerns, but mostly the conservatives who are better than liberals at branding and mobilizing their base.
They have learned that it is a really good crowbar to pry or whatever metaphor to motivate people like a carrot and stick to get people upset to vote for candidates, conservative candidates, on the basis of outrage with among th recent attempts to increasingly politicize abortion.
It is the idea that Democrats want to offer people the option to abort babies even after they are delivered alive. Legislation has been suggested by Republicans and then rejected by Democrats that would prohibit all but the most heroic measures in saving babies who are born alive.
Medical professionals and Democrats consider this a legislative trap designed mainly to make Democrats look like baby killers. The deal is, tragically, some babies who are born alive will die.
Less than 1% of babies are born without brains. They are born with just a brainstem. With minus a brain, they can only survive 72, 96, or so, hours. Doctors and nurses want to retain the right to treat those babies reasonably and humanely, and the families of those babies.
The baby is examined to see if it has a brain and can live, and, if not, then the baby is not put to death, but it is not put on a respirator where it can survive for months or years minus a brain. But the baby is not given heroic care.
But it is taken care of and is brought to the parents. If the parents want to hold the baby, they can pose for photos to remember the baby, which will not survive. After a couple days without a brain, the baby dies from not breathing.
The doctors do not want to be found guilty of not keeping that baby alive for the many months that it could be kept alive. So, things are goofy and sad on the abortion front in America, which makes me wonder why other issues haven’t been as politicized.
For instance, inter-racial relationships, a black guy going out with an Asian woman, a Hispanic woman going out with a white woman. That’s two issues. It doesn’t seem to bother people anymore.
Although, it seems to both people in the past. It is not only in real life but in TV, movies, and advertising. If a company wants an easy shortcut to seem hip, they can throw in an inter-racial couple.
That means that the company is not afraid of backlash from anyone who may find that offensive. America has decided that isn’t that offensive. There may be more people offended in the past like 50 years ago by inter-racial relationships as abortion.
Why is abortion still a thing and inter-racial relationships not? For one, babies ar really cute. If you convince people that babies are babies even 6 weeks after conception, all over Twitter, there have been images of what a fetus looks like 6 weeks.
The anti-abortion people have a pretty cleaned up abortion look. It looks like a fetus but not monstrous either. Pro-choice people have put up actual pictures of what an actual 6 week old fetus looks like through scanning electron photography.
It doesn’t look as nice as the anti-abortion people’s fetuses. Anyway, babies are cute. You can mobilize people around babies. Also, murder is scary. So if you call killing a fetus murder, then that seems super dire.
There is no leverage around inter-racial couples. Inter-racial couples are cute, at least the ones shown in TV ads. Inter-racial couples are also consumers. So if you pull those people in, you can sell more of your product. Also, people like to become couples.
By people learning to consider people of other races as potential partners, they have expanded their potential relationship pool. I guess, there is no hook or easy way in getting people worked up, to get non-lunatic people worked up, about inter-racial couples.
You can get white supremacists worked up about it. That the race is being diluted by white people not dating white people and not having purely white babies. But those people are by far in the minority.
The increased utility of being able to date anyone of any race and the increased utility of being able to sell your products to people of any race; those are bigger hooks in favour of calming down about inter-racial relationships.
The hooks that only work on white supremacists. That was semi-coherent.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Another factor is that we’re babies. We are more influenced by the deliciousness of social media, perhaps, than striver countries like India and China, where we have the luxury of being academically lazy and not buckling down and just giving into the indulgences of personal technology.
But there are China and India with a combined population of America’s population. There are in the middle of big technological pushes. There have 8 times as many people as we do, which means they have at least 8 times as many strivers who are able to buckle down and strive academically.
The ratio is probably much greater than 8 to 1 because Americans are basically pampered and lazy. We like our lives of relative ease. The striver countries, you can throw in South Korea, probably a lot of the Asian sphere countries.
They produce more strivers than American currently might be producing. Right now, America has a government and a culture that is anti-science, and skeptical of learning and skeptical about information.
We’re in the middle of getting our asses kicked. Liberals like to talk about that we have 12 years left to figure out some decent solutions for climate change before the planet faces catastrophic consequences.
But I would argue that we have roughly that amount of time or less to turn around America’s anti-knowledge, anti-science skepticism about information before we become catastrophically unable to compete with the technologically striving mega-countries of the world.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How will this stratify America in the 2020s?
Rick Rosner: America is already the most stratified that it has been and the most divided it has been politically, and stratified it has been economically, in 100 years. It is at Depression levels.
The economic inequality is probably at Depression levels and probably at higher levels, comparable to the Guilded Age in the 80s and 90s. The college thing is one more thing on top of the economic stratification.
Then there is the coming technological stratification. But I feel access to technology is, maybe, less stratified than access to elite education and less stratified than income and wealth.
You don’t have to be rich to good at technology. It probably helps some. But I feel the technological stratification is less than other areas of stratification. Tech can help reduce economic stratification.
In that, there is a little democratization via online learning. You can online. You can take thousands of classes from your choice of any decent university. You can pay money and then take them for credit in some cases.
But most of these online classes; you’re basically auditing the class. You take it for free or close to free. You work through the material. You listen to the lectures on YouTube or how ever they set it up.
Sometimes, you get a certificate. We are in the baby days of online learning. But that may eventually serve to democratize education somewhat. Education, in general, is in trouble because old models of education are just based on sitting and listening to somebody tell you stuff.
Then you work through assignments based on what you have been told and your textbook. That used to be the best way to learn. 100 years ago, it was the system. It was good. It was better than learning via staying on the farm.
The school was the most interesting part of the day. It was where your friends were. It was where the fun stuff was. It was where people became boyfriends and girlfriends. It was where you could compete in sports if that was your thing.
Now, most of your stuff and access to friends is in the palm of your hand. Many of the social and educational functions made school exciting, though miserable, for people. These have been supplanted by the awesomeness of being in constant contact with your group via your phone.
Now, school is where you go to be told to turn off your phone and to get not very personalized information at a single very slow rate to groups of people. So, school is no longer the most information rich and most interesting, and most emotionally compelling, part of a school-aged kid’s life.
So, that is going to have to change.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I would use Carole and myself, and our kid, as an example.
I mean, we had one kid, which meant our focus was one. I don’t think we wee helicopter parents. We weren’t Tiger Parents. We didn’t force her or push her to do things she didn’t want to do. But we were extremely available and helpful with whatever she wanted to do with preparing for college.
She wanted to get national merit. That’s an award – largely meaningless but still something nice to have based on performance on the PSAT, which is the qualification for the SAT. California having a bunch of people and a bunch of good students has a pretty high score.
My kid says, “I want to make national merit.” I say, “It is going to be brutal.” Before she fired me, I had her take 80 practice tests. I dug up 80 tests by buying old books of tests on eBay and online and so on. I went into semi-dark webby places, where people trade old tests.
I made her take more than 6 dozen practice tests and then she said, ‘Alright, that’s enough.” The kid with a single mom who is working two jobs. That kid and that mom have no freaking idea that people are being this psycho out in affluent white people land.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Thing three is, even without cheating as many do, huge advantages for rich people. For one thing, there is no good guide to applying to college. Every family, every kid, has to kind of learn anew the principles of putting together a good application and putting together a good academic record.
It is not clear. There are a gazillion steps in the whole process. If you do it right, it is the culmination of 12 years of school. But it is the culmination of 4 or 5 years to apply in the case of the most prepared applicants.
The less prepared applicants don’t even know this. It is the difference between the chances for a kid with two parents with a family income of $300,000 who goes to a private school versus a kid with a single parent going to a public school in an inner city.
The inner city school may have one school counsellor for the graduating class of 500 or 600 or even zero counsellors. That counsellor may or may not give a shit, or may or may not have clues.
The counsellors at private schools cultivate relationships with the admissions people at certain colleges. They cannot be friends with every admissions person at every college. But they can be friends with admissions people at a few pretty selective colleges.
A week before calls go out. They can say, “So-and-so, my student, is the most gifted and talented kid I have seen in the last 5 years.” Often, that will make a difference. A counsellor at a city school does not have any of these connections or has very little idea.
They may be able to point kids at appropriate colleges. Or a vague idea in their ideas of all the crazy crap that all the most qualified and most prepared kids are doing to get into colleges.
So, you don’t have to cheat to have a huge advantage if you’re a kid whose parents are still married, if they have a decent job, read, are good at researching stuff online.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/14
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Big problem two is that kids apply – the gunners, the elite kids trying to get into the elite colleges. Back when I was applying, a kid might apply to 4 colleges, like a psycho kid trying really hard.
Now, those same kids average, at least, 12 applications to 12 colleges because it is easier to do since you’re doing it via computer and because everyone else is doing it. So, when I was applying to college, in 1978 or failing to apply as I had a nervous breakdown, 20% of applicants were admitted to Harvard.
Now, it is less than 5%. Back when I was applying, you pretty much knew if you would get in or not, a pretty good idea if you were going to get in or not. That 20% was pretty differentiated between the highly qualified and the less qualified.
But now, at 5%, you might still have 15-20% of those applicants being perfectly qualified for Harvard, but, now, you’re only taking 5% of elite applicants. Now, the applicants don’t know if they get in.
They apply to Stanford, and Northwestern, and Harvard, and MIT, and Yale, and Washington as a safety school. The level of panic increases every year among people who know what they’re doing.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Let me say a few things about college admissions in America, which are a mess.
Thing one is, there are many more highly qualified students who want to go to highly selective schools than there are openings in highly selective schools. Most Ivies only admit roughly 1,800 kids a year.
Even though, they have $40 billion endowments and could afford to slowly expand the class size by 2% a year. I do not think the expansion does 2% per year. The total number of people and the spots at the Ivies plus Stanford might be roughly 22,000 spots.
There are 50,000 highly qualified kids who are aiming for those spots. So, no matter how you set your admission criteria at these schools. Somebody is going to get fucked over. Right now, the people getting fucked over are Asians.
Because if you did unbiased admissions, that is, if you did not look at the kid’s name and just looked at the kid’s grades, scores, recommendations, without regard to ethnicity or background, 40% of the classes at highly selective schools would be Asian.
Schools want diversity, which means various things to various schools. But in practice, it means that Asians have to perform much better than everybody else to get into a lot of these schools.
It is similarly in the interest of fairness and diversity with people from a variety of backgrounds and statuses do not have to perform as well on the raw measures, on the raw qualifications.
But the bottom line is that somebody is always going to get fucked over because there are twice as many students going for these spots with 12 AP classes, parents hiring consultants, getting well-rounded extras, writing 7 drafts of their essays, and so on, to try to get into the universities.
That is the major problem: not enough spots. To argue about whether those spots are really worth it, to get into one of these highly selective schools, because if you work hard, you can get a good education at any of the decent schools.
I think there are roughly 6,000 colleges in the US. Although, that number may be off by a few thousand. That means that there are couple thousand colleges in America that don’t entirely suck at the very least.
If you work hard at any of these schools, you can get a good education. However, what you do get at the elite colleges are connections, you’re going to school with the best and the brightest.
People who have a much better chance of succeeding post-college. If you’re among them, you’re going to be connected to them, and that will be wildly helpful later on in life for them.
If you go on LinkedIn, and if you look at the people who are highly successful in your field, odds are that you will see a lot of people who went to Columbia and the other Ivies. It is part of a successful trajectory.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There is affirmative action for the rich in America. What happened in some of these cases?
Rick Rosner: There was a guy who was clearing tens of millions of dollars through the side door into college. The back door is giving the college that you want your kid to get into a shit ton of money.
Jared Kushner’s dad gave Harvard $2.5 million dollars. Trump’s dad gave Wharton $4 million, not in one lump thing. His kids got in. Even though, they’re kind of dopes. That’s the back door according to this scammer who is being prosecuted now along with a bunch of parents. He said that he had a side door that would cost a lot but not as a much as the back door.
The side door involved either bribing college officials and/or paying people to take standardized tests or the ACT/SAT for students. A lot of the time, the students didn’t even know that somebody was taking the test for them.
One way to do that would be the kid would take the test one on one. You can get special testing conditions if you can prove your kid as a disability that requires special conditions, which requires spending about a grand to send the kid to a consultant – a psychologist to diagnoses the kid with a learning difficulty.
Then you send a letter to the testing companies saying, “This is the problem.” Then there are several ways a test can be individualized – 6, 7, 8 ways. Most require the kid sitting in the room with a proctor in a room.
Then you hire a proctor to give the kid a test, and then the kid leaves. The proctor before turning the test in goes over the answers and then corrects them. All this would run between $15 and $15,000 bucks.
It would be cheaper than the amount to get Jared Kushner into Harvard.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about investigations?
Rick Rosner: There are many investigations ongoing now. You have the district of New York investigation. Every investigation is important.
You have I don’t know how many investigations ongoing now. This one is important because if Trump and his people are indicted on state charges then they aren’t pardonable. A president can only be indicted on federal charges.
There was a big story that came out in the New Yorker about big-time malfeasance about Fox News. A Fox News reporter uncovered the Stormy Daniels story during the 2016 election, but Fox News squelched it because they wanted Rupert Murdoch to win.
Now, the DNC is saying that Fox News given its huge bias will not be allowed to host any democratic presidential debates. It is hard to tell if any of this matters. Because Fox News continues to be Fox News and people continue to buy conservative, if you want to call it conservative, bias in Fox News.
Trump is in a mess. As a liberal, I can hope that it makes him act more and more unhinged, so that it eventually becomes apparent to all but the most fanatical of his followers that he shouldn’t be president.
But that is really wishful thinking. Partially because his supporters really support him; also, because, there is a big correlation between how dumb someone is and how much they support Trump.
Not all dumb people support Trump. But Trump supporters are dumber than average; the ones who peel off tend to be the smarter among the supporters. The less dumb will peel off leaving a core of supporters who have a lower level of intelligence.
They will be resistant to any kind of reality. That’s all I have.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/10
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else?
Rick Rosner: Everything is up in the air. There was a story about how Trump’s failures include the federal deficit exploding because of the tax cut for rich people. Many people are paying more for taxes, including those who voted for Trump.
One report said 11 million Americans will lose $323 billion in tax deductions this tax season, which is almost $33,000 per taxpayer. The tariffs are messing with the economy. They failed to get concessions from North Korea, which is beginning to build its ICBM facility.
Nothing happening with the wall. Nothing happening with infrastructure. Trump has done little in real terms for all Americans, except for the super rich, including those who voted for him.
Some things are doing well. The stock market is hanging in there. Unemployment has been low. But these things continue trends that ran for 6 years at least under Obama.
Trump has pretty successful against ISIS, but not as successful as he claims by relaxing the rules of engagement that has led to more civilian deaths and deaths among ISIS fighters.
Mostly, his record has been pretty dismal. But he is a better president than he is a human being.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is this showing that the legal system isn’t working in the United States with Manafort getting sentenced and a whole stream of people coming through from the Trump Administration?
Rick Rosner: Off-tape, you asked what’s up with Trump. I said, “It depends,” because it has gone from a timeline to being stuck in chocolate pudding or quicksand. It is a big ball of mess.
Whether the legal system is working, it is yet to be seen, as Trump has added two conservative judges. One more hacky than the other. Gorsuch may have some integrity. Kavanaugh, we have yet to tell.
He has been a political hack his entire career He was very angry about the way that he was treated. He may turn out to be a Clarence Thomas, who has spent the last 25 years pissed off by the way he was treated during hearings.
We do not know if the court will act with integrity or shield Trump. In terms of individual cases, Manafort, who is a very bad guy, will possibly go to jail for the rest of his life, prison.
The country wasn’t galvanized. Some were galvanized the entire time. But even half the Republicans supported him as he left the White House, but 88% of Republicans currently support Trump; even though, a bunch of historians confirms the corruption.
They say Trump’s corruption is indisputably the highest in the history of the country, more than Nixon or Harding. Even though, he is supported by most Republicans. How things will go, if the support drops to 60%, then, maybe, some of the Republicans in the House and the Senate start to decide that he is not the horse that they want to bet on.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will this mean the 2020 election?
Rick Rosner: The Democrats can’t go too fast. They have to either build the evidence with hearings or the hearings have to look somewhat reasonable, or hyper-reasonable, because Fox will paint them as unreasonable regardless.
They have to time it. So, the damage done to Trump is reflected in his performance in the presidential primaries beginning next year. I think the presidential primaries run from late February into June.
The primaries are more than 10 months away. Ideally, the damage done to Trump will be so considerable that the Republicans will attempt to primary him. Usually, an incumbent first-term president runs unopposed for his parties nomination.
But occasionally not, Jimmy Carter was primaried. I think Ford was primaried. I think both of them were sufficiently damaged by the primarying. In Carter’s case, a single term president; in Ford’s case, a partial term president.
So, if Trump looks damaged enough, somebody like Kasich may decide to run against him (the Ohio governor). It is probable that Trump will be found not guilty but culpable for at least being able to be put on trial.
The deal is, when you can’t charge a sitting president, you can impeach him. We talked about how impeachment has two parts. In the House, a majority of the House can vote to impeach the president. That is step one.
Step two is if they vote to impeach him, then he goes on trial in the Senate. The House is controlled by Democrats. So, it is likely, if Trump seems guilty of enough stuff, then the House will vote to impeach him.
But the Senate has a majority of Republicans. So, it is highly unlikely. No president has been voted out of the office by the Senate, where you need a 2/3rds vote. It is likely that Trump is guilty of a bunch of impeachable offenses.
If they want to try to get him impeached, it depends on if it will help or hurt his election chances in the 2020 election. Because if they impeach him for what appears to be insufficient cause for the conservative half of the country, it may help him get re-elected.
That is the whole deal. He is probably guilty of a bunch of stuff. He is probably not re-electable. But the Democrats have to play things strategically to avoid giving Trump and Fox News, and the Republicans political leverage to generate sympathy and electability.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Will he be charged with anything?
Rick Rosner: He can’t be charged with a lot of stuff. According to the Department of Justice policy, a sitting president can not be charged with most things, even anything. Including Nixon, he can be listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.
But there is no explicit evidence of anything. From a probabilistic point of view, Trump, if he weren’t president, would be indictable for a dozen of things. Most notably, he would be because of the obstruction of justice.
He has shown no subtlety or cleverness in covering his tracks. He has done stuff and said stuff. The report from Manafort was 800 pages long. It is a strong indication that Mueller’s report will be over 1,000 pages, maybe even over 2,000 pages.
Most will relate to crimes of his associates and his family. That is speaking from a probabilistic sense. All things leading to the Mueller report point in the direction of Trump being indictable if he weren’t president.
In dozens and dozens and possibly more defenses, now, the Democrats have to play a game as to how much to go after him and when to go after him. Because they have to make the case to go after him.
They can’t impeach him until the Mueller report comes out. It is only to be read by certain people. I don’t even think if it goes to the entire Congress. Then there may be a limit on how much can be given or leaked to the public.
So, the Democrats in Congress, in the House, cannot get ahead of convincing charges against Trump. Because the Republicans and Trump, in particular, are painting this as “presidential harassment.”
If Trump’s base, or, at least, if no more than 20% of the Republicans can be convinced that Trump has done a bunch of bad stuff, then the momentum for calling it presidential harassment; Trump will be able to keep maintaining that and perhaps hold the support of most of the Republicans in the House and the Senate.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/03/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is up now?
Rick Rosner: Everything is up informationally with Trump. Based on Trump’s history and the amount of stuff swirling around Trump, and how bad he is at doing things cleverly, he is only cleverness is at self-promotion.
Everything else he does blatantly and gets away with it because he’s found niches in which he can consistently act in bad faith and get away with it.
Jacobsen: Is this a form of brilliance in salesmanship but only in the sense of being an idiot-savant?
Rosner: You could argue it. But he only ended up in the real estate business because he has a talent for self-promotion, and has a talent for licensing his name. There were 17 buildings in Manhattan at one point with his name on them.
He only owned 3 of them. The other 14, he made millions for simply having his name on them. Because it said, “This is a classy joint,” to a lot of people. He has revealed himself to be terrible to a lot of people.
I do not think he is electable for a second term. Unless, Democrats do some weird self-immolation or self-destruction. The deal is that he was elected with under 40% or 48% of the vote. He still has 88% approval among Republicans.
But he got elected with fairly strong approval from independents. He has probably lost 20% of the people who voted for him. A lot of people took a flyer on Trump thinking he may be different from other politicians or a good tactician. But he turned out to be like many of the rest of Republicans.
He may only get 52 million or 54 million votes. That is not enough to be elected a second term. We do not know anything yet, for sure.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Right now, what has happened in the last couple of years, since the rise of Trump, is the corruption of American Evangelicals, 10 years ago, 70% of Evangelicals said that politicians’ personal morality mattered.
Now, it is down to 20% of American Evangelicals. 80% saying that somebody as corrupt as Trump is okay as a leader because he is scoring wins for the Evangelical side. To me, this indicates a complete moral surrender and corruption of the Evangelicals, and an erosion of American political standards.
I think we’re at a moment of national political peril. You can circle back to the question of whether the increased decadence and filthiness of entertainment is related or not. The increased scope of American entertainment that has given us Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Sopranos are considered by many, including me, great art. It rises to that level.
There is a lot of television and entertainment that is great. Is the greatness that includes presenting really jaded views helping undermine our culture and leading to our downfall?
Let me give one more example, a Netflix show called Ozark, where every single character is corrupt and evil to some extent. It is a lazier, lousier, more derivative telling of Breaking Bad, where what looks like a typical American family becomes entirely corrupt.
With money laundering for drug cartels, murder, nobody is good. Even the youngest boy in the family at 14, he becomes a money launderer. It is not art. It is a kind of a default thing; it is one more show where everybody is terrible.
The end. That’s enough.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I believe that there is a principle that is often overlooked. It is still overlooked. It was overlooked in science fiction of the 50s and 60s, in movies and books. The writing about the future during the 30s and through the 60s often presented rational futures.
They had the idea that as technology becomes more powerful and people essentially become smarter with the help of technology; that people and civilization become more rational and life becomes cleaner & nicer.
It is the kind of world that you see in Star Trek, where it is not having a lot of foolishness. The public spaces that you occasionally see when the crew of the Enterprise with the open plaza. There is not a lot of foolishness.
It is not grubby. There is no advertisement. It is a clean and well-ordered world. It is not until Blade Runner that you see a grubby future. Now, the grubby future is a kind of a default science fiction future, where a lot of unimaginative crap science fiction has taken that model instead of the clean model.
A well thought out but not accurate picture is Minority Report from the 90s or the early 2000s. It has a world that is plenty of grubbiness, but has some nice parts. It has some public spaces flooded with advertising.
That kind of floats in the air personally directed through individuals’ information gathering equipment: contact lenses, and so on – whatever their eyeballs are engineered to pick up.
When you look at actual culture in the 70s, things were pretty clean or bowdlerized, censored. One of the chief examples being the Brady Bunch, which was a completely sanitized version of life.
It was a completely harmless and sickeningly sweet sitcom that didn’t address any prurient interests whatsoever. Now, you have shows that are filthy. You have a lot of filthy shows on television.
The question is whether filth or being able to talk about anything in popular culture. Like, I have been shocked to hear jokes about anal sex, blow jobs, and so on, showing up on Prime Time NBC sitcoms.
It just seems crazy to me. That we have come this far in a relatively show time, since the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when things were plain and censored. The question is whether this serves a wider artistic purpose that is part of a better discussion than the crappy, lazy, and censored 70s, or if this is a part of the degradation of the culture that will lead to our downfall similar to the late Roman Empire.
The Imperial Romans being depraved, corrupt, and weakening their civilization to the point where the Roman Empire fell.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: We’re getting away from that as we live longer and longer until people who want to a century from now in developed parts of the world should be able to circumvent death altogether.
So, it is a different tragedy to die now. We’re so close to the era where you don’t have to die. Yet, we’re like Moses who can’t cross over into the Promised Land because people my age are just probably just a little too old to ride the technology indefinitely into the future.
But in the future, there’s going to be a different loss that will go along with our increasing technological proficiency. Now, every human; every conscious being or every being we acknowledge as conscious seems like a unique self-enclosed thinking entity.
In the future as we learn how to replicate the brain and replicate the conscious information processing; the uniqueness, the isolated-ness of individual consciousness will be eroded and we will be able to, the extent we want to, merge with other consciousnesses and then it will be the gold standard of existence, which is individual human consciousness, will be increasingly devalued as different ways of being conscious and of sharing consciousness and then of severing.
You’ll be able to merge with people and enter other entities and then unmerge with them and everything will be much more fluid say 200 years from now. The individual consciousness will be looked at much less wonderful than we’ve looked at humans as today.
And so we’ll gain control over being able to preserve and create consciousness and replicate it. The whole deal where to get in a train wreck you will have downloaded your consciousness that morning. So, you will be able to be brought back into existence minus only the three hours that you last downloaded your consciousness.
That’ll be a doable thing a 150 years from now or possibly a little less. But at the same time that our command over consciousness arises, it means that it won’t be mysterious and individual existence – the preciousness of it – will be lost.
We will look for persistence and immortality in other ways by sending our thoughts out into the world via technology and not just thoughts as expressed in words, but our actual thought thoughts via the replication of conscious thoughts and of being able to replicate the aspects of consciousness.
We’ll see a lessened threat by the loss of the self because our selves will constantly be transferable and merge-able; people who fully embrace the cultural life of 150-200 years from now may not fear death because they will feel that they will have immortality by merging their experience, their thoughts, and their memories into larger collective thought and storage structures.
More than two-three hundred years from now. There may be ways of existing that we can’t even imagine, but those ways are likely to value individual existences less than we do now because existence will be less individual because our skulls will be cracked open and will be free to share our thinking directly with other people and merge our information processing capabilities or consciousnesses.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/10
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, what did loss mean centuries ago? What does it mean now and how will this compare to the future?
Rick Rosner: I have never read anything on the strength of belief of say, people in 14th century Europe. Today, if you’re a religious person; your religion, your belief is riddled with doubt because science has made such inroads into explaining things and in insisting on evidence and in some cases contradicting religion.
So, even if you’re a good Catholic, you’re going to have serious doubts or if you’re a Muslim in a modern country, you’re going to have serious doubts about your beliefs. Now, I don’t know if those people in the 14th century were sincerer in their beliefs.
I would have guessed that they were because they didn’t have science fighting with those beliefs at the same time; even though, they didn’t have science. There was still no evidence, no earthly evidence of say reincarnation or an afterlife.
So, I would guess that while religious beliefs in the 14th century were stronger. I would say, that the most faithful doubted to some extent the things that religion was offering them from time to time. I don’t think everybody fanatically 100% believed in the religions that they belonged to.
I think you’re asking about a loss because my brother died unexpectedly a couple weeks ago. Obviously, I’m feeling a loss and we’ve talked about this before but the nature of loss is changing and will be changing further.
People who were say early adaptors of a view of the future; people who are up-to-date on what the future is going to bring and not reasonable expectations for the future realize that death the way we experience it now will be increasingly lessened in the future and then people will live longer and longer and within a century people will be reasonably able to expect to live indefinitely thanks to improvements in medical technology and replicating the brain.
We already live at a time that is less death filled than say the 14th century. People live in the most developed countries and if you’re less than say 50 years old now; you have a pretty good shot at living to 90 or more compared to people of a century ago if they survived childhood.
They had a pretty good shot of living to 60 or 70, or people of two centuries ago if they survived childhood had a shot at living beyond 60 roughly. Our lifespans are already 50% longer than they were a couple of centuries ago, not including child mortality.
If you include child mortality, our lifespans have pretty much doubled. The whole Victorian era was death oriented in the Western or at least in the English-speaking world because Queen Victoria was sad about her husband who left her a widow when she was like 42 and then she reigned as Queen for another 40 some years and wore black every day and there was a fashion of black jewelry in England; mourning jewelry, sometimes with a memento mori; a lock of the dead person’s hair included in a lock and stuff. There was a focus on death in the 19th century that wasn’t that justified.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Trump is a more pure version of the science fiction vision of a vacuous idiot who is completely at the mercy of corrupt interests. He is kind of close to President Camacho in Idiocracy.
So, plenty of people or quite a few people have predicted a vacuous national leadership. For the first time, we have a completely vacuous amoral, corrupt, and stupid president. The question: is this a crazy, one-time disaster? Or are we going to have idiot presidents 1/2 of the time or 2/3 of the time until America falls apart?
Science fiction writers also like to present future or near-future scenarios in which American can’t keep itself together and falls into different parts, which, you could argue, is the end of America.
If America falls apart, it is the end of the American experiment and the end of the nation. You could argue America turns into some crazy dictatorship where people’s rights are continually violated because we are immersed in entertainment.
It could be argued as a kind of end for America. There could be a third and more likely end of America. That, as AI and augmented post-human humanity rises, forces become more powerful relative to the forces of national unity, so the power of national government becomes increasingly irrelevant over the next century.
Then the new political and social structures arise that supplant the American government. There is still an American government. But that there are other forces that become much more important relative to an increasingly irrelevant U.S. government.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Bush 43 and Obama were overly killy. Perhaps, to the point, they could be considered war criminals. This may be more from outside the US in terms of perspective, as you’re outside the US, Scott.
Domestically, Obama stands for a return to political morality. We can hope that he still has enough influence over much of America. Gerrymandering of states is still an advantage of giving Republicans an unfair advantage.
I remember in the early 60s and 70s reading a couple science fiction novels: in particular, Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. It presents near futures, about 20 years from then, where you had a president who is just an idiot figurehead. A good-looking man who stood for nothing and did dumb stuff.
There is actually historical precedent. Warren Harding was elected because he was a good-looking guy and among our worst presidents. In the 1920s, super corrupt, super incompetent, died two and a half years into office, it is limiting the damage. But he did damage.
He was elected on the premise of being handsome. In the 80s, whether you agree with him or not, he had substance. He had a political philosophy. You could argue that he wasn’t super smart. But he tried to appoint competent people.
They fit his Republican philosophy. They were competent and experienced people. Even if, you did not like the philosophy. He got in plenty of trouble. His professionals got him into the Iran-Contra scandal, which had a lot of illegality.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s go with mysteries, problems, or simply anomalies.
Rick Rosner: I am going to ask questions that I do not necessarily have the answer to. Is Trump an anomaly or is Trump simply how politicians are going to be into the future? Another question: is salacious culture just an expanded arena of art or decadence that indicates the decay of our culture?
Before you started taping, you and I were discussing the relative war criminality of Bush 43, the younger one, and then Obama. Bush 43 lied us into the Iraq War, which led to the deaths between roughly 300,000 and even a 1,000,000 Iraqis and other people across the Middle East.
You argued and I was persuaded that Obama was pretty killy over there, to the point of committing a lot of war crimes in a destabilized Middle East with the drone policy and screwing up in Libya with Qaddafi.
Neither of them compares in terms of horribleness to Trump, at least horribleness potential. He has been in office for 2 years, so hasn’t had the full 8 years. But he has the potential to get us in a lot of trouble.
He has loosened the rules of engagement for taking on ISIS, which led to increased civilian deaths. Although, the two previous presidents were responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
Our discussion began with Obama giving a speech, where Obama came out against Trump and the Republicans. He was saying that they were completely corrupt and interested in the perpetuation of power at the expense of traditional American values.
Him being that explicit is a new thing.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: From what you’re saying, I am seeing a nice primer between folk psychology and psychology, and intuitive physics and physics. Folk psychology as a primer to psychology and intuitive physics as a primer to physics. They can make mistakes. But they can lead to some right directions.
Rick Rosner: I guess so. I am not too familiar with folk psychology, except I can imagine what it is. I am more intrigued by folk etymology, where people jump to conclusions about the origins of words based on what they sound like.
The suppositions or the stories that people come up with or find out from others aren’t true at all. They are built out of coincidence. That some words sound like other words. I don’t know.
I would assume that the best physicists are poets of physics. They have a sense. You hear Feynman, Einstein, and Hawking – at least Hawking and Einstein – talked about the beauty of theories.
They became sufficiently experienced from having thought about this stuff for decades. More correct intuitions about physics bubble up. Some potential analyses seem more beautiful and more right than other ones.
Often, it takes the form of equivalences. Newton sees the equivalence of a falling apple in a falling and orbiting body. Darwin sees the equivalence between the crazy proliferation of species and the apparent age of the world.
He sees geological structures that he doesn’t think were created by a catastrophe like a lot of people of the time. He saw structures that he thought took tens and maybe hundreds of millions of years to form. He saw the variety and proliferation of animals and the amount, like across the Galapagos Islands, where each island may have its own assortment of finches depending on what the finches are doing on each island.
They become specialized. He sees this speciation; and this deep time seen in geological structures as being equivalent. They are both from the principle of shit taking a super long time to happen.
Then Einstein sees the equivalences between – in General Relativity – that you can’t tell if you’re in an enclosed space whether you’re in accelerating frame; that is, whether you are standing in a gravitational field because you’re on the surface of a gravitating body, or whether you’re standing in the surface of something accelerated under you, then he sees an equivalence in Special Relativity that everyone sees the speed of light traveling at the same speed regardless of how fast they’re traveling relative to beams of light and relative to each other.
These deep equivalences seem right. The universe is complicated but only as complicated as it needs to be, which is a quote from someone. A lot of the theories that we have developed: simplicity and common sense get you quite a ways towards where you’re going, based on the information available at the time.
We didn’t have the Big Bang theory until Hubble in the 20s and the human computers at Harvard who gave Hubble the data. There are other galaxies. The fainter a galaxy is relative to us, then the more redshifted it is, which gives a framework for the Big Bang.
That those faint and more distant galaxies appear to move faster away from us. That information was not available to us until the nineteen-teens and 20s. So, you couldn’t come to common sense conclusion of the Big Bang until the 20th century.
There wasn’t the information available.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about Newton? What about intuitive physics?
Rick Rosner: He was a good observer and a good thinker-abouter about things. You would have to be a genius to figure out things that he figured out. For Big Bang theory, it is a good commonsensical theory, especially with all that we know about the world and what is going on in terms of information.
But that commonsensical picture will probably be replaced. A commonsensical, at least in our minds, notion that the universe is made out of information. That information is held in a self-consistent information processing entity in a way similar to us.
The common sense conclusion – though this seems like a reach at this point – is that the laws of information within consciousness or something that approximates consciousness have deep analogies or equivalences with physics.
Jacobsen: In a sense, we are not saying the universe is at root information. It is made out of it. But it emerges.
Rosner: It is information held in some structure. The tacitness of the hardware may be so far divided from the universe’s information that we may simply be unable to tell what the information is.
Information held in a self-consistent system has laws. These laws are the laws of physics. They manifest themselves in interrelated ways. The information is perceived in the information-processing system. Then the information as perceived by the material world that is made out of information, which could be a commonsensical thing.
But we haven’t gone far enough to really make the case that this is the most reasonable thing given that this is what we imagine at this point.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the limit of the knowledge from physics?
Rick Rosner: You were talking to a cosmologist who is working towards a theory of multiverses. You were saying that our knowledge is limited in terms of a global view because we’re in the system and not the system.
I have been thinking about how advances in physics are a combination of reasonable suppositions in terms of common sense deduction and then throwing mathematics at what we don’t know.
For instance, Newton sees the apple fall. He sees something fall. He gets the idea that the falling of the small object to the Earth is related to a large orbiting object that has orbital momentum and is constantly orbiting the Earth that pulls its path into a circle or an ellipse.
It is a manifestation of matter being attracted to all other matter. It is one of the simplest suppositions you can make given those equivalences. It turns out to be true as he applied his mathematical instincts to invent the idea of matter being attracted to all other matter.
A couple hundred years later, I forget who; they invented the raisin pie theory of atoms. It is the idea of the raisins being stuck in a pie, as a ball. It is not quite it. But it is a good first pass as to what an atom might be like.
People came up with the idea of electrons orbiting the nucleus. It is a good second pass and a good conclusion someone could draw from the evidence at the time. Then more information comes out, the Quantum Theory is developed.
It is replaced somewhat. People think in terms of orbits. It is still quantized probability clouds. An electron with different quantized amounts of kinetic energy will be found in different shaped clouds in orbit, but it does not quite orbit. It will be in different places within a probability cloud.
Mathematical tools along with conceptions of what the world is like that in retrospect that seems sensible. People like to say that quantum physics is inherently weird and absurd and doesn’t make sense compared to the macro world.
That was mostly said by the first, second, and third generations of quantum physicists. Now, I feel they simply accept this, as quantum systems inherently lack complete knowledge about themselves.
I bet you there are plenty of people who have a mostly intuitive feel of quantum phenomena.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/03
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Currently, we may want to invert the system in place. Biological male identifying as trans-women and biological female identifying as trans-men.
Where, males as men and trans-women and females as women and trans-men compete with one another, it is biologically fair, even though it may seem sociologically unfair on the surface.
Rick Rosner: There’s no fair place anymore, at least in the future. Things will be getting weirder. Sports will begin to get weird. You already have – it’s not talked about and rare – parents who are buying blackmarket growth hormones for kids.
There are steroids for kids. They mostly don’t test for it. Some chess player got dinged for steroids.
Jacobsen: Why use steroids for chess?
Rosner: I don’t know. It helps. I might be wrong. I might be misremembering the article. Steroids don’t just make you muscle-y. There are many drugs out there that are used and abused. A bunch of steroids are illegal.
But if you pick up aa bodybuilding magazine, the whole back of the magazine is for bio-similar steroids. Steroids that aren’t illegal because they change one molecule but have the same effects.
In the coming years, we will see rich parents or psycho parents, or both, this will become an issue. It’s like a couple of years ago. It was when a bunch of families were caught bribing admissions.
You will see this in sports. Parents with the resource will genetically tweak their kids to make them more competitive. Stuff will get weird. My brother and I were pitching this science fiction show set 15 years from now.
There will be natural sports leagues and anything goes sports leagues. It is already the case in bodybuilding. You are tested thoroughly and swear to have never used steroids in the last couple of years.
Then there is anything goes competitions. There may be a little bit of testing. People are freakishly large. They have been doing all sorts of chemicals. We have trans issues entering into it.
There is a documentary on Netflix. You can see the pictures of the woman who used to be a guy and used to be a huge competitive bodybuilder to promote this documentary. Now, they are a ridiculously ripped woman who can probably bench press on the basis of the pictures easily bench press 300 lbs.
That woman will compete in some sports and will dominate, having previously been a man. You probably lose more than you gain by making trans people compete as representatives of their former gender, because they’re going to win if they are allowed to compete in their new gender.
If they compete as their former gender, it will work against the acceptance of transgender people; it is my personal opinion.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/12/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this play into personal dynamics for you?
Rick Rosner: I am a little aware of it. Because I am conversationally awkward. Perhaps, it is more conscious than other people in other situations. I worked in bars for 25 years. I worked in a very loud environment.
I was constantly on my toes, because I was getting incomplete information. What is something that I can say based on me not being able to hear this drunk guy that will be innocuous, my responses were head nodding or “Yeah, for sure.”
And I was hoping that what I didn’t hear the guy saying, “You think I am a real dick, don’t you?” But that was a low probability. Most people don’t go around saying, “You think I am a real dick.”
But I was aware of the pitfalls of agreeing. In conversation, we are doing the same process. We are predicting and setting up different responses on a different basis. It pops into our head. But what pops up is preconscious and non-verbal processing, it sets the brain.
Also, I have been on a couple of cheesy talk shows. I have been on Geraldo once. I have been in situations, where I have been on a panel. The deal is that there are three or four people talking.
In that deal, you have to be very conscious of the next point that you want to make, and then be willing to move on from making a point if the topic has changed. I am pretty interrupty.
Obviously, I am not great at conversation, but I am aware of, at least, some situations in which I am conscious or doing conscious monitoring of the flow of conversation. A lot of the time, we are not conscious of the flow of the conversation.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2019/01/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You were mentioning holographic information processing. It has a sort of analog. I do not want to draw a direct connection. In a live conversation, we have a sort of easy communication. That distribution all-around may produce a sort of priming everywhere.
Rick Rosner: I don’t know if you’ve noticed. But I am old and don’t give a shit. I don’t know if Gmail is doing this. Hotmail, when you want to reply, gives different kinds of replies. Somebody says “Hey, I sent these attachments.”
Then you click reply, it says, “Hey! I sent you these three attachments.” It can give a bunch more. The first instance everyone had of this was when the robot has a heads up display within the eyeball. It gives possible responses based on what is being said to him.
Someone says something to him. One response is “fuck off.” It was the 80s when that Terminator movie came out. We are seeing this in our emails now. In conversation, we are able to respond super fast because the brain is predicting what is needed based on the context.
That we’re constantly like a lineman in football before the play begins. They are constantly poised and ready to leap forward into what it thinks is going to happen. We are not usually aware of it.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/31
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about in-built biases and also in-built accuracies?
Rick Rosner: The in-built accuracies in perception and thought are a result of us evolving perceptual and computational systems that look for and act on the near certainties that are based on gathering a lot of information from the external world and from our memory. I do not know how many photons are perceived by our eyes every single second.
But it is a lot. It has to be in the millions, at least. Enough photons hit our eyes that they give us a near-certain indication of things in the environment. The standard example that people always use is a red light.
When we see a red light and decide whether or not to cross the street, our decision is based on seeing many thousands of red photons from that red light. It might be more. But it is a shitload. There is basically a zero probability that we have made a mistake about the status of the light.
In fact, when people make errors in perception, it is often that they are basing their perception based on suddenly getting less information than they are used to, like Albuquerque in 1986. The Sun was in my eyes.
I did not even see a traffic light. I blew through it. I bounced off one car and hit another one, because the Sun was in my eyes and I didn’t get any information about a traffic light. I assumed in the absence of information about a traffic light that there wasn’t.
We have a shitload of information. We have macro information. That the probability that we’re wrong about those aspects – that we’re focusing on because they’re important – is near zero.
Because when you add them all up, we make millions of judgments a day. You add those up. It depends on the definition of judgment. It could be billions. We may make an error once every million or so times.
The error rate will be so low that it doesn’t kill us.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/30
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You gave an example several weeks ago about an apple. If Newton had the apple hit his head, if it is not apocryphal and, in fact, true, then he saw an apple and not something else. If he saw it from space, it would not even be an apple, be seen.
Rick Rosner: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about the consistency of the universe. The apple doesn’t disappear based on what angle you’re viewing it from, if you’re in the apple’s world.
But if you go far, far away from the apple, you can’t tell what the situation for the specific apples is on Earth from direct observation. You’re too far away. If you’re an astronaut on Mars, you can assume a bunch of stuff happening on Earth with apples because it is a common fruit. It is being grown, transported, and eaten.
But you cannot tell anything directly about specific apples. Unless, you have a specific feed on an apple being eaten back on Earth.
Jacobsen: Two assumptions floating there: one is the prior knowledge of appleness and another is a conscious entity to know of something.
Rosner: Yes, within the sphere of everything within the universe, it is all consistent. You may not know the specific apple from a million miles away. But if you’re within the visual contact of an apple on Earth, the status of that apple will not depend on where you’re viewing it from. Unless, you’re directly viewing it.
The status of the apple does not change as long as you’re within the world of that apple. It doesn’t become an orange or a puppy if you’re standing one foot to the left of that apple. There is a consistency up to the limit of where you can track stuff.
The universe is set up to keep track of itself. It is overall consistent within its macro and micro places.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/29
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What does this imply for material events in relation to information and information processing?
Rick Rosner: Material events can happen without much affecting the information processing or the way the information processing is perceived in the information processing entity; unless, the material events in our universe are of sufficient scale.
That all the little things happening on planets and the individual nuclear reactions within stars are not each notable information events within the information processing entity.
That the same way – not the same way as I am still looking for a good metaphor – or in the metaphor of a captain of a ship not caring or perceiving what is happening in the individual planks of the ship.
Unless, something macro happens with those planks. But any kind of cellular events in the wood or even if the wood has worms or barnacles stuck to it. The general motion of the ship through the water in the operation of the ship does not get affected by what is going on in the planks.
Similarly, the graininess of the material world, which is necessary for us to exist because we are made of trillions of cells and the cells each have their own mechanisms and everything is important for our existence down to the atomic level.
But in terms of how the atomic events that we depend on… when you’re talking on the beach, you perceive sand approximately. You do not perceive what happens under the sand. All your perceptions.
A lot of stuff goes unperceived. Even though, the sand is supporting you. There is possibly a large decoupling between material events in our universe – the stories of our lives – and the information processing that is going on and manifested in the matter that we’re composed of.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/28
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else follows from structure and information?
Rick Rosner: Some information is encoded non-locally, not the same way exactly. In holograms, information is not entirely locally distributed. You get information from the whole of the hologram.
If you cut a hologram in 2, you do not have half of a photograph. You have a whole photograph but just more blurry. If the information is not fixed and localized in the structure that we live in, then there is a chance that material events that we experience do not correspond to the changes in the information structure of the universe.
That there is a decoupling. We have always assumed that the information-processing entity isn’t necessarily, and probably isn’t, aware of what is happening to the material manifestations of its information.
In other words, it doesn’t know. This entity doesn’t have any awareness, except the supposition of what is going on with the matter that is the material manifestation of the information in its, say, awareness.
But we had assumed that the material events that happened in the universe – all the way down to the micro level – reflect micro changes in the information processing changes in the thought – to think sloppily – of the information processing structure.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/27
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would this imply for the world informationally? How does a registering set of things give an indication of the universe?
Rick Rosner: The world is only full of entities that register and detect things, and exchange information, which gives us a sense of everything being information.
It might not always be the case. Because if you cannot tell what is happening 4o light years away or in a galaxy on an uninhabited planet, what you have is an indeterminate set or an indeterminate picture of what is happening elsewhere, if events occur in the material universe that don’t really affect other events, then it might be an open question as to whether or not those events really happen.
That’s all I have. The big deal is if something, whether conscious or not, registers the event. That applies to a wider framework across space and time. If a series of events happen and there are clues of recognizing something happening, and if all the registrants are wiped out, a megalith lands on a planet that has three aliens left and then wipes out all of the aliens, and then there is no further interaction or registration of the events on the planet, then it is as if that didn’t happen.
Because no unobliterated record of it exists, which leads to the nihilistic idea. If our universe ever collapses back into nothingness, it is as if it never happened, which probably is the case in a cosmological and quantum mechanical sense.
But information is only information when it is registered, when it causes other events to happen. If those events themselves are registered and if you break the chain, then it is as if those events didn’t happen or as if those events are among a multiplicity of events that may have happened.
But you don’t know. It is like putting Schrodinger’s cat back into the box.
Jacoben: If you were to excise part of a brain out, it is as if the event never existed.
Rosner: If somebody’s brain is the only thing that registered events, and if you mess with the brain to obliterate the information of the event, then, yes, the event didn’t happen. All the thoughts that anyone has ever had become probabilities within thoughts that could have happened in someone’s head, once the brain shuts down, rather than being actual thoughts.
Information only exists to the extent that it can be recognized and recorded and the recording or the registering continues to be or at least at some point causing further action.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What distinguishes information in the universe that constructs it, and information in individual consciousness, such as evolved organisms like human beings?
Rick Rosner: I do not think information is information unless it is registered and produces action in the world around it. The register-er does not have to be conscious. A security system can be triggered and take preventative measures without being conscious.
Somebody steps on a foot pad. Or if it is a dumb movie, somebody breaks a laser beam and all sorts of stuff happen. A system has been set up to register information. Somebody is stepping into the path of a laser beam and the system reacts to it.
Conscious beings, we can register and react to a whole bunch of different information. We are not specially built to register information; we’ve evolved to react to a wide range of sensory inputs as well as internal inputs.
If a tree falls in a forest without someone around, it might not have fallen. It is a terrible philosophical question because it forces the question. Because there is no tree falling in any forest that is not registered by some external system, like a frog being squashed.
A tree is a macro object in an area freely accessible over a long period of time to all sorts of entities that can register the tree. Nobody may care that the tree falls. But two years later, someone will see the fallen tree and know that the tree has fallen.
A better setup may be that if a tree falls or if a megalith falls on an uninhabited planet 25 light years away. Did it really happen?
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: There are different forms of information. One in a highly organized system but spread out. Another tightly knit and appears to make information, too.
Rick Rosner: Information probably isn’t information without context and the ability to interpret it as information. The information to the universe is only information to the universe. It is matter, space, and energy to us, not information.
We can pull information out of it. The universe isnt’ an information map to us. The universe is the material universe. That’s not to say that we can at some point become sufficiently technologically advanced to figure out to some extent the information of which the universe is made from.
But if it is holographic, then good luck with that. It probably is given the lack of specificity. The universe is basically a bunch of solar systems. It is not like one means asparagus and another means orange.
The information is probably not that localized. Which means, it is some kind of holographic or distributive deal. In any case, when people think of information, I have not thought about what people think about when they think of “information.”
I think people think information is there for the seeing. You see a stop sign that says, “Stop.” Okay, it is information. All information has a conveyance of what it is via a visual aspect.
I am looking at a vanilla folder, a box from Target, a plant. I suspect the information is conveyed visually. But I suspect the information is only available if you have evolved to interpret the information, as we have done.
Those former examples are bits of information. They are conveyed. But they are only available through my sensory and thought apparatus. This probably applies to all information. The easy information that we see.
There is the big data information is on the way, once we’re half computers in 40 years. We will all sorts of new information in the universe. Because we will have all these new sensory and processing capacities.
All information in the universe may be this way. It may be opaque and unreadable unless you have the right apparatus to read it properly. It doesn’t mean that you need a conscious entity to gather information and to act on information.
Information may only exist to the extent that it is registered by the rest of the universe.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/24
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When we are talking about the media and the proliferation of media in different forms connecting to social media, there is also a breaking apart of, not entirely, the state propaganda. That is not just Trump. It can be Xi Jinping. It can be Putin. It can be others. Paradoxically, it is changing the discourse of the public.
In that before, they would probably more readily take in state propaganda.
Rick Rosner: I am going to be slightly more pessimistic than you in the short term, but not in the long term. Was it Archimedes who said to give him a level and a place to stand and he could move the world? Everyone has a lever or a megaphone. Nobody really knows what kind of leverage they have.
The proliferation and weaponization of social media have created issues in conjunction with the amplification of horrible movements and horrible people. Nobody knows what is happening and nobody knows who is winning. If you go through the sheer number of people who think he is a jackass and a monster, there are at least 4 billion across the Earth who would rate him negatively.
So, it is easy on Twitter, almost everybody I follow is anti-Trump and anti the rest of his ridiculous family. Although, Don, Jr., usually tweets stupid tweets. But he came to the defense of Chelsea Clinton who was under attack on the streets of New York for saying that Ilham Omar is antisemitic.
It is a little blip in the first thousand points of light for the first George Bush has turned into the Trump thousand crazy shits happening in a single day. Nobody knows who is going to prevail. Really, it is an inability to contextualize the social media technology. It is as if. You are too young to remember how cell phones were when they came out and only 1% of the population had them.
We just celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the smartphone. Imagine if instead of a gradual thing from the 80s to the 90s with the gradual penetration of the cell phones and smartphones into the population, everyone went from cell phones to everyone has a smartphone.
It would be chaos. Nobody would know how to deal with them. It is a little bit like chaos now. Because we have not been able to judge and incorporate social media and technology into our lives and our worldviews. The added accelerant is Trump adding a fire every 42 seconds.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are some other possible futures?
Rick Rosner: Oh! The deal is that there are a bunch of different possible futures but most reasonable possible futures now encompass us riding this accelerating wave of increasing technological expertise with a few possible futures having the world entirely falling apart.
You can still go to the movies. There are three zillion dystopian books that have climate change in destroying the world. But if you look at possible futures, the more probable futures rendering climate change destroying the world of the future is almost super unlikely.
Instead, climate change futures, which are all reasonable futures, will be reasonable to an extent but will simply fuck a lot of things up. Then there will be technological solutions coming along to soften blows.
We’ll eventually engineer ourselves around most of the worst effects of climate change. We have some tough decades for the next 40 to 60 to 100 years from now, but technology eventually gets a handle on it.
Even if it is slightly the default technology of now, we may solve the problem of consciousness. Which means that more and more humans will live in the future equivalent to cyberspace, they do not live fully fleshy existences of the human population.
Eventually, the population starts dropping around a hundred years from now. By 200 years from now, the human population is maybe five or six billion down from a peak of 15 billion and the 5 billion humans will have a much smaller aggregate footprint because there are fewer of us.
Also, technology’s carbon footprint minimizing aspects will exist more than ever before. So, climate change will be solved after reaching a certain amount of havoc along the coastal areas of the world.
Also, the non-coastal areas of that stuff get to solve, like the gun problem in America. Even if we never get a handle on guns, and guns continue to proliferate, eventually, people become bulletproof because consciousness becomes storable and downloadable.
So even if you are shot by some maniac in the year 2147, you are able to be reconstituted because you’ve been frequently downloading your consciousness. You are able to be reconstructed. Having only lost a few minutes up to between the last time, you were downloaded and when the active shooter obliterated the consciousness.
There will be one in the future. There will be other means of liberation. There may be cyber wars that result in the obliteration of the backups of hundreds of millions of people. But that is almost a level beyond regular humans’ problem.
Where the technology exists, everybody can be practically immortal and indestructible, except for these political wars. You get to live forever, except there is a small chance that you get a race to the cyber war.
But everything points to our current problem and our current questions, scientific questions, besides the biggest being answered solved: consciousness. The super powerful technology is our future, without us necessarily facing the dystopian apocalyptic future or if it is Denzel Washington walking around in a long black leather trench coat.
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License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about our own minds? What other about other possible futures?
Rick Rosner: The problem of consciousness is still not entirely acknowledged as a problem, as a technical or a technological problem. It will be solved too. It will be figured out. We will know how consciousness works mathematically, physically.
That’ll make it possible for everyone – eventually, for people who want to relieve their poverty of mind – to augment their consciousness. So, everything we want as humans will become a possibility, including immortality and various forms of worldly power through understanding.
Then the long ones that are following shortly thereafter are all the things that make it a less than a happy ending, which is that humanity becomes extremely devalued in terms of its consciousness becoming extremely devalued.
New structures, new conscious information processing entities and collaborations of merged beings and all that come along and transform the world into something that most people.
Most human throughout history would find this disquieting. So, the beings of the future will thrive and we’ll face new non-humans. But as far as humanity gets it; there will be humans who continue to live as humans but like super-powered humans, immortal humans with happy satisfied lives.
They will live in a possibly abridged post-singularity environment where they can do whatever they want. But perhaps somewhat shielded from the more intrusive disquieting aspects of the super big data, super high tech future.
So, one hundred years from now, you can live a life is a superhuman as a transhumanist who’s living in an abridged world. A world where you can do all the fun human stuff without necessarily facing the ugly parts of transhumanism. The humans do not count for shit anymore. All right. That is it.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I like happy endings. Does the end of the human era with the slow dismantling of problems about comprehension of the human organism lead to one?
Rick Rosner: I have been thinking. It is now clear that humanity is going to have a happy ending. There is a certain irony to that. That is, it is clear that it is highly unlikely – that given the state of technology that there is little chance – humanity on the planet will be wiped out either by something of our own making or by something not of our own making.
That is before we can build a structure that will intercept all possible asteroids which we eventually will. It is unlikely that our planet will be destroyed if the asteroid is going to hit us or that a random black hole will cross the path of Earth and destroy it – if it isn’t the sun burning out.
It will burn out five billion years before it is supposed to or any other cosmic accident will happen in the next 50 to 100 years before we can get a handle on most cosmic accidents. Similarly, it is apparent that the accelerating pace of technology and the scope of technology is such that we are going to have something like the singularity.
That the singularity people believe that all human questions and problems will be answered and solved. Although, probably not the one the singularity people sketch because their schedule is it all happens by around 2040.
I guess you could call me a slow singularity person where it all happens, but it may take another hundred years past that to get everything going. We will solve all those medical problems. They will be understood, and almost all medical problems will be addressable and even if they are not within 100 years. You’ll be able to move out of your body.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the prediction from a central processing arena for conscious thought? Is this always and only the main operation of the brain?
Rick Rosner: There are plenty of instances where prediction is not the main job of the brain. A more general way of starting to think about what the brain’s job is, is to think of it as a game that your brain is trying to score points; or, you in combination with your nervous system use you as an organism, or try to score points with these points vary from person to person and from moment to moment.
And even with the inner person, you have various parts of the brain and body trying to accomplish various things that may be at odds with each. Maybe, one of the biggest areas in which accurate prediction and surprise minimization is not the objective of you as an evolved organism is in the area of sex.
Think about how many guys both human and otherwise walk around inaccurately thinking, “She wants it,” when they mean females, it is evolution. Given that you are good, you’ve evolved as something that has managed.
You come from a long line of organisms, billions of them, stretching back for hundreds of millions of years. All the way back to the beginning of life. A source of beginning is sex. Those who all managed to get laid.
Given that the guy did try to get laid, it is safe to say that your brain will set you up to say the wrong things if it will help you get laid. So, the guy thinks that she wants it. Even though in reality, she does want it.
But it may help you get laid because you think she wants it. “I am going to go ahead with this,” and then the woman like you that maybe goes along with it, or maybe she has no choice because you are that big an asshole.
But your prediction that she wants it is inaccurate. However, you move forward anyway because your evolutionary history is of a being who evolves through a lot and comes from a long line of creatures who managed to get laid in one form or another.
Evolution says, “I want you to make that mistake and go ahead and try to get laid.” But I will try to learn more about this principle and see what subtleties are since he’s written a thousand papers [Ed. Karl Friston].
I am sure you are also this guy started off as a physician, psychiatrist, or somebody who deals with the issues of people with broken brains. So as soon as he addresses the idea, the situation of brains making an accurate prediction.
Because that has been his clinical practice for his whole life. So, it is an interesting place to start.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does this free energy principle fit into the framework of thinking in animals?
Rick Rosner: I have started learning about this. That it’s thinking in animals. Maybe even animals are not sophisticated enough to think but have some agency in the world or it is not a true agency because it is not based on thinking.
It is still moving along a gradient moving some wavering poisonous substance, like an amoeba. They are minimizing their free energy, which goes along with a general trend in cognitive science. It is in the right direction. That the thinking in the brain as predictive tools.
These predictive tools are for your brain’s main job. Your brain’s main job is to predict what happens next and prepare you for that to do it, thus reducing risk and increasing longevity. This free energy minimization also has something to do with a bunch of principles of physics including the path of least resistance.
The shortest path and time that the light will always pick. A light will pick the path that gets from one place to another in the shortest time, which can be used to explain things like refraction.
However, free energy minimization is a tendency of thinking systems without being the absolute determinative factor so it might be better. I am sure the guy is Karl Friston who has written more than a thousand papers. He addressed a lot of stuff that I have not come across yet.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s the deal with the free energy principle of Karl Friston? This you brought up. I’d like to talk about it more.
Rick Rosner: I started learning about it. I came across an issue of Wired Magazine. It has an article on Karl Friston and his principal free energy minimization. The overall principle or of an organizing principle of all animal life.
He calls this free energy. It has analogies with entropy and lack of information or free energy. What’s important about his system, it at least puts a lot of ideas about cognition on a vaguely mathematical basis.
It has a sense of adventure about analogies between mathematical properties and cognitive processes. Free energy is basically the capacity to be surprised, which is also equal to, in certain ways, the entropy of the system.
The capacity to be surprised about a certain situation is the number of different possible outcomes that there could be. So, a thousand different outcomes for some game between a couple of teams.
You have the capacity to be surprised if you read nothing about the outcome. Because it could be any of a thousand things. So, many of the outcomes would be a one in a thousand event, which is a rare surprise.
But knowing what the outcome is going to be, you minimize your surprise; you minimize your free energy; you minimize your entropy. Because what’s going to happen, you are not going to be surprised.
If you go to one of three things that could happen out of a possible thousand, you minimize your surprise with this principle.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Even with this clownish behavior, what will happen with science?
Rick Rosner: We are not going to do anything about global warming. That whole set of related belligerent people with belligerently ignorant beliefs will persist even beyond Trump.
Probably, as long as Fox News keeps telling people that everything happening to Trump is a witch hunt and its fake news, this chunk of the American population will continue to buy that. When Nixon went down, there was a sense of national shame. His base still had 50 percent support among Republicans, even as he resigned. But they got quiet for a while.
That may not happen now because the same way global warming makes the oceans hotter, which makes hurricanes and tropical storms more powerful; Fox News continues to pump energy into the delusions stream, which will keep tens of millions of Americans not smart – when Americans need to stop thinking wrongly.
Even as Trump is revealed to be a terrible guy, I am not sure what you can do about Fox News. There used to be a thing called the Fairness Doctrine, which said that if you had a politician representing one silo. I do not know exactly. I should read it.
But somebody representing one side had to be countered by stuff on the other side. You couldn’t have a Rush Limbaugh on the air for three hours a day. Unless, you had the obvious contravening viewpoint on an equal amount of time.
Then the Fairness Doctrine is gone. The Fairness Doctrine did not even address people spewing out fake news. Except I do not want to call it fake news, because that is what the Right calls, “Actual news,” with people spewing out a stream of lies.
Because that did not even enter into the national awareness; that that would be a thing that was done as a vividly at it’s being done now.
I do not know that you could ever pass legislation requiring truth in what is pulp news or, even more, opinion. Without that, even as Trump falls, it will continue to have a huge chunk of the population of 60 million people, maybe, believing bullshit. Okay! That is it.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Where does this leave real knowledge of the situation?
Rick Rosner: There are plenty of reasonable opinions, which means nobody knows what’s going to happen exactly.
But it is reasonable to think that all these investigations mean that Trump will not get re-elected. His approval currently runs at about 42 percent, which is a crazy high number for a guy as bad as he is. He thought earlier this week; he got pissed that Michael Cohen was going to prison.
Mueller issued two more memos about ongoing investigations. Trump did not even show up to work one day this week on Wednesday. Even though, he lives in the place where he works. All he had to do was put on a robe and slippers and go downstairs, but he stayed upstairs all day sulking.
I do not think that has ever happened before in the history of the presidency; that a president takes a sulk day. I mean everything is completely nuts. and the Republicans and Trump’s base, which include lots of faithful Christians, are pretending that this is okay.
It means that even after Trump fails to be re-elected, if he does fail to be re-elected; this will probably by then be one quarter to one-third of the country. They won’t go away. That strain of nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-science.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How is this going to be perceived?
Rick Rosner: There is the investigation that will start shortly into one of Trump’s country clubs. Abuse of mostly undocumented labor and these laborers have been abused.
So, all this stuff is going to come out about Trump. Reasonable people think this will be revealed when the Democrats take over the house and have the power to subpoena tax records and everything else.
And when Mueller gets closer to the end of his investigation, it will show that Trump has had a criminal career spanning 40 years or more. But Republicans and evangelicals are saying well as long as the country is in good shape.
None of this stuff matters. It is all inconsequential stuff that nobody got killed. It is in. It is violating campaign finance laws and paying off mistresses and all this is okay. It wouldn’t have been OK. I get most of my information from Twitter. Everybody is saying, “Well, this is rank hypocrisy.”
That had Democrats did any of this stuff. It would be different. The Republicans were going crazy. In fact, they did go crazy over stuff that was much more minor when it was done by Democrats. Some angry liberals think Springsteen, possibly Michael Moore, are saying that Trump may well get re-elected, even as all the stuff he’s done as a fraud is revealed.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/14
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What’s going on today?
Rick Rosner: Alright, so, it is Friday, December 14th, 2018. Trump: there are more investigations into Trump than ever before. I have not tried to dig up a list of all the different investigations. It was taking some time. I have not found a compiled a list. But there are at least six investigations going on, possibly more in a month when the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives takes over.
That will probably mean another half a dozen or more additional investigations, new investigations, including what happened to the hundred and seven million dollars that donors sent to pay for the inauguration festivities.
That is nearly one-eighth of a billion dollars. Where did the money go? Because that is one night of parades and parties costing a lot of money. However, there is no way it cost one hundred and seven million, especially since people were happy when Obama was elected.
Obama had like close to a dozen presidential balls. Trump had three or four. So, there is no way that you could spend one hundred seven million. Unless, there was a crime. Twenty-seven million or twenty-six-million to the party planner for it. What party planning results in a twenty-six-million-dollar bill?
So, there is that is a new investigation.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What would be the downside of this shift?
Rick Rosner: It is the constant distractions. I am reminded of another science fiction story from probably 60 years ago by Kurt Vonnegut, where the concept of equality in his future, in the future of the story has been taken to the point that people who are smarter than average have a buzzer going up in their ear every 30 or 45 seconds, which makes it impossible for smart people to form coherent streams of thought, and thus reduces them down to the same constant level of cognition as everybody else.
And so, constantly being occupied with social media and ephemeral noise people are completely distracted. You see it on the street. You see people who have been zombified by the content coming over their phones. And it is not exactly pop culture; it is the stuff over people’s phones via text, which is individualized culture.
They are getting texts from people they know about themselves so it is even more specifically tailored for them and it eats up people’s attention and productivity. So, that’s a huge downside, especially if they are doing that shit while they are driving.
But the upside, once we get a better handle on being able to deal with this stuff, will in the future involve adding to our cognitive abilities and information processing ability. The upside is that people who are good at keeping up will gain enhanced abilities; having the best apps, by having the best add-ons to their brains, they will be the most productive effective citizens of the worldwide thought cloud and will gain more and more resources, whatever those resources are in the future.
More and more in the future, information will create money and the people who are the best at sucking out the processing information will be the rich people of the future. And the people who are bad at it, they’ll make bad decisions about their consumption or will become technologically Amish to some extent; they will miss out on being the apex predators of information of the future.
There are all niceties we can think about and work out in general. That’s the deal that the old institutions fall away and are replaced by attention to new and constantly changing stuff.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What will happen the short-term with these hammer blows to standard institutions like the church? How will society adapt to this?
Rick Rosner: I haven’t thought about this much before but the entire 20th century, the second half at least, functions to erode unifying institutions. Patriotism, religion, fricking Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts; from the ’60s on, there was increasing cynicism about big institutions that people had believed in or at least a century before.
That’s continued as you indicated with more and more revelations about the Catholic Church and perhaps churches in general that they may facilitate sexual abuse and other abuses. And so, the question becomes if these institutions continue to erode what replaces them and what provides an alternate glue for the social fabric.
I would suggest that the new glue is pop culture/current events literacy; that just keeping up with what’s going on occupies more and more of people’s…well; it is what was formerly occupied with institutional knowledge and in deference and attachment.
People, in general now, are attached to just keeping abreast of what’s happening, what interests other people, what’s highly ranked among other people, and what political views are held by people they respect.
Joe Haldeman, a science fiction writer; one of his novels probably written in the ’70s or the ’80s had moment-to-moment rankings of the most popular celebrities in the world and this ranking would be constantly available and it was constantly shifting.
It is not too far off from what we have with social media right now where people are particularly concerned with where Ariana Grande ranks in say the number of Twitter followers or Instagram followers versus Kylie Jenner at any given moment.
But you can look up that stuff if you want, but people are cognizant of what Kylie and Kendall are up to and what Ariane is up to and what their thoughts on stuff are or what videos, for instance, Ariana’s released, which express her thoughts about her own celebrity and other stuff.
People are occupied with keeping up with this stuff and are rewarded for keeping up with the best entertainment that society has to offer. There’s too much entertainment now. There’s too much consumable stuff.
There are too many takes on things and by being able to keep up with who has the best takes and the best entertainment, you’re able to sort through the avalanche of pop culture and pick out what you like. I guess that’s all I have on that for now.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: eBay, you can look around and find other places that offer slightly – like Etsy – similar stuff, depending on your category. Etsy is not a bid based app. Everybody sets the price.
It is good if you do not want to wait. But on eBay, you are waiting 6 days or something until the bid ends. On Etsy, you, sometimes, pay a little more. But then, there are of items listed simultaneously on Etsy and eBay with the minimum starting bid being the Etsy price.
I do not know the etiquette of doing that is. But then, there are other places. If you want really high-end stuff where you will pay a lot more, and the prices have been or may seem double or triple what they might be on eBay, one place is called First Dibs. There is a place called Ruby Lane.
There are other boutiquey collectible sites. If you look around, you can find versions of eBay that are crappier than eBay with items even cheaper than eBay.
I don’t know if anyone has done anything on the economics of collectible stuff. Where there should be a mathematical function of what the price of collectibles is, given the absence of other factors, other factors being, for instance in the case of Beanie Babies; they were very collectible 20 years ago.
It was right at the end of the 90s and 2000s. People paid a bunch of money for them until everyone realized that they were bullshit. The people hoping to make a lot of money ended up losing it.
But in the absence of some market collapse, for something where there has been an established market for a collectible over decades, there will still be waves of fashionability and unfashionability.
Like Antiques Roadshow, people will realize – like the fancy heavy wooden granda furniture – stuff is kind of worthless. People do not want it; it reminds people of their grandparents. Fashion aside and market collapses aside; I suspect the price of collectibles to go up based on inflation or based on attenuation of supply, like with comic books, where decades of parents throwing away their kids’ comic books.
I had a comic book collection. If there is a rate at which the collectible items become more rare, because they are subject to loss and destruction, and then there is an increase in population; if the population has doubled or tripled since the first issue of action comics with Super Man, you would expect a number of collectors to, at least, have tripled and, actually, maybe, more than tripled because the internet gives people opportunities.
We know it gives people to share their terrible political opinions and to radicalize one another. But it would increase the number of collectors at a greater rate than the numbers of increase in the population because more information about stuff is out there.
Which you’d think would make collectibles an investment, it probably would not, because you are buying from people who know what they are doing. If you are buying from an auction house, when you can buy things online, you are paying a premium to the auction house.
One more thing about knowing whether what you’re purchasing on eBay is fair priced or not. If it is a popular item with 6, 8, or 12 bids on it, you can click on the bids and see who is bidding on it. Not the names of the people but the number of transactions that they have done on eBay.
If a bidder has a thousand or more transactions listed with a number listed in parentheses beside their name, they are probably a dealer. It would be insane for someone to go on eBay to then buy a 1,000 things without selling anything.
A big number means a dealer is trying to buy that thing and means that that dealer thinks that he or she can make money if they get the item at the price that they have bid, which means that it is fairly priced; unless, you’re dealing with a crazy obsessed person.
That’s about it.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/10
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: eBay, there are about 3,000 items in this category for sale at any given time; this category that my wife likes. It gives you a chance to see how much stuff is really worth by seeing how much stuff is really worth.
In terms of being able to buy things, obviously, eBay is being able to buy stuff that you couldn’t buy before the internet. Early adopters of the internet, they went on in roughly 1995. I do not know when eBay came online, but I think 10 years after that.
It gives anybody sufficiently diligent an idea of what stuff is worth, which is, sometimes, great because sometimes people will put stuff up for sale and they have not done sufficient research. Then they give it a buy now option; then you may be able to get a bargain.
But generally, that doesn’t happen. When my kid was younger, I was trying to get us a whole bunch of Legos for cheap. But because eBay has established a stable price point for Legos.
There weren’t bargains to be had. That aspect of eBay is great for sellers. If you do your research and look at comparable items, you can get a decent idea of what price you should accept.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you know about buying or selling online?
Rick Rosner: Like we’ve said, high-IQ types get obsessed online; I have been obsessed. My wife has simple tastes. She shops at thrift stores. I used to get her a lot of flowers 30 years ago.
Now, we have a garden. So, we can get them out of our garden. There are no needs to buy flowers anymore. She did get some collectibles. She liked this collectible item. I have been cruising for cheap but good examples of this type of item.
Plus, you can use eBay to buy stuff. If you look around, you can get fantastic deals, because China wants to bury us. It is the way the Chinese economy and the economic disparities have made it so that you can buy stuff from other countries for just a pittance.
That is using eBay to buy it now option. You are not bidding or competing with people. You are simply buying the lowest price and not the lowest auction price. But if you’re going to bid on stuff, I am a swooper.
The swooping philosophy is coming in at the end with your best offer with about 8 seconds to go before the auction ends. This doesn’t give people time to get in there and outbid you, to think about it.
If their best offer is less than your best offer, and if you bid 10 minutes before it ends, it gives people time to think about it. If you come in at the end, then if your best offer is higher then theirs, then there is no time for them to reconsider and raise their bid.
It feels good and bad. You are not permitting others to outbid you. At the same time, that is the way that it works.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: It is a rare person who continues to believe that the Earth is flat. But just because no one thinks the Earth is flat anymore, except lunatics, and the flat Earth is a naive belief from thousands of years ago, that that naive belief has gone away doesn’t mean that religion will go away. It is just that specific areas of knowledge will squeeze out religious belief in certain areas.
There will always be room for religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs about the world, even a fully scientifically explained world and science will change too. That fully explained world will still have room for religious overlays.
There will always be places to have or insert mystical beliefs. There is a thing in quantum mechanics called Bell’s Theorem. Einstein had trouble with quantum mechanics. He thought that you just can’t have a world functioning this randomly.
He thought there was a structure behind the structure in quantum mechanics; that behind randomness of quantum mechanics there was a layer not accessible to us that made the random not really random.
But with Bell’s Theorem, no, it works and to the extent that quantum mechanics has been proven to work; you can’t have secret mechanics behind determining outcomes. However, under IC, the things that happen apparently randomly in quantum mechanics; those things bring information into the world.
Under IC, that information reflects the state of something; that state of, say, the information being brought into the universe, as the universe accumulates information then it has to be about something.
It doesn’t imply a certain framework behind the apparent randomness of the universe, but not in the way Einstein believed. But in a similar way, it is possible to say, “There is this system. It explains things. But there is still room to say that this also exists. That, yes, you have a scientific world but there is also room for beauty, good, bad, and truth.”
That will always be. Although, the evidence and theory-based framework will continue to shape not just science but non-scientific beliefs.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about the types of the first discussion? What does continual encroachment of more accurate views of the world mean for religious faith and faith in general? Because the trend over centuries has been a decline in outright belief and liberalization of those who do believe.
Rick Rosner: Generally, there is a low cost to have beliefs or large philosophical beliefs about how the world is, believing in a god or a bunch of gods, or no god or whatever. Whatever you believer at the large scale, unless you’re working in the field and or somehow run afoul of some grinding mechanism of where religion meets politics, it doesn’t affect daily life.
You navigate your daily life using a bunch of specific knowledge, situational knowledge. You don’t cross the street on a red light. You don’t drink Draino. You cook the chicken before you eat it.
None of those have large religious import. It is a whole different set of knowledge. People will continue to believe in and have hopes about what the world is. People’s beliefs that are, to some extent, religious over time, on average, be more informed by actual information about the world.
It is a rare person who continues to believe that the Earth is flat. But just because no one thinks the Earth is flat anymore, except lunatics, and the flat Earth is a naive belief from thousands of years ago, that that naive belief has gone away doesn’t mean that religion will go away. It is just that specific areas of knowledge will squeeze out religious belief in certain areas.
There will always be room for religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs about the world, even a fully scientifically explained world and science will change too. That fully explained world will still have room for religious overlays.
There will always be places to have or insert mystical beliefs. There is a thing in quantum mechanics called Bell’s Theorem. Einstein had trouble with quantum mechanics. He thought that you just can’t have a world functioning this randomly.
He thought there was a structure behind the structure in quantum mechanics; that behind randomness of quantum mechanics there was a layer not accessible to us that made the random not really random.
But with Bell’s Theorem, no, it works and to the extent that quantum mechanics has been proven to work; you can’t have secret mechanics behind determining outcomes. However, under IC, the things that happen apparently randomly in quantum mechanics; those things bring information into the world.
Under IC, that information reflects the state of something; that state of, say, the information being brought into the universe, as the universe accumulates information then it has to be about something.
It doesn’t imply a certain framework behind the apparent randomness of the universe, but not in the way Einstein believed. But in a similar way, it is possible to say, “There is this system. It explains things. But there is still room to say that this also exists. That, yes, you have a scientific world but there is also room for beauty, good, bad, and truth.”
That will always be. Although, the evidence and theory-based framework will continue to shape not just science but non-scientific beliefs.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Let’s talk about the whole deal, the use of Evangelicals in politics.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The political use of religion.
Rosner: There is a better word than “use.” The energizing of the base.
Jacobsen: The zeal?
Rosner: It feels like, with the Evangelical voters, this has been going on for the last 150 years, but it hasn’t been. Because this has only happened for the last 30 years. Because conservative think tanks have been thinking about how to get leverage over the American populace, how do they get voters to vote in their people.
Before, in America, you had a more benign form of evangelism. “Christianity close to home” would be a good phrase for it. The 50s and 40s in the, at least, idealized form of America.
You have a bunch of towns each packed with a bunch of churches. Each person went to a church or a synagogue. Each worshipped in their own way, but each in their own Judeo-Christian values and each more or less worked out for each other.
In more sinister cases, they became busybodies on people’s behavior that fell short. It was a more benign form of pervasive religious values, not particularly coercive but with some aspects of coercion.
It is not strident and not feeling threatened and not trying to opposed religious values of others. When necessary, it is not seriously impinging on politics; this is where the conservative side has been piling up now, and a large number of the Evangelical voters.
Any mainstream politician, liberal or conservative, has to claim to be religious. It is a very brave and exceptional politician who doesn’t claim to be religious. It is a rare group of voters that will vote that person in.
The dog whistling in politics every time a politician makes a public statement. The religious voter understands the statement in its nuanced meaning but the non-religious don’t because it is a dog whistle to the religious. It can be used cynically.
The American version of this isn’t new. There is always the potential for it, as long as there has been religion or politics. Although, you have instances of it. There has been the potential for it as long as there has been religious and politics.
Jacobsen: It goes back to Constantine.
Rosner: We don’t burn people at the stake. It has been done at the cross-purposes of politics and religion. By embracing science, you don’t necessarily avoid; you open yourself up to a whole different set of tragedy.
The atomic bomb is one.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Conceptions of the world apart from factual knowledge. We take the scientific knowledge or a theology from the past, then they are applied to describe the real world in some way, either to derive meaning or functionality, or both
Another way that this has shifted is as a political tool. We have talked about how some spiritual conceptions of the world are used as political tools.
Rick Rosner: You’re talking about Evangelicals and politics.
Jacobsen: Not just them.
Rosner: Maybe, Saudi Rabia driving religious fervor up with anti-Western fervor in particular, and politicians using religious fervor for cynical purposes.
Jacobsen: Yes, I would extend this to Catholics and Evangelicals too, which are big hunks of the population.
Rosner: You’re from Canada. Is it there too?
Jacobsen: Take, for instance, Alberta or even Saskatchewan, there is controversy over the implementation of a single school system or a merger of the religious and secular public schools, to reduce costs.
Also, the Catholic kids are paying for the Catholic schools and the non-Catholics are paying for the Catholic schools, apart from the contentions of labeling kids “Catholic” rather than “kids with Catholic parents.”
The finance differential seems unfair to me. So, there is a proposal for a single educational system without any particular religious or other orientation.
Rosner: I am sure this pisses off a bunch of Catholics.
Jacobsen: 40% of the population are Catholics, so certainly.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: A functionally unlimited of them, too. It is a “for all intents and purposes” infinite.
Rick Rosner: Yes, although, that gets scary. But when you say, “Unlimited,” it tends to imply an infinity. Our experience of the world implies huge worlds but not infinite.
Jacobsen: I like the phrase “functional infinite” or “functional unlimited,” which means a very large finite but an unknown number for that finite.
Rosner: The whole thing is either an infinite set of things in the set of all possible things, which is problematic, or you have this infinity, or maybe not.
Jacobsen: In a similar way with can or cannot exist, some things are perceived to different degrees of fidelity. Not perceived by someone does not necessarily mean non-existent, but it’s not perceived into one’s cognitive apparatus. But then, other things are perceived to different perceived grainily or crisply.
Rosner: The best we can say is infinite or not infinite. Our ancestors will argue over this for generations to come.
Jacobsen: That’s why I like the prior mentioned phrase.
Rosner: The idea of IC, of the universe as a self-consistent information system, where any large system is built from information. It is a step back from the purely cold and godless Big Bang, big science, framework; that we’re currently under.
In that, it doesn’t impost God the Creator, but it does suggest a proliferation of consciousness in entities across the universe. In that, the universe has 10^22nd stars with something like half of those stars potentially having planets.
So, you have, at least, a billion-billion environments for life to evolve. If you look at the evolution of life on Earth, if life is going to evolve, then cognition is going to evolve. So, you have both the probabilistic argument, the Drake Equation or some version of the Drake Equation, that says, “Yes, it is unlikely that we’re the only consciousness in the universe,” then the technical aspect of consciousness as information sharing is not a miraculous thing but is a natural consequence of a large self-consistent set of systems.
It means that you have a system potentially full of conscious entities. Not in the kumbaya crystals and I hang amethysts from the wall of my bedroom and my chakra power…
Jacobsen: [Laughing] or hanging a picture of Mother Mary Magdalene on the wall.
Rosner: Yes, thinking beings probably arise in a bunch of contexts and they probably have consciousness, and the universe itself may have consciousness. Some of these thinking beings may survive for millions of years and, in the case of the universe, maybe many hundreds or thousands of millions of billions of years.
It presents that idea that there are conscious entities with godlike complexity and persistence, which is a baby step away from the fully cold universe.
Jacobsen: What about the pre-fully cold universe with the original major religions posited? Their views of the world.
Rosner: You talked about a particular religious philosophy that lives and serves to live in the cracks to fill in the blanks. There will always be blanks. What comes after people and future people will always yearn, people will not only yearn for science, for purely mechanistic explanations of things.
People evolved to search for significance. We evolved as omnivore survivalists. We look for exploitable regularities in the world to survive. So, people will always look for patterns within patterns and patterns within the ineffable.
The possible wondrous things that exist but just beyond our understanding. So, religion and mysticism will never go away. But there will continue to be squeezing, one would think, in the way religion has been squeezed for hundreds of years.
But the understood squeezes out the incompletely understood wonderful, which doesn’t mean what is understood isn’t wonderful; it also means the possibility that what becomes understood involves things that would be considered wonderful by religious people of past eras.
The idea that the unification or the unified nature of the universe, how every point in the universe knows how just about every other point in the universe is doing at every level of the universe speaks for a cohesiveness that may not have the same coziness of God being in charge of everything but does, possibly, offer a certain satisfaction in the wondrous ways that this happens.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/03
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: However, you and I have been talking about IC for years now.
IC still proposes a unifying set of principles that account for what goes on; although, those principles do not necessarily mix or are fuzzy at the edges. The principles of existence, under IC, which are the principles that we’re talking about, pertain to things that not only are non-contradictory in terms of existence.
But non-contradiction becomes stronger the more information that you have in the system; a system without information is fuzzy. You have all sorts of things that are dictated more or less by quantum mechanics and that can exist, or cannot exist, or are on the cusp of being existent, to the extent that they do or don’t contradict the rest of the information in the system.
The more information that you have in the system. The more you have to be contradicted. The more things have to come in line with the information in the system. It is a fuzzy system of rules of existences that get tighter and tighter the more information that you have, which means more space, more time, and more matter because these reflect the amount of information in the system
That still doesn’t allow for a creator or a religious point of view. However, if you look at consciousness, and this is probably the second principle of IC, consciousness is a technical principle or attribute of large-scale information sharing in a large self-consistent system.
For a large system to exist, it must have a large degree of self-consistency. That self-consistency requires large-scale sharing of information because you can’t be consistent about what you don’t know, what information you don’t have.
The universe has to consistently keep the rest of its positions as part of self-consistency. As defining it, the universe has to continually define itself. If consciousness is a necessary adjunct of this large-scale sharing of information, then it is largely unavoidable in large-scale information processing systems.
Unless, it is specifically designed against. If specifically designed against, that implies the hand of a creator, because we create worlds. At some point, we will have the technological wherewithal to create simulated worlds with simulated beings if we wanted.
We could create a self-consistent world that has all the self-consistency imposed from the outside and then there is no large-scale information sharing. We build computers. They process information linearly. They do not police themselves, mostly.
Computers aren’t conscious. But the existence of large created systems implies that they are part of a larger world of beings that are conscious. Consciousness, then, may be an unavoidable aspect of existence.
That while still not implying a creator in many instances, or even most instances, does imply the existence of consciousnesses of unlimited extent and power.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: In the 160 or so years since Darwin, halfway through it, you have Big Bang theory coming up, which postulates a world without any special agency.
Nobody had the idea of a unified field until the 1700s, which is compact equations for physical phenomenon. You do not get unified field theories until Maxwell in the second half of the 19th century.
Those are four equations that thoroughly describe the behavior of electromagnetic waves. After that, the idea of unification really catches on; we’ve been on that program strongly with most scientists not thinking about philosophy on a daily basis.
But if you ask most scientists about if they believe in the idea of a unified explanation for the entire universe, I’d say they believe in a unified explanation of the universe with 2/3rds believing in one or that it’s possible in the future.
A unified scientific explanation under the current theoretical and experimental support for that point of view; there’s no room for a creator. There are some views that try to work together with modern Big Band physics.
God is in the world but God is simply in everything in motion, or set everything in motion. But beyond satisfying compromises like that, God has been squeezed out.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/12/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: But I don’t think there the level of conflict seen in the past 100 years seen between religion and science. Science wasn’t seen or embraced as a program that fully explained everything until the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s.
Yet, you had Newton was arguably more religious than scientific. He believed that he was doing God’s work by doing science. He believed that God wanted us to know the world, and doing that was working on His behalf.
It is God helps people who help themselves. Newton was one of the first guys, people, to come up with a scientific theory that really was fairly concrete and made predictions about the universe.
It extended from us to the rest of the universe into infinity. It was right there in the Universal Law of Gravitation. Universal theories are going to start crashing into religious doctrines, which tend to be universal.
Then you have the tendency of science to keep pushing humanity away from the center of creation with the biggest push or the biggest shove against humanity is the theory of evolution, which comes up in the 1850s.
It arose before that but not convincingly until Darwin and someone else who I forget who did it. He was the co-thinker-upper. He co-published, almost, with Darwin. Darwin’s version of evolution caught on.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: One of the main conflicts over time has been religion and, well, theology which comes from religion and changes in the scientific framework of looking at the world, which is a refinement of looking at the natural world.
Often, this has led to a diminishment of religious authority as a say on what the world is or looks like.
Rick Rosner: The authority is on what set of beliefs that you give yourself over to. To the huge percentage of Americans who profess to believe in some fully Christian point of view, then the scientific view does not hold sway, except insofar as science giving so much to the world and then you’re denying what you find convenient.
Historically, it starts with a beginning. There was no religion or science. But religion got there first in terms of philosophy. In that, it is easier to construct a system of belief that doesn’t have to account for the entire world.
It doesn’t have to be a full on match; I am putting myself in a cul de sac here. With religion, you can make a set of stories about the world, which would fit whatever aspects of the world that you need.
But it doesn’t have to be subject to any form of rigorous logic. Religious institutions and churches come into being. They get a lot of leverage over people’s lives and beliefs, and have all sorts of authority in various ways.
The Greeks and the Romans did not embrace a program of experimental science to any significant degree; they did not science. But it wasn’t part of an overall philosophical push; that science can be used to fully understand and explain the world.
So, there were little outbreaks of science. As far as I know, there was no thorough conflict with religion. But then you have a religion that has been in place for a millennium or more, like the Catholic Church, and with Copernicus and Galileo, their view of the world is challenged.
Catholicism and others have had a long time, like 1,200 years to fully being fleshed out. But you can imagine a younger version of Christianity not having a problem with the Earth orbiting the Sun.
It is not anti-Christian at the root. God made the Sun and the Earth to orbit around it, for us. That does not seem too blasphemous. It did bug powerful Catholics, though.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If someone feels warm to their Jewish ancestry, they educate their families, get together with their families, have some meals, and feel a connection to their ancestors and those who are alive and present.
Some want to trash on that. But they seemed to have made a category error. It is painting religion with the same brush.
Rosner: People who critique religion come in different flavors. Some are thoughtful; others are looking to be an asshole.
Jacobsen: If the religion endorses or the sect of leader has a leader in its history that endorses, and the community affirms, the misogynistic aspects of it, those seem clearly bad to me.
Those deserve open critique and widespread condemnation. Other ones that simply speak to vague notions of doing good to other people, including the Freemasons: brotherly love, relief, and truth. Are those bad?
Even though, those are vague. Does that make Freemasonry bad, religion bad, or mysticism as a whole bad? I think this notion reaches its apex and collapses in the modern period.
Rosner: This has been a place for open assholery. Aggressive atheism is a breeding ground or attractor for assholes. I guess you could almost consider this fundamentalist atheism. There is a certain combative jerk who embraces atheism as a cudgel to get into vicious troll wars with people.
The same way that MAGA people often in combination with coming out of an evangelical tradition could get into vicious troll wars. It’s a function, partly, of social media giving everyone a hammer to go after everybody else.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/28
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Based on the interviews, the issue is a religion per se. It is fundamentalist forms of it. The liberal forms are fine. The fundamentalist forms of non-religion can, sometimes, be more dramatic than that.
My concern is freedom of religion and freedom of belief, and freedom of conscience. Someone who is being mistreated in a fundamentalist religion should have the right to leave and have the free choice to do so.
If someone is experiencing this in some non-religious group, they should have the right to leave it too. My concern is people able to freely live and guide their own lives as they see fit, especially as this is more of a problem for women – which is why women’s rights are more of a concern for women.
It is deeply simple “religion…”
Rick Rosner: What we see in America over the past couple of decades with religion, it has been politicized. It has been politicized in a way in which bad guys are in charge. At various points in the past, even now, religion politicized in such a way to be more tolerant and to help people.
But the forms that the politicization of religion in America has taken are mostly toxic, lately.
Jacobsen: In terms of the narratives of religion, they can be more functionally true in terms of guiding life compared to some of the ones on offer in the secular community.
Rosner: Yes, you can have traditions stretching back hundreds of years. That is concerned with or synonymous with being a good person.
Jacobsen: Maybe, it is less about functional truths about the larger cosmos and more about the functional truths of everyday life.
Rosner: Of being a good person in society, as you noted about the larger metaphysical beliefs about existence, they are less about the general ideas of existence and more about the specific precepts about how to live among people.
If you take the rules of living as a decent person, you can strip away the mysticism and still have the beliefs of what is good and effective ethically, long-established. Some are outmoded like not eating pork or what to do about sleeping on the sheets of someone menstruating.
It may have been practical 2,000 years ago, but not so much now.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think similar trends can exist with these familial and other trends, how ever they are formed, will continue to persist based on natural inertia of history and culture.
Rick Rosner: We have talked about this before. There is a splitting of paths. Depending on how much technological weirdness you can tolerate, there will continue to be unaugmented humans living what we consider normal human lives even 1,000 years from now.
Those lives, what is continued normal, will continue to change and suck up more technology but still living lives we will still understand. But above and around those, there will be increasingly weird, to us, augmented, changed, and tweaked humans and other thinking entities establishing stable cultures and easy ways of being.
The forces that will line up to make it convenient to live in a number of different ways. 200 years from now, there may be four demographically dominant ways of living: 1) traditional humans living traditionally with potentially expanded lifespans, 2) augmented humans living like superheroes and practically indestructible but still following human objectives and imperatives to be studly and rich and powerful and to get laid, and following this, maybe, 3) augmented humans and AI entities are finding it convenient to merge as hyperconnected information thought blobs, and then beyond that 4) you have the worldwide thought blob manufacturing consciousnesses at its convenient, where it needs it.
Beings voluntarily popping in and out of existing based on the information processing needs of the overall information processing enterprise, all these levels, if these are persistent means of culture, will be reinforced by how easy it is for people to live in that culture.
There will be some mobility. People will balls or gumption can change. There will always be escapees. In your interviewees, you talk to a lot of people who have left Islam and religion in general to kind of go out on their own.
People who were part of fundamentalist and constraining religions who have had enough of what they consider oppressive, to try and live without it. You will have people and entities who travel out into the various ways of living.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Helen Fisher is a leading biological anthropologist. She talks about love and aspects of it. It matches some of what you’re saying.
Rick Rosner: The economics of love is there, of two people making shoes as a couple is more effective than one person. But then there is the biological economics of it. That two people may be more successful at producing kids who survive.
All those forces are braided together and in the same direction, in the same way a game show pushes towards the same direction. The pushes in the future will not come from nature but from altered nature.
The beings who take charge of their own drives and objectives as well.
Jacobsen: There is also the sexual wall of the progressive and non-religious popular culture, and the traditional and conservative religious culture of much of the world. Those two sub-trends with the overarching narrative of technologically driven change.
There is a wall. There won’t be much change. But once that wall is collapsed with replication of human-level consciousness, then it becomes immediately cheap. Something akin to the Genome Project costing a billion dollars and then going down to 1,000 bucks.
Rosner: It is Black Friday specials. You can get two genomes run for you, your sister, and your spouse for 100 bucks.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It would be a change of over 6,000 years. Much of the family unit was constructed within the framework of a holy text.
Rick Rosner: It was probably around a bit before that. You hear speculation. I have heard the theory that prehistoric human culture was matriarchal.
Jacobsen: It might have been patriarchal but matrilineal.
Rosner: I read texts speculating or postulating that women were the leaders. That they gave out the sex and had multiple male partners. They were in charge of things. That is not a traditional family structure. But at some point, the most convenient structure was pair bonding.
It was two different-sex couples or people raising kids.
Jacobsen: I mean the last 6,000 years of heterosexual pair-bonding with a framework provided by a holy text and so a literate culture guiding it.
Rosner: The religious texts reinforced it first, or, maybe, the pair bonding was already pretty solidly in place, and then the reinforcement came later.
Jacobsen: Regardless of what happened before, if we take a holy text, it is, at least, a change in 2,000 to 6,000 years of human history.
Rosner: Without a doubt, it has gone on for 6 millennia and probably before that with different levels of formality or civilizational support. You always had a minimum biological support.
To get someone pregnant, you need, at least, a momentary pairing up, enough to have sex at least. At some point, I have heard arguments about the birth of romance. The idea of love as fairly recent within the past 2,000-3,000 years.
The idea that you should be emotionally bonded. That emotional bond should be the number one thing in the relationship, as opposed to the economic bonds, which may be more recent than the heterosexual pairing itself.
Love as the glue is a recent idea.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/24
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: But if we look at the width and size of generations, the bigger impact on this will be the respect for women’s rights and aspects of this emerging in movements like #MeToo, as this is hitting big countries like India now. It will have a significant impact on all of us.
Rosner: The general tendency driven by the Golden Rule is not judging a book by its cover. To judge whether people are fully human or not, it is not judging by race, ethnicity, sex, or gender, but everyone has a brain.
The brain is the great equalizer. No other set of characteristics determines someone’s humanity more than the ability to think. It happens in the demographic segment by demographic segment.
That women are considered to be intellectual equal; that ethnicities are considered equally justified in wanting to be treated decently. Now, for the middle of an awakening, where people with different sexual and gender orientations, they are fighting to be considered equal and not crazy.
In the end, you’re left with anything that can think. In the future, we will be left with controversies about what thinking and feeling mean in augmented beings and in artificial beings.
That already extends to some extent to animals, where something with a tinier brain but still has consciousness. This sort of stuff will play out over time. Biological family structures will, eventually, cease to be the, by far, most culturally convenient way of being or living structure.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: But with the 80-100 years that it will take the Muslim population to rise to the larger portions of the population.
By then, you are looking beyond the near future with the human domination and then moving into the mid-future. It won’t be Muslims increasing their demographic significance in America.
But more overwhelmingly, the entire or all of the existing societal structures will be more thoroughly overturned by the market and technology-driven changes to society. Within 150 years, people will have practical immortality.
Science will be advancing at a fast enough clip – and medicine – that whatever ails you; for most people, for every ten years older that you get, science is able to add another 10, 20, or 30 years of life.
Eventually, people, in practical terms, will be immortal. They could look forward to living for several centuries.
Jacobsen: If you take the modern scientific advances, the societies that accept those or put those into the educational curricula; they see a whittling down of fundamentalist strains of religion.
By liberal religious and non-religious people, they seem like the problem. As they become more dominant around the world, noting, of course, evolution is not seen as the dominant accepted theory by the global population.
There will be a necessary shift in worldview as there is an adaptation of traditional religious beliefs.
Rosner: We have called this the “hollowing out of religion” People stop believing in the mystical aspects of religion less and less, and follow the principles less and less.
Jacobsen: Yes, they become more Spinozan. I think evolution will be the big one. Because it is so simple. I think Daniel Dennett called it a “universal acid” in that sense.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: My wife and I, before we were married; we are broke. Once we got married, it turned us into a powerful income generating and savings team.
It made me straighten up and get employed. We played by the rules. We didn’t think of this in terms of a strategy to accumulate assets. But married people tend to get assets. I was friends with lesbians back in the 80s.
There was the whole deal. Lesbians tended to be broke, at least young lesbians. They were kind of at odds with the culture. It meant to some extent taking shitty jobs and not have easy lives.
That would apply to anybody at odds with the culture. You can make the argument that the very best people in the culture; those who are opposite of Asperger’s people. The super glib and social people can schmooze themselves into leadership positions, higher paying jobs, higher quality spouses.
If you’re good at riding society, whether intentional or not, it is the way society is set up. You are going to thrive. It is almost tautological.
Jacobsen: Those people dominated the culture as per the rules set out before It is a simple recipe of three things: have strong family and communities ties with bonds across generations, have shorter generations between generations, and also have an affirmation of large families where kids are seen as “gifts from God” rather than financial burdens within a certain range of finances.
Rosner: Lance likes to argue the immigrants and Muslim, mostly worried about Muslims, will out-reproduce non-Muslims in America until they become a significant part of the society.
He likes to talk about European countries where Muslims are more than 10% of the population and disruptive cultural forces. He likes to bring up Sharia Law and so on. He thinks this will happen in America. Right now, Muslims are 1% of the population.
Yes, they tend to have larger families. But it will take a long time for the demographics to play out.
Jacobsen: 1/3rd of those born into a religion leave while 2/3rds stay.
Rosner: Just because you are out-reproducing other religions, it doesn’t mean that you win, especially with losing so many followers.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You mentioned off-tape the traditional forces or the forces for tradition out-reproducing simply the more eccentric ways of living. A good example might be Catholic families.
If Catholic families pump out 5 kids on average and atheist families only pump out 1.6 kids on average, then eventually Catholics and Christianity more generally, and more religion more generally, will be the more dominant cultures.
Because the big religions that survive across the generations and centuries are good at passing on themselves, at indoctrinating people – as opposed to people with more fringy beliefs like forms of atheism and agnosticism. It is only recently within the last couple hundred years that scientism has been powerful enough to be instillable from generation to generation.
Jacobsen: These beliefs do not have to map onto the real world to any high degree of fidelity. In fact, they simply have to value the particular set of things that shorten the span between generations and increase the offspring per generation
Rosner: You’re saying get them barefoot and pregnant and spit out as many kids as possible.
Jacobsen: But also provide the values for family and community to provide the comfort to be able to do these things in contexts where this wouldn’t happen otherwise.
Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: In other words, in terms of the traditional roles being affirmed, men orient yourselves in such a way to be able to provide for your family. Women, in terms of your role being affirmed, take care of the home, have and take care of the kids, and bring forth life in an image of Christ thing.
Rosner: Yes, because of everything lining up.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Although, there is room for variation on that. There are plenty of gay people among humans and a certain gayness among animals. That may or may not – gayness – add to the reproductive fitness of a species.
But it certainly doesn’t detract by much. If it were really a hindrance to the reproductive success of a species, it might get evolved out. But it hasn’t. The people who will have the easiest time in human society, at least until recently, would be heterosexual reproductive couplings.
That is where evolution gets its oomph. Family, tradition, culture, religion, and communal life have all arrows pointing towards this. If you live by the dominant forces, the structures living by dominant forces become extinguished when those forces change; and, we’re about to see a huge shift in what the dominant forces shaping human society and transhuman or post-human – whatever you want to call it – will be.
The shift away from the purely biologically and evolutionarily determined forces, and towards market forces combined with technology. It is already happening. It seems weird because we live in a highly sexualized society stuffed with porn.
But people are having less sex than they did in the 60s. People are having fewer kids than before. People are less preoccupied with hooking up and relationships, because there is so much other compelling stuff being generated by our media plus our social media in combination with our increasingly powerful technology.
We have talked about this before. As we get closer and closer to replicate consciousness, we will be able to augment ourselves; we will be able to build other powerful information processing entities.
All these will be able to change what our base drives if we wish to. All these forces will erode the old forces.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the future of cultures or, in particular, sub-cultures?
Rick Rosner: Culture is two things. One is the structure of society. Another is the type of entertainment people like. Let’s talk about the future of societal structure, societal structure lines up with what is convenient and productive for that society.
I am thinking in terms of game shows because I worked on game shows. Who Wants to be a Millionaire began in 1999 and is still on the air 19 years later. Jeopardy was on the air in the 60s, went off for a few years, and has been on solid since the 70s, I think.
It is similar for Wheel of Fortune. It is a pretty straightforward show where the best competitors win. They are watchable but basic shows. You want to root for somebody. You want someone to do well. The competitor to do well.
It is a straightforward show. The show The Weakest Link is an unwatchable show because things did not line up in the same direction. They went through various rounds of questioning. In the various rounds, they would vote off the player they thought was the weakest link.
It was never the weakest link. It was always the player who was the strongest who the weaker ones teamed up on.
So, a couple dickheads would be competing at the end. Then the MC insulted the contestants. It was a hard show to watch. It was unwatchable, at cross purposes to itself, and things did not line up.
I wrote on it for a while. The questions were easy. It was easy to write insults. But it was hard to make a show that you would want to watch more than 2 or 3 times. It wasn’t pleasant and never delivered the desired outcome, which is that the best player won.
We can expand that general principle to societal structures. The most pleasing family structures and societal units are the ones that exist in agreement with the overall principles and objectives of the society.
For human society and to the extent that animals have culture, everything lines up with what has arisen through evolution. That the different sex couples pair up in the case of many, many species and, certainly, humans, and then they reproduce.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: There will continue to be some form of human economy. The financial transactions at the highest level of civilization will be built around the value of all bunch of stuff that is valued now.
Human artifacts, I assume there will still be some market for human-produced items. It will be a weird ghost market. Where all the necessities of life not costing much, and the ability to produce anything, including things that are almost identical to human artifacts, it will wreck the market for human artifacts, except in the ghost economy.
The economy that remains when the more powerful and sophisticated economy has moved on. It is probably the safest bet to say that durable and powerful information processing and storage will be the most valuable thing.
The civilization of the future; the economy and the whole culture will be information processing based. You will still have consciousness, as we’ve talked about. It will turn out to be inseparable, in most instances, from powerful information processing.
It won’t be this weird, sterile robot world with sterile robots living sterile lives. It will be vibrant and full of emotion. Those things will happen among all those entities that will be super AI’d up.
Things will be super fast too. Moment to moment transactions will be super fast. But there will be longer arcs around big data phenomenon. Things will still unfold over months and years.
The civilization will put a premium on things that can process data. That means there may be some things on the Periodic Table of Elements that may still be pricey, because the automated mining and refining may make some things like gold and platinum semi-rare.
I guess real estate will still be valuable. Because you still need places to put stuff, infrastructure. Humans will still take a lot of space. Although, the structure of real estate will change too.
With automation, you will be able to make the whole planet down a couple miles down all over it into honeycombs or something. You can maximize the level of the surface area of things that can be done 30, 100, or a 1,000 fold. But you still need land to build things in and on.
That’s enough of that.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s talk about the future of values and what this implies for sectors of society, we can focus on America, since this is where you’re from.
Rick Rosner: I am not talking about the Golden Rule. The last few months, my wife who seldom unreservedly likes something. She likes these little mini-mosaics from the 19th and the first half of the 20th century that were from Italy.
They were these little flower brooches and sometimes pendant earrings that are made of tiny pieces of colored glass. I have been looking at stuff 80-to-100-years-old. For the past two years, I have been a model for Lance while he creates a fantastically accomplished portrait.
I was thinking that sometime in the future; this stuff will not be valued as much. Because the dominant culture and the dominant constituents of that culture, or the dominant entities who determine what that culture is, will be to some extent augmented or trans-human.
People who have been tweaked biologically or technologically to have increased capabilities, increased lifespans, increased physical characteristics, and so on, not necessarily superhero-like.
It will be focused on information processing. You and I have talked about the near future, the mid-future, and the far future. If you are speaking in terms of the replacement of humans as the dominant entities, the near future is still human-dominated, the mid-future is the changeover, and the far future is the most powerful entities on Earth around as we add stuff to the Earth and other parts of the Solar System.
The various cutoffs are between near and mid-future. It may be 100 years from now. Then there will be more than 100 years. There will be humans around, lots. But they will not be running the show; unless, they are augmented.
The things that will be valuable will be changed. For one, anything manufactured that is not overly complicated will be dirt cheap. Because of a lot of manufacturing, e.g., food and furniture, will be pumped out by the hundreds of thousands of items with automation.
The fabrication of stuff will not cost much. Unless, you’re talking about stuff that is very intricate at a microscopic level, e.g., biotechnology, and whatever the future of integrated circuits looks like.
Everything else will be cheap. Augmented or not very augmented humans will be able to live their lives if society makes room for them – if we don’t run into some form of dystopia. People will get along even though humans are not in charge anymore.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How can that argument be misinterpreted or misused?
Rick Rosner: One of the greatest philosophical cottage industries has been being wrong about consciousness. It is easy to make category errors. The category error is one of the most fruitful areas of doing jokes.
We should talk about category errors in joke-making. You are talking about one thing but then it turns out that you’re talking about another thing. I should be sitting in front of Twitter looking for some of these.
It is hard to talk about evolution without teleological language or biases slipping in. Because the deal is evolution doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t have a purpose. Evolution exploits niches in the world.
For instance, there is a niche or set of niches biased towards the formation of visual receptors. It turns out that it is relatively easy to evolve eyes. So, eyes have evolved a gazillion times over evolutionary history.
When you discuss stuff like that, it is often easy shorthand to say stuff like, “Evolution likes eyes,” or, “Evolution is biased towards eyes,” which, if you’re not careful, assigns purpose to evolution.
I assume, similarly, if you’re not careful about talking about information processing that is at a high enough level to be considered conscious to avoid certain mysticisms sneaking in, I don’t know.
To reiterate, we have a lot of questions as to why increasing order in the universe tends to generate little individual information processors. This becomes more about questions than about answers.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is information processing the path increasing order takes?
Rick Rosner: In another discussion, we talked about what life is, or at least higher animal life. It leads to the question, “Why is information processing via modeling the external world internally and react to it the path that increasing order in the universe takes? Are there other paths of increasing order that the universe can take?”
Let’s assume information processing is the preferred path, why does the universe need additional information processing when the mechanics of the entire universe encompass information processing on a universal scale?
That all the physical interactions in the universe involve sharing information or, in some cases, obliterating information. Why does the universe generate little individual information processors? There are many other associated questions.
What role do these individual information processors play in the overall business of the universe?
Jacobsen: In most cases, would the answer be “not much”?
Rosner: I am not sure, because we do not have a good model. It is reasonably safe to assume that the universe, if it is conscious, is, for the most part, not aware of the evolved structures within the information that comprises its consciousness.
Imagine the universe is conscious, it is also easy to imagine that the universe has no idea what is in the information-bearing structures that is its consciousness from moment-to-moment, including structures such as us – and others on other planets – that have evolved as information processors.
That is the answer to one questions. Evolved conscious beings or manufactured conscious beings made of the information that comprises the universe may or may not play a role in the overall business of the universe.
But it is possible for the universe to simply not be aware of us. We live on almost entirely different planes of existence.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/14
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: You can have moths. Moths may have some idea of space, still; moth space is, maybe, still 3-dimensional but doesn’t have much in it. They have reacting to light, navigating via light sources, and so on.
Bugs are often fatally attracting to street lights. They are attracted to light whose angle to the bug does not depend on changes in the bug’s location. If you’re navigating via the Sun, your angle to the Sun doesn’t change.
It is in the same location in the sky relative to you because it is so far away from you. But if you move from the streetlight, since it is so close, and you move, your angle to the streetlight moves
You are drawn into this fatal spiral of bouncing off the streetlight because your navigation system doesn’t understand the nearby light sources.
Anyway, in a moth’s picture of the world, you have the source of light, which has a position in space; you’re navigating by the light, the food odors, maybe some visual signals, but it is underpopulated and under-understood space. Intelligence in non-biological systems is the ability to model, understand, and react.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How does a principle of persistence and a base feedback with the environment imply a level of intelligence?
Rick Rosner: You can argue the information content or the amount of information in the model of the environment and the repertoire of responses, the flexibility of responses, can be an index of how smart the organism is.
You have to distinguish between things that are purely mechanical reproductions of the environment. You can have a glass lens. It can show an inverted or distorted image, or a focum or more focused image, depending, of the environment.
But that is not modeling the environment. It is simply a purely mechanical manipulation of rays of light. There is an index. It should be possible to assign a value to the amount of information held within consciousness. Max Tegmark, maybe, has attempted to do that.
I don’t think entirely successfully. You can intuitively index that. Humans have a highly developed and multifaceted understanding of the outside world as a model within consciousness, which is replicated in many ways within consciousness.
Higher mammals, including dogs, have less sophisticated models. As you work your way, we down the ladder – we have talked about this – of mental development. You have models of the environment that are less and less detailed or less and less encompassing.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Stupid stuff continues to happen and come out of the White House every day. So, I think that in the years to come; this period will be the focus of some movies, some books, similar to other crisis points in history, e.g., the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watergate, and so on.
All of those have been crisis points in the history of the country. With the Cuba Missile Crisis, it was supercharged for 10 days, where Americans didn’t know whether or not they would be blown up in a nuclear war.
Similarly, we donèt know how much damage will be done when Trump is held to account. It is not 100% certain if he can be held in check via normal legislative means. That’s it. We are in limbo.
We are in limbo with the real possibility of horrible stuff happening and now know what that horrible stuff will be.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: We are waiting on Mueller. Trump’s behavior keeps getting more destructive. He is noting that he is ready to start a trade war with China. It has become increasingly clear that he is just terrible at everything.
He doesn’t give a shit about the country. He has said that he doesn’t care about blowing up the national debt. He is presiding over a tax cut. He doesn’t care. He notes that if this debt becomes even more serious; it doesn’t matter because he won’t be in office.
You have to be increasingly dumb or racist to continue to support him. He continues to surprise at the level of incompetence and cravenness that he shows. But the consequences of his awfulness continue to fail to catch up to him.
It seems as if the consequences that will manifest themselves starting in 2019 will be so much greater than the consequences that Trump has suffered so far. We are in a limbo.
Reasonable people expect things to get more horrible for him. But in the coming months, things will continue along the trend of craziness that we’re increasingly used to, but it is unprecedented. We may be expecting much worse to the point that some point in 2019; they may have – the White House staff – to prevent Trump from using the nuclear football.
But even that, it may be too crazy even for him. It is a weird limbo. We have much more awfulness. But it is even dangerous to the country.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/10
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Right now, we are in this weird semi-limbo in America. Where the ball has been tossed into the air and is at the top of its arc, it is not moving up or down. It is just a moment.
It is at zero upward or downward velocity. The Democrats have taken back the House but won’t take it back for a bit. In the lame duck session, there are efforts to strip the incumbent Democratic governors and legislatures of power.
They are working to fuck over Democrats while they still hold power. That is frustrating because the national Congress has attempted to do a couple things. It will be a couple days until the dissolution of the Congress.
They are working on James Comey testifying. They are going to try and see if they can gin up any further information on Hillary Clinton. It is one last gasp. So much bad stuff and so much bad behavior come out of the Trump White House every day, it seems super unlikely that he will survive to run for president in 2020.
He may make it. He may not be kicked out of office. He may not quit. He may survive the next two years and the president. That he will have to fall at some point. We are still waiting for all the shoes to drop.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: The average lifespan in the 30s was probably 65/67. Now, it is closer to 80. Actually, it is probably much more if you take the more health conscious sectors. There have been splits in lifespans over the last couple decades.
For the first half of the 20th century, everybody was pretty much leaving their longevity to chance. There weren’t that many Jack LaLannes trying to figure out how to maximize their lifespans.
Now, you have larger segments of the population interested in living a healthy life, as healthy as they can. But then, you have people who are chaotic and dumb, and eat whatever they want.
But if you take out the people who aren’t trying to maximize their longevity and health, that leaves the people who are having a lifespan of close to or at 90. It is a big enough segment of the population or a big enough part of the national zeitgeist or mindset.
Now, the avoidance of risk is a huge part of our culture now. Although, people are not overly aware of that because it is not presented to people as a unitary idea. Instead, it is presented to people as a bunch of individual products or initiatives, or fixes when stuff turns out to be dangerous.
For instance, in California, we have been having these deadly wildfires. It is only in the past decade; there is now a push for fireproof houses. It is a question as to whether we should build houses in forested areas or not. If you do, how do you make those houses less burnable? But part of those less burnable houses, it is making people not burned up in wildfires rather than part of this overall risk averse push.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this relationship with less willingness to die more impact men’s self-image than women’s because women tend not to be the ones doing the deadly activities as much?
Rick Rosner: Yes, there are gender differences. But the mindset that we should die for stupid reasons has become more and more part of our culture. That when you look at cars; cars have metal dashboards and no seatbelts in the 1930s.
They also went as fast then as now. There were fewer streets or freeways where you could go 80 and most cars could not. But most people probably regularly drove more than 40 miles per hour in the 30s from time to time.
If you got in a wreck driving 45 miles per hour in 1938, there is a high probability you’d be dead. You would hit the dash or fly through the front windshield, be impaled by the steering wheel, and then be crushed by the crunching of the car.
Now, cars have acquired probably more than 100 safety features. If you buy a car now, you would be surrounded by 100 airbags, have a passenger compartment not crumpling with the rest of the car, and a seatbelt plus shoulder harness.
You have computerized collision dynamics prevention. You have a self-driving doodad setup. Even though, people drive crappier now than in the 30s, probably. The risk of dying in a car wreck is – I don’t know – probably a tenth of what it was then because of the safety features.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/07
Rick Rosner: So, the purported softer generations that are cognizant of bullying is contradicted by what these tough older people are doing, which is getting fat and being stupid. You had a question.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Mores and norms change over time. What defines “weak” now compared to 60 years ago and 2 millennia ago?
Rosner: I think one is that people are more reluctant to die. If you look at history, there have been plenty of opportunities of people to go off to war. There has been a risk of death for ill-defined ideals of nationality.
World War I was a particularly ill-defined war. What were the countries fighting for, it wasn’t clear to the people fighting. It is not clear to us now. The Civil War was pretty clear, though people still argue about the causes.
World War II was particularly clear. In that, the German and Japanese agendas seemed super bad. But most wars via thoughts about nationality are vague and are based on the idea of, basically, not wanting to die.
The Vietnam War was, according to most measures, made things worse. Yes, Saddam Hussein was probably killing thousands and tens of thousands of his own people. Going in there and deposing him in a sloppy way has lead to the deaths of a million people or more since 2003, the prospect of even more deaths across the Middle East deriving from this too.
You can probably get 80% or more of reasonably informed people to say that that was a fucking terrible war. I would suggest that people on average are less willing to participate in war or run the risk of getting themselves killed.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I grew up in a time when bullying was almost considered okay. A certain amount of bullying from peers and adults in life, especially PE teachers, was considered good because it would ‘toughen you up.’
We internalized this stuff. I punched myself in the face, repeatedly, to toughen myself up, on general principles. I punched walls. I still punch walls. Everyone was supposed to be tough.
Now, we are entering an era when we are supposed to be much more conscious of bullying and less tolerant, conscious of microaggressions, and then old guys, such as myself might say, “Aren’t we raising a generation of soft babies?” The response, “Is that so bad?”
If we raise a generation that has been conscious and do not tolerate bullying, does that mean we will end up with a generation of soft and weak adults? I would suggest that “No! It is a false connection or a not 100% solid connection.”
That raising a generation of compassionate people doesn’t mean that it is weak people. If you want to talk about weak, 2/3rds of Americans are obese. Speaking of weak, this ‘tough’ generation isn’t tough enough to stop themselves from overeating.
Much of the adult population thinking Trump is okay. Affection for Trump is probably largely correlated with age. The older that you are then the more you are to think that Trump is good.
These older and tougher generations are not even tough enough to exercise the mental discipline to realize that Trump is this incredibly bad guy who is corroding American society.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had a pitch to Bill Simmons. There was a list of stuff. It was when we started writing together, which was several years ago. One pitch was on risk.
Rick Rosner: The idea was that I would do a series on stuff that would be changing to such an extent that it will pretty much be going away. One of the things that I suggested would be going away was tolerance for risk.
It is another way of saying that as average lifespans increase, then life becomes more and more precious. People are going to treat themselves as being more precious. That has lots of implications.
There will be less tolerance for things like smoking, for additives that might give you cancer. An increased awareness of things that might kill you. Either based on actual studies or simply a feeling that some things are dangerous.
We are seeing this play out in certain ways. Idiots, against all science, have decided that vaccines are dangerous. An increasing number of idiot parents aren’t letting their kids be vaccinated, which reverts to the old-fashioned danger that your kid will get a dangerous disease because assholes didn’t vaccinate their kids out of a misplaced sense of the risk of vaccines.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: But you could make an argument. I mean this as a general argument that could be secondarily made: the opioid crisis, suicide in middle age, poor diet, inactivity, and obesity in men can be indications in a society.
If the development of a society declines a bit, these problems will rise. These are indicative of health problems but also of a developed society in moderate decline.
Rick Rosner: If this society wasn’t so good, if the cheapness and availability of delicious food that made us fat were not as available, if the entertainment kept us lazy, and if the overall good conditions that allowed us to get injuries and then be treated with drugs – like Oxycontin – that we can become addicted to, I agree.
These are the secondary effects of the overall quality of life. Expectations will keep rising for the quality of life.
Jacobsen: That is non-trivial. What do you mean as the driver of the increased quality of life?
Rosner: Technology will keep driving the increased quality of life. Entertainment, medicine, and food will improve; there will be more and more awesome stuff and more and more wherewithal to experience.
Jacobsen: Where is this technology being driven from?
Rosner: It is market forces plus Moore’s Law plus just increasing understanding of everything thanks to AI plus big data. We are going to figure out more and more stuff. The more and more stuff that we figure out then the more and more awesome stuff we can make.
Things will keep getting more and more awesome until our very humanity is stripped from us.
Jacobsen: From the inside out?
Rosner: Eventually, there will be better containers than bodies to contain consciousness. The individual consciousness, at some point, will be supped up to the point where it ceases to be the unit of consciousness and experience.
There will be many more ways to experience consciousness. There is a horrible and creepy movie called Under the Skin. It is super creepy. But basically, she is operating a venus fly trap. She draws guys in.
They get more and more excited and horny.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] it is like the woman from American Gods.
Rosner: They get stuck in this ooze and remain in this state of suspended horniness. But they don’t matter because their brain has been taken over by this constant anticipation of getting laid by Scarlet Johannson.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: They are then taken over by this ooze. That is what will happen with the technology of the future. We will be more and more excited by this technology until we’re completely enveloped by the technology and then morphed into all sorts of forms of the future that we, as humans, will find disturbing.
Throughout the process, we will continue bitch about stuff and continue to find examples of assholery and suckiness. It used to be the notion of a clean future and everything is awesome.
A current version is a bunch of awesome stuff in the future but people don’t really find it awesome because the future is grimy, rainy, and gross. The first example of that was Blade Runner, which was an amazing but grubby future.
There was one show that lasted only one show on Netflix called Altered Carbon. It is a lazily imagined future. They took all the tropes from Blade Runner including the rainy sets, AIs, cyborgs, and nudity, because it was for Netflix or, maybe, Showtime. It was the dirty future, which is probably closer to the future.
It is increasing wonder and awesomeness. I’ll tell you what is amazingly wonderful and awesomely sucky, Khashoggi. He transmitted his torture and murder via Apple Watch. He has an expectation of things going badly for him in the embassy.
He sets the Apple Watch to transmit to his fiance to the cloud and on audio. He ended up transmitting his own torture and murder. It is on audio. Plus, Apple Watch tracks your heart rate. His heart during torture started beating harder and faster until it stopped.
So, the various investigating authorities have a fairly complete account of the guy’s murder, which is both awesome, amazing, and super terrible. It would be science fiction if it was something that was imagined 12 years ago.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/03
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Can we create the Google Suck-O-Meter? The level of suckocity for this company or celebrity.
Rick Rosner: My Google celebrity is artificially inflated because I have the common first name and not uncommon last name. The guy who created CHiPS shares my last name. It is not all me. If you put quotes around it, it probably drops further.
It is still not all. It is an index but a sloppy index. But social media is an awareness of assholery and suckery amplifier. People share their gripes. I had this thing happen over the past two weeks.
Not only is it an incidental amplifier of gripes and discontent. It is used in a propagandistic way. Twitter and Facebook are built to amplify people’s anger. Over the past few weeks, I have had 100,000 followers, new ones, per day, until I had gotten 1.2 million new followers.
I believe that that is a foreign government trying to amplify my recently increasingly pissy tweets, usually against the Republicans. They have been against Kavanaugh who is baldly partisan and the least popular nomination since they started polling on the public opinions about Supreme Court nominees.
He seems like a pretty terrible guy. So, my tweets have been extra angry and extra pissy. Somebody who is trying to subvert the midterm elections decided that my angry voice should be amplified by having more followers.
Because I think that the more angry tweets and then the more followers to amplify this. I looked around to say if this was happening to others. Chelsea Handler said that this was happening to her too. It is an angry time. It could happen to others.
Thanks to social media, we can widely share our gripes; even though things are better now than at any other time in history, and are getting better on average, some things are getting worst such as storms.
Storms are getting worst. Climate change is adding heat to the oceans and the atmosphere. The more energy air and water has, then the more devastating the storms will be. It is not basic physics but understood physics.
A hot hurricane will be more powerful than a colder hurricane. The heat sucks more water into the sky and propels winds, drops more rain, and so on. Others things are getting better steadily. The lifespans are increasing, except for America where opioids are impacting us and obesity.
But it is mostly in the opioids. That seems to be the main culprit. It is really the fault of a single company, Pruitt Pharmaceuticals or something. It is the company that developed Oxycontin and promoted it.
They created oxycontin and the promoted it as non-addictive, which turned out to be not true. Once they were found out for that, they promoted a non-addictive or a non-abusable form of oxycontin that was harder to crush up, was time released, and was bonded with this gummy stuff.
People know this company has made billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people and nobody knows if they will be held accountable for it.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is sucking?
Rick Rosner: Sucking is the corporate or non-human entity aspect of an asshole. I was supposed to go into a genetic test today, because I am an Ashkenazi Jew. We have certain genetic characteristic aspects that are being studied.
A lot of Ashkenazi Jews have the BRCA gene, which predisposes you to breast cancer. I was told to go to the testing center. I am told that I do not need paperwork because I am in the system.
It turns out. I am not in the system. I leave I come back. It turns out, yes, I am in the system. No one apologizes. This sucks. If you google the title of the organization and “sucks,” there are 500,000 entries.
When you’re getting your blood tested, and any mistake is made in how stuff is made and handled, and the insurance is involved, I heard about terrible billing policies and other complaints about the managing of the company by former workers.
When a company fails or an entity, or a product fails to meet normal current expectations of quality of competence, that thing sucks in the same way a person who fails to meet standards of behavior is an asshole.
[End of recorded material]
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/11/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is an asshole?
Rick Rosner: An asshole is someone who continues to take more than their fair share in a socially understood context. Someone who continues to speak on their cell phone. Even though, we understand that, at some level, you should not do that. There is no reason for you to be standing in a line and yammering really loudly.
That is a violation of social norms. Smoking has become an asshole move, at least in enclosed public spaces.
Jacobsen: I see three levels there. A single of each and then a combined. One example, it was smoking. It was making some spaces unacceptable for smoking in public. Then it became possible for the culture to disapprove.
Even though, at the outset, there were campaigns to get pregnant women to smoke. In North America, now, we have #MeToo and all its variations. It is an interesting one. It is happening massively consciously.
There can be comedic representations of what to do and what not to do.
Rosner: We do not know where it is going to end up. Some things will be unacceptable that used to be, more or less, tolerated, like grabbing someone on the ass. If it is a man grabbing a woman on the ass in the context of “I like your ass, sexually,” it will go away.
One baseball game, the manager slapped one of his players on the ass, after a noble strikeout. He took a lot of pitches but he just didn’t manage to get on base: “Good job!” I was shocked.
It was obviously not sexual. I was shocked to see an ass slap in the era of MeToo. It made me think if these sorts of ass slaps will survive or not. General assholery is taking something other people have the good manners to not take, like taking the space with your noise or smoke.
The violations that generally aren’t reaching the level of reaching criminal consequences down on the perpetrator. One is texting while driving. It is also illegal but it is almost never enforced. They have better things to enforce. In LA, the first offense is a small fine.
If you are a big enough asshole, the 50 bucks will not teach you the lesson. Being an asshole is little offenses as opposed to Bernie Madoff that loses people millions of dollars, he wasn’t even good at what he was doing. He was good at the sales part of it.
He was a good salesman. But in terms of keeping the scheme going, there were plenty of people that what he was doing was so obvious mathematically that people tried to raise red flags. Because he was bad at the math part of it.
But they couldn’t get anyone in authority to believe them. Anyway, that is being an asshole.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/31
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We were talking about revolution and its different manifestations.
Rick Rosner: We were talking about revolutions in the context of rising expectations. It is often cited within the French Revolution. People do not revolt when really, really downtrodden. It is when they see the possibility of change that is not happening fast enough to suit them.
I don’t know whether this is true. Although, it would have to mathematically have to be true. In that, if change is people pushing for change, and if a revolution is people breaking from the established societal structures when the change isn’t happening fast enough, it is not like they’re going from 0 to 100.
0 is pure misery. 10-20 is gathering change and then to 100. But there would be some change before revolution breaks out. I do not know how helpful that idea is. But it is like that truism that has been disproved, like the frog in boiling water.
It turns out. Frogs will get out of boiling water, whether raised immediately or slowed raised in temperature. Frogs will get out in either case.
Jacobsen: The importance of the myth there is the reality behind the intended message, but the mythology of the actual imagery. Even though, the reality of the imagery is false.
Rosner: The frog in boiling water is helpful, even if it is not a thing that frogs do.
Jacobsen: In America, one of your more important moral voices was Martin Luther King, Jr. He had the notion of the arc of history being long and bent towards justice. In a similar way, democracies can be seen as mini revolutions happening in 4 year timespans, 5 year timespans.
But sometimes, the political system can lock up, can gum up, can have certain stoppages.
Rosner: It is two steps forward and one step backward.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/30
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: If you look at humanism, they have the view of the cold universe but the meaning you get is the meaning you make, the Golden Rule matters, compassion matters, and science matters.
Rick Rosner: It is science plus existentialism.
Jacobsen: Yes, but not as bleak, it assumes a tendency in the inherent goodness in people.
Rosner: To wrap up, the possible future systems of belief are not as bleak as cold naturalism. That order in the universe might be a thing. That order might be connectable to ethics.
That is, in a set-theoretic way, there are, to some extent, absolutes of existence. Because one of the problems of cold naturalism is that universes can wink out in a quantum mechanical manner, leaving nothing.
No record of that existence. It is not as if the universe never was; it is that the universe never was, according to some versions of super cold naturalism. If there is a set-theoretic requirement of possible universes to exist, the constraints of what can and can not exist are not sufficiently tight to deny everything.
There may a certain absolutism to our existences, even though they are temporally limited. On the third hand, the whole set-theoretic argument itself be demolished by shit we discover farther into the future.
Jacobsen: If you take naturalism and the characterization of a cold, random universe, in the same way the Enlightenment was a reaction to the superstition and bigotry of the Christian church for centuries, and if you build a natural philosophic worldview, then you will derive naturalism through fundamental epistemologies. Your ontology will reflect this.
Rosner: That’s what happens a lot. As humans acquire or develop the power to make their wishes come true, they also tend to acquire the power to realize that said wishes are meaningless or some other bullshit.
Jacobsen: I think it’s a psychological construct. If you find yourself in a world of decentralized importance, at least geographically – so to speak – or topologically, your internal locus of control probably reduces. It is a theory. But I think it might be a psychological reflection of worldview.
People saying, “Humanity and its lessening importance in a role in the universe implies a lessened importance of your own role,” which is probably the wrong frame of the conversation.
When you’re talking interpersonal things, you’re talking about how to relate to one another, and when you’re talking about how to relate to one another, then you’re talking about ethics. It builds right back into the Golden Rule, and it builds right back into its fundamental emergence in compassion.
That’s not meaningless at all.
Rosner: The upshot is that as we gain more and more control over the world and ourselves. We will have to rebuild ourselves. The values, translated as human values, will become, to put it glibly, post-human values.
This is what yelled at Lance for the last few sessions. What of your values will make it? He argued, “People will realize marriage is between one man and one woman.” He believes it will become well-established and completely apparent to everyone.
Jacobsen: It never was well-established. That’s a new thing!
Rosner: The idea that we’re going to keep biologically having kids and most of the conscious entities on Earth will be biological humans having biological kids. It will be the thing for the next 100 years.
Then it is “Katy, bar the door!” for a trillion alternate forms of consciousness.
Jacobsen: Anything that’s talking outside of the universe, the natural world or the physical world, is automatically a metaphysical perspective. Hence, the prefix. If you’re talking about an information processing universe that implies an armature, it automatically becomes not only an information-based universe but also a metaphysical informationalism.
Rosner: That’s true. Unless, you can haul it back into physics by coming up with some proof. But yes.
Jacobsen: When people talk about naturalism, whether humanistic or rationalistic or empiricist, or they have a split in their mind between a theology and they incorporate that somehow, looking at those ideas, the concept is a natural world for all of those.
It is almost taking metaphysics completely out of the equation, because they don’t see it as important. So, those questions do not get asked because they are keeping all the frameworks within a naturalistic perspective.
Rosner: To put it in general terms, any time that you take the dominant belief system in any civilization; 100% of past belief systems have been debunked by future or coming belief systems.
So, the idea that the natural world is everything and that it rolls along randomly or according to raw randomness or probability.
Jacobsen: Cosmic billiards.
Rosner: Yes, a clockworky kind of deal, the history of the past ideas getting debunked: those ideas themselves will probably get debunked themselves before too long.
Jacobsen: That would undermine entire philosophies.
Rosner: Well, all philosophies get undermined. That’s the nature of how stuff goes.
Jacobsen: The successful one gets refined. Newton is good for engineering but not black holes.
Rosner: What survived in the philosophies of antiquity, maybe Plato’s Cave, everyone knows Plato’s Cave.
Jacobsen: Laws of Logic, Animalia and Plantae, the first biological/taxonomical classifications there. But if you are talking about the world made of water, a world made of the infinite, and a world made of air, if you have Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, then, yes, those are definitely gone.
Rosner: Democritus gets credit for first postulating atoms.
Jacobsen: He and Leucippus, they were the Atomists.
Rosner: The argument is, you have to have smallest possible things in the universe or things are infinitely divisible. Once someone makes the argument, one half of the argument will be right.
Jacobsen: It’s those monads that you were talking about.
Rosner: Most philosophies get their asses kicked by increases in knowledge.
Jacobsen: But those are bounded to physical models of the world. So, the idea that everything is made of water, infinite, air, or atoms. Most are gone but atoms stay.
Rosner: Thos are bound to shit visions of the world, bound to wild guesses about the structures of things in the same way we are making wild guesses about Set Theory and armatures and ladders of armatures, and all that.
All that stuff will be rejiggered by future discoveries.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/29
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes. There is another layering on top of that new fuzzy, dynamic set theory. It is based on the information. I think, by the way, as a side note; I think information is important because you can put this in the language of math.
It is not only the 10^85th and the pasts and those single sets of 10^85ths for those sets of possible futures. It would also be the stacking of that, as everything is correlated – as has been said – but some things are more correlated than others.
So, you have these numbers but they are precise in a statistical sense without being absolute. They would not be 0% or 100%. They would be a fast landscape of ups and downs.
Rick Rosner: Yes.
Jacobsen: It is kind of interesting. I guess it would concretize the imagery given about an information map being laid out, in terms of how 3-dimensional space represents different objects in terms of relatedness to one another.
Rosner: Without understanding what I’m talking about. I have said that the universe is its own map. The universe as laid out may be the richest and most efficient layout of what can happen next, because not everything can happen next under the really fuzzy and f-ed up rules of this set theory, where there is a set of next possible moments.
Jacobsen: It can be seen as a matrix of the elements. You can invent a mathematical symbolism with the sub-numbers and sub-letters stating that this is the most likely possible next state if you were to collapse the set into what is most likely to happen next.
Rosner: There is a consensus or statistical consensus of next possible moments.
Jacobsen: A lot of summing and averaging [Laughing].
Rosner: There are a set of moments that are equally probable, then there are those that are less probable but related. Even though, they are super probable; they are more probable than something that’s even crazier than that.
The Philadelphia Flyers have this new mascot, a terrible mascot who is orange with bug eyes.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: The odds that you flip a coin and it stands on an edge are vastly more probable than that the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot shows up in your living room. It is not zero but something like a 0 plus a google zero.
Jacobsen: Not the entire thing, but could it be more likely that little itty bitty bits of him pop into the living room.
Rosner: Yes. I read these textbooks that talk about the air in the room evacuating the room. It is possible but highly improbable. But there are usually more likely things happen. You’re in an airplane and somebody shot out a window. There is a cause for that.
You have to wait for the lifetime of a google universe for air to just statistically drift into the corner and suffocate you.
Jacobsen: It doesn’t crash much. The system doesn’t crash much or at all. The contextualize framework of all those together – the gazillion units of whatever time or unit; one of the units can simply wink out of existence.
Rosner: The pog world is limited in time. The simple citizens would not live long enough to encounter a glitch.
Jacobsen: In a normal circumstance, the air could rush to the other side of the room, suffocating the person and then they die. In an airplane, it could be much more likely that it could exist.
But if you take a bunch of armatures, you can take a massive weave of them linked together informationally – and similar to other things rushing to one side of the room, then you could have an entire universe or armature in the massive weave simply winking out of existence as if it never existed in the superstructure.
Rosner: Yes, I think so. To bring this back to religion and belief, it is stuff that we are not capable of definitively characterizing, but that is pertinent to the nature of existence. It points at one of Feynman’s situations, which is that regardless of what we believe now or what I think we will believe in the near future; there might be a new series of discoveries, physical and metaphysical, which will vastly change what we believe into the indefinite future.
Jacobsen: This raises other questions for me. If you take a rationalist or a humanist lens, or an empiricist lens, each takes the no magic position. But they also take the naturalist perspective, which you are taking.
They tend to take meta-naturalism. It is their metaphysical worldview. What an information-based view on the universe takes is an information-based metaphysicalism, that’s not naturalism.
There is a similarity with Newton’s and Einstein’s math working in different frames. It is just that one is a little more comprehensive and contextualizes the operations of the world better because you’re incorporating information theory and communication theory: Big Bang, expansion, deceleration, and the production of natural objects.
Rosner: You can have statistical naturalism, which incorporates tendencies towards order as a statistical likelihood that becomes informationism or the idea that the idea increases in information over time – or the universe is an embodiment of information.
Jacobsen: Typically, what I hear from that camp, which is an important camp from modern science, the naturalism camp, they talk about this as a conclusion of modern science or a principle of natural science.
But science was natural philosophy, so, yes, you will derive naturalism from science. The idea of the universe runs along its course in its dynamics and natural objects rise, run along, and fall away.
Rosner: Nothing means anything. But we have built towards that over the past 2,000 years, which is every time science stuck its nose into the world. It met a pullback in perspective and a reducing of the importance of humanity with the most famous step being the end of the or the replacement of the Ptolemaic System with the Copernican System.
The Earth at the center to the Sun as the center, building to the Big Bang and then us as simply one of 10^22nd stars in a randomly occurring and playing out the universe. So, we are extrapolating that nothing means anything based on all these previous demotions of humanity from the center of existence to just a little blip in this vast universe.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/28
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Here’s the argument against magic, whether in a simulated world or a natural world, a good simulation, one that you can’t tell is a simulation, will not break its own rules on a regular basis; so, a simulated world where magic is possible is breaking the rules of nature, and those rules are what appear to apply.
You can not go around violating them willy-nilly. Otherwise, you’re living in a shit simulation. The point of a good simulation is the simulation being good.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I like that argument. Baruch De Spinoza had this notion of a natural world. He deconstructed, maybe in Ethics, all these basically supernatural beliefs, e.g., the liturgy, prayer, and so on.
He simply does not take into serious account the supernatural beliefs of the standard faiths. They are irrelevant and nonsensical. He says there is a natural world, and no afterlife. What you’re saying takes an IC context with that plus a digitized form of that…
Rosner: We will see a gazillion convincing simulated worlds in the future. We already have them. You have a number of games with believable reality. But they are market and technology-driven.
It gives them both severe limitations. Nobody or few people think, ‘Wow, I am really in this world.” Unless they are psychos or idiots.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: Few simulated worlds, even in the super high-tech future, will be entirely devoted to being entirely convincing so that you’re immersed without realizing that you’re immersed.
There may be a niche for that. The people who want the San Junipero experience from Black Mirror. Even in the show, the characters know that they are living in a simulated world.
It is just a nice one. But they also know that they are somewhere else. That they are a digital simulation housed in a bank of computers.
Jacobsen: That could be programmed out.
Rosner: Some people may want that. But the preserving of the illusion of a simulation means that it won’t glitch regularly. There are all sorts of arguments. We have already started talking about the ratios of infinities. The ratio of simulated to natural worlds; you can argue if there is such a thing as a natural world.
If there is a ladder of worlds with our information of the universe is stored in a higher storage, and same with that, and if that infinity is a real thing, and if it does make sense, how can you know that all infinity universes along that ladder are not infinity themselves?
There is a whole system of logic that has to be fleshed out. We have tried to use Set Theory to talk about the set of all possible universes. We have had reservations. In that, the members of the set are fuzzy, perhaps for quantum mechanical reasons.
Jacobsen: Also, there is something that should be included in that. The current fuzzy set should include an implied past, somehow, and a set of possible futures.
Rosner: Yes. You can characterize a fuzzy particle precisely. Thus, it is not entirely legit to state that states of quantum existence or the possible worlds are fuzzy because of quantum mechanics, because of the math of quantum mechanics.
Since a particle may be fuzzy or an electron, while not precisely defined in space and time, it is a precise object or mathematical entity in quantum mechanics.
Jacobsen: I have heard this defined as precise not as in 0% or 100% but as statistical precision.
Rosner: Also, fuzziness seems like it will always creep in. One reason: if you imagine every possible world as a moment, or as a string of moments along a worldline, the deal is, when you’re working with it, you’re working with a single moment or a series of moments.
But “moment” cannot be precisely defined because moments are quantum mechanically linked to one another; you cannot entirely separate the moments because the moments are defined or the worlds are defined by the playing out of a string of entwined moments, which seems brutal in a set-theoretic point of view.
Jacobsen: You have Set Theory. You have Fuzzy Set Theory or Multi-Valued Set Theory. The form you’re talking about: let’s say you have a universe with 10^85th particles, we’ll call those particles elements to put them in the language of Set Theory.
You have that, in the language of set theory, with a set of 10^85th elements plus the 10^85th implied past elements plus the 10^85th per possible set future elements.
Rosner: It is like a tapestry. You have a bunch of tangled particles comprised of the past putting limitations on the future, but the weave untangles the further into the past or into the future that you go.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/27
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Apart from individual believers, does this impact the intrinsic claims of validity or veracity to divine inspiration to holy books?
Rick Rosner: You can’t overestimate the power of casually held and inconsistent beliefs. Right now in the world, your mainstream American Christian believes in God and in science, even when they contradict.
Because their belief is loosely held about each thing. People don’t require themselves to have completely consistent belief systems. People live their lives. They casually believe what they’re going to believe about God and science.
Most people are never going to examine their beliefs so that they are squared away and consistent. It will be the same thing in the future. People believing in both religion and science in casual ways; that is probably not consistent or logical, and just people will live their lives that way.
Jacobsen: That is the individual believers again. Given the understanding now, is it plausible, apart from possible, that these texts were divinely inspired or not?
Rosner: I think in the future people will increasingly put things in a secular context. These texts may or may not have been inspired by God, themselves, or their friends, but not, in fact, from divine inspiration.
Jacobsen: For instance, I think it’s 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. You can find a guy named Ahaziah. One says he came into power at 8-years-old. Another says that he came into power at 18-years-old.
I think it’s those sorts of fine print that, as people tend to take on more secular perspectives and simply enjoy the worship and the community without really consistent beliefs about it or examines of the text, will simply ignore this more and more now.
Rosner: I don’t think those inconsistencies are disqualifying. You are looking at many hundreds of years of potential mistranslation. In the early Rennaissance, and maybe even longer, if you are looking sculptures of a Jew, sculptures of Jews would have horns sticking out at the temples.
Because there was some mistranslation in the Bible that Jews have horns. It was not meant as disrespect. It said that Moses and other Jews had horns sticking out. If you are a Biblical scholar, there are probably many words that can be argued over endlessly based on a mistranslation.
Jacobsen: I’ll ask another question. If, theoretically, we had the perfect intended text in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, is it plausible to say that those were divinely written?
Rosner: Not to me, it is not plausible. You can still believe it. You can probably make arguments from complexity. Intelligent Design people like to argue that eyes are too complex to have evolved without intervention, which is the dumbest possible argument because eyes are one of the most independently evolved organs.
They evolve all the time. If you are an organism across hundreds of millions of years, you would have to be doing something way, way wrong not to evolve eyes. You could argue, “How could these systems evolve as set out in the Bible or the Quran, or whatever the holy book is, without God directing it?”
You’ve got a bunch of sheep herders. People who grow wheat and make shoes. These barely technological civilizations or these sub-technological civilizations. How would they come up with this stuff without God coming along?
They probably did not have underwear. I don’t know. How can people who did not make underwear make these holy books and immense ethical schemes?
Jacobsen: Under that scheme, does that mean no magic in the universe? As you call them, the principles of existence or the more common label of the laws of the universe.
Rosner; Yes, I subscribe to that. We live in the natural world. When a macro event happens, it has a cause. Quantum events can happen with a certain amount of randomness because that is built into quantum mechanics.
But when a baseball hits you in the head, there is a thrower and a ball. There is a system in place. You can argue for magic via simulation. People like to argue that there are probably more simulated worlds by a ratio of infinity to 1 than naturally evolved worlds.
I forget the exact argument.
Jacobsen: Is this the Bostrom argument?
Rosner: I forget. But the world feels natural.
Jacobsen: You could apply a reality-simulation certainty dichotomy. Something like this as a principle. In our model, we have the possible states of existence as infinitely more than the states of non-existence.
In that sense, with the argument of simulation being an infinite possibility of those, you really cannot distinguish between those two. Either one of those is reasonable in an infinity context, potentially.
Rosner: That’s reasonable to me, at this time.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/26
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are scientific nihilism and its future?
Rick Rosner: Scientific nihilism will not survive the era of big information. People get this idea that the universe is a big clockwork, even though it cannot be with quantum mechanics. It is indeterminate.
That doesn’t disqualify the view that the universe plays out as a series of random processes. Everything is destined to go to shit. The expanding Big Bang universe will continue to expand until it is cold, dark, and mostly empty trillions of years into the future.
Everything, eventually, goes to shit. A lot of or several of those ideas aren’t true now. In that, entropy does not rule the entire universe; it, certainly, doesn’t rule planets with life orbiting stars. It applies to closed systems.
Open systems can shed waste heat and actually increase in order. We are the current end product of 4.5 billion years of increasing order in our solar system. I believe that a future scientifically based view will be that increasing order is built into the universe and that there are values associated with this.
If you look at ethical values, most of them or most ethical goods involve not destroying shit or preserving shit, whether preserving life or the quality of human life. The Golden Rule is treating people as you would wish to be treated and if you wish to have a good life.
Goodness in life is based on freedom from chaos to a large extent. Chaos being war and cataclysm and disease. You want to hold onto the good things in life. The holding on is preserving order.
Order is built into ethical values and vice versa. So, I believe that future systems of belief that incorporate science will increasingly incorporate ideas of increasing order rather than the half-assed belief in nothing mattering associated with scientific nihilism or that many people have in the back of their minds lazily with an acceptance of a scientific point of view.
You can also look at Feynman. He wrote this article or gave a speech 50 years ago. Where he talked about the three directions that science could go in, science could run into a wall and everything that could be discovered scientifically would be discovered scientifically but that it wouldn’t explain everything, or it would explain everything, or there is an unlimited stuff to discover with science and science would continue to make gains without ever reaching completion.
That has pertinence to what we can anticipate. It can be set as an analogy to future forms of beliefs, what we believe in the near future, which I believe will increasingly be the universe having scientific explanations with a bias for increasing order.
Jacobsen: Do you mean localized order?
Rosner: It is localized negentropy. But I also believe the universe has increasing order on average as a whole. That the universe is built from order. That all the matter and structures of the universe can only exist in the proliferation of particles that we have and in the precision with which those particles are defined in their interactions and positions in space, etc., etc.
That only happens because there is enough order in the universe to permit that. If you believe that ordered systems generally have a beginning point, a point at which the system did not exist and so had zero information; you have to believe, at some point, that the system going from the point to now must have had increasing order, whether synthetically in an artificial world built or in an evolved natural universe.
You have a universe that went from zero order to a shitload of order. I believe that future belief systems would incorporate the science and this idea in the future.
Jacobsen: How would this work in the near future with beliefs that imply a continued belief – sorry – in things like the Quran, things like the Bible, things like the Torah, and things like the Kitáb-i-Aqdas?
Rosner: In numerous of our conversations or interactions, I have mentioned this a gazillion times. That Reformed Jews do not even know what they believe. In Sunday School, I was taught Jesus was a great man, a great leader, who had great things to teach us. He just wasn’t the Son of God.
He was not the Messiah. We were still waiting for him. Increasingly but not exclusively, there will be people who embrace traditional religions in a non-religious way. They will embrace the ritual without buying the divine aspects to it.
It would normally require belief in it. But it will be hollowed out. There will continue to be people who are adherents to the major religions. But that there has already been a large hollowing out of belief.
There will be increasing hollowing out of religion. As I said, Reformed Jews do not even know what they are supposed to believe.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/25
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: This is about god or gods.
Rick Rosner: Or ways to believe in God.
Jacobsen: Then the ways of belief within this.
Rosner: You mentioned off-tape the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Jacobsen: Some of them aren’t meant necessarily to be mean in most aspects but as catharsis. Same with ex-Muslims who left fundamentalist Islam and lost their jobs, their family, their community, their faith, and may be restarted at 40 with a child after a rape, and so on. It is a catharsis.
Parody religions can be a catharsis.
Rosner: The mechanism could be the investigation of the arcana of a parody religion. It makes you realize some aspects of all religion are jokey and then feel catharsis about leaving it. It is social support.
Jacobsen: That’s the biggest thing.
Rosner: Growing up in Boulder, I encountered all sorts of culty religions. I did a job with people who felt as though they were involved with ‘higher dimensions’ through engagement with float tanks of a sort.
You could find a dozen or so beliefs that are not mainstream American beliefs, which is a different form of investment. You get support if you immerse yourself. In Scientology, that would be a tough religion to maintain.
Unless you had been doing it long enough to handle being out and about and exposed to critiques of Scientology by the greater culture. To be around Scientologists for 5, 6, or 10 hours per day, I remember being in college.
My first year, Church of Christ was big on my floor. They had activities for their people 6 days or nights a week. They wanted you constantly hit with the message and not hit with “why the hell are you doing that?”
I remember one girl. I came to my school during the second semester. I missed the whole soap opera of the first semester. I joined in the second semester. The whole floor was Church of Christ.
This guy was a cool guy, ex-football player. He got sucked into it. This girl liked him because he was still a studly guy. She followed him into Church of Christ. What was supposed to happen at Christmas break, you were supposed to tell them what town you lived in, what town you were going back to; they would make sure that you were hooked up to the Church of Christ in that town, so you’d continue to be hit with the message.
Somebody dropped the ball with the football guy. He went home for a month and wasn’t exposed to any Church of Christ. He was like, “What the hell? No Church of Christ for me. I am back to the Kavanaugh life of beer and babes.” He was blissfully free.
But the girl who went with him was stuck in there to be with him. She was stuck there. She was stuck in this oppressive and culty version of Christianity and was pissed because she didn’t get the guy that she liked.
Jacobsen: One thing, it is much harder, as this comes up, for women in those circumstances, because women tend to have less economic degrees of freedom. Not only in America, but it is also even exacerbated worse in more poverty-stricken areas, where men hold more of the cards.
That is an amusing case of being the case but also serious, then there are the ones that are more serious. It comes up in the secular community. Why so many men? Why so many white men? You can not the amount of dependence forced on women in those communities.
The socioeconomic traps for women, not simply “I didn’t get the guy and followed into the Church of Christ and got trapped.”
Rosner: Yes, the religions bend, you can find freedom in a culty religion if you’re willing to cynically gameplay. The televangelists who tell people that God wants them to have a private plane, so send them money.
Again, there was one guy on my floor. He was super-duper Church of Christ. He dressed in disco clothes a lot of the time. It was clothes that showed off his package. Gabardine pants that were 20% stretchy material that hugged his bottom half. Satin disco shirts too; the non-believers, we would ask him, “Why are you dressed like a disco king?”
He would say, “I want to look good for Jesus.” Ways of believing, you can immerse yourself in a boutique religion. You can believe with various degrees of commitment in a mainstream religion.
You can incidentally embrace the current scientism, vaguely believe science has all the answers and that the universe is a random process playing out – and nothing really matters: scientific nihilism.
Then there are a couple of ways that I believe. That I think people will increasingly believe in the future.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/24
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: As change accelerates, you have more of a push on the fear end and disorientation end. Then you have more old people surviving into their 70s, 80s, and 90s who need dumbed down media.
It seems ridiculous people who are not part of the demographic that 40% of America still supports Trump. But when you look at the pressures that create conservatives, those are durable.
It will take a long time, perhaps until 2030 or longer, to drive dumb, racist Trump-loving conservatives back out of public life; enough of them backing out of political life, that we begin to have a reasonable political culture again.
The next two years, will require investigations into Trump and into his Republican cronies for corruption and rigging the election, and all sorts of stuff. Mueller has already indicted dozens of people.
We are waiting on Mueller’s biggest indictments and the overall report on Trump and related issues. That will roll out over the next two years. That will be a daily negative attack ad on Trump backed up by the results of investigations.
This should serve to erode support for Trump, except that the people who support Trump will continue to get their information from media, led by Fox News, that will continue to spin the information in such a way that they will be skeptical of the next two years of revelations of exactly how evil Trump is.
Although, Fox News, Wikileaks, the National Inquirer, and other associated Twitter accounts have been going silent, which is making people speculate – or causing them to speculate that – Mueller has told them that they are about to be indicted for campaign law violations for several things.
So if you can put some kind of a leash on the untruthful propaganda coming out of rightwing media, the next two years may serve to be more erosive of Trump supporters. In 2020, there is a new census too.
It may be that we will see reduced Republican gerrymandering. But that is not a sure thing because Trump named two Supreme Court justices and one of them, Kavanaugh, is thoroughly a political hack.
He will consistently and corruptly – in many people’s minds including mine – rule in favor of Republicans. That’s it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/23
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the math behind reliable demographics?
Rick Rosner: The deal is, for the last 20 or 30 years, people have been saying that the Republican Party in America will collapse demographically. Because Republicans tend to be older and old people tend to get even older and age out and die.
They tend to eventually withdraw from political life, from voting and everything, either because they are too old or too dead to vote. Also, America gets less white, and people who aren’t white tend not to be Republicans.
Republicans have pushed them further and further into an extreme corner trying to hold onto their extreme voters, who tend to be old and white. Republicans tend to hold onto power in spite of demographic power by gaming the system.
In 2010, they gerrymandered the country, so that they, Republicans, could win; even though, they may be getting 5% fewer overall votes than Democrats. But at some point, you have to expect the Republican Party to demographically collapse.
People who are optimistic can look at 2018 as an opening salvo in the collapse. But maybe not, because the Republicans own the Supreme Court, which may allow them to get away with more rigging of elections.
Also, we can look at the creation of new Republicans. Younger people who are more altruistic and, perhaps, less motivated by money self-interest – and minorities – tend to demographically gravitate to the Democratic Party.
Republicans: let me postulate here, older people become conservative when they become afraid of change. Let’s say the impetus to become conservative is, at least, somewhat proportionate to the rate of change, the faster things change in culture and technology, then the more terrifying it is to people who no longer have the up-to-date skills and intelligence to embrace the change or the changes.
Once people begin to fall behind the curve of change, they look at ways to stop it. Increasingly, since the rise of Fox News, conservative media has gotten increasingly used to, and increasingly good at, exploiting the characteristics that go along with the fear of change, which is the loss of thinking ability.
People live longer now. It means that they have more years with old people brains that do not think as well, and conservative media has learned to dumb itself down to be attractive to older and dumber people.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/22
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: In an earlier time, when I was a kid in the 1970s, I had been bullied and ridiculed a lot. In 9th grade, I punched 6 classmates. I did not get into trouble. But that was a different time.
Any punch you do of people (not drywall) should be before you are legally an adult. Unless you have been punched first, you probably don’t want to punch someone, because you can be sued, especially in America.
If you are going to punch somebody in the head, I recommend the cheek. The side of the face, say between the cheek and the jawbone, where you give them a message; that they have been punched in the face.
If you hit square on with the greatest surface area, you probably won’t break a knuckle or damage them too bad. Then you won’t leave a mark. If you leave more of a mark, then that’s bad, because it is more evidence of punching them.
You can punch them in the soft areas, like the gut or even in the groin, which won’t leave a mark and is helpful when you’re denying when you did it later. You don’t want to hit them in the mouth.
Drunk people get in fights and punch people in the mouth. It is filthy. There is a chance that their teeth will puncture your hand. If drunk, a) you may not remember. You may awaken and have a swollen hand.
Your hand is swollen because it is superinfected. The teeth break the skin, I have known people who actually walked away with a tooth stuck in their hand without realizing it until later.
Teeth are filthy. If you relax your hand, your hand has been injected with all sorts of mouth bacteria. As you relax your hand, you pull the tendons back further up your arm that has been made filthy from the teeth.
Then you go back to sleep and forget when you wake up, you have a horribly infected hand. You can go online and read the medical journals about this. Also, if you are going to be punching stuff and be effective, you want to study punch mechanics.
It is punching effectively – not punching strategy if you study boxing – that is about transmitting force through your fist. Those aren’t very effective because your fist and lower arm do not weigh that much.
And the person you’re a person can see it coming if you are punching people against my advice. Instead, you want to punch straight out, so by the time the punch lands; you’re pushing with your whole arm out through your arm.
You have also rotated your upper body, so you’re leaning into the punch. So, you’re transmitting not just the weight of your fist and arm but, to some extent, some of the force and inertia of your upper body.
So, by the time the punch lands, your arm should be almost straight and your left shoulder – if you’re punching with your left hand – should be rotated towards the thing that you’re punching to rotate and provide a strong base, the base of your body, to add force to your punch.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/21
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: The drywall in our house was built in 1966. It’s 5/8ths of an inch thick. I think more recent drywall is half of an inch thick. You will easily punch through 5/8ths drywall.
In even older houses, you have plaster in half. You have vertical studs and then horizontal strips of wood to hold this mortar; that is probably 58/ths. Over the mortar, you have several layers of plaster that have been trowelled on.
You will not punch through that unless you’re a superhero. There’s that. If you are going to punch through stuff, then you want to punch through the greatest surface area of your knuckles.
If you make a fist and then look at your fist, you’ve got your first knuckle. The knuckles furthest up on your arm, right where your fingers start. If you look at those knuckles, and then the inch and a half or the two-inch lower half of your fingers when you make a fist, when you punch something, you want to make sure it’s with the whole lower half of your fingers.
It should all make contact with whatever you’re punching, so that the force is transmitted to what you’re punching but it is transmitted across seven square inches. If you hit something off, so that only one or two knuckles make contact, that’s no good. You might break a knuckle.
The way to transmit force with your fist is across the greatest surface area of your fist. Otherwise, you break your hand. Boxing gloves are not to protect the head of the person punched but the knuckles of the person punching because your head is less fragile than your knuckles.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/20
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the physics of punching [Laughing]?
Rick Rosner: For someone who is somewhat of a wuss, such as myself, I have done a lot of punching in my life. I have punched a fair amount. I was a doorman in bars for 25 years. I got punched – I don’t know, maybe – a dozen times.
I would usually forget to punch back. I never punched anyone in a bar. I worked in one chain of bars if you punched a customer. But you got $25 if you took a punch. I used to punch myself in the face to toughen up.
In the gym, I used to work with the big rubber guys for practice. That you’re supposed to beat up. I punched a lot of walls. This past week, I punched two walls because I got pissed off. Yet, having punched a lot of walls, I never punched through it.
In movies, you always see people punch through drywall. The angry husband or dad punches next to the wife’s head and then punches through the drywall. I have punched a lot of walls and never even dented drywall.
We should talk about the physics of that. For one thing, most walls have a stud, at most every 16 inches. A vertical piece of wood holding the wall together every 1 foot and 4 inches. So, if you punch and happen to be over or near a stud, the wall will not move or break.
Your fist is, maybe, 3 or 4 inches wide. There is only a sweet spot of around 3 or 4 inches between studs where you might get enough flex in the drywall to crack it, and break through.
But that three and a half or 4 inches gives you less than a 25% chance of hitting the sweet spot. Also, it is harder to punch through drywall than you think.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/19
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The right and the left have valid arguments here. They tend to argue two points here. Conservatives argue fatherlessness. Liberals argue patriarchal structures in society. Both make sense.
If you look at the prison population, the ISIS population, and others, they are fatherless very often, including the women. The structures around the society. They encourage the idea that women are objects or their form, in general, is something that men can own.
If you look at the African-American community in rap videos, often, it is not necessarily the best representation of women is not being objectified. School shootings tend to be mostly white boys.
Rick Rosner: This argues against privacy and for algorithms to spot potential shooters. Because what comes up after a shooting is that there were all sorts of tells, in the case of the Parkland shooter, that guy had been turned into the cops dozens of times for being a psycho and various people had dropped the ball.
There was the guy who’s dad gave him guns back and then he went on a rampage. The cops came and took the guns. They made the dad promise not to give the kid guns. Then the dad gives the guns back, and then the kid shoots up a place.
I just argue; there are all these influences in populations in general. It is a tiny minority who become shooters.
Jacobsen: But if you look at the media, it is women as objects.
Rosner: Like today, DJ Khaled is all over Twitter being made fun of, because he is saying that he is the king of the house because he gets blown but does not go down on his wife. This is one of the biggest rap producers being an idiot.
Most people are able to look at this for what it is, which is braggy nonsense. Rap, no matter how misogynistic some of it might be, does not cause most people who listen to it to commit rape or homicide.
Yes, you can exert pressure to make rap less misogynistic. But in terms of minimizing the number of shooters, we should probably develop things. We have this sinister algorithmic stuff like Cambridge Analytica, used to figure out who is voting for whom and how to change minds and stir trouble.
You can use the technology is a similar way, to monitor people’s web presence to pinpoint people who need to be looked in on – to see if they are building an arsenal in their bedroom.
Every time a person shoots up a motherfucking place. The reporters do the post-disaster research and find out that the person had been turned into a cop a gazillion times and the neighbors were afraid of the guy.
None of this made it to the point of definite turning in. Maybe, we need an agency. If there were a branch of some law enforcement agency, I don’t know. If it was devoted to promoting the finding of pre-crime, it is like Minority Report.
Jacobsen: How will this not infringe on fundamental rights of people? In China, they have mood chips in the caps of some workers in order to know when they need a break, when they need to keep working, and when, potentially, to demote or promote them.
Rosner: My answer is I don’t know how you do it. If you tasked people, like a segment of the FBI, to figure out what you could do, and how it couldn’t infringe, and if it infringes then it wouldn’t piss everybody off, every time a person shoots up a place; we find evidence of them being a psycho beforehand.
Is there any way to get at this information beforehand and take action beforehand? It may not work before. If you find reports of people, and if they come in, then you can monitor them if they become an active shooter or not – as they are likely to do it.
Like those cops who examine this kid, who show a kid as a disturbed person, the cops give the guns to the dad. But if that agency had been instructed properly, or trained properly, maybe, they would not have believed the dad’s bullshit to not give the kid guns.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/18
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: Obviously, you know about Incels.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Right, I didn’t know about them until the attacks in Canada.
Rosner: I didn’t either. It means a creepy guy who can’t get laid.
Jacobsen: Or a resentful guy who can’t get laid, it could be the nice guy but turned bad.
Rosner: Yes, it is all rolled into a creepy guy. Once they call themselves an incel, it is bad. When guys are faced with not being able to get a girlfriend, there are several reactions that they can have, “Maybe, someday, I am only 15 or 18. Most people eventually find partners.”
Another reaction that I had starting too early. I didn’t do anything about it. It didn’t work for me, for a long time, “What can I do to make myself more worthy of getting a girlfriend?”
Jacobsen: At the same time, it puts women on a pedestal and can be unhealthy too. It can be a barrier because it is a turnoff.
Rosner: You have to be reasonable about it. But you cannot be reasonable until you have educated yourself.
Jacobsen: If a guy or gal are looking for a long-term relationship, men need to know that, in general, financial stability is the most important, according to surveys.
Rosner: I started in high school. They are not looking for financial stability. You can be patient. You can address it by trying to improve yourself and trying to learn more about social relations or, the third thing, simply guys getting hostile and predatory.
They get really mad. They feel entitled to sex.
Jacobsen: You can see demographic trends. If you look at mass school shootings, 92 of the 94 in a decade and a half long period in the United States were men. Most were aged 17. 2 weren’t.
The most probable group are young men aged 17 who are white by a race or Caucasian by ethnicity. This may come out of the Incel community. Even though, if you take into account that there are more white males than other males in North America, the majority of them will be white males, still.
Rosner: I agree with that to some extent. But a bunch of guys may gravitate to simply wanting a killing spree, wanting to do this thing. A lot of them find an issue to justify the killing spree.
The Incel thing can be one of those things. You can go with ISIS, the Incel thing, or being screwed over at work. But it is a chicken and egg thing. Which came first? The ISIS affiliation, the Incel thinking, the being pissed off at your boss, I would say in some cases that the urge to kill a lot of people – as a cool way to go out – came first.
Jacobsen: I suspect the Incel community is minor and still reflective of a larger phenomenon. If you look at the Kurdish community, one ravaged by war. In many stories, these can be people who have gone through a trauma but react in the manner of building culture rather than being reactionary.
It was pointed out to me. That rape as a tool of war remains prominent. The boys and men are killed off. The girls and women are raped. It is the state and the soldiers feeling as if they own the female form or women and girls.
Incel communities reflect this. They feel entitled to sex with people simply for their existing.
Rosner: They reflect attitudes but are a small example of what can happen.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/17
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, it is an extrapolation to 2100. China will lose about 33% of the current 1.5 billion population. India will continue to grow but taper off as development happens, life gets better, and life gets more precious, and so on.
Rick Rosner: Yes, it is the curve. As people experience less mortality, they have fewer kids.
Jacobsen: One is the empowerment of women. It is a catch-all of women having more say in their lives.
Rosner: In brutal terms, India is still a super rapey country. It will address a lot of women’s empowerment issues.
Jacobsen: In Nigeria, they have, like most African countries, more births per woman, more deaths per woman, and so on. It is more infant deaths and maternal deaths.
Rosner: You can probably expect more technological access for Africa now with Wakanda.
Jacobsen: With Wakanda, it may act as a release valve for refugees in Africa from war-torn areas.
Actually, I did two interviews with two atheists who stopped believing in Burundi. It was having political strife. They fled to Nigeria or Kenya. I got their stories. They stopped believing in their faith.
Rosner: If African as a continent gets its shit together, it can be a huge amount of human capital.
Jacobsen: One aspect is recovering from colonialism. Another is stopping focusing on grievance politics about colonialism. It is valid to get some form of acknowledgment and boost post-colonial context from the globe and forgiveness from the other country.
But a grievance politics about the past will not allow, in the long term, countries to move forward. I hear both arguments and see validity in each.
Rosner: A positive erosive trend is the accessibility of technology, so people who are sufficiently motivated and intrepid and ingenious can reap benefits from worldwide technology – even when their country is going batshit.
I think that will continue to be a trend. It will be an eroding of nationalism as the more talented people sidestep their local politics or national politics to engage in worldwide thought commerce.
Jacobsen: Most tech-savvy people tend to be internationalists.
Rosner: You do not even need to be an internationalist. It is finding talented people wherever they are. If your country is a mess, then you’re looking outside of your country.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/16
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why is China eating our – Americans’ – lunch? What is the anecdote?
Rick Rosner: I bought on eBay Minoxidil, which is this stuff that I use to try and keep my hair. For 99.6% less than I used to pay for it, it is super cheap. When it first came out, it was by prescription in the 80s.
Now, I just paid less than 67 cents per bottle of 5% solution. That’s just crazy. This is with shipping included. It is because you can buy a drum of the stuff, of the powder in China. It may show in a 45- or 55-gallon drum and then you can sell it.
The per unit cost per bottle may be 20 cents per bottle. One time, I spilled some on a tablecloth and mashed the tablecloth on me, the Minoxidil, because that stuff was precious back in the day.
Now, it is cheap. The deal is, if you can find what you need from China, you will pay 90% less than what you would otherwise. It is not good news. It is good news for a while for consumers. But it is not good for us in the longer term.
Because it means that we will get our asses kicked by a combination of human capital and high technology, and dedication to progress. Also, it is a low wage environment over there.
As I have said before, it is the worst possible time to have America governed by a bunch of morons. If you let America do what America has done for more than a century, America will do okay and will possibly do great.
But if you have a political party that cynically tries to strip America of what makes us legitimately great, we will get crushed by what you called the big three, where there is a big four with America. You mentioned Nigeria.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/15
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is this thought about the limited visions of the future?
Rick Rosner: Given the limited capacity to imagine the future, a more idealized version would not include the 1960s ones with the world inhabited by dystopian advanced intelligence, exemplified by the Harlan Ellison story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, where a supercomputer has taken over the world, hates humans, imprisons their consciousnesses, and just tortures their consciousnesses for all eternity, 24/7.
Jacobsen: Also, knowledge is not produced in a vacuum. Stories are not produced in a vacuum. Same when talking about consciousness being tortured. There is a zeitgeist. You gave this example months ago. In the early Industrial Era, the lungs were bellows and the heart was a pump.
Rosner: They looked for mechanical descriptions. That’s true. When people thought about duplicating humans, they had a much more mechanical mental image of what that duplication would look like.
Jacobsen: They had the basic idea. Biology is technology. It’s just not the technology we’re used to. For instance, if you take the recent Ridley Scott piece, which has been praised or lambasted, the Prometheus and Alien: Covenant dual prequels to the Aliens series, he is not a creationist but more of aliens came down and engineered.
Rosner: Yes, I always got pissed that the Aliens series had the good first and second ones and then they went to where I didn’t want them to go. I wanted them to go to the planets where they made the acid-blood creatures because those people feel as if they are engineered creatures. They were engineered to fight wars for people.
Jacobsen: He viewed the Juggernaut ship as a battle chariot. So, you had the right idea.
Rosner: You never get to see the fully developed civilization because that would be too expensive and take too much hardcore imagination.
Jacobsen: Also, Giger is dead, which makes the job harder.
Rosner: You would have to go beyond Geiger anyway because he was good at imagining good penetrative, sexual aliens.
Jacobsen: Right, the biomechanical Freudian nightmares.
Rosner: You can imagine future mechanical humans into dry robots and wet robots when people of 1 and 2 hundred years ago imagined replacing the human body. They imagined clockwork robots made out of hard mechanical stuff.
So, you have dry and hard robots. Then when we imagine replacements for our physical bodies, we imagine the Ridley Scott deals that are wet and soft. You cut open an android in Ridley Scott movies.
They are filled with white goo, as their circulatory fluid. They soft and messy, are as gushy and messy as any human. That is a different model. That we will harness biology to build replacement organs that work because they are close to the organs that we have in their soft-squishy organicness.
Jacobsen: With that series, the metaphor that he builds with the main feature with the black goo is that it is a form of AI. What is the main fear of modern culture? What is the big thing coming around the horizon more and more?
It’s AI. It is the metaphor of the time. 10 or 20 years ago, or even further in fact, but coming into the mainstream, we had the idea of the brain as a big mainframe computer that is super efficient and gushy.
A three-pound mass that is sticky like hot, wet oatmeal.
Rosner: But replicateable via hard electronics.
Jacobsen: Massive serial processing in particular.
Rosner: Now, we are getting to the models like the way we think the brain actually does work. The feelers reach out and try to make a connection. For those that work, they stay, but the ones that don’t then die away.
The general cell count stays the same but the linkages change.
Jacobsen: When people talk like that, they talk in the manner of popular neuroscience. When I visualize this, it is not simply dendritic or axonal feelers. It is really an increase in gap junctions. Because it is the axonal-dendritic connections and the gap in between.
That is the important part.
Rosner: Okay, if a dendrite can reach out and go, “Hey,” and then get a connection, is that what happens?
Jacobsen: Axons are the main feelers. Dendrites as the input. Soma or cell body as the main cell part. Axons as the outputs. That’s where they get the computer model of it from, the 1,000-10,000 connections.
But they don’t physically touch similar to early physics when atoms do not talk.
Rosner: Right, it is air molecules, so you never touch things. If you break a cracker or a vase on the moon, you can put it back together with bonds, at least according to what I’ve read, as strong as those before you broke the thing.
Because air does not coat the surface and then the surfaces are free to come back together and bond together with a lot of the original bonds reforming because air just cats everything and makes for crap bonds.
That’s why superglue works. It gets in between two gaps and absorbs the excess air. Air is the crappiest glue. It makes almost nothing stick together. It incorporates the air into something sticky, and then you can get the nice bond.
Jacobsen: The gap junction is an empty space from which to spit out neurotransmitters across.
Rosner: To use an old model, it is a transistor gate kind of.
Jacobsen: The metaphor reflects that, of the time.
Rosner: We are in the beginning to see things. I think information processing will dominate the next few centuries. I think we are seeing the beginning of our information-processing metaphors.
I think it is the right framework via which to view the near future and much of the present.
Jacobsen: One add-on, the future is not predetermined. We don’t know. There are a bunch of competing ones. Just the humanistic one, there is a certain flattening of everything trying to bring everyone to the same level.
There are the authoritarian ones. Where it is highly hierarchical, we see this in authoritarianism of various forms.
Rosner: The gross trends of the future are pretty hard to avoid, which is that the future will be dominated by increasingly powerful information processing. With the powerful information processors not being unaugmented humans, the major players – the types of future players – will not be too varied.
There will not be that much variation in the types of major players. I agree with you. What will be less determined is what will happen to the formerly dominant groups, is it a nice human future or a future that discards us?
I think the general thrust of civilization is probably unavoidable. But the specifics of how nice that civilization is, is up for grabs.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/14
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the wave of new shows?
Rick Rosner: There explicitly state that their characters are terrible. They are the worst. There are shows, like sitcoms generally, are explicitly presented as huge assholes. We are supposed to be entertained and have learned how horrible these people are.
These people are presented as problems for themselves and others. It is explicitly stated that these people, these products of America, are awful and then we are supposed to be entertained by their awfulness.
There is a sub-text that, maybe, we should not be as awful as this. Seinfeld was one of the first shows to wallow. The idea is no one learns any lessons because it was a terrible sitcom troupe.
Most of the decades of sitcom are that people are generally good, goodness will prevail, and then people will learn their lessons. There is a backlash against this. It is seen as cloying and done lazily. Most sitcoms from the 60s through the 90s were lazy.
So, anyway, the degradation of culture was able to help. The end for this one.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/13
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What are the old ways people believed in gods, and, to some extent, still believe in gods?
Rick Rosner: In the old days, which is Greece and Rome and before that, you had people without a lot of science and technology but who had sufficient technology and civilization for them to consider bigger questions of existence.
When people barely had language or had no language out on the Savannah 100,000 years ago or 150,000 years ago, any belief in gods would have been shared without anyone else and would have been a vague sense of rightness or wonder.
A person without language could see a tree with a different color that they’d never seen before, like a Jacaranda or a Bougainvillea. I don’t know if they had that out on the African Savannah.
Something with a shocking color and still have a sense or feeling of beauty. Or they could bring down a large animal in a hunt. They could still be favored by existence. There might be feelings of their in godness.
That the world has provided for them or has given them a special visual treat or something. But really, then, you get the cave painting gods. Some speculate some of the cave paintings were meant to be in homage or a figurative sacrifice to God.
You’re saying, “Hey!” But we don’t know; the cave painting people didn’t leave too many clues behind. People like to say that you can get clues about how people felt about the afterlife and, therefore, God by their burial practices.
The things a living person would need put in the graves. So, fine, but we don’t have a lot of information, you can then get to the civilizations that everyone is forced to study. The Greeks, the Roman, the Etruscans, and so on, the people from 10,000 years ago up to 2,000 years ago.
Those people didn’t have a lot of science and technology. But they had enough that they could live in towns and cities, and their lives were stable enough that they could – and they hand language – start thinking about questions beyond day-to-day existence in a more systematic way.
They developed extensive sets of gods to account for everything they couldn’t account for given their level of knowledge about the world. The idea of gods intervening on a daily basis and fighting with each other via humans.
Gods coming downing and humping humans to make demigods. Their gods were active because they needed to do a lot. Their world was largely unexplained. Then the gods get consolidated under the big current religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.
I don’t know exactly what the push is, but religions with a bunch of gods were superseded with religions having, usually, one god. As the world becomes clearer, perhaps, it becomes more efficient to group all divine powers under a single deity.
There is a thing going on with the late Roman Empire. I doubt that most citizens of the Empire believed in the full pantheon of gods. Religion got hollowed out. People paid a lot of lip service to Roman religion.
But a lot of people probably didn’t believe in the whole thing. Maybe, the new religions with the single gods were easier to earnestly believe in, because you didn’t have a frickin’ clown car of gods.
Maybe, it was easier to bring back sincere belief. You have, from the time of Christ up through now, these big religions and with many people sincerely believing that the information in the religion was provided through special spokespeople directly from the deities.
Moses gets the tablets. Jesus’s disciplines get the Word and write down stuff. It comes directly from divine beings. It is similar to the kings of Europe. That system of kingdoms stood for many years on the idea that kings were kind of anointed by God or somehow had the power via God to rule over everybody.
As with all these beliefs, it is probably a combination of sincere beliefs and not having the time/gumption to question the beliefs. Then a big chunk of people who think, “Yes, it is bullshit.” But it is a continuum.
You have people actively questioning it. But you don’t have a lot enough of that. Because there is no overthrow until the Rennaissance. Then you have full and complete belief in gods and kings.
Then you have degrees of laziness, cynicism, and dealing with the tasks of life, and not having the time or the curiosity to really question stuff. Plus, there’s still not enough information to definitively overrule these beliefs.
Who will you believe? The person who says the Earth goes around the Sun, or a religion that took 300 years to put up a cathedral with a 250-foot tower, and whose representatives dominate every aspect of life.
Those are the flavors that you get from the Rennaissance until now. Where 400 years ago, people start noticing that systematically applying analytic skills to technical problems leads to good results.
You can make machines to do jobs for you. You can make trains and ships. You can find math that accurately represents physical processes like gravity. Then increasingly, you get what you’ve told me to call the God of the Gaps.
That as the world continues to fill with scientific and technical knowledge. If people want to continue to believe in God, their belief will be strongest in where science hasn’t yet extended.
For instance, the mind and consciousness, even today, there are more people probably believing in the special divinity of the mind than in the special divinity of any other things. Because it is the last big area that has not been adequately explained, except the entire universe has been explained by Big Bang theory.
Today, you have several predominant flavors. You have the entirely scientific people, who may or may not be that scientifically literate or not.
But a science-oriented person or believing person will believe there is no divinity in the universe – and it is all random processes. And if there are some things that science cannot explain now, there are things that science can explain later.
There is a slightly more sophisticated version of that expressed by Richard Feynman. Even if science is never able to completely explain everything, even the things that we can explain through science, they have a scientific basis.
But it is too tricky and complicated for us to explain it. That’s science as default. That everything has a scientific explanation, regardless of when if ever scientists come up with an explanation.
Then there’s “meh” science. People think, “Probably science, but I don’t care, I’m busy.” That flavor of belief has probably run through humanity for all of history. People who don’t give a shit and have a casual acceptance.
They will not strongly examine the prominent beliefs of their society. They are spending too much time on other things like investing, getting laid, and so on.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/12
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What was the book that you were reading? Did you finish it?
Rick Rosner: I may have mentioned this in another session. I finished reading Homo Deus. It basically meshes with something else that we were talking about, which is the types of gods that you can believe in.
A lot of this was without research, so a lot was taken out of my butt. This guy did a 400-page treatment of the history of belief and then speculated about the future. He argued each god represents humans’ position at some point in history and prehistory.
The idea of finding the divine in everything. Pantheism makes sense when humans are primitive and have not developed civilization yet, when they are out there and struggling to survive amongst every other species.
So, things are on more of an equal footing, so you find the divinity in everything including the animals that you are hunting. The next step is monotheistic religions where God has created Man in God’s image.
Now, Man is on an elevated position of dominion over the rest of nature. It is consistent with the newly formed agricultural civilization and the formation of towns. You go to town and farm dwellers.
At this point, humans have a pretty good control over nature. They can raise their own animals and crops. The author argues that it would feel like shit if you had to continue to consider every other species divine.
Because these are now animals that you’re raising for slaughter. For everyone’s peace of mind, animals lost their divinity. Once you get the Rennaissance, you get humanism, which the author posits as the worship of humans with the increasing knowledge of the world and doing stuff with that knowledge.
The author argues that the final belief system for humans – which will lead to the end of unaugmented humans – is data-ism or worship of information and information-processing, which he says we are starting now.
I agree with him. It will be this way for the next many centuries. It will be more and more about information processing, which will dominate the world. Where he gets it wrong, I think is right at the end.
He thinks that consciousness is a) no big deal and b) characteristic of humans and animals but not of AI or, at least, a helpful characterization of AI. He argues AI will get increasingly powerful and render humans irrelevant.
I don’t disagree with it. It is similar to horses. He argues horses are amazing creatures capable of a bunch of stuff. But nobody uses horses on a daily basis. Nobody uses horses as a part of daily activities in the cities anymore, because we have invented better ways of transporting us than horses.
He says AI, as it takes over, will have less and less use for us and for consciousness. I think this is where he goes wrong. Because I think consciousness is an unavoidable characteristic of high powered information processing.
When you have a whole panoply of AIs, some of which are simpler and do not have sophisticated consciousness, and then sophisticated AIs with consciousness, and AI-human hybrids, you have these consciousnesses and not quite consciousnesses acting on each other.
He does not think consciousness will be a part of high-powered information processing of the future. He thinks high-powered AI will simply not value human consciousness at all. He thinks they will look at humans the way humans look at horses.
Interesting and fun, and capable of a lot of stuff, but not really involved in the main work of society, he says consciousness will go by the wayside. Future AI will not value humans and their consciousness at all.
When he goes wrong by discounting consciousness as part of information-processing, he reaches the wrong conclusions, I believe. I think it lead me to a more reasonable conclusion, at least step in history.
Where there will be a bunch of different consciousnesses 100-200 years from now, he argues AI will not give a shit about consciousness at all. There will not be any moral judgments by AI.
It may be nice and let unaugmented humans go on about their existences without giving much of a shit about us. But in a world that has a whole bunch of consciousnesses because it has a whole bunch of different powerful information-processing systems that combine and bud off with each other, those moral judgments will be more central to civilization in 50-200 years from now.
The only way, I think, that consciousness will be addressed – that the issues of which consciousnesses get respect and don’t – is to develop a technology where everyone’s consciousness gets preserved.
Everyone who wants it, get it. Because it will be increasingly cheap to create and preserve consciousness. We will have a mathematical understanding of how consciousness works. We will be able to replicate it.
There will be commerce in consciousness. There will be an economics of consciousness. There will be a system that acts to preserve consciousness because it will be helpful in many contexts.
In the context in which it isn’t particularly helpful to the dominant means of the time, it will be so cheap to preserve anyway. That the powerful entities in charge will simply go ahead and preserve it.
It is consistent with the idea I had for not quite a science fiction story but for the background of a story. In the woke future, all animals with consciousness have been infected with more sophisticated consciousness than they previously had.
Everything has gotten smarter. Bears, deer, rabbits, and so on, are smarter. Everything has a worldview. A picture of the world that is the best that they can have given the size of their brains.
It is the kingdom. It is the animal kingdom, where animals can communicate with each other in ways that we communicate with each other. Animals have a vaguely, roughly human equivalent human understanding of the world, where they had zero understanding of the overall nature of the world before.
Because they never had the brains to develop a science and a language to develop a complete picture of the world. Here, animals are abridged versions of humans. They still have to function in nature as animals.
But the covenant set up amongst all animals is that if an animal is going to kill another animal then the killing animal has to absorb the consciousness of the animal it kills. It is the only fair thing to do.
The animals who do not exercise this courtesy are considered assholes. if a coyote is going to take out a rabbit, the coyote that takes out the rabbit will take in the rabbit’s feelings and awareness.
This way the rabbit has an afterlife of a sort in the coyote that killed it. I kind of see that existence being the way in which the blob will work in the future. The worldwide thought blob.
Consciousnesses will be absorbed and combined, and everybody will be reasonably happy because they will have a certain kind of immortality where their thoughts and experiences remain relatively preserved – even as you get absorbed into the blob.
There will be a bunch of commerce in consciousness. Both as the driver of future civilization and to provide solace for the participants in that civilization. It is part of the deal of future civilization.
You don’t get fucked over consciousness-wise. You don’t get thrown away. Unless, you’re okay with getting thrown away.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/11
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Is God a mathematician?
Rick Rosner: As an analogy about the weird things that may arise in our future understanding of existence, think of the number line, it is the 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, 11 apples, 14 apples, and so on.
Every 4-year-old can count to 10. It is the simplest kind of math. But as mathematicians poked more at mathematical structures, they found more and more weird stuff. The Complex Numbers, the square root of negative numbers, the different magnitudes of infinity, the countable infinities that are Rational Numbers, uncountable infinities that are Real Numbers.
I bet if you looked into it; there are probably 50 or 100 different numbering systems that mathematicians have uncovered. You have fractals. You have Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. It says a bunch of stuff. It says that there are true statements that can never be proven to be true.
The mathematical system that gives us the counting numbers can never be proven to be consistent. There are all these trap doors and crazy surprise, even lurking behind the most conservative parts of mathematics.
I am saying, similarly, there will probably be explosive surprises lurking behind our existences and the existence of the universe. That given that we’re generally wrong whatever we believed to a certain point, where what we believed is overthrown by what we believed in the future.
Nothing can be ruled out, except, perhaps, the things that we have believed historically. Like I said, we’re never going to arrive at a conclusion that the universe is really run by Roman gods. But it is not unreasonable to think that, at some point, some point 100-200 years from now; the paths of exploration and knowledge will conclude that there are entities in the world that have the powers that we once associated with once-debunked gods.
It is not that the old-school gods will be brought back. It is that some of the ideas of omniscience or omnipotence – some aspect of godhood – can be found to be embodied in the principles of existence.
It seems ridiculous and antiscientific. But we just don’t know what the future will hold. I can imagine a future where everything has a scientific basis. Almost every material manifestation of the world and every phenomenon in the world has a scientific explanation.
But if you keep poking the logic as to why science is effective in the world, if you dig deep enough, it may show surprises or paradoxes that allow for the idea of things we thought that we were beyond, including the ideas of God.
I think it was Einstein who said one of the most amazing things about the world – not a direct quote – is the way in which mathematics is so crazily good at describing the world. It may be that as we try to figure out why that is the case.
If we poke deep and long enough, it may lead us back to areas of belief that we thought we were done with.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/10
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is this God proof you’ve been thinking about for the last little bit?
Rick Rosner: It is a super sloppy and unrigorous proof that some time in the future. We will discover an omniscient and/or omnipotent God or gods. The crux or spine of the proof is that we’ve been wrong every single time in history.
Initially, the Greeks and Romans had a bunch of gods. Then the major religions that replaced them – Christianity and Islam – tended towards singular or solo gods. One big God in the universe.
Scientific-based or science-based versions of the world replaced those gods. For the past 200, 300, or 400 years, we have had an increasing belief in scientific and naturalistic explanations for everything.
It goes against the previous 10,000-year of belief. The proof that we’re going to be wrong in our scientific beliefs is that we’ve been wrong about everything leading up to those beliefs.
Even if you grant science being the true version of things, that has only been 4% of the last 10,000 years. So, we have been way wrong 90%+ of the time. It is a strong argument that as time goes on and we learn more about the universe; the odds that there is a purely cold and random universe explanation for everything.
The odds that that viewpoint will stand without being corrected by later discoveries and insights are pretty low. If we drew a quadrant or a grid with the various general types of belief in gods, atheism, agnosticism, monotheism, polytheism, and all the different degrees of belief and flavors of belief and non-belief, the idea that any part of that grid is off-limits to justified beliefs in the future might be wrong because we’ve been so wrong in the past.
You and I could imagine a semi-naturalistic world with a bias towards increasing information, which has room for plenty of god-like entities but none of which are the ultimate creators of anything and none of which is omnipotent.
Even if that becomes substantiated, I do not think that is reasonable to think that that is the endpoint. I think our understanding of things will keep expanding over time and become more rooted in or based on what we discover about the universe and the logic behind the universe: the rules of existence behind the universe.
There are plenty of places in that logic – that future logic – where crazy surprises can lurk. Those surprises have an almost statistical tendency to overthrow previous beliefs. I am thinking that there is a non-zero chance in the future that we will end up believing in god-like things that would be shocking to the scientific thought of today, but wouldn’t align with the old forms of gods either.
It is not like there will be science and logic pursued into the future and then ending up with the Roman gods, and then end up with a form of old-school polytheism. But we may find hidden in the structures of logic and the structure of the universe that there is room for crazy twists in the belief about the nature of existence and what is behind it.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/09
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the split between forms of information processing at a large-scale, potentially?
Rick Rosner: I haven’t done that much thinking about it. Hawking suggests that the surfaces of the event horizons of black holes are holographic and contain a bunch of information.
It is 3-dimensional with the consequence of being shrunk down to a 2-dimensional surface. I do not know the math of it. But I know what I read from articles. I can conceive of something like this.
The information from the events that transpire in the center of the universe basically get plastered up against the rest of the universe given enough billions of years. It can be seen as a painting over of the rest of the universe.
It is not that the clusters of matter aren’t maybe the sole repositories, specific bits of information, but there is a sequential painting over by receiving radiation somehow encodes the history of the universe on the rest of the universe.
That still leaves the problem about how you get specifics out of everything. Even if there is no place in the universe that contains the logical associations and instructions around the concept of “orange,” you are still able to pull out of the whole mess the notion of orange within a series of associated and specific things.
You are able to think about those things, not in their original context. You can think about them in a new context. It means that we’re not that far in thinking about how the information is encoded, retrieved, and manipulated.
I hate the idea of holography. It is one of those things that people default to because they do not know the math of it, and it seems mysterious. But it probably can’t be discarded as a context or an analogy to think of.
Then that leaves the further question, “If it is all holograms, how do the clusters function here? Is everything some mix between holography and specificity?” It would make sense in terms of how the brain is structured.
In that, we know from experiments that you can poke into various parts of the brain and get very specific reactions in terms of what is being thought about. This book, the researchers found that there are specific neurons that light up when you think of specific people.
The two people he gave were Bill Clinton and Homer Simpson. That is a site-specific associated with very specific entities. At the same time, there are still arguments for distributive storing of information.
Those two things may not be mutually exclusive. Maybe, you do have a neuron that specializes in, among other things, Bill Clinton. But it is linked to thousands of other neurons.
That massive connectedness may be some distributive scheme that does pop out specific information at specific locations but, somehow, it is able to do it via something that is informationally smeared out.
It might be more efficient to have smeary storage of information that is still able to pop out of specific nodes. Still, I don’t know how that works. I would guess that there are information advantages. I would guess this is both for holographic and distributive storage.
I guess the universe is set up to or structured in a way to maximize those efficiencies. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. It is simply hand-wavey.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/08
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What happens if the science fiction future does not become future science?
Rick Rosner: What you’re talking about harkens back to Feynman’s three scientific futures, one where science grinds to a halt because the things in the world that can be understood by science are limited.
There are things that science can’t understand because science can’t decipher it. Then there is science understands everything. There is a limited number of things to understand and science is able to understand all of it.
There thre is the future where science keeps plugging along because there is a limited number of things to understand and science keeps chugging along and making new discoveries using increasingly powerful techniques.
With regards to the actual future and the science fiction future, there are some things that are probably absolutely impossible like time travel and FTL travel. But those are simulatable via information processing.
About anything that can emerge in a science fiction way via increasingly powerful and sophisticated and power information processing will come to pass, all of this will have some suckiness due to us being able to imagine things being better than they are.
There will be increased expectations due to market forces, where there is not enough profit in making stuff perfect and completely non-sucky, and the compromises of time and money.
People, or what people turn into, will have to do what they have always done, which is build their best world based on what is available to them. Netflix presented to me in 1980. I remember how awesome it was when I first saw HBO, in 1980.
You could see a whole movie and not a shitty movie from 20 years ago. But a whole movie that had been in the theatres 18 months ago and boobs on TV. That was so fucking fantastic.
I quickly learned that it wasn’t that fantastic. But imagine giving Netflix to me in 1980. It would be awesome. You learn about Netflix. You learn that if you do some really hard binging for 2/3/4 months out of the year.
You exhaust the easily awesome stuff: the Bojack Horseman, the Black Mirror, and then you’re left to sift through the sleeper hits. The private life with some celebrity. It is the same deal.
What seems amazing only seems amazing for a second, then you’re left to make the best of it to make your own little oasis of goodness from the rinky-dink technology that you’re surrounded with.
We live in a paradise of food. Supermarkets, imagine taking someone 1883 and then dropping them into a Costco or a Ralph’s. But to a modern and informed consumer, you have to walk, take your time, really see if you need a 48-pack of Pop Tarts, or whether that 3-pound box of triangular ravioli is something you’ll be sick of after 1 pound of it.
Whether that package of a dozen chocolate, chocolate chip muffins are awesome or simply disgusting, people will still have to exercise judgment and make reasonable guesses about how to reduce their exposure to suckiness and assholes.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/07
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do the major political parties in the United States of America represent?
Rick Rosner: The major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, take huge demographic slices out of the population. When you look at the expressed values of each party, they’re both positive in terms of their explicit values.
Republicans have traditionally stood for traditional values. Patriotism and self-reliance and a country that is strong in the world. Democrats stand for the positive values of community and tolerance.
There is some overlap of positive values between the two parties. Between them, they represent the entire spectrum of positive values. Historically, you have huge parties. Parties that encompass or each encompasses 40% of the population.
It is less now as people hate the parties. But I assume there were times in the past century when close to 90% of people belonged to one of the two major parties. Now, it is down 65% – ? – of American adults.
But you had these huge parties. These parties would slice through huge chunks of America. The people in the parties were representing a whole bunch of different folks. Demographically, and to some extent ideologically, the slices are taken through America by each party captured enough of America that the parties weren’t cray.
You had enough variety that each party would behave more or less reasonably. Even Nixon himself who was a little bit of a criminal and a little bit mean and awful, even under Nixon, the Republicans did a lot of good stuff. They started the EPA.
Nixon started the EPA. They started the War on Cancer. They behaved reasonably. There was a certain amount of cynicism. He didn’t care about the environment. He figured it would be a good thing to do.
But over the last 30 years, the Republicans saw that they could gain or find an advantage. That they could attract more easily than other segments of voters. They could pull into their tent and keep in their tent dumb assholes.
Or to be nice, the low-information voters, voters who do not know a lot and do not care to know a lot, and want to know easy explanations and might be angry or scared. There is that cliche phrase: economic anxiety – that led to the election of Trump.
People who are dumb jerks who can be told easy stories and who are more vulnerable to branding and catchphrases. So, once the Republicans started doing that, they represented a tighter and tighter sector of America – a tighter and tighter more assholish sector of America because of primaries.
In the primaries, the person is the biggest asshole wins. The person who is the strongest to their parties leaning wings: if the Democrats, then to the left; if the Republicans, then to the Right.
In the gerrymandered district, the person who wins the primary wins the general. After 30 years of this, of pandering to dumb assholes, Republicans are more and more solidly comprised of dumb assholes.
There are tens of millions of Republicans who aren’t dumb assholes. But, unfortunately, now, the loudest millions of Republicans are the dumb assholes. They are the ones who elect the people and the ones who get elected.
People without integrity. People who win by any means possible. In any case, one political party has gone completely crazy and has given it a ruthlessness that has allowed it to dominate. There are three levels of the government.
They own all three now: Supreme Court, the Judicial, the Legislative, the Executive, the Presidency, and the House and the Senate. That is where we are. Everybody is hoping that the Democrats will manage to scratch back one half of the legislature.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/06
[Beginning of recorded material]
Rick Rosner: I think we’ve talked about this before. But that may be giving books too much credit. I am sure there are books that get it way wrong too. There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of science fiction books.
But only dozens or hundreds of science fiction movies or TV shows. So, they stand out more. You can swim through the sea of crap and find the people who do a good job. The guy who wrote The Windup Girl. Charles Stross, Neil Stevenson, David Marusek when they write about the future.
I should find some female writers about the future. We can talk about the ways in which the future goes wrong on TV and in movies. Thing one that makes me crazy is unaugmented humans being the primary form of conscious life more than 100 years from now.
The major offender is Star Trek. You have regular people with regular bodies zipping among the stars centuries from now. Mostly, it is regular people walking around on starships.
One problem is the ships are going faster than light. It is one of the only ways to make stellar exploration narratively doable. It is not the only way but the main and easiest way.
The Aliens series, they will try to reboot it again in the next 5 years. That series has ships that can’t go faster than the speed of light. It actually has people in cold storage. It is narratively tougher.
But it seems somewhat more accurate. Although, a much more accurate version would have the exploration of space is largely automated, at least in the early periods. It depends on what you call automated.
But it is fantastically wasteful of people and resources to try to send other humans to stars. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. You are sending hunks of flesh that are at least 50 kilos, plus food and water.
It is a huge expense in terms of getting it off of Earth and into space. There is a model. Is it von Neumann? There has been a model popular for decades with galactic-explorers that go out into space.
Jacobsen: Do you mean the von Neumann probes?
Rosner: They have instructions to replicate themselves and proliferate as they go out. There are problems with that method too. It announces you to the rest of the galaxy. Also, it is unsophisticated, as you have probes that double and then double again.
At least, it does so without sending people out as well. Even Hawking made this mistake, the only way to save humanity is for humans to get off the planet and colonize other planets. Actually, Hawking doesn’t make this mistake.
He says that if we want to guarantee humanity’s survival then we should have colonies elsewhere. Other people make the mistake of thinking to reduce population pressures; we should colonize Mars.
It is super expensive. It takes a long time. It doesn’t do anything to put even a tiny dent in burgeoning populations on Earth. If you’re looking at 200-300 years from now, anything that has mostly humans and a few scattered virtual beings or AI.
I had an idea or have all sorts of ideas. Fictions projects that I do not turn into anything because I am scattered and lazy. I think it would fun and interesting to present an empty world of the future 250-300 years from now.
By empty, I mean the world population of regular humans or largely only somewhat augmented humans. The population going from a peak of 12-14 billion 80-100 years now declining to less than half that.
Another 200 years later but with hundreds of billions of virtual conscious beings. Conscious beings of human-level information processing abilities and levels of consciousness existing virtually along with all sorts of other forms of AI.
Big swarms of these mostly existing in ways that don’t necessarily overpopulate the Earth. There are fewer people on Earth than there are 300 years from now.
But there are 100 or 1,000 times as many conscious beings as there are now, but existing within information processing infrastructures and with much of the Earth being Disneyfied having been taken over fairly extensively by nature management technology turning much of the Earth into a giant park.
An apparently wild, undisturbed natural realm but one that is being extensively monitored to make sure we don’t fuck it up again. With much of the Earth have a subtle level of tech, tech that tries to be unobstrusive. While, at the same time, you’ve got tech having fantastically penetrated the Earth but in a way that leaves Earth’s surface or alrge parts of the Earth’s surface apparently pristine.
That’s just an opening thought. I would have to work out the whole thing.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/05
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What bases are there for what you call the end of normal human life or a steady erosion of normal human life?
Rick Rosner: We were talking earlier: Is it surprising or weird that we’re at the end to having no alternative to human life? For the last 10,000 years of human life, all that is going to become a minority option in the next 150 years.
More entities, people, augmented people, and other entities will have a vast array of choices of how to exist from moment to moment in the coming centuries. It is weird that we live at the cusp of it.
Even though, we have been living normal human lives for 10,000 years. It is not that great. It is mostly sucky. Especially until recently, as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, the average human lifespans only went to 50 years or less.
Even with our increased longevity, the period in which we’re at optimum physical and mental ability and attractiveness is only about 25 years. Before your early 30s, you are clueless. You are attractive and competent from the mid-20s to mid-40s.
Then the signs of aging start to make you invisible if you’re interested in being attractive to people. That goes away for everybody by age 50. It is a short little run. We are talking about a few decades.
Somebody is really strong if they can lift their body weight. If we fall more than 6 feet, we break. We can’t hold in our heads a string of numbers longer than 12 digits. The 12 digits are only now because everyone as to deal with area code for texting and stuff like that.
The general rule is that it is possible to imagine vast improvements in any area of human performance that you can think of. We will get those improvements. The price of getting those improvements is the blessing and the curse with the way people living being overturned.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/04
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How might this trend in Moore’s Law relate to evolution?
Rick Rosner: I think evolution is imperfectly opportunistic. That all the organisms in the world are facing the conditions that they face; life is organisms facing conditions. According to traditional ideas of evolution, organisms that have abilities well-suited to their conditions are, on average, more successful at passing on their genes.
But there are a gazillion assumptions hidden in that idea and a bunch of probabilistic landscapes spread out for these organisms. Every organism has a set of things that it could possibly do given what it is.
An amoeba isn’t going to tap dance. But there is some variability in amoeba behavior. You have these landscapes of what the organism can do in terms of behavior when faced with various situations.
You also have various probabilistic landscapes in terms of what is doable genetically. Is there something in the amoeba’s genome that would let it change color to somehow absorb more heat? Would that be helpful if it possible?
Every organism faces a landscape of things that it could do both behaviorally and genetically. Groups of organisms have probabilistic landscapes as to whether a novel behavior is going to be embraced by the group.
You have probability working all the time through organisms. Where things that are genetically easy, there is a possible mutation to make this happen easily. For instance, there is a crazy mutation, as far as I know, in all mammals.
There is a gene that turns off muscular development. If that gene fails, if there is a glitch and the gene is missing, the individual organism will have double the muscular development of organisms in that species. You can google this.
There are dogs, bulls, people, and all sorts of mammals that have double the muscle. We know that just from looking at mammals that doubling muscle is an easy glitch. But it has not caught on. It has not spread through the population for probabilistic and other reasons.
It might be too rare for there to be enough organisms with this glitch to pass it on efficiently. It might not be advantageous enough and may come with extra costs. Organisms with double muscle are less fertile. Maybe, they die earlier. Maybe, they cost too much. They have to work harder to find all the nutrition to support all this muscle.
A genetic glitch that supports all this muscle has not become common for all sorts of probabilistic reasons. Associated with the idea of evolution as being probabilistic and opportunistic, more likely to take easy ways to do stuff or to do the hard stuff, for instance, there are no organisms that I know that can achieve escape velocity and escape Earth’s gravitational field.
There are no organisms besides humans who can do it technologically rather than evolutionarily. There are no organisms that can get to an escape velocity of 25,000 mph. Because the genetic mutations to do that are almost inconceivable.
Also, there are no immediate conceivable advantages to achieving it. You leave the atmosphere and then die. It is not efficient at focused technological things that humans have become good at.
As far as I know, there’s not much more genetic advantage to faster travel. For instance, a cheetah can travel at 60-70 mph. It is not worth the extra effort to double the speed to 140 mph. You already locked in the niche at 60-70 mph.
Evolution is imperfectly or weakly opportunistic, but widely opportunistic. It will take anything probabilistic that is accessible and advantageous. When the AI guy said duplicating the brain’s special architecture will take more than 100 years – I assumed that he would say, I would disagree with that.
Because I believe the brain has found a bunch of easy tactics to function. This guy finds that the neural nets are super simplistic. He finds that there is no way you can build a brain out of something as simple as that.
My thinking is the brain takes whatever simple things it can get to easily build. It takes advantage of, according to probability, most opportunities to develop efficiencies in information processing.
You will find most of the simplest ways to do neural nets or simple feedback information process, and maybe some more complicated or complex ways to do information processing.
They will be mixed haphazardly, except with a focus – as evolution is focused on the tasks that it needs to focus on to help the organism thrive in its environment. The brain takes a bunch of simple mechanisms, optimizes and combines them in an imperfect and haphazard manner.
You get a fairly well-functioning brain out of good but not perfect systems and components because everything is built out of this probabilistic and opportunistic evolutionary and sloppy mechanism.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/03
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did the conversation with the AI guy go?
Rick Rosner: I talked to a guy who works in AI. He told me that I was way off about human-level AI in the near future.
I said that we were talking about different things. I said I was talking about computational density. That is, we are coming close to the computational density of the human brain.
But we are, certainly, farther away from replicating the architecture of the brain. At that point, we got distracted and then the conversation fizzled out. He would have fought me if the conversation continued.
He would argue that it would take about 100 years or more to replicate the architecture of the human brain. I disagree. I think replicating the architecture will go slow initially and then fast.
It will be a hockey stick thing, which is seen everything in the development of technology. It goes hand-in-hand with science fiction stuff. The predicted stuff never shows up as soon as it is predicted to show up in science fiction, but, eventually, it does show up.
If you combine both things, it will take longer to replicate brain architecture. But when it takes place, it will happen in a hockey stick manner. It will be sputtery and puttering and not great and then become super efficient.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the plural nature of Moore’s Law?
Rick Rosner: People have been arguing for years. Moore’s Law is a set of laws about the rates at which various computer components shrink down, become more powerful, or the number of transistors you can jam onto a chip.
It is a combination of these laws. Every 18 months, something is supposed to happen. A micro transistor is supposed to shrink and so on. I think it celebrated its 50th birthday. It has been going for a while.
For at least 20 years, people have been speculating when it will stop being able to continue. Some argue it already is past that point. There was a well-respected person giving a speech in March saying that the more computation you do then the more heat you generate.
The number of calculations per second is such that there is not efficient way past a certain limit, even if you keep shrinking the transistors, to push the heat out of it, especially if you’re producing 3-dimensional stacked systems.
Everybody in the past saying it was over, then it hasn’t been. At the very least, it has to slow down. These doubling times of three years and so on. But the performance of computers now, instead of doubling every two or three years, can’t keep going.
It looks like there are only, according to this article, doubling times of 20 years. That’s thing one.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
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Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/01
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did we come to the Golden Age of Comedy?
Rick Rosner: I have a half-assed and obvious theory. Dominant media attract the most talented people. The shift over the past 120 years. The stage gave way to radio, to TV and movies. Now, radio sucks.
Because there are so many other media that pull the other good talent. That radio is this neglected wasteland with few good broadcasters. I would say Carolla was the last great one. But he is a podcaster now.
Mad Magazine was this little comic book. There was a Golden Age of Comic Books, especially horror comic books. Until they were shut down in 1954 when a book by Frederic Wertham was published, called Seduction of the Innocent.
It said comic books were destroying America’s boys. Then there were congressional hearings. The horror comics got shut down. All these authors and artists were working for EC comics. You had a giant corral of super-talented writers, artists.
The EC was decimated, more than decimated. It lost most of its titles, but Mad survived. You had a super big concentration of talent working on Mad Magazine. It was not only funny and incisive in satirizing American life and culture.
It was also a really good capsule guide to American life and culture. Most of what I know about the 50s comes from me collecting Mad Magazine in the 70s; all those issues from the 50s.
Many comedians of the latter half of the 20th century up to today mention Mad Magazine as being a major influence. It can be cheesy and super juvenile. It was squeezed out of its niche as being the leading satirical magazine by more salacious, less innocent products into the 70s and beyond.
The 70s, you had National Lampoon, which was an outgrowth of Harvard Lampoon. One a movie and another a dramatization. In the 70s, the National Lampoon took over the premiere satirical magazine.
It has a good 10 years and then was squeezed out by the company self-destructing. One of its greatest minds may have committed suicide; it is not clear. Out of National Lampoon came SNL. They poached most or much of the talent.
National Lampoon branched out into stage and radio productions. Then their stage of performers were poachers – some writers too – by Lorne Michaels. SNL has been in production for 44 years now.
It seems like a normal part of the comedy landscape, when it came out it was revolutionary; but when it came out, it was revolutionary. There had been sketch-comedy shows before like the Carol Burnett Show but nothing targeted at young people – and as irreverent and as anarchic as SNL.
Also, it also arrived during the downfall of Nixon, so the timing was great. Now that it has been around for 4 decades, it seems normal; people have always felt comfortable saying, “It sucks,” because, on average, about 1/3rd of its skits work.
It is actually a good batting average. A huge percentage of the things that it tries like coming up with new skits every week work and then become cultural touchstones.
Jacobsen: Who are some of the top comics with an influence from prior eras that led to now? Who are people you look towards in a similar way you look to Mad Magazine?
Rosner: As a general thing, before Mad Magazine, there was a little mass market satirical attack on American culture and American politics. Lenny Bruce gets a lot of credit for being among the first in the late 50s and early 60s.
A comedian who went after actual targets. There is a trend in comedy around the same time in not only telling jokes but also making it personal by telling about yourself and the world you live in, as opposed to the “take my wife, please” jokes like the Catskill/Borscht Belt comedy of the 50s.
People who came out and told generic jokes for people who wanted to get out and laugh with little social outrage. The Borscht Belt refers to resort hotels in Upstate New York where a lot of Jewish families would go in the summer.
Those places would book good but harmless comic: Henny Youngman, and so on. Then the comedy scene got targeted: Lenny Bruce was ruthless, Mort Sahl did political comedy. Then you had a wave of attacks through political comedy.
Mad Magazine did a lot of stuff against the Vietnam War – not as harsh as the National Lampoon when it came out. Then in the 70s, you started having the brick wall comedy clubs like Carolines in New York.
Then you had this wave of comics that came out of there: Letterman, Leno, Seinfeld. Before Letterman and Leno were talk show hosts, they were good comics and personal comics.
Comedy became developing your own comedic persona. This is who I am; this is my life; this is why it is funny. Then you had sitcoms developed around these sitcom characters: Everybody Loves Raymond. Roseanne was based on Roseanne Barr’s comedic persona as a stand-up comic, which she developed in Denver in the early 80s.
This character of the “Domestic Goddess, ” as she called herself. It was kind of a terrible housekeeper and mother and celebrating her own messed-upness in those roles. She was saying that she was entitled to be. That those were terrible roles anyway; that they deserved the full force of her half-assedness, as a wife and mom.
Along with these satirical pushes, you had an evening out of the comedy landscape. There is a Thomas Friedman book that says the world is flat. It is a book about economics. It makes the point about the increasing interconnectedness of the world reduces competitive advantage among producers and countries. Anyone can get into the economic game now with everyone having advanced communications technology.
When I say, “The world is flat in comedy,” I mean everything is knocked down; everything is subject to being made into a comedy. None of the taboos or few of the taboos are left that dominated TV from the beginning of TV through the 80s.
You and I talked off-tape yesterday. I mentioned some of these projects that celebrate the end of taboos. Preacher is a TV series where the Christian God has disappeared from Heaven and may be living as a dog in New Orleans.
A preacher goes out having super violent adventures trying tot rack down God because he thinks God needs to get back into Heaven. He runs into this Catholic military organization, which has the job to protect the descendants of Jesus for the past 2,000 years.
They always have a Messiah on hand, a descendant of Jesus, but because the descendant is the product of 2,000 years of inbreeding the Messiah is completely retarded.
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Rosner: This is a TV show! There is American God. One is called Bilquis. She shrinks them down, collapses them down to their penis, and then absorbs them during sex. This is a TV series! It is not even a pay per view channel.
It is a regular cable channel. In movies, you can only say one “Fuck” and its remains PG. More than one and you get an R rating. On cable TV now, there are no limits; Atlanta, they say, “Fuck.” A lot of the FX shows. They say, “Shit,” a lot.
FX seems to think that saying, “Shit,” is okay to a certain extent, to be edgy. Comedy Central on South Park, they tried to swear more than any other show in a half-hour episode. You have references to anal sex on Prime Time sitcoms.
It is shocking to someone as old as me that this is going on. Nothing is off-limits. Even if it hadn’t been off-limits, I do not know what you would do in the current political landscape, where a major political candidate in Roy Moore in Alabama, I think, was narrowly defeated because of accusations that he was a pedophile.
We have another blatant pedophile – a proud, strong pedophile – who is running on a conservative ticket in one of the Southern States right now. You have something like 6 white nationalists and white supremacists running as candidates across the US.
You have the president caught on tape before he was president talking about grabbing women by the pussy. You have Samantha Bee on her TV show calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”
We mentioned Roseanne. Her show was cancelled because she compared a black woman, Valerie Jarrett, with Planet of the Apes – that she was a product of it. The landscape has been debased, but, at least, we have the comedic tools to go after it now. Unlike, the miserably bland 70s, where you had shows like The Brady Bunch that tried to get comedy – and, I think largely failed – out of a bland and limited palette.
It left most serious issues of life off the table. That is enough of that.
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