Our Fabulous Fantasies
Lester Earnest (les at
cs.stanford.edu)
2016.12.06
[This is a work in progress with
additional fantasies to be added over time.]
Many people like to pretend
that they think and act rationally even though there is ample evidence to the
contrary. Each of us lives in a fantasy world set by our DNA inherited
primarily from hunter-gather ancestors dating back millions of years but modified
somewhat by evolution since then and further by our personal educational and
life experiences but some aspects of our inheritances cause us to think and act
irrationally.
Below are reviews of some specific
fantasies that interfere with rational thinking. Humans
are naturally interested in histories of the world and a lot of effort has gone
into researching and recording that information. However, because of human
nature, all histories are incomplete and distorted but vary a lot in the
degrees to which those deficiencies apply.
Yes, I too write distorted histories but claim to be more closely
coupled with reality than most people, perhaps because I am a bit Aspergerish. Below are reviews of certain widespread
fantasies including some accounts of my personal experiences with these
problems.
Egotism is valid. Most people like to think that we are the most
intelligent species on Earth, if not the Universe. In fact, intelligence is not
a one-dimensional rating but has many aspects and some other species on Earth
are far more intelligent than we in their perceptual abilities, examples being
the visual perception of raptor birds, the perception of aromas by wolves,
dogs, and others. Consider also the communication abilities of elephants, using
low frequency sounds that we canÕt hear, and other talk that we cannot
understand between various kinds of whales and dolphins.
For almost a hundred years,
certain machines have been grossly outperforming humans in doing various kinds
of information processing, such as complex arithmetic and searching large
databases, and the scope and speed of that work is expanding daily.
Considering the choice of
many people to ignore science and pretend that global warming is a fantasy, we
are clearly a rather stupid species. With any luck, space aliens will arrive
soon and take over, else we must develop a superior species ourselves.
Piracy provides a good life.
Life appeared on Planet Earth about 3.8 billion years ago and evolution then
began developing many species and discovered that piracy (capturing the assets
of others) was strategic, so it became widely used by many species and remains
dominant today.
Humans naturally inherited
that trait but it is now causing serious problems. For
example, all modern governments are run by pirates, predominantly men, who take
assets from others, thus enlarging their power, while making life miserable for
their subjects. Because of advancing technologies this behavior is now
threatening us with a world-wide die-off, so moving away from that lifestyle is
essential. However, that is a tall order as discussed in Unfortunately
We Are All Pirates.
Paranoia makes life safer. Through the process of evolution, our ancient
ancestors naturally adopted a somewhat paranoid view of the world because
worrying about things that could go wrong helped them survive in the rough
world where they lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers and had to follow the food
as the weather changed throughout each year.
When moving they often had
to go without food for days at a time, so they tended to eat anything they
could get their hands on. That adaptation got imprinted in their DNA which has
been passed along to us, resulting in modern tendencies toward obesity and type
2 diabetes.
In modern times, our
intrinsic paranoia is used by politicians and others to manipulate us in
various ways. On the morning of 9/11 I started writing the fourth article
in a series aimed at restoring democracy in USA Cycling, the national governing
body of bicycle racing that had been taken over by commercial interests in a
thoroughly crooked way. It was to be posted in the Usenet newsgroup rec.bicycles.racing but as I was writing, news came in
about planes being hijacked and rammed into buildings, so I switched topics and
predicted the effects this would have on civil liberties Š see S*x,
lies and politics: Part 4. Terrorists and the politicians who love them, Unfortunately,
my predictions began coming true the next day and have proven to be a big
setback for civil liberties.
For
thousands of years, politicians have known that people can be manipulated by
talking about boogeymen and the threats they pose, recent choices being
Africans, Jews, anarchists, communists, fascists, homosexuals, Iranians,
terrorists, Muslims, etc. Increasingly, public media also play this game
irrationally.
Today
public media focus on terrorists and blow their importance far out of rational
thinking. The chance than an individual American will be harmed by a terrorist
on a given day is infinitesimal compared with the chance they will be injured
or die while driving or walking somewhere that day, but you get a very
different impression from the evening television news.
[More to come]