True or False

It does not have to be true to be valuable.

It does not have to be correct to be valuable.
It cannot be incorrect and be valuable?
It does not have to be true to be valuable.
It cannot be false and be valuable?
It does not have to be right to be valuable
It cannot be wrong and be valuable?
valuable: legal, ethical, moral – in that order
valuable: correct, true, right – in that order

It does not have to be true to be valuable.

Paranoia is Easier than Hard Work

18 November, 2011

A week ago the weekly discussion group’s topic was conspiracies, mostly Freemasons. My take on conspiracies is that generally conspiracies are more about the fears of those who believe in conspiracies than the actual occurrence of conspiracies. It is easier to believe someone has done something to us rather than to believe our circumstances are arbitrary or maybe by our own neglect. No doubt there are groups who conspire to aspire secretly to power and wealth by subversion and corruption but our need and ability to see conspiracy much outweighs the conspiracies to be found (but mostly it is about sex and money). Secrets are not kept well. There is always someone who wants to brag. Our willingness to believe in the grand conspiracies may make use blind to the mundane and close that is more fundamental. We see the world with cultural minds. It is in part about the we and the they in the world. (Just because someone is paranoid does not mean that they, the ubiquitous they, are not after them.) Or maybe, we are afraid of that which goes bump in the night.

A traditional Scottish prayer

From goulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night

Good Lord, deliver us!

This week’s topic was foster care in Native American communities. The attendance was half or a third of the previous week’s attendance. A problem that needs attention and one that could yield to some concerted effort, but does not pique our interests in the way nefarious, dark forces of the world are planning our demise do. Most of what we see as conspiracies is human behavior without overt, planned evil. The residue of culture and institutions is the kind of evil that is hardest to deal with. I knew an old Jewess who had fled Germany during the time of the Second World War. She said, “The universe conspires against us.”: not humanity, not the world, “the universe”. The Native Americans must see the conspiratorial in the way they have been treated.

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Why People Believe in Conspiracies

A skeptic's take on the public's fascination with disinformation

By Michael Shermer, September 10, 2009, Scientific American

After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”

“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example. “Knowing what we know now ... film footage of Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and ironies—from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they thinking?) to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.” Add to these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all together—think of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both equally fictional.

What should we believe? Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Or as folk rock group Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep ...

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "Paranoia Strikes Deep."

Vitamin B12

The vitamin that most strict vegetarians go wanting is B_12. That begged the question of how to supplement the want.

20 ea. 12 ounce servings of beer has the US RDA of B₁₂

if :       a 12 ounce serving of beer has 0.12 µg of B₁₂ ¹

and:    the US RDA of B12 is 2.4 µg of B₁₂ ²

then:   20 servings of beer has the US RDA of B₁₂

Dave was outside sales for a local wholesale supply house. He had a customer who on his way home from work every night would buy a case of beer. His wife and he would sit down in front of the television each evening and split that case between them.

Mike was an Irishman here on a green card. He had been here for twenty four years without having been back to Ireland. We tried looking up the street view of the house he lived in in Ireland on Google. They had not been down his road.

Mike on non holiday evenings would drink 12 beers, on holidays he drinks whiskey. I asked him how much he cuts back on the beer for the holidays. He declared he does not. The beer is his base line consumption so the whiskey is in addition: a fifth a day.

He lost his job at the plant when he lost his wife to cancer. He was drinking too much. I wondered how much that took.

The US annual per capita consumption of beer in 2011 was 20.8 gallons as reported by the Huffing Post ³. This is beer only, not spirits or wine. As is most often with statistics or even calculations of quantities when reported in the press once the digits are on the page all else is at best incomplete. The US Census Bureau reported a US population of 311.7 million for 2011 (I take this for all populations counted and estimated, legal and illegal).

Now,

does this mean 20.8 gallons for every adult and child in the US,

does this mean every person 21 years and older,

does this include binging teenagers after Friday’s football game,

does this mean only admitted drinkers,

or is it the average for the eleven guys most frequently found down at the corner bar: probably not those eleven guys.

Dave’s customer and Mike were (if they took no holidays from drinking, drank 411 gallons of beer a year (but still were not getting their RDA of B₁₂)) taking up the slack for me. In any case, I am not keeping up.

1) USDA Basic Report 14003, Alcoholic beverage, beer, regular, all

2) USDA Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs): Estimated Average Requirements

3) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/27/americans-soda-beer_n_885340.html