Sometimes on Sun Nov 27, 2022, my blog reported that the number of registered subscribers surpassed 10,000. This is not a huge number by the current social media standards, but this number has humbled me as it means that at least a few thousand actual real flesh and blood people hit subscribe on my blog site.
I have no way to tell how many of the accounts are automated machines and I do not intend to bother real people that subscribed with pointless questions just to find out.
As I’ve outlined on the Readme page the last thing I will do is waste your time with meaningless actions.
I’m preparing a few more posts, one is about a concept that I called MCC or Macro Composite Consciousness, and a few are about the concept of Self-Reliance and the Exoverse hypothesis. If possible I’ll publish the MCC article at the end of 2022 and the SR articles are to be expected in 2023.
Unfortunately writing blog articles is a secondary activity done when I can find the time to do it. My full-time job and my family (including my dog Mocha) take up most of my time, but I’ll definitely try to find some time to finish those important articles (important at least in my mind that is).
I would like to humbly thank you for taking interest in my writing and I promise not to overwhelm you or disappoint you (this last one is the hardest promise to keep).
It is said that “The road to hell is paved only with good intentions”. Does this folkloric knowledge “hods water” and if so, why and how? Let’s explore this concept with few diagrams and a bit of ideation around them.
Humans (and not only) are born in this reality and are roaming it until they die. During all this time all forms of life must solve one big problem, and that is, how to maintain their “alive” state. This implies solving various problems among others how to find or grow food and keep away from being food for other living beings.
Humans are one of the few species that have mastered collaboration in large groups and this is due to our larger magnitude of the abilities to communicate more efficiently in large groups.
Unfortunately to us this reality is much more complex than we can handle now or ever, even if its “guts” are working by following relatively simple rules (quantum mechanics might look weird but it is make of relatively simple rules). This is simply because of its immensity of states and configurations those simple rules can combine in order to create diversity.
The best we can do is only to ever increase our abilities to more accurately know what the reality is by using Scientific Methods in order to reduce the risk of confusions and mistakes.
In this context some of the errors and mistakes we do are embedded in the processes we use to identify and find solutions to our problems.
In most cases (unless ignorance, fear and hate are predominant drivers) we identify problems and than start with a large amount of compassion, some knowledge about why and how and some hope of being able to help more than ourselves, to help the others (the business component).
The diagram bellow tries to depict the relative importance of those 3 aspects of our fight to solve an issue.
Please understand the difference between the absolute quantity and the relative quantity. This is not a “zero sum game” depiction it is simply the relative (to each other) influence of each of the three factors considered in this case. For example you may say, well my Compassion or Knowledge did not diminish (as the diagram may suggest) and that is true, yet what matters is the relative comparison of the magnitude of all three factors. That is important as our minds (and processes) tend to be impacted by the relative importance and not only by the absolute magnitude of the feature.
As time passes we may get our idea off the ground, we start to gain more understanding and other people start to “buy into it” by investing resources (time or money or hope). It is only natural that now we have (relatively) more focus on acquiring knowledge and try to “sell” it to more people. However this simple “normal” action has the consequence of pushing the Compassion component down in the relative balance between itself and the other two components. An important observation is that in absolute terms the compassion may remain at the same value but the unfortunate reality is that in the relative space it becomes less important.
This phenomena is depicted in the diagram bellow.
Once we have a solution, the business world takes over and the main reason of action is now to “sell” the idea or the product to other people. Now gaining profits take main stage and since we still need a grip on the “how it works” (or the Science component) it is almost inevitable that the Compassion component will be in further relative decline and will slide into the configuration depicted bellow.
Unfortunately this configuration is the one that has the highest probability to create monsters that will end up destroying (almost) all we initially intended. Now is the time when mistakes are hid and coverup of mishaps happens and when BS flourishes.
Twenty six years ago, in 1995, Orson Scott Card wrote once a short called “How Software Companies Die” where he follows on how this process happens in the software application development companies and groups. The article ends with the prophetic phrase “Got to get some better packaging” that is the main indication of BS overdrive of a product. You should read it, is only two pages long and is as relevant today as it was 26 years ago.
OK, fine, you may say, now what? What is the solution to this problem? Eventually a solution that not ends in a bigger disaster by embedding in it the very process we just described.
For most, it would be clear that the solution would be to forever keep an eye on the compassion and humility in the business process. But this is much easier said than done. If you put yourself in the shoes of a business owner or a manager that needs to make it possible for his employees and himself to take a salary home then you can see how this can be more than nerve wreaking it can be almost impossible to overcome.
Given our current state of business with the “dog eats dog” type of competitive environment it is extraordinary that we are still keeping sanity in the society at large. To me, this is one item banking towards the proof that human beings are good in their “normal” state but the environmental constraints can erode that “goodness” to sometimes horrific levels.
And that my friends is “the road to hell”, as you can see it starts with good intentions (at least) most of the times but without a lot of focus on the relative importance of the Compassion, Science and Business components we can all “go to hell” sooner or later.
Let’s try to target to the bellow (or close to) distribution of relative importance of those components that are part of all we do.
One important tool to help us with that is the notion of humble and humility. Too many of us seem to equate humble with weakness when in fact it is one of our greatest strengths. If you are surprised to hear that please read my previews article on humility.
A short retrospective about the published articles and ideas during 2020 and some predictions about what you should expect to see here in 2021
As I’ve outlines in the Read Me First page this blog is not a daily blog but rather an idea sharing blog. This means that (in general) I’m trying to produce a minimal number of articles and try focus only what I believe (is my blog) really matters. This way I’m trying to reduce the overall information pollution out there on the internet. Feedback that will help improve the quality of the site will always be welcome!
From this perspective, the ideas I’ve explored during 2020 were around “Real Facts“, “COVID-19 Pandemic“, “Humility as a tool“, “Police brutality“. In addition I’ve published a hypothesis on the overall picture of the place we live in and postulated that there is more “out there” than just the “Real” and “Imaginary” and I’ve called this space the “Exoverse”. There is a lot of my activity on the Exoverse on twitter, please see the diagram bellow.
Also linked to the above diagram I’ve settled on a definition of the relationship between the notions of “self” and “Universal Consciousness” with the following image
The Self and the Whole
There was a lot of activity on Twitter and you can check my twitter profile for learning more about it.
About the drafts I’ve worked on during 2020 but did not published. I’ve drafted ~14 articles during 2020 that remain in unpublished state and I hope some of them will get published during 2021 (in addition to potential new ones might come my way during 2021). Bellow are some of the titles of the drafts and short descriptions. Please live me feedback (via twitter will be just fine) if you think you would like to see some of them be published, that will help me to work on priorities.
#
Title
Description
1
Constructive and Destructive Competition
Making sense of the notion of competition and providing a solid way to define and separate the notion of Constructive versus Destructive Competition and the impact those two forms of Competition have on our society at large
2
Will
Is there free will? A look into this issue from the perspective of Exoverse and “The drop in the Ocean” concept
3
Faith
What is Faith what are the advantages and disadvantages of having/using it (expect information, computers, Exoverse links)
4
Magic
Defining magic in the context of today and why we can’t rule it out yet unable to have a “normal” relationship with the concept
5
Morality
Linking the notion of Moral/Morality in the greater picture of the Exoverse, expect same gist as in the published article “Humble”
6
Boxed
Explore the notion of “thinking out of the box”, what really is is, how can we use it efficiently to improve our lives
7
Self Reliant
Describing practical ways to achieve various levels of #SelfReliance following the ideas in the “The Nautilus Project”
8
Dogs
Presenting my experience in raising my dog Mocha my four legged friend. Feeding, caring, playing, working together
9
Simple Extremes
Defining the notion of “Simple Extremes” and how this negatively affects our individual lives as well as social ones
10
Robocop?
A look into how can we safely combine technology information and humans in order to allow for a lawful society but without the issues we’ve known and also seen lately happening in our societies when it comes to Law Enforcement with humans (Policemen)
11
Scientific mind
What is the difference between the Scientific Minds and the rest of the minds? Can/Should we all use this approach?
12
RGF
The “Rube Goldberg Factor” Taking a look on these fascinating “solutions” where “taking the long cut” is the rule. Help define over complexity in human solutions in a more measurable way
13
About AI
Its suddenly everywhere. Should we fear it? Will it take our jobs? Will it bring us in a “Star Trek” scenario or a “Hunger Games” one? when should we use it and when not? Safety?
14
Correlation Causation and Intelligence
What is Correlation and Causation? What is Intelligence? What are the issues we may have if we can’t tell them apart?
15
Terraformer
We are all “Terraformers” as all life before us was and we are alive because of that. Taking a look at this concept that explains that everyone is important for life
A BBC documentary, Prof. Philip Zimbardo and Sheena McDonald
“us” and “them” (the mirage of self)
obey orders (mindlessly ~ human automatons)
do “them” harm (instill fear)
‘stand up’ or ‘stand by’ (fear control)
exterminate the opposition (destroy diversity)
What is most interesting is that the steps 1 and 2 seem to be a consequence of confusing factual(real) and fictional(imaginary) information. Once can only divide in “us” and “them” then blindly obey if they first confuse the real and imaginary.
More, as we start to better understand the place we are part of, what we call real, universe life consciousness we should realize that we are but temporary parts of a much larger consciousness fields spanning the Exoverse.
What is the ExoverseEach of us is a small drop existing for a short time before returning back to the whole
The last three steps are directly linked to our abilities as individuals to be Self-Reliant.
New year resolutions, things made to be broken, or maybe this time, this one time, we (I) may succeed in making progress on what really matters now.
I wish everyone reading this article a lot of happiness in 2019 and hope you’ll check to see if the resolutions I’m sharing here make sense to you and your beloved ones. I believe they can make or break our future our children and the generations to come, so we should probably not ignore them.
So what are those few things which really matters to everyone?
Number one: The ability to distinguish Fact (Real) from Fiction and understand the notion of Truth Hash-tag: #ReFiT or #FaFiT UUID: ab3fb2d4-9cfa-4f72-9a5b-bebd72b0c65e
Second: Understand how to use Computers Automation and AI to help yourself as an individual to thrive and avoid the dangers those technologies pose. Tho hash-tags: #SelfReliant(UUID91d101ea-d250-4298-9177-20880e1dded6) and #informageddon(UUID: b17ea217-e20c-4202-bb0e-954803cd2176)
#ReFiT / #FaFiT
Our life and life quality depends on how accurate our inner model of reality built by our minds since we are born reflects the actual “hard” “cold” reality. In my opinion there is nothing more important than our ability as individuals to get our inner reality model in sync with the actual common reality out there.
I have wrote two articles describing the notion of Fact Fiction and Truth (links bellow), in 2019 I would like to get a step closer to giving everyone who reads my articles a clear guide on how to produce and verify factual information by using existing technology and seek future more reliable ways to produce it.
Fact Fiction and BS (describing the notion of Fact and Fiction and the danger of consuming a mix of fact and fiction thinking is fact, a mix I call BS).
Fact Fiction and the Truth (describe the notions of Truth and Fact and how we confuse them and why it is almost impossible to detect a lie)
#SelfReliant & #informageddon
Automation is inevitable, AI is inevitable, if you think you can escape it you are fooling yourself. So, if you can’t beat them join them. However, as with any new technology there are some avoidable pitfalls.The computers and AI have some very dangerous and insidious ones. Knowing them is (in some cases) literally a life and death situation. More, it is about our future as free people or as disposable (irrelevant) salves.
There are two distinct ways this can go down.
First path is if we will try to keep the current social organization unchanged and try to graft automation and AI on it. In my opinion this is guaranteed to lead to #informageddon and irrelevant slavery, a future 99% of us will hate.
The second path (or social model) is the one where the technology of automation computers and AI are used mainly to enhance each individual in order to produce a #SelfReliant entity using a symbiosis between human and machine (carbon+silicon). Those entities will be capable of thriving in (almost) any conditions without required help from anyone else.
The society (almost as we know it) can then be rebuilt from free standing, self reliant, entities, a society which will be orders of magnitude more powerful and resilient than the current one, A society which can exists for millions or maybe billions of years. This model has the potential to lead to a social organization close to the one depicted in the SI-FI series StarTreck or even more advanced (excluding warp drives and teleportation for now) and is probably the real future incarnation of the current American-Dream.
In 2018 I’ve created and launched a Global Challenge hosted on https://timenet-systems.com in 2019 I wish to start a first iteration solution design for this challenge.
That is all!
Please live any comments via Twitter (use the Twitter button in the WordPress page).
Thank you very much for your support and feedback, have a wonderful 2019!
United Sates is becoming a communist regime. I could not (or did not want to) believe it, but the signs are there. I lived trough it, and I can recognize it.
Contrary to common beliefs communism is not about the economy, or the common ownership of goods or businesses, is about confusing fact and fiction, or more concise, the wide spread of disinformation and lies in the core of the society leading the destruction of the diversity.
The universe hates to have its diversity reduced. When the diversity falls under a certain level the group who over simplified will collapse. This is how civilizations die. I hope we’ll wake up in time to avoid a western civilization collapse.
Though I’ve seen this coming I was not able to see all the details on how will it happen.
The good thing is that there is a way to overcome the collapse, I call it “The Self reliant way” and includes using all the knowledge we already acquired to strengthen the base of the society, the individual.
To all out there believing that strengthening the individual is a bad idea and the group (or the society must prevail) I will remember you what the realistic solutions look like (as opposed to delusional ones). To showcase this please check how the cabin crews are instructing you to proceed in an emergency case. You FIRST put your oxygen mask BEFORE trying to help ANYONE else. Obviously once you have the mask on you MUST help other if they need help!
That is the key in balancing the abilities between individuals and groups and not the other way around we see currently be promoted in a delusional way by the social agents posed to extract the last ounce of profit of the society even if that will lead to its total collapse.
We need to wake up and face the factual world or we will go the way of the dinosaurs.
By now we have all probably heard the two magic letters ‘AI’. Artificial Intelligence we say, and this steers a lot of awe and fear in different people depending on what level of understanding you happen to be on the subject.
The problem is that, as with many other new things in our society, the full utility impact and danger of this technology are pretty much under or over-estimated. If you were old enough to understand the issue, during the first time microwave ovens first popped on the market, you may remember salespeople pitching the oven as a miracle able to cook pretty much anything. Today (2018) most of us would never try to cook something in a microwave oven but simply reheat food already cooked by conventional means. I feel that the same is true with today’s AI hype when we’ll look back in 10 or 20 years.
What is AA then?
AA is not Alcoholics Anonymous as it may first sound like but in the AI context, it stands for Advanced Automation. I think AA is actually what most of the current so-named AI applications are doing. Limited signal (image, sound, or other sensors) recognition, can e hardly be called ‘intelligence’.
Why AA and not AI?
Fits better the current functionality, as in pattern search and identification in various data streams video, audio, other sensor types, or human input (old good keyboard)
In real AI (or AGI), I mean the one Data from StarTreck or the Human Replicators in StarGate or Terminator, machines are self-aware, living noncarbon-based systems. Our current systems we call AI are far away from having enough complexity to allow consciousness to emerge.
The main problem with Real AI
Around 25 years ago (more or less) I won a praise from a radio station when (for the first and last time), I bothered to call in to comment on their show, which was about all those smart machines of the future. At that time AI was not yet what it is today.
My comment, which impressed the radio host was this:
“Any system modeled to work as the human brain does whose complexity is higher than a certain unknown level will naturally spawn a consciousness, or simply put will be a living intelligent entity like you and me!”
This is a totally different ball game than what we call today AI. Our current level of technology is much closer to regular automation but at a higher level of complexity due to the ability to process complex natural data flows generated by sensors sensing the real world by using various Machine Learning systems and variants.
Why we should not create real AI systems?
The answer is simple. If we will create real AI systems, they will by definition compete with human beings for resources and abilities sooner than later. Since we are already living in a highly competitive environment ourselves, the last thing we should do is to add high-ability competitors for human beings. This can and most likely will end in us humans being wiped out of existence. The only thing yet to be solved is a power source compact enough for the machines to use, but we’ll get there.
If not AI then what?
Advanced Automation (AA) targets enhancing existing human beings. Instead of creating new competitors for human beings as in AI’s case, with AA we simply increase the abilities to live and compete with regular humans and even other living things.
May 9, 2018: Since publishing this article I’ve got some feedback and I’d like to add the following additional info to the article. Trying to clarify some issues pointed out to me without getting into technical details.
A hypothesis I like is that our universe uses a fractal engine whose change in the time dimension is powered by quantum mechanics (injecting random changes in the fractal structure). So, basically, it works based on algorithms (laws of nature). There are two kinds of algorithms out there, fully predictive and partially predictive. Regular (no ML/AI) programming is fully predictive. ML and AI are not. We built digital computers to BE fully predictive because we need stability in dealing with the quantum nature of reality (dealing with small random changes).
We did not yet master the classic coding, (how many defects are in our products so far?) and we are jumping head-on into more advanced cases of automatically generated algorithms used by ML which is the bases of AI. My point is simple, to succeed and avoid getting in trouble (legal?) in the future we have to make sure we know how to test ML and AI in order to minimize their errors. On the other hand, we have to educate the end user to understand the limitations, pitfalls, and dangers of the technology.
I’m afraid that the warning Carl Sagan gave us was not to put advanced tech. in the hands of technically illiterate users is near and it can impact all businesses using ML and AI very soon.
So ML and AI test automation as well as end-user schooling in limitations and pitfalls is a must.
From this perspective, I believe that AA (Advanced Automation) is a closer-to-reality acronym than AI, at least for now. Obviously, it is up to all of you out there to choose what two letters to use to label this new technology…
I’m the father of a girl and a boy and my daughter and son are not children anymore. In the Me toomovement I can’t afford to take sides and since I have a public site I can’t stay silent either…
To be very clear about this, I will state my position in this matter from the very beginning. I strongly believe that we all should be able to live in peace and no human being (man or female) should live in fear of being used and bullied by other human beings in any way.
Women and girls should feel safe around male human beings and given the same opportunities as man or boys.
All that said, we have to get to the murky part of hows, “the devil is in the details”….
What freaks me out, is this idea of ‘unconditionally trust the women’. In the context of political fights, can get extremely close to repeating the history of the dark ages of the witch hunts. The times when a lot of innocents were used, tortured and killed by other people to enhance their egos, fears and pocket books.
I have published two articles which are essential to understand the dangers of the wave the Me Too movement may create. a wave which can push good people to do extremely ugly mistakes. It can transform angels in to daemons, one judgment at the time. The articles are Fact, Fiction and the Truth and Fact, Fiction and BS.
The key to avoid those mistakes is to understand how Truth, Fact and Fiction concepts are in a tight interplay and how unchecked errors in perceiving each one’s reality can lead do disasters.
Again, I do not try to diminish in any way the women who suffer and possibly still suffer from abuses of males in power (power of any kind). What I’m trying to warn, is for other people who may think they know the facts or the truths in any of those cases and blindly take sides (of both accuser and accused).
If you are a religious person, please remember that one of the reasons humanity has been cast out of heaven is because of making judgments. Remember also the “who is without sin to cast the first stone“. Also remember that “Who lives by the sword will die by the sword“.
If we do not fight with all our power and soul for a fact based world we will only have chaos….
Please read my articles about Fact, Fiction and Truth and make your own decisions in a more safer way for you and all other people around you.
As you see I’m not talking about Lies here, that is a completely different can of worms and I do not want to mix it in this message, as it would send the wrong signal. What I wish, is to warn, that good people, can pushed by a social wave, to rush to judgments and actions they may later regret…
Is Truth the same thing as Fact? What is the difference between Fiction and Lie?
In the post “Fact Fiction and BS” I’ve looked at the notion of Fact. In this post, I will focus on the notion of Truth and its relation to the Fact.
You can check the classic definitions of truth, fact, and fiction in dictionaries or lately online dictionaries. I’ve included some links at the end of the article.
I will try (below) a definition of my own aiming at the core of the concept.
The “Truth” is the mental projection of a Fact
Also, the Truth is the attempt of the human mind to capture and recall a Fact.
Let me present the definition of Fact and Fiction from the “Fact Fiction and BS” article:
Fact: A fact is any piece of information, created by a sensor of any kind measuring one or more parameters, from a well-defined position in space-time and whose content can undoubtedly be authenticated by a quorum of “witnesses” at any moment in time and space, after the measurement, upon request.
Facts are the bricks of what we call “reality”.
Fiction: Any information which is not fact is fiction!
Based on the above definitions of Fact and Fiction you can see that the Truth resides somewhere between Fact and Fiction. For a short time, a Truth can “match” perfectly a Fact but will never be a Fact, it is simply our mental image of a Fact.
So, the human mind alone can only produce Fiction or Lies and in certain cases (at random or not) match a Fact.
One important corollary of the above sentence is that any attempt to find “facts” by probing human memory is futile. For example, using a machine such as a classic lie detector may at best only probe if an individual lies intentionally. If your intention is to get to a fact by using any device to probe the brain’s memory content then you are simply leading yourself on a wrong path.
The most accurate dictionary definition I found so far is in “The Devil’s Dictionary (1881-1906)” stating “TRUTH, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance.“. I’m not sure why the devil seems to be closer to defining a term than the holy. That says a lot about how our psyche works.
So, how and why the brain is such an unreliable machine to produce factual information? Let’s explore some of the most important causes of error.
Errors in how the information is acquired by the brain via natural sensorial processes
Errors induced by the “malleability of the mind” as our memories change continuously for many reasons
Let’s explore those error-inducing reasons.
1. The information acquisition errors.
We all know that our visual and auditive acuity is different from person to person as well as at different moments of one’s life. Our “reality” is constructed by our brain exclusively out of sensorial information. If the information produced by our natural sensors differs from person to person and even for the same person in time, then how can we think we can produce factual information out of it? Additionally, sensorial errors induced by external conditions further undermine the accuracy of the raw basic information our brains use to construct our reality.
An excellent case study, put in a movie is (obviously) The Matrix scene where Morpheus explains to Neo what Matrix is. Interestingly enough our reality may be an even more complex and convoluted case of The Matrix where each individual tends to live in their own Matrix and our reality is only an overlap of many individual Matrix-like realities.
2. Memory storage inaccuracies.
The fact that the information in a human mind matches a Fact does not necessarily makes it a Fact. To be a Fact the information must be able to be verified by other entities (minds or machines) and we have no way, yet, to precisely extract mind states and test them against other minds or machines. The problem is, even if we can probe and examine a mental state, the mental state will change almost immediately (that is how minds work) hence rendering the mind state non-factual. Yet for the mind, there will be no way to sense that without an external reference. So, the Truth (the representation of a fact) will drift away from the Fact. This is a complex relationship and if we are not aware of it we can end up confusing Truths and Facts with disastrous consequences for us and the society.
My definition of the Truth is based on analyzing how the human mind works. To perceive anything, our mind needs to rely on memory. Simply put there is no way for the human mind to make the distinction between any entities outside of the mind itself without prior information about the external world. To use this prior information the mind needs to store it in the physical support, the neurons in the brain.
An interesting book explaining how our memory works and how reliable is (or not) The Memory Illusion by the researcher Dr. Julia Shaw. The book cites many research projects including her own trying to understand how reliable the human memory is, including how the memory can be manipulated. YES! your memory can be manipulated by what you hear in ways you can barely believe. Many other researchers such as Elizabeth Loftus have studied how human memory works and provided sufficient proof for us to understand our own weaknesses and our inability to gather and use factual information by only using our own natural bodies.
So, we are bad at probing our reality with our natural sensors and we easily mess up what we acquired by mixing it with fictional constructs of our own information induced by other minds and yes we do forget things.
Knowing all this, how anyone can hope to get to and be able to work with Facts? Luckily for us, we invented ways to precisely sense and measure reality and also accurately store and recall information. Our digital computers, if used correctly, have the potential to do exactly that.
My solution to these limitations of the human mind is to pair human beings with digital machines in a fully symbiotic way in order to use the machine as a scaffolding for the mind. This new living entity will be able to accurately acquire and use factual information as well as unleash human creativity in the realm of fiction.
I’m coining a new concept called “Self Reliance” for Self Reliant Individuals as the base unit for a society of the future. Self Reliant is NOT equal or equivalent to Selfish, but exactly the opposite. A society made up of self-reliant living entities has the best shot to endure until the end of time and enjoy life together with all humanity. “Live and let live” kind of society. This society is also built on shared facts and will lead to a microbalance of abilities. However this is not a given, we have to fight for this type of society. Unfortunately, our current society seems to head directly towards auto-destruction instead. Yet there is hope….
Obviously, this is what I believe and I’m presenting here the base on that belief. I’m happy to get any feedback that may lead to a better understanding of this essential issue deeply affecting the lives of all of us. I also believe that most of the atrocities humans committed against other living things including other humans during our short history under the sun are rooted in this confusion between the Truth and Fact.
I have intentionally not analyzed the concept of Lie in this article. A lie is an intentional distortion of truth by a human mind when communicating with other human minds. This is all for now on the subject of lies. If time permits I’ll come back to this subject in a different article.
Added on Oct 28, 2018: If you are still skeptical about how easy is those days to change digital information without the ability to detect the change just take a look at the excellent abilities of the InPixio suite of editors (https://www.inpixio.com). Those tools are exquisite and have a lot of use in creating fictional constructs by mixing and altering real data. The edited info is good and can add value as much time as we can detect that it is fiction. Without detection, it is just beautiful BS… Below is a small example of what inpixio erase can do. The following images are before and after the removal of an object from the image:
and, after removal…
End add Oct 28, 2018
Links to other people’s opinions in this matter
Dr. Julia Shaw on human memory imperfections
Elizabeth Loftus: Powerful case of human memory issues
Anil Seth: Excellent talk about the mind and reality
Blowing your mind, we live in “A Matrix” like reality, Nick Mercer:
The heads in the sand: Next, how and why we run towards our own demise… (gullibility and ignorance) Forget for a while this is a commercial, just turn off the sound and see the brilliant way it points out a human weakness of all of us (more or less but always there).
Did you ever observed that smart people (I mean really smart ones not fakers) will never say “I’m sure of…” this or that? Why is that?
Charles Darwin seem to come to a conclusion as he may have said:
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
Here is a simple explanation, which describes the phenomena of the knowledge horizon. Imagine that all your knowledge is represented as the interior of a circle and the “unknown” as what lies outside of it. However you can’t “see” outside of the circle, the only thing you see is the “margin” or “perimeter” of the circle. Anyone can “see” that there is “something” they do not know by measuring the “perimeter” of the circle.
Now, here is the funny part. As you increase your knowledge, you have more information to store in your “circle”. To store more you need to increase the diameter of the circle but if you do so you will increase automatically its perimeter. So, the more you know the more “unknown” you may be aware of. Unless you hit “the wall of all there is to know”, which to my current knowledge never happened, you’ll always know that there is potentially more than you do not know than what you know.
Another important clue is your focus on the known or unknown. People who advance their knowledge are the ones which focus on “the whole” circle both the interior of the circle (the known) or the perimeter “the unknown”. Focusing only on the known will end in a stagnation of knowledge process and create “smart ignorant” people (yes, there is such ting).
So, it is impossible to be “humble” and say that “I know it all” at the same time because you really don’t know it all. The focus on knowledge only and avoiding the unknown is also opposite to “humble” and generates the phenomena I described above, the “smart ignorant” type.
Well, but there are a lot of people asserting that “they are sure” of things. Are they all ignorant? I think not. I guess too many times we are forced by the social pressure to behave as “we know it all” because most of us do not realize this simple principle of the “knowledge horizon” and push for “perfection” and people freak-out and give up and assert over confidence. The other explanation is that when people assert that “I’m sure of..” they actually fail to give a more precise expression “I’m sure of … with this error level” assuming the rest of us already know what they wish to say.
What can we as a group take out of this idea? We need to stop asking people to be “perfect” at all cost as no one is really perfect. Pushing for perfection we will get in fact more imperfection wrapped in “perfect superficiality” or more blunt put BS.
