Know, believe, trust.

February 23, 2015 //
2

“Seeing is believing.”

Yeah, right.

So, do we really know anything?

For instance I know that the Earth exists – I am able to walk on it and I eat things that grow out of it.

I also believe – without ever having seen it from far enough – that the Earth is round. Just as my ancestors used to believe that the Earth was flat. Both I and my ancestors were told what to believe and we did that. Because we believed in those who were offering us that particular piece of information and because the issue wasn’t of any real importance for us, personally.

I do trust that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon. I’m not going to share with you my reasons for that here, this post is about something else. My point is that belief is casual while trust is active. I did research the matter, as I could, and I considered it carefully before reaching the conclusion that ‘Yes, I am convinced that Neil Armstrong did land on the Moon’.

As we all know ‘know’ is a verb. The corresponding noun is ‘knowledge’, information that we are aware of. And so familiar with that we don’t even remember how we have arrived to accept it as true.

Believe is also a verb. It’s corresponding noun is ‘belief’, information we are aware of and believe it to be true just because we were told so by a seemingly credible source.

Trust is both a verb and a noun. And here comes the really interesting part. While trust as a verb means more or less the same thing as believe, trust as a noun has nothing, but absolutely nothing in common with belief. Trust is a state of mind while belief is a piece of information with a ‘value’ attached to it.
In fact ‘trust’ is something you consciously choose to invest while ‘believing’ is something you are led to, sometimes even without you being aware of what is going on, by a person or even by the circumstances you happen to find yourself in.

Now it is time to introduce another notion. Faith. It exists only as a noun and that’s why I didn’t brought it up from the beginning.
It has something in common with both belief and trust. Similar to belief no proof is usually attached to faith and similar to trust faith is something that the individual has to willingly accept/profess/invest.

Coming back to knowledge we discover there are many kinds of it.
We have factual knowledge, the kind we have either witnessed or otherwise seems so evident that we’d never even dreamed of questioning. So evident that if somebody asks us to be specific and put it squarely in one of the ‘belief’, ‘trust’ or ‘faith’ drawers we’d be at a loss and protest vehemently ‘it’s plain knowledge, what’s wrong with you guys?’
Then we have our beliefs. For instance we know that we love our partners and our kids and we believe that they love us back. We also have faith in a lot of things. Some of us have faith in God, some others put their faith in politicians, market analysts or even the weather-man. For a longer or shorter period of time. When gravely ill we put our faith in doctors and in medicines. And so on.
And finally there is the trust problem. For a real trust to develop we need an actual understanding of what is going on. That’s where science and technology comes is. If we’d done something for a long enough period of time we gradually become confident in our ability to do that thing over and over again with consistent results. If the results are reproducible, if other people can obtain results similar to ours by following our methods then our endeavor is deemed scientific and, hence, trustworthy. Same goes for information gathered following scientific methods.

And here lies the pitfall. Science has to be constantly challenged in order to remain valid. If we reach that point where we start to put faith in science and scientists instead of continuously demanding proof and doing our best to understand with our own heads what is going on then we are doomed. Science morphs not in ‘religion’ – that is something else – but in hoax.

The ‘thing’ with science is that the only trustworthy aspect of it is the method, not at all the results. We’ll never be able to find the absolute truth – no result will ever be 100% accurate – but if we keep using the ‘scientific method’ – consistency and unhidden-ness – then we’ll remain on the safe side.

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Categories Psychology

‘Baby Girl’.

February 23, 2015 //
1

Do you have any qualms about ‘what’s going to happen when these children grow up’?

Have you considered the fact that it was us who raised them?

That we, their parents, presented them with clothes like these when they were young and that it was a member of our own generation who had fashioned this design and then organized manufacturing and distribution?

That we, their parents, are those who share jokes like the one I just found in my mail?

“Today be my baby girl’s 18th birthday. I be so glad that this be my last child support payment! Month after month, year after year, all those payments!
So I call my baby girl, LaKeesha, to come to my house, and when she get there, I say, “Baby girl, I want you to take this check over to yo momma house and tell her this be the last check she ever be gettin’ from me, and I want you to come back and tell me the ‘spression on yo mama’s face.”
So, my baby girl take the check over to her momma. I be anxious to hear what she say, and bout the ‘spression on her face.
Baby girl walk through the door, I say, “Now what yo momma say ’bout that?”
She say to tell you that “you ain’t my daddy” …and watch the ‘spression on yo face.”

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The world as described in jokes

Rituals

February 22, 2015 //
4

This post is dedicated to my friends who do not yet accept that rituals still play a huge role in our lives.
No matter if we are religious or not, in the conventional sense of the word, we all feel something special when witnessing rituals being observed.

To me this is a powerful proof that we need to belong, that our need to be an accepted member of a community is ingrained somewhere deep inside us. And for good reason because none of us would be able to survive on its own for more than a very short time.
In fact this is the real meaning of ‘religion’.
“Religion (derived from the Latin religare, meaning ‘to bind’) binds people together.”

From time to time religious teachings become perverted, in most instances by precisely those who were supposed/’entrusted with the divine mission’ to preserve and pass them on to future generations. We shouldn’t allow these manipulators to destroy our livelihood.

Maybe time has come for us to understand the entire process and to rebuild religiosity/togetherness on mutual respect?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HW3QVLlK-kE?feature=player_embedded
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0W7YdKYPl0
https://www.wordnik.com/words/religare

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Doomed to succed.

February 20, 2015 //
0

Some of us go by ‘the winner takes it all’.
For them each ‘win’ is another step that must be climbed on the ladder towards ‘success’.

Until the inevitable failure, and a single one is enough for the kind of game this people choose to play, brings them back at the foot of the ladder.

Samuel Becket suggested and then Nicholas Nassim Taleb amply demonstrated that there is an alternative to this scenario.

Next time ‘fail better’ was how Beckett taught us to deal with life’s inevitable downs while Taleb’s notion of ‘antifragility’ is the key that unlocks the door towards the understanding that the real success is to be able to survive everything that life throws at you.

In fact that’s what we’ve done, as a species, until now. We are still here, right? Even more, we managed to overcome all hurdles and became the dominant species on  Earth.

There is one small thing though. We’ve apparently grown close to the limits of our planet. We’ve explored almost all of the land mass and we’ve discovered many of it’s natural resources. And now we have become aware of all this.

We have some obvious venues in front of us.
Start fighting among ourselves for the control of what ever resources still are out there. Depending on what kind of weapons we’ll use this scenario might lead to total destruction or to a long war of attrition that will be won by those who have the less to loose. Any of these two will lead to a lot of misery.
Or extend competitive cooperation – the kind that is currently known as ‘really free market’, no monopolies/bullying allowed – to cover up the entire planet. The demographic pressure will ease up considerably – what we currently describe as ‘advanced nations’ have a lot less children than the rest of the population – so we’ll be able to stretch out existing resources for longer. This way we’ll have a lot more time at our disposal to develop sustainable technologies that will enable us to survive on the really long run, potentially until the Sun will grow nasty on us.
And who knows what will happen until then.

But to find out what the future has in store for us we’ll have to survive til that moment. And in order to do that we’ll have to re-learn what it means to trust, respect and love our fellow human beings. All of them.

http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/4362/

https://www.facebook.com/PrinceEaHipHop/photos/a.10150198151749769.315787.71760664768/10153123610239769/?type=1&theater

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Categories Choices we make, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

To keep or not to keep…mum!?!

February 17, 2015 //
2

broadcast to the Universe

“Professor Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, warned in 2010 that humans should keep as silent as possible because alien civilisations may be attracted to Earth and have the technology to travel here and exploit its resources. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” he said.”

Let’s accept for the sake of the argument that an ‘imperialistic and inconsiderate’ civilization (like the western Europeans were during the time of Columbus) manages to reach the technological prowess of being able to travel at velocities higher than the speed of light – otherwise no one would bother to leave their native planet except for a real emergency since building an empire in this circumstances is impractical.
Would you think they would wait for an invitation from us? Or that they would even need one to know that the Earth is a ‘hospitable’ planet?
If ‘they’ are as belligerent as we were, and still are, the Universe would be either divided into at least two empires busily trying to bite each other’s throat or a huge one who continuously gobbles up new and new planets.
We are still free after so many eons since the galaxy has been in place so chances are that either ‘they’ are a lot more peaceful or interstellar travel is not a feasible thing. Not in any recognizable – by us – form of animal life, anyway.

What we are left with is another, and for me a lot more plausible, hypothesis.
Long range travel has indeed been mastered, in one form or another. After a prolonged interstellar war or even from the very beginning the ‘travelers’ have understood that peace is a lot more ‘profitable’/nice/cozy than generalized war so they don’t allow ‘beligerant’ civilizations to get out of their planets until the would be new-comers ‘grow up’ from their ‘waring’ pubescence.
For instance by installing monitoring stations around ‘promising’ planets and actually sabotaging their efforts at ‘conquering the space’ until they reach a comprehensively peaceful stage of social development.

I remember that one of the conditions for Romania to be accepted in both European Union and NATO was for it to have good relations/’friendship treaties’ with all its neighbors. If we were wise enough to do such thing don’t you think that a civilization that has mastered space travel should have reached the same conclusion way back in their development?

It seems that our fright about the ‘aliens’ tells more about the way we are than about anything else…

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Science and technology, where are they headed?

February 16, 2015 //
0
 
Scientific thinking gave us vaccines, planes, computers, plenty of food through higher yield crops and state of the art health care, among other things.
Most of us have decided that using computers is good, including for our children, despite the fact that many of them develop “Facebook addiction”, that planes are safe enough to transport us and our children from place to place and that antibiotics tainted beef isn’t that bad tasting after-all.
Simultaneously some of us decided, all of a sudden and after more than 200 years of successful and safe use of the method that vaccination is ‘bad for you’. No, almost none of those have yet given up the use of planes and still surf furiously on the internet in their quest to convince others of their new found truth. Some of them have indeed shifted to organic food, whenever they can afford it.
Meanwhile the Taliban have started to shoot down the health workers that work hard to immunize Pakistani kids against polio.

And all this came to be because some reckless people who should have known better started to misuse the principles of the same scientific thinking by:
– Trying to produce perfect assassins through the use of LSD,
– Building an eavesdropping net the size of the entire Planet,
– Producing so many almost poisonous food additives and by promoting almost useless but very expensive drugs that regular people have lost their faith in both big pharma and ‘regular’ food industry,
– By the CIA using a “a sham hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where” bin Laden was hiding in a failed attempt to find him.  (As we all know the good news are that they found him after-all, using more straightforward methods.)
The bad news are that if we don’t clear up our act people will slowly but totally loose their trust in what we now call ‘scientific attitude towards the world’.
And, in fact, the real question is not about where are science and technology headed to but what do WE use them for!
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Categories Choices we make, psihologie, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

small Bang.

February 13, 2015 //
3

“Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity.”

Ever since Man became aware of the world around him he tried to find explanations for each and every individual occurrence that  grabbed his attention.
Eventually he became aware of the various links that exist between ‘things’ so he started to look for a ‘theory of everything’.
Right now Man seems stuck in the middle of the road.
I’ll assume the presumptuousness of my proposal but what about getting out of this sink hole by giving up mathematics as the main tool of investigation into the matter?
After all mathematics is nothing but just another language. A special kind of language, OK – a lot more precise than all the others, but still a language – nothing but another medium for rational thinking. And just as it happens in any medium/language, nothing can be expressed in that medium before it has been ‘grappled’ with the mind.
Of course that I don’t propose to give up mathematics altogether, that would be both ludicrous and absolutely inefficient.
The problem with our over-dependency on mathematics is that we no longer think first in words/concepts and then translate those into mathematical equations for verification but proceed the other-way around. We first ‘do our math’ and only then try to describe with words whatever imaginary place we have arrived at by using calculus. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Specially if one looks at it from this angle…
So what do we know about this so called Big Bang?
– Planck says that things cannot be divided further than 1 quantum.
– Heisenberg says that we cannot calculate anything with absolute precision.
– Einstein says that everything is tied together – ‘relative’ to each other.
– Stephen Hawking demonstrated – using calculus, of course – practically the same thing as Einstein when he convinced us that black holes are not exactly one way highways to nowhere. The implication of what Hawking says being that the ‘known’ Universe is somehow encapsulated towards the rear and has only one ‘open side’, the one that faces towards the ‘future’ – whatever that means.
And we still look desperately for a precise description of what happened during and even before the ground/moment 0… Really?!?
How about adopting a more practical attitude and accepting that each level of organization implies a certain amount of “in-determination”, the equivalent of those demonstrated by Heisenberg for the sub-atomic ‘world’ and by Schrodinger for ‘cats’ in general?
Maybe this way it would be easier for us to accept not only that we’ll never be able to find out what existed before the ‘Big Bang’ (if anything even imaginable in our terms) but also that it would be absolutely useless – my hunch being that we cannot ‘go back’ completely through a ‘layer’ of in-determination. A plastic analogy would be that we can see through a soap bubble but we cannot actually cross it and a more scientific one that Hawking taught us how to calculate what happens inside a black hole but never advised us to go there and check for ourselves…

And now, that we have reached this point, here is my scenario for what happened during … call it what you like.

At first there was nothing. No space, no time, no matter/energy of any kind.
‘Nothing’ in the sense that everything that existed – and that still exists – was so ‘indiscriminate’ as to be completely uniform. The pure bred scientists would use ‘congruous to itself’ to describe this state. Amorphous would be a very weak term for what I have in mind.
White light is a very pointy thing while pitch black is a lot more than its opposite. Light creates shadows, black creates opportunities. There can be ‘nothing’ between a light source and the observer while absolutely everything can hide in the dark.
That was that existed ‘before’. An immense ‘black nothing’.
Everything started/changed when the first ‘symmetry’ crashed in shatters – and who really cares about the ‘why’ of the matter since there was, by definition, no possible cause for anything, for nothing existed yet? I don’t know which symmetry and, again, I don’t really care. For me it is enough that from then on the continuous nothing became divided into ‘quanta’ that started to simultaneously aggregate furiously among themselves and disperse wildly.
The aggregation process gave birth to what we now call ‘things’ (mater, energy) while the ‘dispersion’ gave birth to both space and time.

Coming back to where we started from – ‘math can explain only what happened…’ – I must remind you that math cannot explain anything. Only people can do that, including through the use of ‘math’.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html#jCp
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Categories physics, physis, The kind of world we live in

Lice, Mayo, Plastic Bag. And Death.

February 13, 2015 //
1

“(Reuters) – A western Massachuetts toddler died over the weekend after suffocating while undergoing a home treatment for head lice involving mayonnaise and a plastic bag, police said on Thursday.“

OK, one thing at a time.

– Lice. Pestiferous insects that can carry dangerous diseases – typhus among others – usually associated with deficient personal hygiene but also with low standards of living/economic hardships. Last huge outbreak of typhus took place during WWI in Eastern Europe where both conditions for lice infections were met simultaneously. Deaths were numbered in millions, one of my great-grand fathers among them.
– Mayonnaise. Delicious – if well prepared – sauce comprising egg yolk and vegetable oil. Or various presumably edible chemicals, if bought in a jar. Some, as in this example, try to use it as treatment for lice.
Supposedly the fats that make up most of the ‘regular’ mayo will “suffocate” adult lice and the nymphs while the eggs will ‘survive’ the treatment. A second operation, involving vinegar, will be necessary to finish the business.
Anyway here is the ‘disclaimer’ that can be found on one of the sites that ‘promote’ this kind of ‘treatment’: “There are no scientific studies that prove the effectiveness of mayonnaise as a treatment for head lice, but there are many parents who have been using it for years and are very satisfied with the effectiveness of this home remedy against adult head lice.”

NB. This particular site actually warns that the mayo treatment is not suitable for children – who might try to eat some of it out of their hair. They also warn against covering children’s heads with plastic wraps after applying the mayo. These two warnings practically ban the use of this treatment whenever children are involved, right?

– Plastic Bag. Useful industrial product. So versatile that has become almost ubiquitous and so resistant that has become a rallying point for the environmentally minded people: they try to ban it because it ‘clogs’ the waste management systems. It also has been known to having produced accidental deaths, specially among children, by suffocation.

– Death. An otherwise normal occurrence for all living organisms.
It can also be induced intentionally – as in suicide/murder/self defense, hunting/culling or butchering/harvesting, unintentionally – when negligence/callousness is involved, or even against the will of the ‘perpetrator’ – by his own failure to take into consideration obvious aspects of the reality because of temporary ‘blindness’ induced by ‘ideological lenses’.

What has ‘ideology’ to do with anything?

People tend to forget that the concept of ideology has at least two sides and concentrate on the practical one. Most of us see ‘ideology’ as “a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation“ and forget about the ‘beacon’ role it plays to our minds: ideology understood as “the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group”.

Why on Earth would somebody subject an 18-months old child to an “unproven” treatment involving mayonnaise and vinegar for a condition that can be cured simply and effectively with FDA approved ‘chemicals’?
Two situations come to my mind: ‘regular’ treatment was applied, several times, and failed or the person resorting to the ‘mayo treatment’ is convinced that ‘FDA is a bunch of liars’.

In both cases that person did a poor job as a researcher. “And if you prefer mayonnaise with French fries and really don’t feel like putting it on your children’s heads, you can instead use an olive oil treatment, this will also be very effective.”

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/611812/typhus
http://headlicecenter.com/head-lice-mayonnaise/
http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/head/treatment.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/head_lice/page5.htm
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ideology

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Categories Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Gura pacatosului adevar graieste.

February 10, 2015 //
0

Din pacate prea multi dintre pacatosi se decid sa spuna adevarul abia atunci cand este prea tarziu.
Atat pentru ei, adica dupa ce au pacatuit, cat si pentru ceilalalti, care nu mai cred nimic din ce spun acestia tocmai din cauza prea multelor pacate comise de ei.

Tot din pacate si tot de prea multe ori nici macar ajunsi in momente de criza prea multi dintre pacatosi nu au curajul sa dezvaluie intregul adevar. Mai degraba transforma oportunitatea unei confesiuni potential eliberatoare, macar din punct de vedere psihologic/moral, intr-o sordida lupta de ariergarda.
Dar asta nu inseamna ca printre spusele lor nu se gasesc adevarate perle. Ar fi pacat sa nu le ridicam din mizeria de pe jos, mai ales ca ne sunt extrem de folositoare chiar noua.

Ca sa nu prelungesc prea mult introducerea iata ce spunea Elena Udrea atunci cand procuratura a cerut pentru ea, intr-o sigura sedinta a Parlamentului, trei incuviintari pentru anchetare si tot trei incuviintari pentru arestare.(Exista oare rubrica pentru chestii din astea in World Book of Guinness Records? Poate la ‘ciudatenii’?!?)

“Timp de 10 ani am luptat pentru statul de drept, justiţie independentă, instituţii puternice. Sunt dintre cei care au acuzat Parlamentul că nu poate garanta progresul României şi nu poate da ţării viitorul de care are nevoie, despre ineficienţa Legsilativului, despre reducerea parlamentarilor la 300, de nevoia întăririi justiţiei şi reformele pozitive la nivelul serviciilor de securitate. Am încercat în discursul meu să mut greutatea acţiunii de pe Parlament pe alte instituţii. Într-o anumită măsură recunosc că am greşit. Am pierdut legitimitatea publică a Parlamentului pentru a creşte prestigiul altora din păcate. Cosnstat astăzi eu însămi ce înseamnă să faci parte dintr-o clasă politică şi un Parlament cu credibilitatea pierdută pe fondul clădirii unor statui unor instituţii de forţă.”

Pentru ‘conspirationisti’ acest pasaj ar putea constitui un argument de genul ‘uite dom-le cum vor astia sa slabeasca Romania’. Pentru cei care au ‘boala’ pe ‘servicii’ inca un motiv sa sustina ‘astia au deja prea multa putere’!
N-am de unde sa stiu nici ce a vrut cu adevarat sa spuna Elena Udrea si nici daca serviciile au prea multa putere sau nu. Cu atat mai putin am vre-un argument clar cum ca ar exista vreo conspiratie malefica care ar incearca sa distruga, din exterior, statul roman.
Ca or fi tot felul de oportunisti si de pescuitori in ape tulburi care isi incearca permanent norocul… asta e cu totul si cu totul altceva.

Si, de fapt, exact asta a marturisit, printre dinti, Elena Udrea. Ca a facut parte dintr-un grup de indivizi care odata ajunsi la putere au incercat sa foloseasca aceasta putere in scop personal. Ba, mai mult, ca nu s-au multumit cu firmituri ci ca au incercat, din pozitiile pe care le ocupau si in mod total ‘netransparent’, sa schimbe structurile de putere din interiorul statului roman, tocmai pentru ca sa isi poata atinge mai usor scopurile. Indiferent care or fi fost acelea.

Ar fi mare pacat sa trecem prea usor peste marturisirea, chiar din partea unui ‘initiat’, ca exista astfel de tentative.

http://m.adevarul.ro/news/politica/arestare-elena-udrea-dosarul-microsoft-gala-bute-urmarire-penala–noaptea-mai-lunga-1_54d90b6b448e03c0fd71923a/index.html

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Categories Justitie, politica, psihologie, Respect Mutual., Tara din care traim

Stages

February 9, 2015 //
0

“- Can we talk to you?
– We talked, now it’s time for each of you to listen to your own hearts.”

Misterious Ways, Pure of Heart: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0655359/?ref_=ttep_ep3

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology
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