The Mind is Fragile *and* Weak

As a follow-up to this earlier post, The Mind Is Fragile:

I see that Sam Harris is taking a break from railing against misinformation to defend "his friend" Joe Rogan. 

Obviously this seems at the very least unnecessary if not absurd. But to me, it makes perfect sense. Joe Rogan is much more famous than Sam Harris, and Rogan has repeatedly been very deferential to and promotional of Harris.

Now even though Rogan is a "bad" human being and a significant net negative for the world, the human mind is simply not built to do utilitarian calculations. Our mind is meant to deal with small groups of people who we see every day. So if someone stronger and with more social power is kind and deferential to us, our brains simply can't help but view them as a "friend."

This is true for me as well. For decades, one of my best friends was someone who yearned for money and fame. I should have realized this when I heard him talk about famous vegans or look at big houses and ask longingly why that couldn't be him. But I remained blind to his true nature until 2014, when my blindness cost me everything I had built professionally.

Yet sadly, I didn't learn my lesson, again mistaking personal kindness for character until it cost me dearly last year. 

One thing these situations have in common is an "enemy." Sam Harris constantly rages that people on "the Left" are mean to him on Twitter, so he sees this as a common enemy with Rogan. With me, the "enemy" was animal exploitation, as well as the general assumption that vegans are good people. (Har.)

I think this also explains a lot about the former guy's appeal. He is supposedly rich and powerful, and he says nice things about certain people and speaks harshly about "the enemy" (immigrants, Muslims, etc.). Many people thus see him as on "my side," even considering him "my friend." It is why the great despots always created an "us vs them" dynamic, demonizing Jews, Tutsi, Blacks, Muslims, Mexicans, Commies, Hippies, etc.  It is why it does not seem unreasonable to fear for the future of democracy.

Very Important Quote & Losing My Religions Table of Contents

One of the hardest things to do

is differ with some of the people

you agree with on most issues.

And people need to learn that’s not a betrayal.

–Barney Frank, quoted in Nick Offerman’s Gumption

Here's what you get in Losing My Religions:

• Anything for Her Laugh  + Warnings & Notes
• Day 1: One Love, One Hate + Carl Sagan
• Parentheticals & Grammar & Memory
• Day 1 Continued: Up Shit Creek
• Day 1 Concluded:  The Tyranny of Money
• Harold and Ed
• SportsBall!
• The three tips for you  but not my enemies  (you know who you are)
• Day 2: Bullet in a Bible
• Day 2 Concluded: Zero to Sixty
• What’s Dick Got to Do with It?
• Day 3: Funeral Suit
• Day 3 Concluded: Ready … Aim …
• Day 4: Losing My Religion
• Day 4 Concluded:  “Just one more.”
• Worse than Hitler
• Day 5: The End of Innocence
• God, the Greatest Murderer of All Time
• Day 6: Adventures in Wine,  Wings, and Women
• Day 6’s Wild and Crazy Ending
• Sex Is Gross
• “Don’t Threaten Us”
• Day 7: The Bullet Is Fired
• Day 7 Continued:  “We’re here, we’re queer,  we don’t like the government”
• Day 7 Continued:  Inevitably, the cops came.
• Day 7 Concluded:  The Bullet Is Dodged
• Day 8: Soulmate.  Literally. Not Figuratively.
• Day 8 Concluded: Stone Cold
• Day 9: The (Two Hour) Courtship  of EK’s Mother
• Day 9 Continued:  The Road to Perdition (and Prague)
• The Giddy-Up Courtship becomes  Time the First
• Day 9’s Surprise Conclusion!
• Why Reason Is Needed
• Day 10: “Not comin’ all that way  just to eat vegetables.”
• Travelog Erfurt
• Day 11: Remembering Perfection while Flying Coach
• Day 11 Concluded: Won’t go naked,  but open to party.
• Brains! BRAINS! (There is a self! But no free will.)
• My Brain Flaps Again
• Day 12: Hot for Teacher
• Day 12 Concluded:  I Used to be Smart … and Dumb(er)
• Very Little Really Matters
• Day 13: The Puritans were Assholes
• Day 13 Concluded: Freezing, Snuggling, and Wine Undrunk
• How to Be a Stud: Relationship Advice
• Day 14: Prelude to  The End of Happiness
• Fight the Power Part 1:  “To breed or not to breed”
• Day 14 Concluded:  Worst the First
• More Unpopular Opinions
• Day 15: A Lot of What?
• Fight the Power Part 2: Family Feud
• Day 16: “Who eats animals?”
• The End of Veganism
• Day 16 Continued: Test Your Marriage!
• Day 16 Concluded:  Money might not buy happiness,  but lack of money can  bring unhappiness
• Money makes the world go ’round,  but your time will run out. 
• Lessons from a lifetime of bad decisions.
• Day 17: To the Exurbs – and Beyond!
• Day 17 Continued: Time the Second
• Brains! Redux: The Mind Is Fragile
• Day 17 Concluded:  Dazed and Delirious in Deutschland
• Day 18: Time of Your Life
• Day 19: Wolf Park, Dog Camp,  and Time the Third
• Bonus Tips
• Day 20: “That’s a high math score!”
• Day 20 Concluded:  Running to Stand Still (SportsBall! redux)
• Day 21: Sowing the Seeds…
• Day 21 Concluded: “You’re Matt Ball?”
• Biting the Philosophical Bullet
• My Expected Value  Is Bigger Than Yours
• I welcome our robot overlords and you should, too!
• Day 22: The Shocking Inevitability
• Day 23: Flashback to Worst the Second
• Day 24: Prelude to Worst the Third
• The Interesting Life of  an Uninteresting Person 
• (but really: Drug-Aided Meditation)
• A Personal Request from Me to You
• Day 25: The One Who Got  (Inside) My Heart
• Day 26: The Green Party Fucks Us Again
• Climate activists are to blame for some of the suffering  caused by climate change
• Greta Thunberg’s misery is the result of child abuse.
• Extinction Is No Big Deal
• I Take the Colbert Questionert
• Day 27: Burn the Heretic
• Travelog for Introverts
• Day 28  2021: A Suffering Odyssey
• Day 28 Continued:  “Maybe I’m paralyzed”
• Day 28 Concluded: Free-Falling
• Day 16 Revisited: Karma, Money, and a Bread Machine
• Mindfulness, Meaning, & More Drugs
• Day 29: Good Times!  Literally. Not Sarcastically.
• Day 29 Concluded:  Even with a Soulmate, Life Can Become Not Worth Living
• Day 30: The Foreshadowing Pays Off “Where is his heart?”
• Day 18 Revisited: So Happy It’s Scary
• Day 31: And In The End

Noah Smith: Lifting humanity out of poverty is Job #1.

Mezquita in Córdoba, Spain
(Not related to post)

Somewhat related to "There are enough people," Noah Smith explains "The elemental foe." (A portion relevant because a friend's life was quite possibly just saved by antibiotics.) Excerpts:

I remember a particular scene out of a book that terrified me when I was seven years old. During an argument, some minor character talks about having been to Calcutta and having witnessed the desperate poverty there. He describes seeing beggars on the street, starving, covered in sores. That mental image stuck in my mind for weeks. Even as a child, having never myself known absolute poverty, I had an elemental terror of it. [I wonder if this book is A Fine Balance, a book that horrified me. -ed]

look at animal existence in the wild places of the world — a constant desperate struggle for survival, where populations are kept in equilibrium only by starvation and predation. That is the natural state of most life. Then look at how humans lived for the vast majority of our history — indigent subsistence farmers forever skating on the rim of famine. That is the natural state of preindustrial humanity.

When we spin fantasies of our collective past, we write about kings and princesses, because they’re the only ones who lived lives we could even remotely relate to today. Even then, the comparison is only approximate — the mightiest emperor of yesteryear had plenty to eat, but lacked antibiotics, vaccines, flush toilets, or air conditioning.

...

In the developed societies almost all of us manage to stay a few steps out of reach of that monster for our entire lives, and this fact is the wonder of the world. The artifice we have built to keep it at bay — vast farms blanketing whole continents and tended by fantastic machines, sprawling landscapes of ersatz caves to keep us sheltered from the elements, endless roads and rails, an empire of warehouses and supermarkets and pharmacies and just-in-time logistics — is the only meaningful thing that has ever been built within the orbit of our sun in billions of years.

It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

When smug intellectuals sneer at “economic growth” or “GDP”, they are denouncing the very walls of the fortress that has allowed them to live more than an animal existence. Safe within its sheltering bastions, they are free to indulge in the extravagance of pretending that the foe isn’t lurking right outside. They revel in the luxury of their material security by staging mock revolutions over differences in social status and relative wealth among the elite. With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past — pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements. Sometimes they imagine they could move to one of those fantasy worlds.

As shallow as all that sounds, it’s precisely to allow the luxury of shallowness that humanity struggled so long and hard. Yet we can never afford for luxury to become complacency, because the foe has not been defeated.

...

As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

No redistribution of resources from Europe and America to India and Africa will fix this. The wealth of the world is not a fixed lump of treasure to be plundered; that is simply another daydream. Our true wealth is not gold and paintings lying in vaults in rich men’s mansions; it is the system of industrial production and logistics that is built and rebuilt and maintained every day by billions of human hands. Foreign aid is helpful, but it cannot substitute for economic development. Industrial modernity must be built out where it does not already exist.

...

It is our highest task to push that foe ever backward, to build out the fortress of industrial modernity, to reclaim the Earth for the safety and comfort of beings that think and feel.

Man's Search for Meaning; aka "These are indeed the crucial years, maybe the last crucial years."

Wilco "You Never Know" 

“Come on, children, you’re acting like children

“Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world” 

A follow-up to yesterday: 

I totally get it: We want to believe our lives have meaning. 

If not born into a religious tradition where god(s) provide that purpose, we look elsewhere. It can be some philosophy, some dogma, some story, some community, some cause. (This is why "religions" is plural in Losing My Religions.) We'll create / believe arguments that our actions are important and impactful, that we live in the most important time ever, that only our group actually knows the truth, that the future depends on us. 

It is worth recognizing that this is part of human nature. It is also worth remembering that the human mind is fragile and weak. 

It isn't just below-average people who believe that Jesus talks to them, Bill Gates is trying to chip them, and that the election was stolen. The smarter we are, the more likely we are to believe fake news and conspiracy theories. And the smarter we are, the less likely we are to recognize our limitations.

IMO: The more certain we are about something, the more passionate we are, the more we should doubt and question ourselves.

PS: The title is a reference to a famous book but also social commentary. My experience is that it tends to be primarily men who spend their time searching for / inventing "meaning," and men are more likely to go down rabbit holes. Women tend to be more practical, on average. (This isn't to make a blanket statement, of course, any more than noting that men are, on average, taller than women means that every woman is short.)

PPS: Since I wrote the above but before I published, I came across this amusing and scary Joel Stein podcast about conspiracy theories being a religion. (Note: I'm not calling AI or especially climate change a conspiracy theory.) All of Joel Stein's "Story of the Week" podcasts are good!

Then I got the latest newsletter from Bill McKibbon re: global warming. It concludes: 

"These are indeed the crucial years, maybe the last crucial years."  

Nice knowing ya.

If you find this blog interesting, please share it. Thanks!

Last Mental Health Note: The Mind Is Fragile

A very long time and very smart friend of ours has now made "anti-vax" their identity. Their Facebook feed is just one long string of anti-vax posts. They no longer work for animals, as they had for decades, because they won't get vaccinated.

It seems it started in 2016 with their capture by the Bernie Bros contingent. It wasn't Senator Sanders' ideas (Denmark is happier than the United States; if it was politically possible, we would gladly support those ideas). Rather, it was the anti-Clinton and then anti-establishment posts. Then it morphed into acceptance of more and more "everyone is out to get me and my small group who know the truth" conspiracies. (I wrote this last year in an obviously unsuccessful attempt to influence them.)

The problem is that this evolution is entirely understandable. You read more and more, deeper and deeper, until it is all of a piece and no one else can be believed. This would have happened to just about anyone with the same background and the same media consumption (e.g., study of YouTube's radicalizing algorithm).

The same is true for people who grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh at home and then started watching Fox News. Racists. Sexists. Anti-LGBTQ fanatics. Killers. They all believe that because that is what got into their brain.

It is, really, the same for people growing up in a religion. What you believe is what you see, and vice versa. Our brains are not rational machines, but rationalizing machines. We want an identity, a tribe. We'll give up anything for that.

It is horrifying and crushingly sad, often without any consolation.  

[More upbeat posts coming. Sorry for the public wallowing. Update: this is now a chapter in Losing My Religions. 
Song.] 

We have met the enemy... (Yes, I'm still bitter.) Plus: conspiracies!

Song: Chemical Brother's "Galvanize"

Update re: The Mind Is Fragile: 

Conspiracies of Cognition, Conspiracies Of Emotion

As you've read in Losing My Religions, I'm still bitter at the Green Party.  

But as Matt Yglesias recently documented, the "mainstream" media was at least as much to blame for the 2016 fiasco:

"That one splash from the Times has become emblematic of the obsessive coverage of the Clinton emails story, but the issue was much broader than that. The mainstream American press treated the 2016 campaign as one in which the most important issue was whether or not Hillary Clinton had accidentally mishandled classified information as a result of breaking State Department policy to use her own email server for work.

"Consider broadcast television news. The Tyndall Report concluded that there were roughly 32 minutes of coverage of the candidates’ policy positions on network news during the 2016 cycle in contrast to 100 minutes on the emails story. David Rothschild and Duncan Watts looked at the Times’ front page and found, similarly, that “in just six days, the New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”

"I would also note that beyond the emails, there was an inordinately negative inflection to the coverage of Clinton.

"The 2016 cycle, for example, saw a lot of scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation and its activities. I am, as I hope people know at this point, pretty interested in the subject of philanthropy. So I’d wondered for years whether the Clinton Foundation was any good. My suspicion was always that a closer look would show that the “real scandal” of the Clinton Foundation was that it spent tons of money on programs that sound nice but don’t do any good. But Dylan Matthews, who had similar suspicions, looked at it, and it turned out that the Clinton Foundation was pretty good!"

The Mind Is Fragile, Projection Issue (2/2)

Dan Bern, "Jerusalem."
Funny and relevant to the below, the "Everybody's waiting..." section.

As a counterpoint to the above "makes me laugh" review:

In the "Robot Overlords" chapter in Losing My Religions, I mention someone who stopped donating to animal advocacy and instead gave his money to promoting Christianity (infinite expected value). I didn't mention that he had also gone through a kick where he tried to convince me to put all my money into silver - he had all the charts and facts to "prove" this was the best course of action.

Well, sir....

So last week, out of the blue after many years, I hear from him again. He's writing to tell me that he left his cult and is now into Effective Altruism and chanting. But mostly, he wanted to tell me that I'm "sick" and "need help" because I "want robots to kill all humans."

Um....

The coincidence is that Anne and I had just been discussing a book I was once asked to blurb. In it, animals can talk to each other, and one says, "Kill all humans." (That line was the main, but not only, reason I didn't blurb the book.)

Anyway, I'm sad but not surprised that veganism and effective altruism attracts so many mentally unstable people. I'm also sad that people can't consider, let alone discuss, ideas without massive mischaracterizations and accusations of genocide. I guess I have a slight understanding of what Peter Singer goes through. 

The Impossible Quiz Show

Ben Folds - Not the Same
About a friend who took acid and became a born-again Xtian

More for The Mind Is Fragile (and follow-up) in Losing, is this parody or real?

Did you guess real? You "win."    😢

Her whole feed is like that:

How awful it must be to live in that brain, where everyone is out to get you and nothing is falsifiable. 

It didn't take Bill Gates or 5G to turn some people into zombies; it seems we're like that by default. 😧

I think Effective Altruists have some assumptions they really should question. On the other hand:

Wk'end Reading: The Mind Is Fragile (long edition)

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

A truly crazy story. Not happy or encouraging but illustrative. Yikes.

When I first got involved with the Animal Rights Community of Greater Cincinnati in the late 1980s, it became apparent that animal rights / veganism attracted more than its share of people with some form of mental instability. The same is true for effective altruism. (And probably every "out there" philosophy / religion / dogma.)

Mental Health / Pain Posts Compiled

Adventures in Pain Management: Counseling / Therapy

Adventures in Pain / Mind Management: Drugs Part 1, Backstory

Adventures in Pain / Mind Management: Drugs Part 2, 2021

Adventures in Mind Management: Drugs Part 3, Anxiety and Pot

Adventures in Mind Management: Media Consumption

Last Mental Health Note: The Mind Is Fragile

Chiropractic and my recent adventure in pain

Latest Adventure: Acupuncture

Laughter :-)