Tag Archives: science

Health advice rollercoaster

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Coffee is bad for you, no wait, it’s good for you! A glass of read wine a day is good for your heart health, no wait, any amount of alcohol is unhealthy! Drink fruit juice, it’s high in vitamins, no wait, there’s too much sugar and not enough fibre in the juice alone! Creatine can damage your liver, no wait, it just spikes the creatine marker for liver issues, it doesn’t actually mean your liver is having issues, just that you have to look at different markers if you supplement your creatine.

From what food to eat, to what vitamins and supplements you should and shouldn’t take together, to exercises that are guaranteed to give you results, it seem like there is always a constant stream of new, updated research and information about improving heath which contradicts something we’ve heard (and believed) previously.

Here are 2 rules to follow as you travel the health advice rollercoaster:

1. The science matters. How big is the sample size, how many other studies suggest the same thing?

2. The messaging. When the threat is over emphasized, the message needs to be taken with a grain of salt. When a product is being pitched, there is an underlying benefit to exaggerating, either the cost of not taking the product or the benefit of taking it. This doesn’t mean that what is being said is true or false, it just means you need a good dose of scepticism unless you’re actually referring back to the science yourself.

Ultimately, it comes down to one question, are you getting research or are you being sold something? It’s not that you shouldn’t question both but rather if it’s advertising, this scrutiny should be significantly greater. And, no matter what it is, you can be certain that it’s probably going to contradict something you’ve heard previously. There are going to be a lot more twists, turns, and loops on this roller coaster before we truly understand how our body works and what benefits it the most.

The case for limited free will (Part 1)

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Part 1

When I retire, and have more free time, I’m going to expand on this topic considerably. But for now I’m just sharing a 3-part premise.

There is a convincing argument against the idea of free will, and some very bright people argue that there is no such thing. I, on the other hand, believe we do have free will… but it is limited.

Go to the ‘free-will’ tag on my blog and you’ll see that I’ve shared this and other related idea before.

Right now I just want to put down a list of premises which, one day, I’ll defend, but for now, here they are:

  1. Consciousness is emergent. It is the product of excess processing time beyond what’s needed for survival.
  2. Free will is not fully free. Both the environment and more importantly our hardware affect our ability to think freely. Don’t believe me? Try to make a challenging decision when you have an agonizing tooth ache.
  3. Limited free will is also emergent and comes with consciousness. Despite the fact that there are constraints and limits to how free free will is, it’s still more free than no free will.

Consciousness is at the crux of the argument. Consciousness does not have a physical position in our physical world. You can’t point to a part of the brain and say, ‘there it is’. So arguing against free will based on physics falls apart.

Looking at an MRI or other brain scan after asking someone a question and being able to predict their answer before they say it is another argument against free will. However, that doesn’t tell us how our brain came to that decision, it only shows that our conscious mind doesn’t react or even necessarily fully understand our unconscious mind… but there is still an unconscious mind that made that decision. Deciding to discuss the conscious and unconscious mind as two separate things is a false division that is useful to talk about, but the reality is, we are of one mind… Even if we ourselves can’t fully grasp how our own consciousness works. 

Two things are happening in the MRI argument that are faulty when used in an argument against free will: First, there is a free will decision that happens, even if it’s before our conscious mind knows. Second, the fact that our hardware limits the decisions themselves and then also how we rationalize those decisions based on our (limited) decision-making, does not negate the fact that we still made the decision.

Well, there you have it, I said I wasn’t going to expand on these premises and I already started to. The thing to realize is that just because our free will has considerable limits, and constraints, doesn’t negate the fact that we are still making choices that are truly ours.

We have limited free will but still freer than not having free will at all.

Lie with confidence

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Be controversial but wrong, say it with confidence, and watch the likes and re-shares come your way. I had an Instagram video shared with me. The ‘influencer’ who posted it has over 600,000 followers and she claims to be an autoimmune specialist.

“You’ve got to see this,” she says, after saying that a man tested his blood before and after EMF (Electric and Magnetic Field) exposure. Then the clip changes to a guy looking at an image on a screen of what he claims to be red blood cells in “pretty perfect blood… I, mean these cells are absolutely amazing cells… it may even be hard actually to mess them up.”

Then they do a ‘phone test’ where the test subject sits between two cell phones, and has a third one between his legs on the chair, to test how “these EMF’s are affecting his ‘perfect blood’… Admitting that this is, “A bit of a risky game,” He then pricks his finger to draw a drop of blood after this supposed EMF exposure. They put a drop of the blood on a microscope plate and we switch views to see the screen again.

The contrast from the original image is comical. Worse yet the person is scrolling on the screen to a point that would go far beyond the edge of a drop of blood on a microscope plate. The difference in the slides is described as “A lot of inflammation. It’s all over.” After a very non-medical, exaggerated analysis, it concludes with, “None of this is good.”

When the video got to me it had 336,000 views and over 9,500 likes. And again, it was sent to me by someone who was concerned by this and wanted to share it.

We live in an era where confidence trumps competence. Be controversial and convincing and you are going to get not just attention, but believers. If I were to make a video debunking this, it wouldn’t get traction. Even scientists with large followings would likely not get 336,000 views on a debunking video.

So the inventive is huge. This influencer probably gained thousands of followers from this video. She made hundreds if not thousands of dollars from it going viral. And so it pays to put intentionally fake pseudo-scientific crap on the web. Just pick a controversial topic, lie with confidence, and watch the profits flow in. No backlash, no consequences, just greed, and incentives to continue to lie.

My fear? I see this getting worse, not better. AI will only serve to exaggerate the problem with more convincing lies that cater to wider audiences. It feels like as a society, we are actually getting dumber and social media is incentivized to make the problem exponentially worse.

Where else have we seen lying with confidence working? Everywhere from biased news outlets, to product advertising, to politics. Whether selling ideas, products, or partisanship, lying with confidence seems to gain far more traction than telling the truth.

_____

Update: After posting this, (and probably thanks to re-watching the above video a few times to get the quotes right), I opened Instagram and the first post had dramatic music and warned against wearing polyester on planes:

I took the screen shot and didn’t watch the rest of the video. People actually fall for this crap? 🤦‍♂️

Ground Truthing

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The term ‘ground truthing’ was shared with me last night by a friend, Neil. I had never heard the term before so did a quick MS365 Copilot request to learn more.

Ground truthing is the process of collecting data on-site (in the real world) to validate and calibrate information obtained from remote sensing technologies, models, or other indirect methods… It’s essentially a reality check to ensure that what the data suggests matches what’s actually happening on the ground.

While it is primarily used in Geography & Remote Sensing, Environmental Science, Agriculture, and Machine Learning & AI, I think it’s a term (or at least a practice) we are going to see a lot more use of in the future. More and more, when I receive information I’m immediately questioning if it’s real. Anything remotely controversial, or surprising, easily falls into a category of doubt… ‘I wonder if this is real or AI?’ But more recently, almost every video and article I see seems to sit in an uncanny valley of almost true or almost real. Before I accept new information, I have to ask myself, ‘Where can I verify this?’ In other words, ‘How can I ground truth this?’

Here is a simple example, in that the information is obviously false, but the deep fake is impressively realistic.

I also saw a video of Physicist Brian Cox saying that comet ATLAS 3i was definitely a spaceship. I didn’t bother fact checking it, I new it was fake, but enough of his followers questioned these kinds of videos that Brain came out on social media to say this:

“I keep seeing AI shite of me popping up on YouTube. The general rule is that if I appear to say something that you agree with and you are a UFO nobber, flat earth bell end or think comet ATLAS 3i is a spaceship, it’s fake.”

Where it gets more complicated is where actual facts are taken and then exaggerated. On the same theme of science and space, I recently saw a video that was talking about the theory that our entire universe might be in a massive black hole. From Copilot:

Some physicists propose that our universe might exist inside a black hole. This idea stems from the observation that black holes warp space and time so intensely that they could create a new, self-contained universe within. The consistent spin direction of many galaxies could be a result of the angular momentum inherited from the parent black hole, influencing the structure and motion of matter in our universe.

This is indeed a theory that is being considered by some scientists and I find it very interesting. So when a video comes up on my social media stream about it, I watch it. But when 20 seconds in I hear the narrator say that this is now considered true, I can’t even get myself to watch to the end of the video. These kind of videos really piss me off. I am angered that someone would create a video based on factual, interesting and novel ideas, but exaggerate the information and outright lie about it for the sake of views, clicks, and likes.

All 3 of these examples are actually easy, because my BS detector goes off. Where I’m concerned now is where that detector does not go off. What happens when the lies are more subtle, when the information is more nuanced? For example, do I really understand the issues happening in one of the many global conflicts right now? What’s the bias of the news or broadcasting station sharing the information? Where do I get more authentic information? How do I go about ground truthing what I’ve heard? Can I even get access to information ‘from the ground’?

It’s getting to the point where I have to question almost everything I hear. Is it real, what is the source, and where can I verify this? I hadn’t heard the term ground truthing before last night, but I realize that I’ve already started doing it, and I’m going to be doing a whole lot more of it in the future.

Avoid this, try this, buy this

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I am getting sick and tired of social media ads these days. They are following a recipe designed to make you less knowledgeable, more stressed, and frankly dumber. Here are the two main formulas, or should I say ingredients, in these tasteless ads:

Either:

“Don’t eat these 3 items that are killing you.” Followed by a list that includes seed oils, or certain nuts, or another common item in your kitchen. Before plugging a product, or casually naming a name brand item while suggesting alternatives.

Or:

“Doctors hate me.” Followed by an exercise program or diet that has made the person ultra fit without ‘traditional’ medicines and practices. What,you need is our callisthenics program, Tai Chi, ‘Just 9 minutes a day’, or the Butt Blaster 3000.

It’s ‘Avoid this – it’s killing you!’ And then a product plug. Or it’s ’Transform your body, it’s easier than you think… if you buy into what I’m selling.’

And none of these are 30 seconds long. They are all longer format where they attempt to suck you in, feeling invested in the video for a minute or two before the secret to a better or healthier you is revealed.

But there is no real science behind what is claimed. Or worse yet, there are some factual aspects that are proven but irrelevant. “Did you know that ingredient XYZ in product ABC causes cancer?’ You didn’t, so you watch the video. But what isn’t shared is that the dangerous amount of that item would be 10,000 times the dose you would get from eating product ABC… and it only ever showed a link to cancer when that massive dose was fed to mice for continuous days or weeks.

These ads scare you with ‘facts’ that aren’t actually scary, or make promises that a program or product will change your life with a sample size of one person who is telling you how ‘This worked for me and it will work for you too’.

Fear and false promises are being sold on a grand scale and this formula is just showing up more and more. I guess from the amount of ads like this that I’ve seen, the formula is working.

(I’m sure everyone who tries Tia Chi looks like this at 62! 🤦‍♂️)

So vast

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This morning I watched a video that explained that to get to the next galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, it would take 2.5 million years travelling at the speed of light. Imagine that, travelling 300,000km per second for millions of years. And then you’ve only reached the first of trillions of galaxies… Not billions, but trillions of galaxies in our universe.

It’s so hard to make sense of these numbers. I understand what they mean, but I can’t really comprehend the scale. For example, let’s break down the idea of traveling 300,000km in a second. That means travelling 18 million kilometres in a minute, or 1,080 million kilometres in an hour, or 1 billion & 920 million kilometres in one day.

And at that speed it would still take 2.5 million years to get to the next galaxy.

I understand what the numbers mean, I just struggle to fathom the scale in a way my brain can grasp beyond saying, ‘That’s really far,’ and ‘The universe is really, really big.’ No matter how much I cognitively try to grasp how ‘really big’ our universe is, I know that in reality it’s magnitudes bigger than I can comprehend. This is truly mind boggling.

Somewhere in between

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There is somewhere in between hard science and woo-woo science where consciousness sits. There is a space between evidence we can see and unknown connections that are not yet explainable, but will be one day.

We talk about coincidences, synchronicity, and even dumb luck to try to understand relationships between unlikely events. We’ve all heard stories of people ‘just knowing’ things they shouldn’t know, or being aware when something happens to a loved one far away. It happens. It’s unexplainable.

Some people will profess that it’s divine intervention, others will talk about energy fields, still others will proclaim psychic powers. There are as many theories as there are experiences that promote them.

I think that consciousness is inherently connected. I think that we don’t yet understand how? We can’t understand how to either harness or observe the connections, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Without a radio, I can’t prove to you that there is music being transmitted on multiple frequencies around you right now. Without sensors, I can’t prove to you that the sun hits you with ultraviolet light.

We don’t have consciousness sensors yet. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t being bombarded by waves of consciousness all the time. Maybe the holy men of the past were just tuned into a frequency that we aren’t able to see or hear. Maybe intuition is a kind of a weak consciousness radio receiver?

Somewhere between current science and wacky woo-woo wanna-be science there sits a currently unknown and undiscovered understanding of consciousness. We see glimpses of of it, but don’t have the knowledge to explain it.

We don’t know

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Is light a particle or a wave? According to the double split experiment, it depends on how you choose to measure and observe it?

How many species are still unknown to us in tropical forests and deep in our oceans?

What is consciousness? We know so much about the functioning of the brain and yet we still really don’t understand consciousness.

What if anything exists beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There is currently a theory that we might be trapped in a black hole. This would help to explain why most galaxies spin in the same direction. If this is the case, is our entire universe just one black hole in another universe with many more?

Even if that is a disproven theory, there is still so much more we don’t know about our universe, and new discoveries from modern space telescopes are often showing us things that make us question what we thought we knew.

We don’t know so much about the universe or even where our thoughts come from. And yet we are constantly trying to find meaning in everything around us. We seek to know the unknown, to know more than we now know.

There are still so many more mysteries to be solved, so many unanswered questions. We don’t know. We don’t know. We don’t know… and so we wonder, we question, we delve into the mysteries with wonder and amazement. We don’t know, but we seek to know.

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

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Is this the newest epidemic?

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

Some very interesting findings have come from a new study:

  • Researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Decay claim stupidity spreads “at rates comparable to the common cold, but with longer-lasting effects.”
  • Dr. Helen Tropp, lead researcher:
    “It turns out stupidity is highly contagious, especially when transmitted through phrases like ‘I did my own research’ or ‘That’s just your opinion.’”
  • Study participants who spent just 10 minutes in a room with someone spouting conspiracy theories lost an average of 12 IQ points, some “permanently.”
  • Exposure is not limited to in-person contact: scrolling through the ‘For you’ section of X (Twitter) carries “a 73% risk of infection.”
  • In rural test sites, researchers noticed “stupidity clusters” forming, which they compared to “wildfires fueled by bad takes, energy drinks, and supplements promoted on ‘Bro Culture’ podcasts.”
  • One experimental group was forced to binge-watch reality TV marathons—nearly half had lowered basic math test results afterward, and 12% struggled to write in complete sentences when asked to summarize episodes in a paragraph.
  • Professor Alan Greaves, epidemiologist:
    “We tried developing a stupidity vaccine, but test subjects refused it, saying they ‘don’t believe in science.’ At that point, we gave up.”

And if these ‘research based’ bullet points weren’t enough ‘evidence’, let me be explicit in saying these were all Chat GPT inspired, following a response to my request for them stating, “Here’s a bundle of fake “facts,” bogus statistics, and ridiculous quotes you can mix into your parody piece.” I tweaked them a little, but none of them were my ideas.

Stupidity travels at the speed of laziness.

Stupidity isn’t contagious, lazy thinking is. We no longer live in a world where information can be taken at face value without some level of fact checking. Our bullshit detectors need to be left in the ‘on’ position. And we need to be sceptical of evidence, be that evidence in favour of or against what we believe.

It can be a quote, an AI generated video, or even a person of influence that you have followed and admired, but who was equally duped (or lazy) in their gathering of information… Misinformation, fake “facts”, and downright intentional falsified data is everywhere these days, and if we are lazy with our diligence, it’s easy to contribute to the spread of information and lies.

So while this study was made up, it seems to me that if we are lazy in the way we consume (and share information), as many people seem to be, this really is leading to the spread of stupidity.

Free will or no free will tug of war

Consciousness and Free Will

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I just finished listening Annaka Harris’ audio documentary, ‘Lights On: How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe’. I’ve also listened to her and moreso her husband, Sam Harris, talk about Free Will – or rather that we lack free will. On these concepts I consider this couple two of the brightest minds. They have researched these topics far more than me and their depth of knowledge and understanding far surpasses mine. I look to them for anything they share on these subjects and admire the scope of what they know and understand on the topics. And yet I disagree a fair bit with their conclusions.

I’m not going to detail my thinking completely here. Rather I’m going to do a bit of a mind dump and hopefully expand on my thoughts later. I just feel that these two topics belong together and I often think of how they are connected. I’ll also share some links to the things I’ve already written on the topics. 

1. I don’t think consciousness is fundamental.

I think it is emergent. Consciousness is on a spectrum, but life is an essential necessity before consciousness. If life must come first, consciousness is not fundamental. So a rock does not have consciousness, but the simplest amoeba does. Every living thing has some level of consciousness. However, there is a minimal basic consciousness related to ‘the lights being turned on’. We can argue about where this point is, and while I favour the idea of self-awareness being the ‘lights on’ moment, I think even the idea of what it means to be self-aware is debatable and that a human definition automatically biases greater intelligence than I think is required for an organism to be self-aware. 

2. Consciousness comes from an excess of processing time.

“…life requires consciousness, and it starts with the desire to reproduce. From there, consciousness coincidentally builds with an organism’s complexity and boredom, or idle processing time, when brains do not have to worry about basic survival. Our consciousness is created by the number of connections in our brains, and the amount of freedom we have to think beyond our basic survival.” And from the link in #1, above, “It’s sort of like the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy pyramid must be met, (psychological and safety) AND there then needs to be extra, unnecessary processing time, idle time that the processor then uses for what I’m calling desires… interests beyond basic needs.”

3. In this way, free will starts early. The early decision-making might be as simple as moving towards more nutritious food, but somewhere in the development of brains choices move more towards desires… choosing to move towards something we like/desire, not just something better for the organism. The fact that we do not just operate in a way that best serves survival to me is one of the strongest arguments for free will. Free will is ubiquitous in nature. Animals show higher order consciousness and make choices that show value for other life and do not make sense in a universe without free will.  

4. Free will is on a bell curve.

Our hardware and software are imperfect, and our beliefs, our morals, our desires, our wants and wishes are all fed through imperfect systems influenced by outside sources. As a simple example, we know that being hungry can affect our disposition as well as our decision-making. These ‘outside’ influences can be very strong and can keep us low on the free will bell curve, while other choices we make might be a lot freer on the free will bell curve. Hardware issues like our gut biome or a tumour as examples can limit our free will, as can software issues like the brainwashing of beliefs or the societies we live in, which can and do reduce our free will. But as significant as these influences can be, they do not negate free will. 

5. We truly don’t understand consciousness and free will because of our inability to understand the unconscious mind. However, this hardware issue gives us hints. 

 I’ll start by saying we do ourselves a disservice when we separate our conscious and unconscious minds. This is a hardware issue that gets in our way and our software does not have a way around it. The argument that we can ask a person a question while they have sensors on their brain and we can figure out what their answer is before they consciously do is a poor argument that we don’t have choice or that we don’t have free will… Even if our conscious mind makes up after-the-fact reasons for the decision. The reality is that we are of one mind, and our conscious mind not knowing what our unconscious mind knows at the same time is not the separation we think it is. It’s simply that we have poor hardware that makes us think these are two separate minds.

Glimpses of the unconscious, for example with the use of psychedelic drugs, show us extremely metaphoric imagery and not a doorway to logical processes. This might not seem to be a good argument, but I think it’s better than thinking of us as having two minds, the unconscious with no free will and the conscious with just an illusion of free will. If consciousness is built from idle processing time, the idea that organisms start to make any choices at all that veer away from survival inherently suggests that there is choice and so there is free will. 

All this said, and despite thinking we have free will, I really don’t think it’s all that free. I think our basic survival needs, the desire for sustenance, the desire to procreate, the desire to protect our family, the desire for community and attention, these all limit the freeness of our free will. Then there is also the limits of our hardware and software, the influences of other organisms on our bodies… these all flatten the curve of free will to the point that we spend most of our lives not really having much choice… But limited choice and highly influenced choice is still not no choice, and so there is free will even if it’s not completely free.