Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
One of my favourite responses when someone asks me how I’m doing is “Living the dream!”
Yesterday I wrote about how there seems to be many people who think they ‘took the red pill‘ – revealing an unpleasant truth, but they have actually taken the blue pill – remaining in blissful ignorance.
Then this morning I was listening to a podcast and musician Baba Brinkman was quoted as saying, “What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
This made me realize how much reality right now (for many if not all of us) is literally like being in a dream. Let me explain… In a dream, when something doesn’t fit with reality, it doesn’t always trigger a response.
Examples:
You are in a dream talking to someone and turn away, you turn back and now it’s a different person, but having the same conversation.
You are in a dream and in it you are in your own house, you change rooms and now you are in a room you’ve never seen before, or even outside.
You are in a dream and cars can fly, or you can fly.
In each of these cases, had it been reality, the experience would be jarring, but in a dream it just makes sense.
Well in today’s reality, I think many people are living in a dream. So, you give an anti-vaxer, or a flat earther some profound point that undermines their belief, and what happens? Nothing. It doesn’t interrupt the dream. It isn’t jarring, it doesn’t ‘wake them up’. Their reality includes points and counterpoints that do not trigger a wakeful response. So, the dream can keep going… uninterrupted.
“What we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations.”
The problem today is that too many people are agreeing on hallucinations that just don’t fit our reality; hallucinations that undermine our future reality… and I’m not sure how we can wake them up?
“We are living in a redpill/blue pill moment, except people are colourblindandeveryonethinks they are taking the red pill.”
— — —
The TermsRed PillandBlue Pillrefer to a choice between revealing an unpleasant truth, represented by the red pill, or to remain in blissful ignorance, represented by the blue pill. These terms are in reference to the 1999 filmThe Matrix.~Wikipedia
The insightfulthingabout this is that there are a lot of people who are (unknowingly) choosing the blue pill. This can be summarized by 2 TikToks I’ve seen recently:
While these are American references, (welcome to using social media in Canada, that’s what you get), there are many conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxers all over the world that think they’ve somehow taken the red pill, but are colourblind and have ignorantly taken the blue pill.
This is so much more dangerous that people who just choose the blue pill because that’s what they wanted. This is about people steadfastly believing that they have seen behind the (metaphorical) curtain. They “know” the unpleasant ‘Truth’.
Ignorance may be bliss but intentionally seeking out ignorance and claiming it is fact is outright dangerous.
Dangerous. Not mistaken, not misguided, not just ignorant. Dangerous.
Social media has amplified this danger. When Facebook posts with misinformation get shared 5 times as fast and as much as the information debunking the information; When QAnon can constantly change their stance(s) and people still believe, despite how wrong this ‘inside information’ has been; When crackpots that claim to be experts get more views than researchers who actually share the data… this is dangerous.
It’s one thing to choose the blue pill, it’s a whole other kind of scary thing when the blue pill is ignorantly chosen while the taker believes they are taking the red pill.
We don’t perceive reality. We quite literally make it up. Our beliefs are fiction. It’s not an easy thing to accept. But this, unlike our beliefs, is true.
Religion, politics, relationships, even theories are all based on the knowledge that we’ve either had passed down to us or that we consumed. Relying on other people’s beliefs.
Then we make judgements and then we stand by them. Some are good, some are bad, all are judgements… not reality.
Think of the stories that have been passed down to us. From origin stories to cavemen to great floods. How many people believe that early humans lived at the same time as Jurassic dinosaurs? That’s just one story many people have wrong.
There are so many more. We should be more humble, and less susceptible to stories that don’t move us towards being more loving, caring, and kind people. We should worry less about tribal stories that keep us apart.
Why can’t the stories we choose to believe help us make the world we live in a better place to live? But then again, that’s the reason for religious wars… the strongly held belief in a better world. It’s an endless loop.
We need better, more believable stories, the current ones aren’t working.
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in decibels. A ratio higher than 1:1 (greater than 0 dB) indicates more signal than noise. Wikipedia
This is a scientific term that relates to how much background noise there is interfering with the data or information you are trying to receive. A simple way to think about this is having a conversation in a party. If the noise of the party is too loud, you can’t pick up the signal (what the other person is saying). There is a point at which the noise does not interfere and the signal/communication is easy to hear, then moving along the scale the noise can interfere a little or a lot.
With machines this ratio is easy to calculate. With humans it’s a lot harder. It isn’t always about the quality of the signal, it’s also about the the willingness of the receiver to receive the signal. Sometimes people are not ready to receive the signal no matter how clear it is. Sometimes people choose to listen to the noise. Sometimes the noise is in their own head, not just coming from outside.
We are currently living in a world where a large number of people pay attention to the noise and are missing the signal altogether. A world where the noise is intentionally being spread. A world where the signal is considered noise. But humans aren’t machines, and so the noise isn’t easily calibrated and removed.
Social media used to amplify the signal, now it amplifies the noise. News used to amplify the signal, now it constantly reports about the problem of the noise, thus highlighting the noise and bringing it to everyone’s attention… not always in a negative light… or putting the signal and the noise on an equal footing as if to say here are two equal signals to be weighed and considered. As a result, communities, families, and friendships are being torn apart as they argue about what is signal and what is noise.
I’m reminded of the ‘More Cowbell’ skit on Saturday Night Live.
https://vimeo.com/257364428
The noise is becoming too loud to receive the signal in any meaningful way. We need to simultaneously turn up the signal and turn down the noise. If not, we better get used to the cow bell.
This is an interesting time that we live in. I find myself in a position where I need to question my own values. I don’t do this lightly. I don’t pretend that my values have suddenly changed. It’s just that present circumstances put me at odds with my own beliefs around freedom of speech.
I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I think that when a society sensors speech, they are on a dangerous path. I take this to an extreme. Except for slander, threats, and inciting violence, I think people have a right to say and believe what they want. I believe that taking away such freedom puts us on a perilous path where a select few get too much control, and can undermine our freedoms.
An example where I take this to the extreme would be agreeing with Noam Chomsky.
So now, even as an ardent defender of free speech, I find myself agreeing with YouTube’s decision to ban vaccine misinformation:
YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.
Two, four, eight, or sixteen years ago when YouTube began, I would have screamed ‘Censorship!’ at the idea of a platform banning free speech. Even now it bothers me. But I think it is necessary. The first problem is that lies and misinformation are too easily shared, and spread too easily. The second problem is that the subject area is one where too many people do not have enough information to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience. The third problem is that any authentic discussion about these topics is unevenly biased towards misinformation. This last point needs explanation.
If I wanted to argue with you that Zeus the Greek God produces lightning and thunder when he is angry, I think everyone today would say that I was stupid to think such a thing. However, if I was given an opportunity to debate a scientist on this in a public forum, what inadvertently happens is that my crazy idea now gets to have an equal amount of airtime with legitimate science. These two sides do not deserve equal airtime in a public, linkable, shareable format that appears to give my opinion an equal footing against scientific evidence.
Now when dealing with something as silly as believing in a thunder god is the topic, this isn’t a huge issue. But when it’s scientific sounding, persuading and fear mongering misinformation that can cause harm, that’s a totally different situation. When a single counter example, say for example a person having adverse effects from a vaccine, becomes a talking point, it’s hard to balance that in an argument with millions of people not having adverse effects and also drastically reducing their risk of a death the vaccine prevented. The one example, one data point, ends up being a scare tactic that works to convince some people hearing the argument that the millions of counter examples don’t matter. And when social media platforms feed similar, unbalanced but misleading information to people over and over again, and the social media algorithms share ‘similar’ next videos, or targeted misinformation, this actually gets dangerous. It threatens our ability to weigh fact from fiction, news from fake news, science from pseudoscience. It feeds and fosters ignorance.
I don’t know how else to fight this than to stop bad ideas from spreading by banning them?
This flies in the face of my beliefs about free speech, but I don’t know any alternative to prevent bad ideas from spreading faster than good ones. And so while I see censorship as inherently evil, it is a lesser evil to allowing ignorance to spread and go viral. And while it potentially opens a door to less freedom, and I have concerns about who makes the decision of what information should be banned, I’d rather see a ban like this attempted, than for us to continue to let really bad ideas spread.
I thought in this day and age common sense would prevail and there would be no need to censor most if not all free speech. However it seems that as a society, we just aren’t smart enough to discern truth from cleverly said fiction. So we need to stop the spread of bad ideas, even if that means less freedom to say anything we want.
Today we will wear our orange shirts. At Inquiry Hub, students will be wearing ones with a design by one of our students with indigenous heritage, Madison D.
On Orange Shirt Day 3 years ago, I shared this on Facebook:
Tomorrow will be the first Truth and Reconciliation Day holiday. We are moving forward, and people will remember.
We are living through one of the biggest social experiments in history. We are getting thousands of data points all over the world that show us what the Delta variant is doing…
In Florida:
Florida becomes first US state where the daily deaths in current wave have exceeded previous waves. pic.twitter.com/xK9UK2don8
Please don't blame vaccines not working as the cause for rising death rate in Florida. Vaccines are working to prevent deaths in many other countries that have seen post vaccine spike in cases; and most other states in the US as well. Florida is different. https://t.co/wGBW7xgdYV
Want to guess what the death rate will look like in these highly unvaccinated areas?
Where does the social experiment come in? India didn’t have ready access to vaccines, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana all did. Meanwhile, the Florida Governor has an order against mask mandates in schools. Over the coming months we get to see large scale data sets on how decisions like this affect the lives and deaths of people in different places. We get to see what happens when people put themselves before their communities, and what fear can do to undermine society.
Decades from now there will be case studies in textbooks that will discuss the differences in preventable deaths. There will be questions about how to prevent this in a future pandemic. There will be models to show how devastating this kind of response would be if the same pandemic response happened with a virus that is 3, 10, or 20 times more contagious and/or deadly.
The Delta variant, which is affecting younger people more indiscriminately than the original variant, is quickly becoming the great un-equalizer. It is quickly revealing how a good response to the pandemic fairs so much better than a bad response. The sad part is that it’s doing this with hospitalization and deaths.
Equally as sad is that many younger kids and immune compromised people that do not have a choice to get a vaccine will suffer because of people who are able to take an available vaccine and choose not to. The unvaccinated, that are so by choice, are creating a giant social experiment where they are playing with people’s lives, and the data that’s coming out is proving this.
Sometimes I see a comic strip and I think it makes a truly powerful statement. Mohammad Haj Youssef shared a post on Facebook that had a whole series of these comics with a comment, “This is the world we live in.”
Here are the images. Because sometimes images speak for themselves, I’m going to share the images without commentary. Some speak to me more than others, bit they are all powerful in their own way.
I’m currently listening to ‘Nameless‘ by Dean Koontz. It it, a nameless clairvoyant with scientifically induced amnesia, and a didactic memory for everything after his memory was wiped, is a vigilante. He is the executor of bad people who have killed others for greed and/or pleasure. He is hired by a tech-savvy team that use cybercrime to confirm that the people they hunt are indeed bad people. Then Nameless exacts justice, often in befitting ways.
I’m not an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ kind of person, I have spent a lot of time as an educator helping students come to peaceful resolutions of issues in positive ways. But something about this book appeals to me. I think some people are beyond reproach. I think there are people in this world that are very bad, and they know it, and they prey on the weakness and kindness of others.
Recently we have had gang wars in Vancouver spilling out in the streets. An innocent person died in a drive by ‘hit’ of a known gang member. And a gang member was targeted and killed at the airport, leading to a car chase with guns being fired later. These gang members have had a complete disregard for innocent people in the wake of their war.
Now I’m not saying it’s vigilante time, but rather, I’m wondering what should be done when these known criminals disregard public safety and endanger peaceful citizens? It’s a case where they are playing by completely different rules than law-abiding citizens, and causing significant harm to the community. Even if they are caught, it is often only after they have done further harm to innocent people.
I think some people are intentionally evil. They choose to do bad things, then get caught up in a world where others around them disregard the value of the life of others. There are also evil people who get pleasure out of hurting others, including children, in violent and disturbing ways.
Listening to this book, I feel no remorse for the killers that are getting their just dues. I don’t think that they should be arrested and put on trial instead. Perhaps I should. But this fictional book is making me question what we should do with people who skirt the law and do truly evil things? It’s interesting that the characters in this book can pull out of me a character trait I didn’t know I had. I have never seen myself as approving of a vigilante, but I find this book enjoyable… I see justice in a serial child molester, or a doctor that preys on the elderly, or a killer who stalks campers in remote areas, meeting their demise after learning that they have been found out.
I think there are some truly evil people in the world, and they don’t always deserve to live after what they have done to others. That said, I’m not convinced that vigilante justice is something I’d like to see played out in the real world on a regular basis… I’ll just go back to my book and enjoy it there.
When we lived in China from 2009-2011, we would see people wearing masks when we were out in the community. They weren’t used by most people, but there were enough people that wore them that they became something you were quite accustomed to seeing. Certain places you would see them more frequently, two of these being on public transportation, and in large underground malls, common in the city of Dalian.
Also, you would see street vendors who made your food wearing them as well, or the staff at the back of restaurants or food stalls. It was a common courtesy for food handlers to wear a mask.
Basically, you’d see masks occasionally worn in public, and worn more frequently in crowded indoor spaces, and by people who served food. That makes a lot of sense. Another place we would see them is worn by students who had colds. Parents would still send them to school, but with a mask… and that’s far better than what happens here with young students sniffling and wiping their snot on their sleeves.
As the population slowly becomes double vaccinated and the Coronavirus numbers come down, I wonder what mask use will look like here in Canada? How common will mask-wearing be as we start to unmask?
My guess is that Asian cultures that are used to having masks around for over a decade since SARS and H1N1 will wear masks far more frequently than other cultures… simply because it is good etiquette to wear them in crowded public places. But will this be something that is looked upon as a gesture of safety and respect for others, or will this make them a target for racism?
Who else will we see wearing masks regularly? The immunocompromised, germaphobes, food handlers? Will there be many random people wearing masks because they feel comfortable doing so, or because they don’t feel 100% well and don’t want to spread anything? Or will mask-wearing be an anomaly in a sea of unmasked people, going about their business like Covid-19 never happened?
I think the acceptance of after-pandemic mask wearing will depend more on the continued spread of variants, and that the longer Covid-19 lingers, the more accepted mask-wearing in public after vaccinations will be. My hope is that as people unmask, they also become accepting of seeing people prefer to keep masks on in public. Living in China and seeing masks frequently, I never thought of it as weird. I never judged someone for wearing one, and as an avid fan of street food, it comforted me to see a street vendor who wore a mask as he or she prepared my food.
We will be mostly unmasked soon. Let’s make sure that we are considerate to those who continue to wear masks, since they are being considerate of us.
