Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
Archive for October, 2010
9/11 thoughts, the Peak Oil linkage, and how to separate the ice cream from the bullshit
Oct 27th
Conspiracy theorists, 9/11 thruthers, or the so called 9/11 debunkers are ready to put their hands into fire in order to make us think they’d proven that the U.S. Government’s leadership is inherently diabolical, ready to succumb to any fiendish plan for the achievement of their global domination and oligarchical nirvana. It just fits too well for them and for any other anyone that doesn’t have an education about causation and statistics, that the predicament of Peak Oil, which we currently start to realize we find ourselves in, kick started the Bush’s administration conspiracy engines and lead it to its most extreme and unimaginable of actions. So let’s analyze this course of actions just like a skeptic would and see if this could ever happen in 2001′s American complex, but faulty, and bureaucratic society.
Several versions of the conspiracies are traveling in the memosphere, but here we’ll tackle the most unlikely one: The Bush Administration & Co meaning the Bush family, Dick Cheney, several bankers, and several CEO’s from petroleum and military corporations managed to pull out a plan for a false flag attack and kill almost 4000 of their own citizens. All this was done in order to take control of the major oil fields in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc. It seems plausible right? The US is running out of cheap oil, so they try to take hold of it right at the source. Additionally, in Iraq, for example, the CIA couldn’t so easily apply CIA’s sponsorship programs in order to corrupt the right kind of politicians and decision makers because of the Saddam Regime. So, after 9/11 the US Administration acted as though it did conspire against its own people by promptly invading Afghanistan and Iraq and securing all their major oil fields. All elements fit too well in the story, so it seems, right?
First of all, the fact that the US Administration acted as though it conspired against its people doesn’t mean it did conspire, but that it just took advantage of that times’ situation. They just profiteered like a hungry hyena would devour a dead carcass when no lions lie around; the dead carcass was of course the result of another animal’s struggle for existence. Looters that robbed women, children, and weak men right after the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake didn’t provoke the earthquake, but abided by their selfish agenda and took advantage of the quandaries that bedeviled those moments. You see, the shear ruthfulness of the looters, just like the ruthfulness of the ones responsible for the killing of more than one million Iraqis, doesn’t prove anything but the outright selfish nature of the human being and nothing else. In order to prove US Administration’s implication in the planning of 9/11 you need more than this contingency of events and coincidences to happen.
A lot of conspiracy theorists retort to the argument of the impossibility of covering up such a grand-diabolical plan without a couple of whistle blowers whirling out from the sway of the conspirators, by giving examples such as the Manhattan project or the conspiracy of silence surrounding the development of the F-117 Stealth Fighter. The reason that these are not good analogies is that 9/11, unlike the later two, is inherently vulnerable to individual selfishness and does not abide the rules of behavior in a group with individuals that share a common interest. Let’s analyze these two motives one by one!
Individual selfishness shows us that this conspiracy wasn’t impossible because people are so inherently good, but because they are so inherently selfish, greedy and jealous. For such a conspiracy to yield success there must surely have been hundreds of people needed: the engineers that placed explosives on almost all the floors of the 3 buildings that collapsed, the operators that flew the two empty planes into the twin towers from some underground secret base, the shills that masqueraded someone or some act at all TV stations around US, the military personnel that did not scramble any jet fighter in order to intercept the “so obvious hijacked airplanes”, and the list goes on and on. Hundreds of people with hundreds of mindsets and motives for their involvement in this diabolical conspiracy, and no whistle blower until now? There surely must have been some individuals that didn’t get paid enough or didn’t get paid as much as their buddy and would certainly have regained that difference in money by blowing the whistle. Again, the greatest conspiracy of human kind with so much money to be made by any whistle blower and we have yet to be been given the pleasure to meet any of them?
The second motive, the group behavior. The reason there were no whistle blowers on the Manhattan Project or the F-117 Stealth fighter is that there wouldn’t have been anything to gain from by making public that information. Besides some techno-geeks and a certain percentage of the technical press that would have surely devoured the data, the majority of the public wouldn’t have found that news of too much interest. The benefits of being a whistle blower would surely be outnumbered by the risks, including legal ones considering you would be charged with putting your national security on thin ice. So, the good of the group’s (i.e. the country) interests would surely bring more personal benefits than the risk of deserting would have. Now, put side by side the conspiracy of the Manhattan Project with the Conspiracy of 9/11. By being a whistle blower on 9/11 you would surely be seen as a hero not as a traitor, and you would surely have more to benefit because, by the virtue of being the biggest and fiendish conspiracy of them all, all the planet’s eyes are going to be on you. Now ask yourselves: Isn’t it all logical? Isn’t it all clear that if there was a 9/11 Bush Conspiracy there would be a very high probability of there being a whistle blower by now, just as it were in the cases of CIA’s drug smuggling operations, banking cartel corruption cases, 3rd world countries support of terrorist groups, and the list can go on forever?
The reality is that one thing that some of the conspiracy theorists will never get is that the US would have gotten hold of the oil fields one way or another. They would have gone to war with Afghanistan and Iraq without any right just as they did with Bosnia, and in that case there wasn’t any oil involved. In fact you can search the web and find relatively conclusive evidence that that US was preparing to go to war with Afghanistan a couple of months before 9/11.
And yes, 9/11 was because of oil. The CIA and some American corporations felt their presence in Afghanistan way before 2001 and that managed to anger up the wrong kind of people over there. Simple as that.
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Peak Consumption – Or how to mac your way out of plenitude right into scarcity
Oct 23rd
What are the main sets of behaviors which our modern brains are genetically and environmentally wired for? One attentive thinker might curiously ask in what kind of environment do these people (i.e. us) live in order to take a non-shallow attempt at dividing and conquering the issue in question. Some sets of behaviors that yielded some 100.000 years ago in the societies of hunter gatherers tribes from the plains of Africa might be completely untraceable in today’s culture and society.
The fact of the matter is that cultures evolved just like human beings evolved, from so simple beginnings where only people and a small set of tools and rules were needed in order to survive, to societies so perplexing in complexity that no one could knowingly give himself the task of trying to understand how the whole system works and hope to succeed; the days of polymaths are long day gone. Leaving aside my humble intellectual modesty, all systems, no matter how complex they are, are driven and manage to govern themselves by some simple sets of rules. I doubt anyone can deny that this simple axiom is abided by all complex systems which are to be found in the universe we live in.
It just so seems that ancient societies, hunter gatherers tribes, were foremost driven by their most visceral desire also present, though belly-fulled, in every human being living today: the will to survive. The lack of food and resources cemented this basic rule at the base of all the systematization, socialization, and culture development that bedeviled their ancient societal evolution.
But, unlike the days past gone, here we are on this planet, almost 7 billion defiant consumers making a living in the biggest tribe that had ever existed. Survival, although a serious issue in a lot of poor countries, is hardly a prime time audience maker in today’s modern society. If the primal, reptilian, hardcore urge to survive has supposedly long been handled by modern science and technology knack and by the plethora of resources available and ready to be exploited anytime, anywhere, what is the main rule that governs our contemporaries’ dynamic?
Whatever the rule is, it surely makes the wealthy wealthier, and the poor poorer, not by conspiracy but by design. Leaving this minor detail aside, the system managed to produce wonders of technology that could easily be classified as magic, and, antithetically, is responsible for some of the most futilitarian environmental stories ever written in human history. So, if environmental safety may not be one of our main concerns as we burn fossil fuels with the utmost stolidity and without any consideration to their increasing scarcity, if basic personal survival is of no concern either because, as we’ve explained, this issue is almost already solved by society’s specialization of farming and the food system indulged by the vast amounts of petroleum, then what’s the main artificer that drives all of our daily struggle?
Because oil took the burden of daily individual food production out of the prime time of modernistic living, then maybe this meant that our desires had to follow exactly the same rule that each and every other evanescent product of nature follows: they had to evolve, not because the must have started to evolve, but just because oil industry opened up a new landscape, a new set of adaptation opportunities that were never possible before. So, unlike daily survival imposed and restricted by scarcity, daily consumption tendered and given plenty of rope by today’s plenitude of resources is the new main rule by which we engage in our everyday life.
The consumption of objects increases our social status and thus satisfies some of our most primeval urges, the will to socialize, to be liked, respected, feared; all these have effect because they offer us a sense of security and well being. Does a Ferrari and a private plane make a man more sexy? We’ll, you’ll just have to look at the women he’s taking to dinner and you’d probably find out that, obviously, he’s very sexy. And that’s available to women also. How many of us didn’t we hear about the rich old lady having fun with young model Kens? It’s all about the status, that’s why it’s all about consumption now days.
There’s no conspiracy here, there’s no design of society by some evil controlling entity in order to make us consume more, it’s just that our vulnerability to consumption due to behavior that is triggered abnormally by false flags that used to be of necessity thousands and million of years ago makes us unknowingly build the consumption based autonomous system that we live in. And because we’re living in the world of the selfish gene everyone will try to make a living; this is the reason for the distribution of wealth which we see today. Our society is like a flock of birds, never governed by anyone, but driven as a whole by each and every constitutive element; it’s built by each and everyone of us, it was never built for us.
I’ll also make the bold assumption that consumption is the single prime rule by which our today’s society powers itself. That’s why global warming is here, that’s why peak oil is waiting around the corner, that’s why environmental issues have long stopped to be minor problems, and that is why maybe sometime in the future we’ll have to hark back to the survival rule again.
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The road to Quantum Computers – What’s the progress so far? Will we ever see a quantum computer in our lifetime?
Oct 21st
Unlike conventional computers which by their nature perform one task at a time, quantum computers’ strong ace will be that they will be able to perform an unimaginable large amount of computational tasks in parallel at each time cycle of their operation; this technological knack is to be made possible by quantum mechanics’ strange laws which govern each and every element of our subatomic world.
Imagine, at your fingers, a computing power so potent that is capable of doing as much operations in a second as there are particles in our observable universe. Leaving aside some of its apparently “blunt” applications like cracking all the cryptographic codes invented so far, searching and instantly finding elements from databases so big that wouldn’t fit all the servers on the internet, factorizing numbers so large that no network of present-day supercomputers could ever have the chance at succeeding in our lifetimes, imagine how this could give us the power to build all of our future, but highly advanced and unimplementable on today’s computers, artificial intelligence systems. With the help of quantum computers we could build super brains, simulate complex molecule interactions that are completely intractable on present day supercomputers, find out the secrets to unlimited resources, and maybe discover the ultimate secrets of reality.
The parallelism I’m talking about is not achieved by any advancement in parallel computing of the currently available Turing machine systems, but by the property of every subatomic particle to find itself in multiple places at the same time. No matter how weird this might seem, parallel universes have long stopped to be the topic of science fiction novels. The components of a quantum computer manage to compute different tasks in an infinite number of parallel worlds and them combine the results from all those computations into one result ready to be made available to the output register located in the quantum computer’s electronic components that are of course constrained to our set of universes.
So how do we build them? Unlike a normal Turing machine that uses bits, that is, electrical circuits that can be put into two different electrical states, 0 and 1, albeit only one at a time, quantum computers will have to be build using Qubits. The difference between a Qubit and a bit is that the former one can store the value 0, or 1, or any combination of the two values at the same time, whilst a bit can only memorize a single value, 1 or 0, at the same time. Let me clarify this! Qubits can have 76% the value 1 and 24% the value 0, or 43.23% the value 0 and 56.77% the value 1, all at the same time. And you can dream of any other combination. This translates to : in 76% of the parallel universes belonging to the Multiverse the Qubit which I’ve exemplified earlier will poses the value 1 and in the rest of 24% it will poses the value 0. In the other example the Qubit will poses the value 0 in 43.23% of the parallel universes and in the other 56.77% it will poses the value 1. That’s a lot of parallel computing considering the total number of parallel universes calculated to be possibly perceivable by an observer lies around the figure of 10^10^16 universes (source).
What’s all this clap-trap about parallel universes and the multiverse? Quantum mechanics, the field of physics that deals with sub-atomic particles has solved and clarified some of our most mysterious experimental data that even Einstein couldn’t get the grips with. The interactions between all subatomic particles can well be explained and predicted with an accuracy worthy of envy by using the well worked mathematical model of Quantum Mechanics. But, although we can predict and calculate the subatomic world with very delicate precision, paradoxically, we do not understand why subatomic particles behave the way they do. As renowned quantum physicist Richard Feynman said : “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics“. And why is that? It’s because atoms, electrons, protons, and all the rest behave in strange ways; they can be in multiple places at the same time; they sometimes behave like particles, sometimes like waves; they can travel back in time and even be connected one with another in ways that defy classical physics’ logic. Many explanations exist on the scientific highway as to why the quantum world behaves the way it does, but the most widely known, the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI, Parallel Universes , Multiverse) first introduced by physicist Hugh Everett is converting with an ever increasing rate physicists from all kinds of fields. If you read Russell Standish’s The Theory of Nothing you can find that in a survey done by David Raub on quantum mechanics experts and cosmologists 58% of them believed that the MWI is true.
So, in order to build a quantum computer we must have bits that can find themselves in multiple universes at the same time and these are called, as we’ve stated earlier, Qubits. The fact that they must be made to work together in order to show their prowess, just like normal bits do, is a real impediment because quantum systems are easily vulnerable to the outside world; their small size and the risk of interference with other particles gives a real challenge to the experimentalists in this field.
Practically the challenge is to build a set of isolated-from-the-outside-world qubits, which are all interconnected with one another through what we call Entanglement. Unlike bit computing systems, which are relatively easy to put together and to integrate with one another because they are very large so they are immune to interference from other particles therefore they can be easily manipulated through classical physics methods, qubit quantum systems are very hard to make practical. Qubit systems must be read, written, and protected from alien particles all at the same time without disturbing the already established quantum entangled system. Entanglement, or “spooky action at a distance” is one of the strangest phenomenon that governs the quantum world. For example, when two particles are entangled, modifying a certain quantum property belonging to one of the two particles will also instantaneously modify the same property belonging to the other particle no mater the distance between the two; to translate this into quantum computing terms, measuring a certain property of a certain particle will instantaneously give you information about the property of the other entangled particle. Entangling a sufficient number of qubits (ions, electrons, photons, superconducting devices – solid-state qubits), and keeping them entangled and isolated from all the outside world an adequate amount of time is the main challenge that lies ahead in building the quantum computer.
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Two tips on critical thinking – Always asking questions and how to get the right answers
Oct 9th
Blessed be the evolution of language and the environmental triggers which contrived its architecture! Language made possible the appearance of coherent, highly social, and clever groups of hominids acting as a single intelligent entity which could more easily foresight mother nature’s squeamish evolutionary roadblocks. As an individual that was part of that group you could more than likely increase your chances of survival by communicating complex information with the other members of the tribe; this complexity in the transfer of information could have only be achieved by the knack of language architecture. Tool building skills, hunting skills, food gathering skills, and cultural memes, you could easily have access to by learning to use the already evolved language circuitry of your brain.
Although some may see language just as a tool used in order to communicate to others the already complex thinking dynamics of our brain, conversely, we can easily find reasons to ponder on language’s gift of speeding up and stimulating thinking instead. What if language’s talent was to spark the creativeness, to provide “food for thought”, to create the architecture of thinking? What if real thinking was non-existent before the evolution of complex language? What if the evolution of language was the main cause, the main artificer, for the appearance of highly intelligent hominids and not the other way around? Or could it be that I’m exaggerating by completely reversing the real state of affairs, thus being sucked in another “Chicken or Egg?” evolutionary conundrum? Either way, language still remains a major fuel source for our brain without which brilliant minds and creative thinkers would be as rare as hen’s teeth.
The thoughts we have, the good ideas, the bad ideas, the sometimes wonderful stories we have to tell, they’re all smeared in the voluminous neuronal circuitry of the brain by specialized content fixation mechanisms, that, by the nature of brain’s architecture and wiring, we could rarely get them to coherently coalesce, to fully aggregate with one another using its internally operating mechanisms. The real way they sex each other is by means of language. Say, two ideas belonging to the same mind need to merge with each other but the current neural wiring makes it impossible for them to meet; so, one of those ideas is transferred verbally into someone else’s brain, it is processed, and then the result of that computation, that is, the same idea but slightly altered, easily molded into another format is then returned into the brain of the communication initiator. Now, because the idea is now slightly modified it may more easily find a neural path leading to the idea which it was impossible to reach a few moments ago. (see illustration).
Now, if talking to others helps us gather our thoughts, clear our mind, and spark creativeness, then why shouldn’t talking to oneself achieve the same tactical benefit? In 1960, E.M. Forster cleverly summoned the above : “How can i tell what i think until i see what i say?“. In 1991, in Consciousness Explained, Dennet said that “pushing some information through one’s ears and auditory system may well happen to stimulate just the sorts of connections one is seeking…“; by talking to oneself your thoughts become more coherent, more interconnected, and more importantly they become the artificers of new thoughts, new ideas, sometimes brilliant ones.
So how should one talk to himself in order to bootstrap the all-too-needed creativeness software? More than likely simply mumbling nonsensical words will not spark the plug of any creative thinking, but maybe asking questions relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve will perhaps have this desired effect. Aristotle had four questions that he used to ask about everything there was: the four aitia. He wanted to know the material cause of something, that is, the stuff from which that entity is made of; the efficient cause or what brought about the entity into existence; the formal cause or questions about that entity’s architecture, structure, or shape; and the final cause, that is, what is the purpose of the entity in the world. From so simple questions, forms of inquiring so manifestly complex and lucrative will easily start to evolve in your brain.
If asking questions may be the correct way to get the engines running, how are we to be able to speed up this process and manage not to get stuck unwillingly into a mental cul de sac? If the answers to the questions we address to ourselves are not readily available how are we to appease our mental hunger? As I’ve stated in a recent article, following a sufficient amount of channels of information and at the same time maintaining a good dose of skepticism towards all these dispensers of memes and temes, even though that dose’s measure will have to be tuned to the credibility of the source, will give you the gift of being one step ahead in the race to find out the truth.
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Infinite growth on a planet with finite resources – The ins and outs of the “smart society” that failed to forbear its ever increasing demand for energy
Oct 5th
If someone were to ask me to name a few things in the world that just keep expanding at an ever increasing rate and would do so forever i would suddenly find myself in bogged down state. Besides the ever expanding Universe and the ever increasing demand for energy, i can hardly and promptly sprout any ideas about anything else.
The reason I’m about to give you for all the disconcerted actions of society (regarding its asinine and irrational usage of natural resources and energy) as a whole might carry the face of defeat and cynicism, but, on a carefully and non-superficial analysis, it should surely blemish the rosy colloured tableau of life with its well deserved abjective miseries. Here we are on this once beautiful planet, and, as the smartest and the most advanced of societies we couldn’t balk our perverse drive for energy/growth in order to prevent the already predicative Global Warming Situation and the right-around-the-corner cul de sac of Cheap Oil Shortage. How the hell couldn’t this set of smart people manage to organize themselves and prevent this already unsafe and perilous state of affairs?
The main reason has its most basal roots hardly ingrained in our biological heritage. The Selfish Replicators, our genes, have programmed our bodies so to maximize their number of copies in the present day gene pool which is comprised of the cells found in the bodies of all humans. Sets of genes wage war with each other through the tool of sex, and the ones that are most successful at it multiply their numbers in the gene pool at the expense of the not so lucky or well adapted ones. Successful genes are selfish genes; selfish genes are genes that manage to program the behavior of their carrier robots, us humans, in such a way as to blindly achieve their unplanned selfish purpose: copy, copy, copy (for more enlightening check out our review of The Selfish Gene). Cynically, all of this is achieved by the “selfish” genes mechanistically and unconsciously, for the only rules they obey are the rules of simplicity (physics’ laws).
Now, if each and every one individual would abstain from its selfish actions in such a way that the whole group would benefit from it (i.e. everyone in the group has its secured piece of pie, and is protected from treachery by others), then we’d have a perfect system. Hard to achieve though, and not encountered in any biological system: Group Selectionism is a fable. This system will fail just because selfish individuals, driven by their selfish genes, will cast aside their medium sized chunk of pie in order to get a bigger slice at the expense of the others. All politics, state diplomacy, corporate dynamics, free trade, and all other complex systems inter-relationships, are all self-regulated by the behavior of their most constitutive elements, the People. They can’t be regulated for the whole benefit of humanity, because there will always be some caviler ready to rip some extra juice at the expense of the other unwary, gullible, and well sensed humans.
So, why should corporations give a damn about future environmental issues when a big jug-load of money is just waiting around the corner? Let my family live the high life, and let the others have a hitch in their giddy-up and handle the long row to hoe themselves. And this is exactly what we experience: corporations blithely seeking high profits in disregard of any environmental and social issues, politicians lying to their voters using their infinite-growth paradigmatic discourses, banks inflating their customers’ debt with mysterious commissions, countries invading other countries for oil indemnity, and military industrial complexes making a living out of building weapons for the so-called “war on terror” which, surprisingly, killed less than 10.000 people in the United States. What about the massacre done by cigarette corporations annually? The leading causes of death in 2000 were tobacco related – 435,000 deaths only in the United States! Does 10.000 vs 400.000 ring a bell? Are you at daggers drawn now?
To all the people that say: “Well, what would you do without corporations, banks, and politicians? You wouldn’t have your Karaoke DVD Player, your smartphone, the internet, pharmaceuticals, and all the other good stuff!” my answer is: “Couldn’t we have all this sweet juice without the party poppers?“. Without military corporations, junk food, high-frequency-trading profit-making without producing anything useful, cigarettes killing millions of people without anyone taking any significant action against it, and a hell lot of other useless crap, not to forget coke and its diabetic inducing magic formula.
With all this hogwash there also comes non-prudent energy consumption. I’m a very big fan of Physics, and one of the most important universal law I’ve learned about from this subject is that you can’t create energy out of nothing at the macro level. For all this 100 year boom there must surely be a gloom; consuming all this energy without any respect and humility towards the millions of years of time necessary to render it capable of growing 7 billion people in such a short time must, out of necessity, be charged by nature’s finite resources ruling; all this trouble because in a world with selfish “tribes” of common interests, selfish individuals, and selfish genes, the epilogue must be comprised of Global Warming and almost nobody willing to take the first significant steps in order to cut down gas emissions, and also of Peak Oil and almost nobody willing to switch of their big trucks for a smaller and more environment friendly car, and the list goes on, and on, and on.
This I think is the main reason for the predicament we find ourselves right now. The following video by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett takes on a different approach. Instead of selfishness, he argues that stupidity and ignorance are the principal reasons for the observed facts. Friend or Foe? You be the judge!
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Tools for thought – How to protect your mind and make sense of the multitude of information which transits your senses
Oct 1st
There’s so much “food for thought” in this era of unlimited information that there is no wonder you can easily get fooled by shills pretending to be truth harbingers. How can we make sense of these peta-bytes of memes and temes without being smeared by their facile non sequiturs educed by the same shills of information generation that may not always have all of our best interest on their agenda?
Divide and Conquer! So what if we let these shills tear each other apart and do their job for us? They’ll expose each other’s lies, miss-information, propaganda, fractures in logic, ethics and their so called moral standards; this, they’re already doing! In books, newspapers, blogs, tea parties, television shows, social networking websites and the list goes on and on. The memes and temes are having sex with each other through the waging of war between individuals, and groups of individuals: governments, non-profit organizations, nations, corporations, etc. All you have to do in order to make sense of all this apparent hogwash of data is to listen to a little bit of what all the channels have to say. All of them will expose to you “their real truth” and will beg for you to enshrine their version on the most precious wall of your house. Cognitive dissonance… how many times have you read two books in which the authors clearly had antithetical opinions, and you couldn’t make your mind on the truthfulness of either of their abstract views; you just flip-flopped from strongly believing one and then the other? Maybe plenty! Maybe that is the reason you couldn’t make your mind on the issues debated, because of the abstractedness, and of course because of the ideas expressed being loaded with the burden of subjectivity and bias.
So what are we to make of all this disarray? Is there no objective reality? Is there no real truth, but an infinity of them molded by each individual onto its subjectively helter-skelter? Would i be able to answer this question, i would had surely solved the questions that mind boggle today’s most brilliant physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. But, leaving aside this intellectual unpretentiousness, maybe some truths are more frequent, more rife than others, at least in the set of universes that we live in, and this is all that matters. Maybe just because almost all apples that had been seen have fallen on the ground when they’ve gotten ripe, and maybe because almost all politicians are mass manipulators that deceived their credulous masses, then this constancy in history may be the only thing we need to consider in order to take these facts as “frequent truths” that we’ll more than likely encounter in our lifetime.
What should be our first three basic “tools of critical thinking” with which we should masticate the “food for thought” that so blithely invades all of our senses? The first and the most important is the tool of accessing all channels of information. The mainstream media, alternative media, blogosphere, are all worth paying attention to as long as you use all of their brushes to paint your own personal version of the truth. All are worth a pint of heed as long as they don’t manage to bite all your mental fingers.
Ask yourself what is the main reason of the source, which you’ve got the information from, to spread that data onto people like you. A source like, for example, the Richard Dawkins Foundation would surely have a different set of reasons for spreading its ideas than CNN (the Cable News Network) or the other corporate media companies would have. The first one is a non profit organization whose mission is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering, whilst CNN …, well, take a look at the main share holders and you’ll promptly find out more about the possible reasons for its existence. This tool will help you hand pick the sources that are least likely to spread insidious information. The sources’ reason of existence should be taken into account prior to taking into consideration their data as reliable or not. Non-profit, scientific, skeptical, non-biased sources should be regarded as the most trust-worthy, though not amenable to absolutely blind praising.
Search for the middle ground and beware of the “absolute truthers“. Lodged inside the truthers’ arrogance lie all the sins of non-critical thinking; climate change and peak oil negationism, crazy conspiracy theories, and a hell lot of other bunch of nonsensical constructs are its offspring. The agenda of these groups of people certainly does not comprise “finding the truth” as their main pursuit, but maybe “finding their truth“. Although they’re highly recommended to be ignored, we’re not absolutely required to do that; once in a while every nut may have a great idea worth taking into account.
Until now everything’s all talk and no trousers, so i should let others speak. Here’s Dr. Richard Paul in a video made available on Youtube by the Foundation for Critical Thinking in which he cuts to the chase and presents his 5 standards to critical thinking: Clarity, Precision, Accuracy, Relevance, and Depth. A short but interesting introduction to skeptical, reliable thinking…
