Views from Crestmont Drive

Wednesday, 5 October: Last morning in Lisbon, we found a sidewalk cafe for croissants and coffee. I did a bit of computer work, then we checked out of the hotel and taxied to the cruise ship.

We’re on an Oceania cruise this time; our two previous cruises, to Alaska in 2008 and Hawaii in 2010, were on Norwegian. When we planned this cruise I’d thought the Oceania ships were somewhat smaller and more exclusive. Turns out this Oceania ship, Marina, is virtually identical to the Norwegian ships we’ve been on; apparently, I’ve gathered, the two companies are the same at some level. The difference between those earlier cruises and this one is that this is geared toward adults, without activities or events for children, and so there are virtually no children, or hardly couples under 40, in view. It’s a boatload of geriatrics…

The ship is well-furnished, with the usual buffets and specialty restaurants, bars, a small casino, a spa and workout area, and a quite decent library. The library has the usual array of bestsellers, but also shelves of classics, travel books, quite a bit of fiction, with a smattering of SF. There are even two Greg Egan books! (OCEANIC and ZENDEGI.) And recent nonfiction from my own shelves, by Shermer, Wilczek, Mlodinow, Hidalgo. The ship also has a DVD library with several hundred selections.

We booked with a promotional package that includes free wi-fi — but it turns out the free wi-fi applies to only one device *at a time*. Between us, Yeong and I have five devices, two laptops and three iPhones. So we alternate, which can be irritating. An extra paid account runs almost $1/minute.

We’re in a different port every day on this cruise.

Thursday, 6 October, was Cádiz, a Spanish port city west of Gibraltar, that sits on a spit of land shaped like a fishhook, once an island but now connected by narrow peninsula to the mainland. We booked a “highlights of” excursion that drove us around the area in a bus before we disembarked to walk among the narrow streets, browsing through the city museum, and being set free to do some shopping. The town has its cathedral, ruins of a Roman theater, still being excavated, and the familiar cobblestone streets.

Friday, today the 7th, we’re in Málaga, note the accent on the first syllable, a larger port city east of Gibraltar — and since we sailed overnight, we had no chance to see the big rock as we cruised by. We didn’t book an excursion here; we wandered the city on our own, with a map and advice from an advisor on the boat. The city is famous as Picasso’s birthplace, and has a decent if small Picasso museum. As in Lisbon there’s a castle, the Castle of Gibralfaro, and below it a large palatial fortification called the Alcazaba, a vast maze of stairs, open courtyards, and enclosed rooms running half-way up the hill — though without any way out at the top to continue on to the castle! We had to descend through the maze and find a parallel road from the bottom to make the not inconsiderable climb up to the castle (only to discover a bus can take you were via a back road). Gibralfaro is larger than the Lisbon castle if more of a shell, without much detail, but offers spectacular views of the coast and city in every direction.

And Malaga has a cathedral, and a roman theater (in much better shape than the one in Cadiz) and narrow streets full of shops and sidewalk dining, and street vendors selling almonds. We had lunch in a crowded plaza across from the theater and beneath the Alcazaba. (Note again: a tiny cafe at the castle called itself a bar and serves hard liquor; the sidewalk lunch spot had a considerable bar, outside by the tables and umbrellas.)

We changed time zones between Portugal and Spain, losing an hour. Sunrise this morning was at 8:30! Maybe that’s one reason people rise late, lunch late, and dine late…

A recurrent theme: human mental habits do not perceive reality accurately.

Here on Huffington Post is a huge circular graph, a Cognitive Bias Codex, grouped into four quadrants and 20 ‘buckets’. Here’s a link to an enlarged version of the graph.

From the HP article:

“You look at this overwhelming array of cognitive biases and distortions, and realize how there are so many things that come between us and objective reality,” Manoogian told The Huffington Post. “One of the most overwhelming things to me that came out of this project is humility.”

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And via another Facebook post, here’s an essay by the creator of that chart: You are almost definitely not living in reality because your brain doesn’t want you to, with a breakdown of his categories and links to Wikipedia explanations.

Somewhere in here, surely, is an explanation for Donald Trump.

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And certainly for the common perception that the world, and the US is so much worse off than before. Nicholas Kristof had a good column the other day, The Best News You Don’t Know:

The world is a mess, with billions of people locked in inescapable cycles of war, famine and poverty, with more children than ever perishing from hunger, disease and violence.

That’s about the only thing Americans agree on; we’re polarized about all else. But several polls have found that about 9 out of 10 Americans believe that global poverty has worsened or stayed the same over the last 20 years.

Fortunately, the one point Americans agree on is dead wrong.

Catching up.

Washington Post: Six maps that will make you rethink the world.

I’ve always been fascinated by these sort of ‘alternate history’ maps. Khanna is the author of the new book “Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” in which he argues that the arc of global history is undeniably bending toward integration. Instead of the boundaries that separate sovereign nations, the lines that we should put on our maps are the high-speed railways, broadband cables and shipping routes that connect us, he says. And instead of focusing on nation-states, we should focus on the dozens of mega-cities that house most of the world’s people and economic growth.

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From a Facebook post by Adam-Troy Castro (where he links to someone else’s photo), about the world’s major religions:

Think of it like a movie. The Torah is the first one, and the New Testament is the sequel. Then the Qu’ran comes out and it retcons like the last one never happened. There’s still Jesus, but he’s not the main character anymore, and the Messiah hasn’t shown up yet.

Jews like the first movie, but ignore the sequels. Christians think you need to watch the first two, but the third movie doesn’t count, Muslims think the third one was the best, and Mormons liked the second one so much that they started writing fanfiction that doesn’t fit with ANY of the series canon.

It’s all fiction. Well, crude history, optimized to advantage whatever tribe is telling the story.

Retcon, of course, is an abbreviation for “Retroactive continuity”, in which TV or movie series establish

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This is a ‘clickbait’ site, annoying for all the ads and pages you need to click through, but which has many valid points.

CAN’T HAPPEN: 33 Scientifically Implausible Things That Movies Still Want You To Believe

These examples partly illustrate ‘intuitive physics’ but also illustrate why almost all sf movies are nonsense –- they’re appealing to how we think the world works, not how it actually does.

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This is revealing about how human nature and intuition works:

Meet the People Who Believe the Earth Is Flat

Their reasons are often personal insights that somehow override the rational understanding they might get from others. (I went up in a balloon and the horizon was still flat!) Some are religious. And commitments to vast conspiracy theories are pervasive.

“I want them to know that NASA and all the astronauts and all of NASA are liars,” Patrice said.

Because, you know, they perpetuate the fraud that the Earth isn’t flat.

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Trump doesn’t read; neither, I suspect do many of his supporters, being relatively uneducated.

The New Yorker: The Donald Trump–Roger Ailes Nexus

Nevertheless, Trump, who admits that he reads almost nothing and gets his information from “the shows,” adopted Fox rhetoric, Fox fury, and Fox standards of truth and falsehood, all with a dollop of Trumpian nativist flair. The Republican Convention in Cleveland last week was like a four-day-long Fox-fest, full of fearmongering, demagoguery, xenophobia, third-rate show biz, pandering, and raw anger.

More: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All.

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A genuinely useful insight from Thomas L. Friedman, in New York Times: Web People vs. Wall People. It’s not about Democrats vs. Republicans; it’s about those who would build walls vs. those who understand the world is necessarily becoming more interconnected.

…the instinct of Web People is to embrace the change in the pace of change and focus on empowering more people to be able to compete and collaborate in a world without walls. In particular, Web People understand that in times of rapid change, open systems are always more flexible, resilient and propulsive; they offer the chance to feel and respond first to change. So Web People favor more trade expansion, along the lines of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and more managed immigration that attracts the most energetic and smartest minds, and more vehicles for lifelong learning.

While the wall people, afraid of change, want to cower within their walls and shut out the outside world.

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A review several weeks ago Chuck Klosterman’s BUT WHAT IF WE’RE WRONG?, by Jim Holt: The Good, the True, the Beautiful and Chuck Klosterman

I bought the book and have skimmed it, and while many details seem interesting, it’s point would be obvious to anyone who intellectual mindset has been honed by science fiction: *of course* much of what we presume will be true in the future, won’t. The reviewer’s summary:

1. We are not special. We are neither at the twilight of an era nor at the dawn of a new one.
2. The future will resemble the past.
3. Reality will always turn out to be bigger than we think it is.
4. Nine-tenths of everything is crap. (“Sturgeon’s law”)

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Adam Lee On Human Negativity Bias.

Why are so many people, despite clear evidence of relative peace and well-being in the world – compared to any past era – so inclined to believe we’re on the brink of social and political collapse? Statistics show crime rates have decreased, as have poverty, child mortality, and illiteracy.

(I said before this is partly a common misunderstanding of how the news media works; if the world were entirely peaceful except for one traffic accident, that one accident would dominate the “news cycle” for days, and rabble-rousing politicians would demand investigations into the corrupt auto industry and accuse the current administration of gross negligence, if not conspiracy to bring down the nation, and a certain segment of the population would become greatly alarmed a convinced the end of times was upon us.)

Lee:

The question, then, is why so few people realize this. Year after year, surveys show that most people believe, inaccurately, that crime is increasing. (The violent crime rate in the U.S. has plunged in the last several decades.) Even people who’ve personally lived through far more violent times often suffer from this illusion.

This is negativity bias, the human tendency to pay more attention to bad news than to good. It manifests in all kinds of ways, not just beliefs about crime rates: for instance, most people are far more sensitive to a potential loss than a larger potential gain. We overrate the odds of stock-market crashes and terrorist attacks.