Views from Crestmont Drive

More About Things People Believe That Aren’t True

Posted on Wednesday 1 November 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
—Mark Twain

Jonathan V. Last about how most voters are “disconnected from reality”;
How Google’s Pixel phone could destroy humanity;
Tom Nichols about why we shouldn’t care about what people in diners believe.

Here’s an item I saw in this week’s issue of The Week. The link to the article here, alas, won’t work for you unless you’re a subscriber and log in. But you can view the screen capture of the page in question. And I’ll quote the item, below.

The Week, Nov. 3rd issue: Best Columns: The U.S., summary of a column by Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark [which I couldn’t find on its site].

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Posted in Conservative Resistance, Epistemology, Lunacy, Politics | Comments Off

Beliefs and Reality

Posted on Tuesday 31 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

On this Halloween there are Christian forces out there warning against demons, since they apparently believe demons are real. For their definitions of “believe” and “real.” Which are not the same definitions that reality-based people use. My understanding of this distinction has become clarified in recent weeks.

Here is a point I’ve made before: religious people are more persuaded by conspiracy theories than others. Because religious people do not have an anchor in reality. They “believe” things that are not plausible given humanity’s understanding of the real world, built up over recent centuries. They believe in all sorts of outrageous myths, as long as it’s old enough. They are not part of the “reality-based community,” or adhere to Jonathan Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge,” either in government, or in science. This article makes this point precisely.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 31 Oct 2023: Mike Johnson’s Satanic panic: How evangelical delusions trained Republicans to love Trump’s lies, subtitled “If you believe Noah’s ark was real and demons come out of the TV, it’s just a small jump to embrace the Big Lie”

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Posted in Lunacy, reality, Religion, Science | Comments Off

The Corporate Enemy of Truth

Posted on Monday 30 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Just finished Jonathan Rauch’s 2021 book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, which argues that the government and science have evolved analogous mechanisms to steadily close in on objective truth, with self-correcting mechanisms, and that modern political forces are at work (as always) to undermine them for their own ends. Will discuss the book in detail soon.

Here’s another example of a force working to undermine objectivity. It’s not even that they’re doing so consciously, necessarily…. it’s that, as Jonathan Haidt has described, humans are instinctive lawyers, working to justify conclusions reached on emotional grounds, or which benefit themselves. As Upton Sinclair (an early 20th-century novelist), or maybe others, said: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It. There are variations.

Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 29 Oct 2023: Lies, damned lies and “corporate bulls**t”: A consumer’s guide to bad-faith arguments, subtitled “Co-author Donald Cohen on the research into generations of false claims that led to ‘Corporate Bulls**t'”

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Posted in Psychology, Science | Comments Off

My Essay Accepted for Publication

Posted on Sunday 29 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

The news this late October is that I’ve had an 11,000 word essay, the one I’ve been working on since June, accepted by Gary Westfahl for publication in a volume of essays to be published in a year or so by McFarland, provisionally titled A New Sense of Wonder: Re-Defining Science Fiction in the Twenty-First Century. The title of the essay is “Evolutionary Psychology, Science Fiction, and Consilience,” and it brings together many of the themes I’ve discussed on this blog, as drawn from the many nonfiction books I’ve read over the past decade, many (but not all; I’m behind) of those discussed on this blog. As they apply to science fiction, and bring a new understanding to what science fiction *is*. (Some of these ideas appeared in the two dozen plus reviews I did for Black Gate, in 2020 and 2021, and in the reviews of a baker’s dozen of novellas that I did, July-Oct 2022, in support of a short fiction group on Facebook, and posted here on my blog.) The book, presumably, will look like these earlier Westfahl volumes.

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Posted in Personal history, science fiction | Comments Off

How “Meaning” is just another example of the Narrative Bias

Posted on Saturday 28 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Three pieces from Big Think.

How history is told by story-tellers, and cannot be taken literally;
How philosophy advances science by asking forbidden questions;
How questions about the “meaning of life” reveal the narrative bias.

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Three sciency links, all from the same site on the same day, five days ago.

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 22 Oct 2023: How storytellers (and their biases) crafted our history, subtitled “Discover how the threads of myth, legend, and artistry have been woven together by storytellers to craft history.”

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Posted in History, Meaning, Narrative, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off

Disconnects from Reality

Posted on Friday 27 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

The economy is doing great and yet conservatives deny it;
Heather Cox Richardson contrasts worldviews, one leading to our economy, the other to mass shootings;
More about House Speaker Mike Johnson: hate for LGBTQ+ people; allegiance with “debunked faux-historian” David Barton;
And wondering why we shouldn’t take modern prophets, like Kat Kerr, as seriously as any of the Biblical prophets.

More about conservatives’ disconnect from reality. They believe what they believe.

Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 26 Oct 2023: Opinion | When will Americans stop worrying and learn to love the U.S. economy?

It’s not just Paul Krugman saying this.

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Posted in Economics, Epistemology, Politics, Religion | Comments Off

The New Speaker of the House and Delusional Reality

Posted on Thursday 26 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Items about newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson from the NYT editorial board, Paul Krugman, and the LAT editorial board;
Specific items about Johnson’s claims that fossil fuels don’t cause climate change, that the US is not a democracy but a “Biblical” republic, and how mass shootings are due to teaching evolution;
And Johnson’s sympathy with discredited Christian historian David Barton.
And Philip Glass’s score to Martin Scorsese’s 1997 film Kundun.

Well I can’t let this current event pass without noting the further evidence that Republican party is becoming more and more extreme. And delusional. Really, like so much on my blog, this is all about epistemology. How do these people think they know what they know? Things that the reality-based community dismisses as false?

NY Times, Editorial Board, 26 Oct 2023: Trumpism Is Running the House

The Republicans in the House unanimously voted for a man who made it his mission to try to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who put the political whims and needs of former President Donald Trump ahead of the interests and will of the American people. A party that once cared deeply about America as the leader of the free world, and believed in the strength, dependability and bipartisan consensus that such a role required, has largely given way to a party now devoted to an extremism that is an active threat to liberal values and American stability.

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Posted in Music, Politics, Religion | Comments Off

Misapprehensions of Reality

Posted on Wednesday 25 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

The new House Speaker is an election denier who would criminalize homosexuality;
How Christian conservatives are flatly wrong about homosexuality being “unnatural” or that “creed” is part of “what you are”; and the evolutionary reason why they resist homosexuality, cross-dressing, and so on;
Conservative alternatives to Disney believe in a simplistic “basic reality”;
Paul Krugman contrasts conservative beliefs about crime, with statistics that say otherwise.

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More about Republicans being flatly wrong about things.

New Republic, 25 Oct 2023: Well, We Have a Speaker. He’s an Election Denier and an Extreme Christian Fundamentalist., subtitled “Meet Mike Johnson, Republicans’ new House speaker.”

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Posted in Evolution, Politics, Psychology, Religion | Comments Off

The Twilight Zone of Religion and Conservative Politics

Posted on Tuesday 24 October 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Adam Lee counters Christian claims that “new atheism” has collapsed; it hasn’t
Greta Christina patiently explains the vacuousness of “Pascal’s Wager”
Religious presumption and “our religion”
Republicans look to Jesus
Republicans can break promises if God tells them to
Short items about how Fox News spins a loan repayment; how the fossil fuel industry pays to lie to children; the Scholastic book fair; and indoctrination via a Christian Military Academy
Conservative Rich Lowry on the right’s purity tests
And the moral collapse of Liberty University

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