Physicists weigh in on 9/11 stuff

Physicists Say Twin Towers Destroyed by Controlled Demolition on 9/11

By Darius Shahtahmasebi

Anti Media

September 13, 2016

Christmas has come early for “conspiracy theorists” around the world. An academic report published by Europhysics News in time for the anniversary of 9/11 is questioning the official explanation for the collapse of all three World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, and their conclusion may make even the most rational person rethink their outlook. As the report from Europhysics News, a “ magazine of the European physics community,” notes:

“It bears repeating that fires have never caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise before or since 9/11. Did we witness an unprecedented event three separate times on September 11, 2001? The NIST [U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology] reports, which attempted to support that unlikely conclusion, fail to persuade a growing number of architects, engineers, and scientists. Instead, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that all three buildings were destroyed by controlled demolition. Given the far-reaching implications, it is morally imperative that this hypothesis be the subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities.”

Entitled “15 Years Later: On the Physics of High-Rise Building Collapses,” the investigation was conducted by Steven Jones, a former professor of physics at Brigham Young University; Robert Korol, a professor emeritus of civil engineering at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada and a fellow of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering and the Engineering Institute of Canada; Anthony Szamboti, a mechanical design engineer; and Ted Walter, author of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s Beyond Misinformation: “What Science Says About the Destruction of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7.”

The Europhysics News report begins by questioning the official explanation for the collapse of the three buildings on September 11, 2001, as determined by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST began carrying out an investigation in August 2002, and their findings are still questioned to this day. The report reminds us that:

“Indeed, neither before nor since 9/11 have fires caused the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise—nor has any other natural event, with the exception of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, which toppled a 21-story office building. Otherwise, the only phenomenon capable of collapsing such buildings completely has been by way of a procedure known as controlled demolition, whereby explosives or other devices are used to bring down a structure intentionally.”

The report explains why this would be the case, offering four main explanations why steel-framed high rises have endured large fires in the past without undergoing total collapse: (1) the heat of a fire and its duration do not typically generate enough energy to heat the large structural members to the point where they would fail; (2) most high-rise buildings have fire suppression systems (such as water sprinklers) that would further inhibit the fire from reaching anywhere near the heat necessary to create a total collapse; (3) the structural members are protected by fireproofing materials, which are designed to prevent the structure from reaching failure temperatures within specified time periods; (4) steel-framed high-rise buildings are designed to be highly redundant, meaning that the buildings can suffer a partial collapse due to a fire but would not result in a disproportionate collapse of the entire structure.

“Countless other steel-framed high-rises have experienced large, long-lasting fires without suffering either partial or total collapse,” the report points out.
It goes on to confirm the scientists’ doubts regarding the official explanation by referencing the head structural engineer of the buildings, John Skilling, who was interviewed by the Seattle Times following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Skilling, who was concerned about a possible airplane attack, performed an analysis that proved the towers would withstand the impact of Boeing 707:

“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed…The building structure would still be there…However, I’m not saying that properly applied explosives—shaped explosives—of that magnitude could not do a tremendous amount of damage…. I would imagine that if you took the top expert in that type of work and gave him the assignment of bringing these buildings down with explosives, I would bet that he could do it.”

To put it politely, Skilling believed the only thing that could bring down the Twin Towers was controlled demolition, certainly not a fire alone – not even a “horrendous fire.”

A controlled demolition would better explain how the buildings were able to collapse in the manner that they did, the report argues:

“In general, the technique used to demolish large buildings involves cutting the columns in a large enough area of the building to cause the intact portion above that area to fall and crush itself as well as crush whatever remains below it. This technique can be done in an even more sophisticated way, by timing the charges to go off in a sequence so that the columns closest to the center are destroyed first. The failure of the interior columns creates an inward pull on the exterior and causes the majority of the building to be pulled inward and downward while materials are being crushed, thus keeping the crushed materials in a somewhat confined area—often within the building’s ‘footprint.’ This method is often referred to as ‘implosion.’”

The lesser-known WTC building 7, which also collapsed that day, is “remarkable because it exemplified all the signature features of an implosion.” According to the report:

“The building dropped in absolute free fall for the first 2.25 seconds of its descent over a distance of 32 meters or eight stories. Its transition from stasis to free fall was sudden, occurring in approximately one-half second. It fell symmetrically straight down. Its steel frame was almost entirely dismembered and deposited mostly inside the building’s footprint, while most of its concrete was pulverized into tiny particles. Finally, the collapse was rapid, occurring in less than seven seconds.”

In relation to WTC Building 7, the report criticizes the official NIST explanation by pointing out some heavy flaws with their investigation. The NIST investigation began with the conclusion that fires brought down WTC building 7 but then had trouble trying to reconcile the evidence with that predetermined conclusion. The NIST report also attempted to deny the building fell at free-fall speed. However, independently verifying NIST’s computer modeling is currently impossible because NIST refuses to release a large portion of its data, arguing doing so “might jeopardize public safety.”
The most surprising aspect of this report, however, is that it goes further than any “conspiracy theorist” would ever have expected it to by questioning the explanation for the collapse of the Twin Tower buildings, as well. The report acknowledges:

“Thus, the definitive report on the collapse of the Twin Towers contains no analysis of why the lower sections failed to arrest or even slow the descent of the upper sections—which NIST acknowledges ‘came down essentially in free fall’—nor does it explain the various other phenomena observed during the collapses. When a group of petitioners filed a formal Request for Correction asking NIST to perform such analysis, NIST replied that it was ‘unable to provide a full explanation of the total collapse’ because ‘the computer models [were] not able to converge on a solution.””

Lastly, the report briefly argues that to this day, there is still a significant volume of unexplained evidence that further supports the theory controlled demolitions took place on that tragic day fifteen years ago, including the fact that videos and photographs show numerous high-velocity bursts of debris being ejected from “point-like sources”; the well-documented presence of molten metal throughout the debris field; and a number of eyewitness accounts (some 156 witnesses) stating they saw, heard and/or felt explosions prior to and during the collapses.

As the authors of the report note, until their hypothesis is the “subject of a truly scientific and impartial investigation by responsible authorities,” we will never know the truth of what happened for sure. People will continue to speculate, and those of us who question the official story will continue to be labeled “crazy” despite the fact that there are many unanswered questions.

For example, if it’s crazy to question why media outlets reported on the collapse of WTC Building 7 before it even collapsed, then perhaps we should never question anything.

As rapper Lupe Fiasco wrote in his song “Words I Never Said”:

“9/11, Building 7, did they really pull it?”

The simulation hypothesis

Are we living in a virtual reality? Is the universe emerging from an information processing system? And if so, could we ever tell? Is it possible to 'hack' the system and change reality? Take a look at the evidence and decide for yourself.

See also: does the simulation hypothesis defeat materialism? Link at Skeptiko:

READ EXCERPTS:

Kent Forbes: As outside of the box as Einstein was, it took him right until the end but he did shift his thinking, and very clearly says so in his correspondence with peers at the end of his life: we need a new theory that can speak to the problem [that] matter is not the base constituent of reality. But we don’t have a way of talking about this. So that’s what the information theory and simulation hypothesis [are]. [They’re] Einstein’s dream in a way, because it fills that gap perfectly and I wish he were alive to see how that’s come around. I believe he would be satisfied with it.

Alex Tsakiris: You do a nice job in The Simulation Hypothesis of laying out in very clear terms what is at stake in terms of choosing one set of findings versus another set of findings. And you make it clear that’s it’s unreasonable to choose this set of findings that consistently over and over again are not producing results that scientists would normally consider affirming their position. On the other hand, piling up again experiment after experiment, top scientists, top journals that affirm the counter-hypothesis seems to carrying the day in every way we look at it, from every angle.

Kent Forbes: Absolutely. There’s also the idea of progress behind all of this. Ever since the enlightenment period the materialist paradigm has been incrementally built up as a way of understanding the experience that we’re having. They had a lot of success with it that was designed to undermine the divine right to rule of monarchs. There were terrible abuses of power by the popes and so forth that speared this mechanical view of the universe as a way of undermining the narratives of the church. I think that it was justified at the time. After hundreds of years of building up this alternative, to find that a close examination of physical matter reveals a connection to consciousness, which undermines strict materialism, it’s a little bit much. I think it’s completely understandable for people who are invested in materialism to be skeptical because they’re afraid that they’re going to be reinforcing the claims of those religious [people] who are then going to say, see, we told you so. We’ve been saying this all along.

Alex Tsakiris: The film, The Simulation Hypothesis, is fantastic. As I said, rich in science but also very accessible and breaks some things down that people have probably heard about a dozen times before: the double-slit experiment; the observer effect; and quantum entanglement. You do a fabulous job of explaining that and then more importantly, as you were just talking about, explain how that completely contradicts, undermines and falsifies materialism, naturalism, [and] physicalism. All of this simplistic “you are a biological robot in a meaningless universe” stuff (the way that I like to put it). But, and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, are you stretching the metaphor too far? I always get a little bit nervous when we say things like, therefore we’ve falsified this. It has some aspects of the simulation model from a philosophical standpoint. Therefore, we live in a pixilated world that works like a computer simulation. I wonder sometimes if we’re stretching the metaphor? If one, we’re making a leap that’s unnecessary and two, maybe completely unfounded–particularly, if we jump over and look at it from a spiritual standpoint and what the extended reality folks are telling us. That is, the [ones] who are scientifically more or less looking at what’s happening in these extended consciousness realms; the spiritually transformative experiences and all the rest. Can you try and fit those two together? Are you stretching the metaphor too far? Do we have to consider extended consciousness and spirituality as a reality in this formula?

Kent Forbes: Starting with the last point, yes, everything should be considered. I don’t believe in censorship or stopping the argument in any way; or saying this is out of bounds. People consider everything.

Alex Tsakiris: But that is the legitimate fear of science. Because at some point it does reduce to Carl Sagan [and] how many angels fit on the head of a pin? Because now we’re saying we have to take seriously the idea that other spirit entities work and influence our world. We can kind of control that in our PSI experiments and our parapsychology experiments. We can pretend we’re doing real work on healing and prayer and all the rest. But what we’re really saying is everything’s up for grabs. We don’t have a clue how any of that stuff works.

Kent Forbes: During my time at Berkley I became aware of this philosophy of relativism, which I saw as extremely pernicious. Relativism being the idea that there is no essential difference between right and wrong. Obviously there is a difference between ideas that are worth considering and can be backed-up with what we like to consider objective evidence. Or a consensus on at least as far as a shared experience of repeatable, demonstrable, empirical, process will provide. Something that is completely nonsense and is not backed by anything and there can never be a consensus because it’s all up to the individual to decide how they feel about it. But at the same time there is always going to be the problem of limits of knowledge.

Alex Tsakiris: I just had this conversation with Dr. Sean Carroll. Maybe you’ve run across him. He’s a Caltech, Harvard trained physicist and has the number one best selling book in science right now. He’s a staunch materialist and not backing off one bit. His recent book is The Big Picture. He says, there’s nothing. [Life] ends. Death is natural. Everything is natural. Hard line materialist. We had this discussion that was along the lines of your movie. I said, Niels Bohr and Schrodinger, and many of the leading people, saw this issue of consciousness collapsing the wave function as central to the philosophical underpinnings of quantum physics. He said, no, you’ve got it completely wrong. They didn’t think that at all. So I went back and showed him after the show this wasn’t true. I don’t know how you get a PhD from Harvard in physics and not know these things but he didn’t know these things. The real point is what Schrodinger says, and Bohr almost says the same thing but Schrodinger says it directly, consciousness must survive death. So from a physics standpoint, it comes with the package. Consciousness surviving bodily death comes with the package doesn’t it?

Kent Forbes: Absolutely. And part of the problem is the divvying up of philosophy into the sciences and psychology, and…

Alex Tsakiris: …religion

Kent Forbes: It’s all philosophy and the thing is Plato understood that ideas about what constitutes an object, a self, and a reflection, that must precede the experience. So obviously it follows the experience as well. So yes, consciousness survives because it preceded the experience to begin with. This is not new. This is not a new idea. Someone like Schrodinger and Niels Bohr just understood that the idea of archetypes or platonic forms must be right. There is a mental construct about limits that create objects for us to have an experience with. That does not pass with my individual death or the death of my brain, or the death of every living thing. The idea that created all of this stuff is still going to be there after this construct or the matrix disappears. But we have divided philosophy up into the sciences and religion. So theology and physics wind up at these opposite poles where they’re really just philosophical pursuits.

***

Alex Tsakiris: But are you stretching the metaphor too far when you say we live in a pixilated world? And it works like a computer simulation. A lot is made of this idea consciousness is like a computer. I think the history of science shows us that whatever our latest technology is, and that’s what we latch onto and say we’re just like the river before we had any technology; or we’re just like the machine; and now we’re just like a computer simulation. Are we stretching the metaphor too far?

Kent Forbes: It depends on the individual who’s receiving that narrative. How are they receiving it and what kind of emotional response are they having? Is it possible the metaphor’s being stretched too far? Sure. Of course it is. But, when you’re designing a narrative to illicit an emotional response, you back yourself into this corner where you have to provide some kind of logical conclusion. Otherwise it’s just empty, meaningless drivel. So you have to wind up somewhere and that’s [where] the imagery and the metaphor that works for people who are having this experience in the information age that we live in now. So you’re providing an example that’s already within their experience they can relate the narrative to and say, oh, I see. Yes, I could be an avatar in a game; or I could be a character in another being’s dream. See what I’m saying?

Alex Tsakiris: I do. From your lips to Ray Kurzweil’s ears, that’s what I say. I guess that goes with where you’re going with your PhD and broadly looking at how we respond to new information integrated in, because I think you’ve captured it beautifully: it works for us and it matters less the extent to which it conforms to something we’re going to call “real” or anything like that. It propels us forward, is what I hear you saying, in a way that’s relatable for a lot of us.

Kent Forbes: And what’s really real is the emotional experience that you have. If you feel satisfied at the end of receiving the narrative, that’s what’s real. You’re scared in a scary dream and your fear is real. The thing that’s chasing you is part of your dream. But the emotion you’re experiencing is the only reality that can ever be traced back to anything that matters.

***

Alex Tsakiris: One last question: this is my personal issue right now and I want you to put on your theologian’s hat on the one hand. At the same time, put on your scientific hat because you keep saying you’re an artist, and that’s awesome. I want everyone to relate to you as an artist because you do great work. But you’re a scientist as well. You have a scientist’s sensibility that I think is really refreshing and will connect with a lot of people. You can roll your sleeves up and understand the science, and communicate it in a way that’s really terrific. So, here’s my question: what’s love got to do with it? That’s my point. Here’s why: if you talk to the near-death experience researchers, they say the narrative (to use Kent’s term) that everyone wants to talk about is did I see my dead relatives? How far was I outside of my body? What verifiable information was found outside of my body? And the near-death experience [people] will tell you that all day long, and allow you to put it into your survey, run your numbers, and come up with all of these great statistics. Then they’ll say, but you didn’t ask me what was the most important thing about my experience? I’ll tell you what it was: it was love. It was love in a way that I can’t even explain to you other than to say, take the most loving thing you’ve ever had in your life and multiply it times a thousand. Then you say, okay, let’s leave that near-death experience person and let’s walk over to this person who’s had a spiritually transformative experience; a Kundalini experience that happened spontaneously. They were just driving down the road and it happened. They come back and start saying the same things. It’s about love. They come back to devotional people and religious people [who] say that’s what it’s about love. Forget about all of the baby Jesus myth and all the rest of that. What I care about is the experience that I have of love. We have written that out of the narrative at every turn. Not only has science written it out, but even our newest, cutting-edge science; our futuristic science that you’re talking about; the near-death experience science; we all want to write love out of it. I just wonder if we’re making a mistake when we do that. Do you have any thoughts on what love has to do with it?

Kent Forbes: In order to have the experience of the individual, we have to place a separation between ourselves and wholeness–just to relate to other individuals, and to navigate a world of objects. We have to limit ourselves so severely, right? So if I were in Berkley in theology class this is the way I would say it (and almost everyone would agree, at least in Berkley): it’s unnatural to be limited in this way. We’ve limited ourselves so severely. From a spiritual standpoint, this is incredibly limited to a highly unusual degree. Love is the desire to be whole again. That starts with another individual who you want closeness with. Behind that is the ultimate organizing factor. Call it God; call it whatever but it’s really your entire whole self not divided into 7 billion individuals. So we all want to relate and we all want to get closer but guess what? We have to be separate in order to have individual experience. One of the limiting factors of having this experience is that distance and separation. Absence of love creates a desire and a want for love. So we desire closeness because we’ve created this distance. Individuals are always going to want closeness because as individuals we’ve separated ourselves. That seems like the major tension in the human experience.

Shamans and their world with Stanley Krippner

Stanley Krippner, PhD, professor of psychology at Saybrook University, is a Fellow in five APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions (30 and 32). Formerly, he was director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, in Brooklyn NY. He is co-author of Demystifying Shamans and Their World, The Voice of Rolling Thunder: A Medicine Man’s Wisdom for Walking the Red Road, Dream Telepathy, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them, The Mythic Path, and Haunted by Combat: Understanding PTSD in War Veterans, and co-editor of Debating Psychic Experience: Human Potential or Human Illusion, Healing Tales, Healing Stories, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence, Advances in Parapsychological Research and many other books. He is a Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and has published cross-cultural studies on spiritual content in dreams.

Here he discusses the common features that he has observed in his studies of shamans around the world. He describes their rituals in terms of drumming, dancing, sensory deprivation, drugs, diet, and dreaming. He notes that shamans often invoke the “trickster” archetype, but that this should not be taken to imply that they are necessarily fraudulent. Shamans receive that designation from their community; and they work in the service of that community. A self-appointed healer, therefore, is not a shaman. However, all shamans are healers.

UFO Encounter at Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe 1994

This clip contains footage of interviews with the children at Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe who had an amazing encounter with UFO's and their occupants in September 1994.

Identity, self, and the secret of life

Introduced by NASA Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell and narrated by philosopher Alan Watts. A media compilation featuring Apollo mission footage and music from The Cinematic Orchestra and Tomáš Dvořák (Machinarium OST).

You are almost definitely not living in reality because your brain doesn’t want you to

via Quartz:

Every cognitive bias exists for a reason—primarily to save our brains time or energy.

I’ve spent many years referencing Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases whenever I have a hunch that a certain type of thinking is an official bias but I can’t recall the name or details. But despite trying to absorb the information of this page many times over the years, very little of it seems to stick.

I decided to try to more deeply absorb and understand this list by coming up with a simpler, clearer organizing structure. If you look at these biases according to the problem they’re trying to solve, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they exist, how they’re useful, and the trade-offs (and resulting mental errors) that they introduce.

Four problems that biases help us address: Information overload, lack of meaning, the need to act fast, and how to know what needs to be remembered for later.

Problem 1: Too much information

There is just too much information in the world; we have no choice but to filter almost all of it out. Our brain uses a few simple tricks to pick out the bits of information that are most likely going to be useful in some way.

•     We notice things that are already primed in memory or repeated often. This is the simple rule that our brains are more likely to notice things that are related to stuff that’s recently been loaded in memory.
•     See: Availability heuristic, Attentional bias, Illusory truth effect, Mere exposure effect, Context effect, Cue-dependent forgetting, Mood-congruent memory bias, Frequency illusion, Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, Empathy gap, Omission bias, or the Base rate fallacy.
•     Bizarre/funny/visually-striking/anthropomorphic things stick out more than non-bizarre/unfunny things. Our brains tend to boost the importance of things that are unusual or surprising. Alternatively, we tend to skip over information that we think is ordinary or expected.
•     See: Bizarreness effect, Humor effect, Von Restorff effect, Picture superiority effect, Self-relevance effect, or Negativity bias.
•     We notice when something has changed—and we’ll generally tend to weigh the significance of the new value by the direction the change happened (positive or negative) more than re-evaluating the new value as if it had been presented alone. This also applies to when we compare two similar things.
•     See: Anchoring, Contrast effect, Focusing effect, Money illusion, Framing effect, Weber–Fechner law, Conservatism, or Distinction bias.
•     We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs. This is a big one. As is the corollary: we tend to ignore details that contradicts our own beliefs.
•     See: Confirmation bias, Congruence bias, Post-purchase rationalization, Choice-supportive bias, Selective perception, Observer-expectancy effect, Experimenter’s bias, Observer effect, Expectation bias, Ostrich effect, Subjective validation, Continued influence effect, or Semmelweis reflex.
•     We notice flaws in others more easily than flaws in ourselves. Yes, before you see this entire article as a list of quirks that compromise how other people think, realize that you are also subject to these biases.
•     See: Bias blind spot, Naïve cynicism, or Naïve realism.

Problem 2: Not enough meaning

The world is very confusing, and we end up only seeing a tiny sliver of it—but we need to make some sense of it in order to survive. Once the reduced stream of information comes in, we connect the dots, fill in the gaps with stuff we already think we know, and update our mental models of the world.

•     We find stories and patterns even in sparse data. Since we only get a tiny sliver of the world’s information, and also filter out almost everything else, we never have the luxury of having the full story. This is how our brain reconstructs the world to feel complete inside our heads.
•     See: Confabulation, Clustering illusion, Insensitivity to sample size, Neglect of probability, Anecdotal fallacy, Illusion of validity, Masked man fallacy, Recency illusion, Gambler’s fallacy, Hot-hand fallacy, Illusory correlation, Pareidolia, or Anthropomorphism.
•     We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories whenever there are new specific instances or gaps in information. When we have partial information about a specific thing that belongs to a group of things we are pretty familiar with, our brain has no problem filling in the gaps with best guesses or what other trusted sources provide. Conveniently, we then forget which parts were real and which were filled in.
•     See: Group attribution error, Ultimate attribution error, Stereotyping, Essentialism, Functional fixedness, Moral credential effect, Just-world hypothesis, Argument from fallacy, Authority bias, Automation bias, Bandwagon effect, or the Placebo effect.
•     We imagine things and people we’re familiar with or fond of as better than things and people we aren’t familiar with or fond of. Similar to the above, but the filled-in bits generally also include built-in assumptions about the quality and value of the thing we’re looking at.
•     See: Halo effect, In-group bias, Out-group homogeneity bias, Cross-race effect, Cheerleader effect, Well-traveled road effect, Not invented here, Reactive devaluation, or the Positivity effect.
•     We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about. Our subconscious mind is terrible at math and generally gets all kinds of things wrong about the likelihood of something happening if any data is missing.
•     See: Mental accounting, Normalcy bias, Appeal to probability fallacy,Murphy’s Law, Subadditivity effect, Survivorship bias, Zero sum bias, Denomination effect, or Magic number 7+-2.
•     We think we know what others are thinking. In some cases this means that we assume that they know what we know, in other cases we assume they’re thinking about us as much as we are thinking about ourselves. It’s basically just a case of us modeling their own mind after our own (or in some cases, after a much less complicated mind than our own).
•     See: Curse of knowledge, Illusion of transparency, Spotlight effect, Illusion of external agency, Illusion of asymmetric insight, or the Extrinsic incentive error.
•     We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future. Magnified also by the fact that we’re not very good at imagining how quickly or slowly things will happen or change over time.
•     See: Hindsight bias, Outcome bias, Moral luck, Declinism, Telescoping effect, Rosy retrospection, Impact bias, Pessimism bias, Planning fallacy, Time-saving bias, Pro-innovation bias, Projection bias, Restraint bias, or the Self-consistency bias.

Problem 3: The need to act fast

We’re constrained by time and information, and yet we can’t let that paralyze us. Without the ability to act fast in the face of uncertainty, we surely would have perished as a species long ago. With every piece of new information, we need to do our best to assess our ability to affect the situation, apply it to decisions, simulate the future to predict what might happen next, and otherwise act on our new insight.

•     In order to act, we need to be confident in our ability to make an impact and to feel like what we do is important. In reality, most of this confidence can be classified as overconfidence, but without it we might not act at all.
•     See: Overconfidence effect, Egocentric bias, Optimism bias, Social desirability bias, Third-person effect, Forer effect, Barnum effect, Illusion of control, False consensus effect, Dunning-Kruger effect, Hard-easy effect, Illusory superiority, Lake Wobegone effect, Self-serving bias, Actor-observer bias, Fundamental attribution error, Defensive attribution hypothesis, Trait ascription bias, Effort justification, Risk compensation, or the Peltzman effect.
•     In order to stay focused, we favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of us over the delayed and distant. We value stuff more in the present than in the future, and relate more to stories of specific individuals than anonymous individuals or groups. I’m surprised there aren’t more biases found under this one, considering how much it impacts how we think about the world.
•     See: Hyperbolic discounting, Appeal to novelty, or the Identifiable victim effect.
•     In order to get anything done, we’re motivated to complete things that we’ve already invested time and energy in. The behavioral economist’s version of Newton’s first law of motion: an object in motion stays in motion. This helps us finish things, even if we come across more and more reasons to give up.
•     See: Sunk cost fallacy, Irrational escalation, Escalation of commitment, Loss aversion, IKEA effect, Processing difficulty effect, Generation effect, Zero-risk bias, Disposition effect, Unit bias, Pseudocertainty effect, Endowment effect, or the Backfire effect.
•     In order to avoid mistakes, we’re motivated to preserve our autonomy and status in a group, and to avoid irreversible decisions.If we must choose, we tend to choose the option that is perceived as the least risky or that preserves the status quo. Better the devil you know than the devil you do not.
•     See: System justification, Reactance, Reverse psychology, Decoy effect, Social comparison bias, or Status quo bias.
•     We favor options that appear simple or that have more complete information over more complex, ambiguous options. We’d rather do the quick, simple thing than the important complicated thing, even if the important complicated thing is ultimately a better use of time and energy.
•     See: Ambiguity bias, Information bias, Belief bias, Rhyme as reason effect, Bike-shedding effect, Law of Triviality, Delmore effect, Conjunction fallacy, Occam’s razor, or the Less-is-better effect.

Problem 4: What should we remember?

There’s too much information in the universe. We can only afford to keep around the bits that are most likely to prove useful in the future. We need to make constant bets and trade-offs around what we try to remember and what we forget. For example, we prefer generalizations over specifics because they take up less space. When there are lots of irreducible details, we pick out a few standout items to save, and discard the rest. What we save here is what is most likely to inform our filters related to information overload (problem #1), as well as inform what comes to mind during the processes mentioned in problem #2 around filling in incomplete information. It’s all self-reinforcing.

•     We edit and reinforce some memories after the fact. During that process, memories can become stronger, however various details can also get accidentally swapped. We sometimes accidentally inject a detail into the memory that wasn’t there before.
•     See: Misattribution of memory, Source confusion, Cryptomnesia, False memory, Suggestibility, or the Spacing effect.
•     We discard specifics to form generalities. We do this out of necessity, but the impact of implicit associations, stereotypes, and prejudice results in some of the most glaringly bad consequences from our full set of cognitive biases.
•     See: Implicit associations, Implicit stereotypes, Stereotypical bias, Prejudice, Negativity bias, or the Fading affect bias.
•     We reduce events and lists to their key elements. It’s difficult to reduce events and lists to generalities, so instead we pick out a few items to represent the whole.
•     See: Peak–end rule, Leveling and sharpening, Misinformation effect, Duration neglect, Serial recall effect, List-length effect, Modality effect, Memory inhibition, Part-list cueing effect, Primacy effect, Recency effect, Serial position effect, or the Suffix effect.
•     We store memories differently based on how they were experienced. Our brains will only encode information that it deems important at the time, but this decision can be affected by other circumstances (what else is happening, how is the information presenting itself, can we easily find the information again if we need to, etc.) that have little to do with the information’s value.
•     See: Levels of processing effect, Testing effect, Absent-mindedness, Next-in-line effect, Tip of the tongue phenomenon, or the Google effect.

Great, how am I supposed to remember all of this?

You don’t have to. But you can start by remembering these four giant problems our brains have evolved to deal with over the last few million years (and maybe bookmark this page if you want to occasionally reference it for the exact bias you’re looking for):

•     Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter.
•     Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps.
•     We need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions.
•     This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits.

In order to avoid drowning in information overload, our brains need to skim and filter insane amounts of information and quickly, almost effortlessly, decide which few things in that firehose are actually important, and call those out.

In order to construct meaning out of the bits and pieces of information that come to our attention, we need to fill in the gaps, and map it all to our existing mental models. In the meantime, we also need to make sure that it all stays relatively stable and as accurate as possible.

In order to act fast, our brains need to make split-second decisions that could impact our chances for survival, security, or success, and we need to feel confident that we can make things happen.

And in order to keep doing all of this as efficiently as possible, our brains need to remember the most important and useful bits of new information and inform the other systems so they can adapt and improve over time, but make sure to remember no more than that.
Sounds pretty useful! So what’s the downside?

In addition to the four problems, it would be useful to remember these four truths about how our solutions to these problems have problems of their own:

•     We don’t see everything. Some of the information we filter out is actually useful and important.
•     Our search for meaning can conjure illusions. We sometimes imagine details that were filled in by our assumptions, and construct meaning and stories that aren’t really there.
•     Quick decisions can be seriously flawed. Some of the quick reactions and decisions we jump to are unfair, self-serving, and counter-productive.
•     Our memory reinforces errors. Some of the stuff we remember for later just makes all of the above systems more biased, and more damaging to our thought processes.

By keeping these four problems and their four consequences in mind, the availability heuristic (and, specifically, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon) will ensure that we notice our own biases more often. If you visit this page to refresh your memory every once in a while, the spacing effect will help underline some of these thought patterns so that your bias blind spot and naïve realism is kept in check.

Nothing we do can make the four problems go away (until we have a way to expand our minds’ computational power and memory storage to match that of the universe), but if we accept that we are permanently biased—and that there’s room for improvement—confirmation bias will continue to help us find evidence that supports this, which will ultimately lead us to better understand ourselves.

Reality Smashing Quotes

via Fractal Enlightenment  

“Quotations are like wayside robbers who leap out, brandishing weapons, and relieve the idler of his certainty.” ~ Walter Benjamin

Ah quotations, those little packets of redemption, those tiny bundles of emancipation. They take our tiny bowls of fixed thinking and stir them up into giant bowls of flexible thinking. They eclipse both certitude and uncertainty, intermittently. They intellectually crush out. In this article we’ll delve into ten quotations that tear the veil between the believer and his/her belief. Ten quotes that rattle the cage of our certainty, tease out the hypocrisy of our convictions, and force our heads over the edge of the abyss of the human condition. As Bradford Keeney pinpointed, “Words are only useful in teasing one another. In teasing we are less likely to get stuck in any particular belief, attitude, or form of knowing.”

Number one: “We understand nothing! If you understand this, you understand everything.” ~ Paul Mic

It’s okay that we’re fallible. It’s okay that we’re imperfect and prone to make mistakes. It’s even okay that we’re inherently hypocritical and torn between spirit and flesh. After all, we are a ridiculously young species in a preposterously ancient universe. Does this get us off the hook? Nope. But it does get us out of our own way, so that we’re able to focus on what really matters: life, love, and laughter. As, Jorge Luis Borges said, polishing up the predicament, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

Number two: “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.” ~ Richard Feynman

Indeed. Questions are infinite and free. Answers are finite and fixed. I would even go so far as to say that the only answer is to question. How could it not be? When you can question anything, ad infinitum. One could even question my declaration that the only answer is to question. As Elie Weisel said, “Every question possesses a power that does not lie within the answer.” Of course! In the end all one has are questions with which to challenge the lot; to usurp the throne it’s intellections, and make assumptions naught. And then there’s Franz Kafka’s thought on the subject that knocks it out of the park, “He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.”

Number three: “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” ~ James Russell Lowell

Such a thought keeps us open to new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences, so that we may perhaps evolve, or co-evolve, into having a healthier perspective of reality. We’re able to move from thesis to anti-thesis and into synthesis, and then back into thesis, to which a new anti-thesis becomes inevitable. Lest we doom ourselves to making the same mistakes as our ancestors did, it behooves us to intuit when an antiquated ideal has grown unhealthy and stale. As Aldous Huxley warned, rounding out the thought, “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Number four: “You must change in order to find your truest self. And keep changing. The false idol is any form that hangs around too long and gets fossilized. It’s worth considering that if your ideas of God don’t change, then your ideas are dead. God is not dead. He simply went elsewhere because you were too boring… Tease God. Do not fear God. A fool’s love is what God loves best. It represents the ready and available heart of a child at play.” ~ Bradford Keeney

Barring the idea that everything is an illusion, ‘change’ is perhaps the only certainty we have to hang our hats on. It seems to be the only permanent. Which is ironic, because change is the epitome of impermanence. Oh well. Might as well have a good sense of humor about it. Better to laugh with all the gods (and with the absence of god, if you’re an atheist) than to stare all self-serious and dead-mackerel-eyed into the infinite nothingness vainly tempting to force-feed “Truth” into a reality that doesn’t give a rat’s as*. Alan Watts smooths out the thought, “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

 Number five: “God emptied to the limit is man, and man emptied to the limit is God.” ~ Alan Watts

Imagine it: God emptied to the limit. What’s left? Man, in his imperfect, naked vulnerability: a finite, trembling creature at the seeming center of an Infinite Flourishing. Imagine further: Man emptied to the limit. What’s left? God, writhing in perfect union with all things, interdependently spread out into infinite ubiquity. Such is the existential predicament of mankind: a breath-gasping, sphincter-tightening, mortal beast daring his soul into transcending it all with the self-actualized symbolism of God. Either way, man is God and God is man. Especially considering Meister Eckhart’s thought on the subject, “The eye with which I see God, is the same eye with which God sees me.” Or? As Rumi said, “Maybe you are searching among the branches for what only appears in the roots.”

Number six: “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may very well be another profound truth.” ~ Niels Bohr

Truth shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s ability to hold multiple conflicting dispositions at the same time regarding the same topic. In short: Truth is a slippery red herring. In order to handle it, the mind must be both flexible and sharp, all while not taking itself too seriously. This requires being circumspect with ideas while also attempting to sharpen them on the whetstone of probability. And then having the audacity to be circumspect with probability. Perhaps nobody said it better than Aristotle, “It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Number seven: “’I don’t know’ is an unparalleled source of power, a declaration of independence from the pressure to have an opinion about every single subject. It’s fun to say. Try it: ‘I don’t know.’ Let go of the drive to have it all figured out: ‘I don’t know.’ Proclaim the only truth you can be totally sure of: ‘I don’t know.’ Empty your mind and lift your heart: ‘I don’t know.’ Use it as a battle cry, a joyous affirmation of your oneness with the Great Mystery: ‘I don’t know.’” ~ Rob Brezsny

Indeed. “I don’t know” frees us into a state of “prepared to learn.” We are liberated from the burden of having the answers. We shed the weight, so that maybe we can pack it back up in a healthier way that makes us more robust. We unlearn what we have learned. Then we shed the weight again, back into a state of “I don’t know.” We empty the cup, so that we can fill it back up with the fresh water of awe and wonder. Then we empty it again. Over and over. Education by perpetual astonishment is the thing. ‘I don’t know’ in order that I may be overwhelmed by my not knowing.

Number eight: “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ~ Mark Twain

If, as Voltaire said, “Religion began when the first conman met the first fool,” then perhaps the fool gets un-fooled by realizing that the conman is just a man – fallible, flawed, imperfect, prone to mistakes, and more than likely just as wrong about his assertions as the fool is about his uncertainty. The absolute folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, if only he could intuit it. But alas, as Mark Twain surmised, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Number nine: “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” ~ Rene Descartes

Just as the folly of the human condition is the only salvation for the fool, so too is doubt the only salvation for the blindly faithful. And the predicament is much the same. How to get the blindly faithful passed their blind spot. It comes down to a problem of cognitive dissonance that’s exacerbated by people’s tendency to take themselves and their beliefs too seriously. But breakthroughs can be made. We just need to trip our ignorant religious tendencies into an enlightened spiritual dance. As Eckhart Tolle suggested, “Here is a new spiritual practice: Don’t take your thoughts too seriously.”

Number ten: “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There you are: a tiny human in a gargantuan cosmos, a small speck in a vast universe, a flash in the pan of Time heretofore. What to do with the existential angst? What to do with the delicious tearing between spirit and flesh? What to do with the preciously finite amount of time you have within an infinite reality? It’s all yours to take in. It’s all yours to open up to. It’s all yours to plant seeds so as to flourish into the healthiest, most open-minded version of yourself. It’s all yours to breathe in an out with a flexible and un-shatterable sense of humor. It’s all so serious that it’s not serious at all. Laughable, really. And yet, as Terence McKenna profoundly stated, “You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.”