Open Letter to the Ghost of Richard Dawkins

One can't deny an assertion without a reasonable understanding of what's been asserted. To deny an assertion because "it sounds wrong" would be sheer intellectual arrogance, no?

"It's wrong because it doesn't pass my smell test — and I am the smeller-in-chief!"

Are you quite sure you understand what people are talking about when they use the term, "God"?

I've previously suggested that your style of atheism rests on a Straw Man argument:

Much of atheism amounts to a straw man argument decrying the absurdity of the notion of some higher-powered dude sitting on a cloud. Who, aside from pinheads and atheists, thinks any such thing?

But I'm not sure you've made even such flimsy an effort to understand. What, exactly, do you refute, sir? When a devout person prays with a full, poignant heart, kindling a profound sense of peace and consolation and a firm, ongoing present guidance far steadier and wiser than what they know themselves to be capable of, is that something you have personal experience with? If not, then what licenses such confident dismissal? In fact, precisely what are you even dismissing?

To wave such experience away as "mere emotion" is to pretend the label drains the reality. But the thing about the universe, as you know, Dr. Dawkins, is that labels don't have that power. Innumerable essential human experiences which can't be explained by logic could be bundled under that shallow catch-all term. Deliciousness, beauty, forgiveness, insight, et al. Many real phenomena resist logical dissection. This doesn't make them illogical.

A cookie is not delicious because of its 9 grams of fat, 10 grams of sugar, and adequate recipe. All cookies have similar ingredients, and most recipes are adequate, yet a rare special one makes us groan. Given that groaning is possible, why does the overwhelming majority not kindle this effect? Why has it not been formulized? Companies with billion dollar research and development budgets have failed to bottle the lightning, yet the world makes us groan in non-random ways that are impossible to dismiss. And it all makes not a lick of sense. 

There are groans you've never groaned. With arrogant tautology fully engaged, one might summarily dismiss all experiences one hasn't experienced. But how could you characterize such visceral dismissal as serious refutation?

I hear the skeleton of your objection as "I haven't experienced it, and it doesn't pass my smell test, hence "NONSENSE!" And this sort of oblivious haughtiness is the epitome of foolishness — and of comedy. Which reminds me to add "funny" to the list of real things that can't be touched, probed, or catalogued — nor flippantly dismissed as "mere emotion".

Perhaps, along with deliciousness, beauty, and forgiveness, humor should be waved breezily into a drawer marked "Emotion". I suspect, though, that you wouldn't be so quick to dismiss "insight" — an essential phenomenon in your day job, despite its uncanny mysteriousness.

One personal note, if I might. I've watched videos of your science lectures, where you stand before classes scrawling nonsensical symbols (most likely runes and incantations representative of your "beliefs"). You fill entire blackboards with ridiculous nonsense that makes NO SENSE AT ALL. Mark me down as a non-believer. Good DAY, sir.

Making Hay

Sometimes I'm fast-smart and sometimes I'm slow-smart (the rest is an uninteresting morass of confused incompetence).

The fast-smart part is talent. I can't really account for it.

The slow-smart part — the larger part — is, paradoxically, where I do my best work. Slow-smart really means stupid-but-tenacious. It's a much better faculty, though very few people discover this (I'll explain why in a moment).

The fast stuff is dangerous, and must be closely supervised. It's so facile that it can effortlessly churn out vapidity and wrongness (at age six I announced to my family that "smart people have no sense."). I've trained my slow self to vet my fast output in order to weed out bullshit. Meanwhile, my slow stuff requires no vetting. It's slow because vetting's baked in.

I constantly see people burying their slow sides, steering clear of entire realms to avoid even contemplating it. It strikes me as a tragic waste. I don't avoid butterscotch candy because it takes time to melt. "Painstaking" is good, so intellectual slowness — i.e. stupid tenacity — can be more deeply rewarding. More...intelligent?

Yet people twist themselves into pretzels to avoid contemplating their slow side, much less channeling it. We all want to feel super fast and super sharp.

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It took me 25 years to touch my toes in yoga, while the bendy ectomorphs simply bent over and dropped. I gleaned volumes of wisdom from every millimeter of progress, and now when I perform a forward bend, the vibe in the room changes a little.

See also:
The obscure Vedic story told here

The Infinite Potential of Slow Learners

Samson

Naughty or Nice

Some people can't be in pain or inebriated without being mean to others. Their kindness is a fragile facade that shatters under duress.

Others aren't like this. They may grow less coherent and be less heedful of courtesies. But their deep-seated kindness remains intact, come what may.

I dislike flat umbrella terms like "good" and "evil". But however you might care to define those terms, this seems as good a test as any.

Debriefing Encounters with the Unthinkable

"Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable"

Why does that read fresh and surprising? Why does it jolt us into shifting perspective (aka reframing)?

Because we don't normally consider it. We're blind, subconscious, essentially asleep to this. Per dream logic, we perpetually find ourselves caught, Groundhog Day-style, in a fraught game where we MUST NOT TOUCH THE WALL, because it's REALLY REALLY HORRIBLE IF YOU TOUCH THE WALL, yet we touch the wall every single time (only scoring points by delaying the inevitable). We then hit "replay" so compulsively that we never hover thoughtfully above for a broader view. We're too busy stoking our petrification about the dreaded wall.

Let's consider two especially horrific and extreme examples of apocalyptic events that would have made any sane person pull the world's emergency brake:

When Russian invaded Ukraine and began perpetrating all those bombings and barbarities, it was expected that Ukraine would soon be essentially ruined, even if they managed to fight on bravely. Four years later, there's still a Ukraine, not a demolished killing field. Not that there hasn't been massive loss of all sorts (I'm certainly not making light!), but the people there are not post-apocalyptic wretches resorting to cannibalism. After four years of pummeling and atrocities and civilian targeting, the country is not ruined. Even leaving aside its remarkable military turnaround, it's somehow still Ukraine.

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A great many people stopped working during Covid lockdown and survived with nary a yelp. A relatively small number went through foreclosure, but there were not vast mobs caught between grind stones of Dickensian poverty. No starving to death. No hordes of impoverished wretches living in Hoovervilles. Before covid, it would have been unimaginable to survive any such thing. And while it sure wasn't fun, here we all are. Still us.

An injustice or a cruel word can grate for decades. But survival and continuity are scarcely noticed. We just draw a new hard red line of unthinkability.


It's particularly hard to parse the daylight between doomed expectation and mildly suboptimal outcome. If I’m terrified there's a burglar in the house, and discover it's just a window swinging in the wind but stub my toe on my way back to bed, some deep visceral sense pipes up to holler “I KNEW IT!”

The Curdled Master

A musician recently died, and there is testimonial after testimonial about how he was the kindest, most wonderful person.

I've read a number of books about spies. Their trade secret is homework. Every action that seems to go right with a mere shrug is made possible by unimaginable hours of unseen preparation, backup preparation, and backup-backup preparation. A spy's edge over the rest of us is that they're willing to do that work, and we never expect it because we imagine we live in a world where people aren't capable of it.

This musician went so far out of his way to wrong me on multiple occasions that it defied all expectation. He "put in the work" whenever our paths crossed.

Was I rude to him? Did I steal work from him? Had I wronged a friend of his? Nope. My sin was that I was overly familiar and friendly with him once on a gig a very long time ago. I'd spoken to him with an easy camaraderie that he didn't believe I'd earned. That's it. Yep, that small. I noted his reaction immediately, an experience I haven't had before or since. There was a contemptuously curdled sneer that didn't appear on his face. It filled the room. His capacity for sour contempt was.....enormous. It was scored like a movie scene. It came with cellos.

I wasn't actually important to him, strangely enough. At all. A mere blip on his screen, so his efforts against me weren't constantly ongoing. But whenever I appeared on his radar, he'd get busy. I think he was a guy constantly on the lookout for radar blips.

I don't know how many blips he tracked, but I've observed, at a distance, several others. And I know for a fact that even one of his peers/friends saw him clearly. That musician (let's call him "Seth", not his real name) is a solemn part of the chorus of Facebook eulogizers. While Seth was never tortured by the guy (because he holds a prominent position in the business, so this guy was obliged to kiss up to him, not kick down), I once quietly complained about him to Seth, who rolled his eyes in displeasure at the sound of the name. So at least one knew....but kept it quiet.

I'm not uttering his name, you'll notice, and I'm no shrinking violet. Some people exercise an uncanny level of control. A guy who can curdle the whole room is someone you innately know not to mess with. Even after he's gone.

He taught me that there are predators moving among us, managing not to be recognized or explicitly acknowledged despite their egregious behavior. It's a horrifying thought, but at least today there is one less of them.


Sidebar
The above is, I think/hope, interesting even for non-musicians. And it's intended as a stand-alone. But I can't resist adding, as a sidebar mostly for any musicians reading along, this extra bit of color:

Truth is, there are plenty of awful, nasty-assed musicians near the top of the food chain in NYC. More garden-variety assholes, without the supernatural predatory component. I always tried to steer clear — easy enough, since Broadway pits and Nestle's Quick jingles were never my targets, even though that's where the money is.

As I sold my web site, which had grown beyond all intention, to a silicon valley corporation, I ran across all sorts of Silicon Valley characters. Guys with $100 million in the bank, who do enormous deals and drive super cars. Guys people have heard of. Guys so powerful that they can afford to be super-friendly and cool 100% of the time, because if they don't like something about you, they can simply eat you....and, as they do, they'd never stop grinning. Everything goes their way! Life's so great! :)

See the tale of Vrtra within the larger story of my sale of Chowhound.com

They each had reason to bully me or lie to me, because, for a cosmic five seconds I'd appeared on their radar because community web sites were the rage among the Big Boys and I had the most prominent food one. From one perspective, I briefly joined their league. But from a more realistic perspective, I'd become chum in their water, and thus imperiled. Just because they value you, or even "like" you, doesn't mean they want to do well by you. I, after all, love chickens and potatoes.

I got through it and receded back into obscurity. And while I never really got back into the music scene, I did briefly brush by a couple of the old music biz assholes, smelling their distinctive musk and remembering how they act — their malevolent gangster ways, hypercompetitiveness, and lavish self-importance — and it just made me laugh and laugh. Which was not what I expected.

Remember "Lil Archies"? The comic books where Archie, Jughead, Veronica, etc., are all 1/4 size because they're little kids? The music gangsters looked like "Lil Gangsters", and they just seemed absolutely ADORABLE. I wanted to pet them like bunny rabbits.

Why Everyone Seems Irrational

Every single person I've ever met is dumbfounded by the enormous irrationality of other people....even as they themselves are obviously irrational much of the time.

It stems from each of us feeling robustly capable from our experience operating in some narrow realm with clarity and competence. We feel comfortable forgiving our failings outside that realm. An otherwise competent person is naturally prone to err a bit, so it's forgivable!

It only feels like "a bit", of course, because the 98% of life outside our remote islands of competence and clarity feels like a junk drawer. Our self-image remains intact, so self-forgiveness is generous.

And we most often see others outside their remote islands of competence and clarity — especially on social media, hurling confident nonsense about politics, epidemiology, international relations, economics, etc.. We disregard their narrowly-earned self-respect as they rave on, aware only of the raving itself. And we do not share their inclination to forgive it.

Random interactions most often catch others outside their expertise. And we have more discretionary time than ever to pay attention, and to judge. We also have far more time to wander outside our own corridors of rationality.

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I hired a really expert retired auto mechanic as a handyman once. He had no experience with home improvement, but he felt that nothing could come up that would be harder or more complex than his previous experience, so he felt qualified to do anything mechanical. He then proceeded to pretty much wreck my house.

Reverse Engineering Intellectual Humility From Fruit Selection

Choosing oranges is easy. Heavy = good, light = bad. Heavy is juicy. Light is dry. Water weighs more than dry pulp. Duh!

Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform this check. They poke, inspect, admire color, avoid blemishes, compare shapes. Even in Portugal, where oranges are everywhere, I watch shoppers deplete the various bins evenly, even if one contains noticeably heavier fruit.

How can anything so obvious remain so utterly invisible?

Even stranger: it took me six decades to see it, myself.

We should be trained by now. We choose heavy oranges and are sensually REWARDED. We choose light ones and are PUNISHED. Even mice can be trained. Why not us?

The orange trick is like a spooky invitation from an invisible dimension to consider what else we're missing.

It feels like we've nearly filled in the map of knowledge, so at this mature stage we are simply adding minor details to First Principles which feel like solid bedrock. But what if the "unknown unknowns" are far, far more numerous than we imagine?

We never knew we were walking around unable to choose oranges. No one knows the orange trick until they're told, so the rest don't perceive a gap. In our ignorance, we feel reasonably whole. What if, despite our blithe confidence, it's a landscape of gaps, and we never notice because the thing about gaps is that there's nothing there?

Is it possible that we have not, in fact, done anything like filling a map? Have we, instead, been plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched? Missed truth, leaving no evidence, can't be weighed. And yet we imagine — both as individuals and as a species — that we have some real sense of "where we're at.”

As a side note, even those spindly lines — our proud "First Principles" — might not be broadly foundational, after all. What if our First Principles are nothing but a tentative first try? Maybe our "First Principles" are more in the sense of First Batch of Pancakes? Idunno, I'm just asking questions.

Recognitions of missed truth do tend to accumulate in daily life, don't they? And if we're intellectually honest and not comically over-proud of human accomplishment, we might wonder whether the total mass of overlooked a priori "duhs" — the myriad latent epiphanies — might titanically outweigh everything we've figured out from a few centuries of plowing spindly thin lines through an immense field otherwise untouched.

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I have not devised some brilliant new orange choosing system. I have simply pointed out the obvious. So obvious that one absorbs it without a sense of prior absence. My point here is that there are many widely-know things no one knows.

Let's call them A Priori wormholes. Latently obvious insights that remain utterly invisible until they suddenly become boringly inevitable. Assimilation erases subjective evidence that they were ever missing.

Cosplay in Oppositeland

Truly competent people embrace challenge and correction. They never assume they've got the best or the only solution, and this makes them good managers and leaders.

Incompetent people despise challenge or correction. Whatever solution pops into their head is instantly canonized. It's not just stubborn vanity and over-self-confidence. They’ve mistaken the performance of leadership for leadership itself.

There is a clear but underrecognized pattern in the human world: Every loud THIS is a compensation for some uncomfortable THAT. So as one gains experience, this gradually begins to feel like Oppositeland:

Selfish people feel overly generous, while generous people feel overly selfish.

You can be smart or you can feel smart, but never both.

Super patriots have a magnetic attraction for tyrants.

Bullies become bullies because they're terrified.

Machos act macho because they're sexually insecure.

Smiley people can be the most vindictive.

Pomposity and arrogance are hallmarks of the dimwitted.

The most artsy-seeming people are almost never the most creative.

Flamboyantly aggrieved victims are usually coddled aristocrats.

Homophobes seldom recognize that straight people usually don't spend much time thinking about gay people.

And people never seem so low-class as when they try to act high-class.

It's mostly about the pose. The peformance. Let's try flipping the framing and see if the point settles more clearly:

Secure heterosexuals don’t try to act flamboyantly heterosexual.

Secure non-racists don’t try to act flamboyantly anti-racist.

Kind people don't plaster on flamboyant smile masks.

Genuine people don’t flamboyantly project genuineness.

Honest people don’t flamboyantly project honesty.

Smart people don’t flamboyantly project intelligence.

Helpful people don't flamboyantly offer to be helpful.

And great singers became singers because they wanted to sing, not because they wanted to be singers.


See also "Seemers Always Win: Posing as Someone Like You"

Dylan on Aging

Bob Dylan squeezed gobs of mileage out of his poetic license. He was so palpably gleeful to let listeners Rorschach his lyrics that he could come off like Exhibit A of the old slogan "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit."

But I must concede that some of his thin, vague images — like "the answer blowing in the wind" — do stick with a person. Useful framings are made more accessible. And that's a high aim of art, so I oughtn't complain.

A new NY Times interview upon Dylan's 85th birthday shows that he remains gratuitously ellipitcal, but the points he's slipperily encircling seem more fully-formed. Even, shockingly, kind of sharp.

The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.

The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.

The Needlessness of Kübler-Ross

Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable. So maybe the problem is in the red lines we draw.

If you sit with this realization, and apply it as you go forward, you may find that you no longer need to laboriously struggle through every one of the Kübler-Ross levels to reach acceptance. You might find that you can perfectly well accept on the fly.

The thing to bear closely in mind is that acceptance is not approval. As a society, we've lost the ability to make that distinction. Acceptance doesn't mean a lovely day. Acceptance doesn't mean being totally cool with it. Acceptance just means opting out of performing theatrical resistance to the inevitable.


Enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable." - Anthony de Mello