The Nature of Belief

 Much of my thinking is influenced by reading and I am currently reading a book about some people who changed American thought in the period after the Civil War. One thing I find interesting is that even the most scientific of these tried to defend a belief in God, meaning the Christian god and the Bible as scripture. The author goes through a list of the approach of various people, including Louis Agassiz, who made important contributions to science, especially in glacier studies and classification of fish including fish fossils, but also rejected Darwin's theories and tried to disprove them, unsuccessfully. The author says he simply rejected modern science to preserve his beliefs.

The part that caught my attention today was discussion of William James Pragmatism, in which he describes his understanding of thought and how belief works. He says we believe things that we are willing to act on, and we believe them because that belief provides value, which makes the beliefs "true". To me, that suggests that he does not believe in objective truth, in the existence of facts outside human thought, which seems rather silly, but he was certainly a more successful man than I am, so maybe he saw something I don't. The Law of Errors was something still working its way through science and culture during that time, so a belief, for example, of the "true" position of a star or "true" trajectory of a comet was something they had just learned to calculate based on measurement, which they had to admit contained errors.

One could wonder about the "value" of a belief in God, but I expect it is largely social. I have read many times that those who study belief in religion find that the beliefs come largely from family. There are people who convert from one religion to another. I know this from experience because I was a missionary for the Mormon church, which may not like my using that name, but no one objected when I was a Mormon missionary and everyone knows to whom I refer when I use the name, so it serves a purpose in communication, and I don't care if it offends so old white guy with whom I disagree on fundamental issues, the naming of his church being rather trivial in comparison.

So I believed in God because my family did. It made my parents happy, which was a major goal in childhood and into adulthood. It was reinforced by responses to affirmation of my belief by others in the church, even strangers I met when attending church with relatives. As the Mormon church was of prime importance to my father and most of those in the church, it is not surprising that I did believe. It seems more surprising that I stopped. When and how did belief in God cease to have value that reinforced the belief.

I can't answer that clearly. I do remember having and asking questions about scripture, such as how much water would it take to flood the Earth and cover all the land, as in the story of Noah and his ark. No one can answer that in a manor consistent with science. Also, how many species could actually fit on Noah's ark? While in college, the one run by the Mormon church, Brigham Young University, I looked up the number of mammal species known, and calculated that space based on estimates of the dimensions of Noah's ark, and found that per creature, there was about 2 square feet if there were two of each species. My calculation was very simple, and didn't make any attempt at following the instructions of seven pairs for certain kinds of animals or subtracting out the aquatic mammals, nor make any allowance in space for Noah and family because the point was that just the mammals wouldn't fit, and then there are birds, reptiles, and maybe a few amphibians, before getting into invertebrates. The whole story lacks credibility. Later I learned that The Epic of Gilgamesh has a great flood story with a lot of similarity to the Noah story, but with different gods.

Then there was science. I read a book by Apostle Mark E. Peterson, who I admired for his talks at General Conference and because we shared a name, but in this book, directed at youth of the church, he denounced belief in the Theory of Evolution without explaining the theory or showing any reason except his own conceit why we shouldn't believe it. I was crushed. Totally disillusioned. Never got over that. I always felt like an outsider in the Mormon Church for believing in evolution, though I never found a member who could explain it and give any reason to disbelieve in the theory other than that some General Authorities spoke against it.

Maybe I was just a teenage rebel against my parents. Maybe my father insisted on reason from his offspring, and that shot down any belief in God of Mormonism, which don't hold up under scrutiny, as far as I have seen. But I stopped believing in God, and then I stopped professing a belief.

I haven't worked out a system of belief, or created a new brand of philosophy. I may examine my beliefs as I read this book, and I may change my understanding and come to new beliefs. I doubt I will reconsider God or any god, because there is too little evidence to suggest a belief is based in objective reality, which I still consider true.

Possible Reasons for Optimism

 Reports in the media are now saying that nationally new cases of Covid have peaked and are beginning to decrease. Deaths, which are usually a lagging indicator, still seem to be rising, but if the normal trend holds, those may begin to drop in a week or so. I'm not quite so optimistic.

The United Kingdom announced an end to isolation requirements and so forth, as if the pandemic were being declared over even though new cases were not dropping there. I hope there is reason behind the decision, though I fear it may be an attempt at distraction from the pressure on the PM to resign over his blatant disregard for Covid policies, and his denial that the parties at 10 Downing Street were parties that violated the rules. I think he deserves to be hounded out of office. But the people of the United Kingdom deserve leadership and public health decisions based in science. I expect I will track cases there for a week or two to see what happens.

I am still wearing a mask in public. Masks are required at work and I support the policy. I'm not clear on the basis for the decreased isolation time after contracting Covid, though my employer has adopted the updated recommendations. I am still having students reporting active cases, though I have not yet been informed of any known cases of spread at the school. Still, it seems like we should still be cautious, as thousands of people are dying of Covid. I expect we will reach 900,000 deaths within three weeks.

I sometimes think about going back to Facebook conversations from 2020 and pointing out to the deniers that this pandemic was very much the real deal. One guy I know is still trying to claim that he was right all along, and that Covid is a hoax, that masks don't work, that the vaccine is a conspiracy, and that Trump was right about all those crackpot treatments. I find it hard to understand that level of delusion, but I know he is not alone.

It seems the political pundits are saying much of the approval issues for President Biden center around the continued problems of Covid, which is not really reasonable, but the American electorate and public in general is not known for its reasonableness. I hope that Covid cases have peaked and will drop rapidly, and that this latest surge is the last, but I know that most people don't understand the complexities of a pandemic. America had the worst response to Covid of any advanced nation, and while there has been progress, there is still a lot of open resistance to public health measures. There is a case in the media of a woman making reference to "all the guns, fully loaded" in talking about a mask requirement at an elementary school. I have read that law enforcement are investigating. Based on what I have seen, I think she should be arrested and tried, and at the very least should permanently lose any right to own a gun. But she will not be the last. Aside from having an incompetent president at the critical beginning of this pandemic, America struggles with issues like this because of an astounding level of ignorance and fear, something the perpetrators fight to maintain. There is no easy solution to this.

New Toys

 There is a new topic for science lovers. The James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched and is making its way to its programmed orbit. The JWST group on Facebook is an active discussion group that addresses all kinds of questions about the telescope and about the cosmology it will be used to study.

I'm not that excited about the group. Some of the questions people are asking are old questions, and there sure seem to be a lot of them. I am tempted to drop out of the group, which I joined because Liz invited me to. I eagerly await the images from the telescope. I am interested in the advances in engineering and everything else that led to development of this project. I enjoy learning details of the plans for the telescope. I'm just not that interested in rehashing basic cosmology with so many newcomers, I guess. How big is the universe? How old can the most distant objects the new telescope will see be? Is it possible that the speed of light hasn't always been the same, that it has slowed as the universe has expanded because the space/time continuum has stretched out? Yeah, someone asked that. I'm more interested in that question, maybe because I've read science fiction stories that include technology to slow the speed of light as a way, for example, of trapping people around a specific planet or something so by the time they get out of the trap, millions of years have passed in the rest of the universe while they made their slow light speed dash of a measly few million miles. The technology in those time traps was not explained, just assumed.

Still, it is exciting to see the response and to anticipate the improved data collection of the new instruments. People should be excited by advances in science and technology.

There was also an article on the BBC News website about a new projection for when the sun will become a red giant star, which will cover Mercury and Venus and burn up the surface of Earth. About 5 billion years, so I won't be around to see that one, I don't think. Besides, increases in solar radiation are expected in more like one billion years, enough to kill all life as we know it on Earth's surface. So, the authors of the article say, we should look for ways to expand human existence beyond Earth, start travelling the galaxy, so we might have a possible future beyond a billion years.

I'm not going to worry over the fate of the planet due to the shifts in the life cycle of our star. That's a time scale beyond my limits.

I am wondering, though, what sort of algorithms are involved in the calculations of these expected developments in solar activity and in controlling the fancy new space telescope. Will the AI involved have a meaningful affect on the chosen actions or the interpretation of data? If the advertising algorithms on the Internet are any guide, I hope the control and calculations are pretty much human, because the algorithms are even less efficient that plant reproduction processes.

Experience

 I am reading a book about how though in may areas changed in America after the Civil War. The war probably influenced some of the changes, but so did the rise of science. After all, a lot changed with publication on On the Origin of Species. I wasn't aware of some of the changes, including the influence of science on the restructuring of American universities.

I find it sad that much of America still has no understanding of evolution. Darwin contributed to this, but so did many others. After all, Darwin didn't know the source of the variations among individuals in a population, and didn't know the details of inheritance patterns, either. We should not be debating about whether to teach children and college students about theories of evolution. Perhaps we should be debating whether there is any value in discussing Christianity in the modern world, as the history is quite dark in many ways, and contribution to knowledge has often come from heresies that were punished and suppressed as long as possible.

Still, many of the leaders of change in philosophy, science, and politics in America in that period were quite racist, sexist, and religious, and even some who were not were believers in some supernatural or spiritual realm on which our experience reality depended. Ah, the arrogance of humans.

My thinking about this is that the universe seems to have existed long before any human mind did, and I see no need for any mind to understand existence for it to exist. It is only our understanding the requires a mind, and that is only our mind because it is our understanding. Reality is probably more than an abstract concept.

Our minds have developed in ways that were conducive to biological success of our ancestors. We experience the world as continuous and three dimensional because it is, so our perception presents it to use that way as well as it can. That seems to have bothered some thinkers back in the 1880's; they had figured out that the retina of the eye is more or less flat and that signaling to the brain was episodic, so what our brains "see" and record are moments, or frames, of sensory input, so they didn't understand why our perception isn't like that. On the other hand, I doubt they could come up with any utility in such perception, flipping frame by frame slowly enough for us to notice each change of frame. We don't make movies that way because if we want to catch dinner, we have to follow the actual movement of our next meal, and not the true frames we catch.

I have read that engineers have been trying to make robots with "true" depth perception like what we seem to experience, but haven't been able to create it artificially. So the forces of evolution still have a few tricks hidden from us. I expect it is due to speed of processing and complexity of processing. I don't know how fast modern robots can catch and process frames of visible input, or actually how fast signaling occurs in the visual pathways of the human nervous system. I recently read that new observations of neurons show that there is a whole level of processing in dendrites of neurons, which basically adds at least an order of magnitude to the computing capability of the brain to previous models. Let the robots figure that one out.

Dark Comedy

 My brother and all his family got Covid. I think all of them had been vaccinated, but a few days after they were all together after rChristmas, they started getting symptoms and they all tested positive for Covid. My oldest niece has a compromised immune system. She got the worst symptoms. She was pretty sick for about a week.

I just saw a post on Facebook from IFLS that says people who get Covid become much less smart. The brief bit I saw compared Covid to having a stroke and said Covid could be worse.

I hope that is not the general experience. I know quite a few people who have had Covid.

I am sad that the United States has had the worst response to Covid of the developed world. Dead last. And it still goes on, with fights against tools that help decrease the spread like vaccine mandates and mask mandates. The Supreme Court, with no understanding of public health and a big chip on its shoulder since so many of the current members have tainted histories, including three being appointed by a corrupt and incompetent president, will decide on the legal powers of the president and Congress in taking steps to protect public health, probably without actually considering the value of such actions in promoting the general welfare, which is explicitly part of the justification for the Constitution. I expect it will be another blow to the myth of American values and success. It seems the fears of the uninformed have become the driving force for politics in America, and it is only getting worse. We are very likely stuck with a bunch of political hacks on the Supreme Court for decades, and the undemocratic institutions we are operating under work against the interests of pretty much everyone in this country.

I'm glad I have a sense of humor. It's better than spending all my time crying for my country.

Don't let is slide

 I see the news, and I keep wondering when some things are going to happen. I still want to see Trump prosecuted for felony campaign finance violations from 2016 for which his co-conspirator was convicted. I want to see a criminal investigation into felony campaign finance violations in connection with Trump's infamous phone call with the president of the Ukraine, plus maybe investigation into bribery and conspiracy to commit there crimes. I would also think it was a criminal offense for a president to use his position to commit crimes for personal campaign benefits, though I'm not sure I can name the crime in accurate terms. And obstruction of justice.

There seems to be progress in the fraud investigations in New York. I'd like to see that continue.

I'd like to see some  progress in criminal investigations into interfering in the Georgia election and vote counting.

I think a case can be made about inciting insurrection from the 6 January assault on the Capitol. I hope the House committee investigating that event continues. A lot of insurrectionists have been charged and convicted, but there are still questions to ask. I would not balk at expulsion of every member of the House who voted against certification of the election on the grounds that such a move is supporting the cause of the insurrectionists and violates the oath they all took to defend the Constitution, but I don't think that will actually happen. Our system of justice is not that robust.

I have seen enough reports and opinions about the state of American democracy to make me afraid that we might be in real danger of losing our democracy, and I don't want to have to deal with what these dimwits responsible try to replace it with. But since they don't acknowledge facts, I don't know how to work against them. Except to pursue criminal charges against Trump and his ilk wherever possible.

Cars

 We bought a used Subaru Impreza in October, I think, because our '97 Toyota was falling apart and would have cost more to repair that it was worth. The Impreza is an '18, so much more modern than our other car, an '07 Honda Fit.

This car, which we named Prudence, has proximity sensors on all sides and a backup camera. It has seat warmers, which I haven't used deliberately but might if it gets cold enough. It has coordination between the cruise control and proximity sensors, so I can set the cruise control to go 60 mph and when the vehicle in front of me is going slower than that, the car adjusts speed to maintain a safe distance. I just have to keep us in our lane.

I spend some of my time while driving Prudence watching the average gas mileage reading. There is a menu of parameters you can have up on the screen, but I mostly keep it on average gas mileage, which is calculated for the current "trip" which means tank of gas, since I reset the trip indicator when I fill the tank. I haven't used it for anything else. I don't know why I enjoy that as much as I do, but I see how the numbers vary quickly at first, and start rather low, but once I get a trip to work and back done, the changes slow down. Still, on today's second trip to work, the gas mileage dropped from 32.3 to 29.8 before I got to the highway. Then it went up until I exited near work, and dropped only a couple of tenths from the peak of 33.1. I'm making up these numbers, because the actual values don't matter, but the size of the changes is pretty close.

The mileage drop was greater when I got to the car to drive home today because my mask strap got caught on my hearing aid, which flipped off my ear and disappeared. I thought if had fallen between the seat and the middle ridge where the transmission is, which is a tight groove I have trouble reaching into and can't see anything in. I looked down, tried the flashlight function on my phone, reached around trying to feel for it, and then finally noticed it was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. But since I had started the engine as I removed my mask, well, for those two minutes or so, my gas mileage rate was zero.

Prudence recovered most of the lost value, and got back to 33 mpg by the time I got home.

I think it is really the cruise control feature that makes it easier for me to maintain my chosen speed of 60 mph or less, and not seeing the gas mileage. When the car is controlling the speed, distractions like up-tempo music have no effect, as they do when I am driving myself. But the gas mileage display keeps me smug about my choice and helps to reinforce the decision. Sometimes I like technology.

Bad Screens

 There was an article in the New York Times this weekend about some genetic screening tests that have a high rate of false positives. I worked through the math in my head to some extent, and I'm not surprised at the results. I'm more surprised that anyone is using these screening tests because the results don't seem very helpful.

The issue is that we now know that some fetal cells end up in the maternal system during pregnancy. It's not a lot of cells, but technology to find and analyze nucleic acids is very sensitive, so someone came up the with idea of taking a blood sample from the mother and using things like PCR and antisense tagging to check for presence or absence of chromosomes or bits of chromosomes in fetal cells or fragments of nucleic acids found in the maternal blood sample.

I guess this works great for identifying Down's syndrome in a pregnancy. There are some false positives, but few false negatives, and the true positive rate is high enough that most people think the method is useful and successful for early detection.

Other conditions caused by chromosomal abnormalities, though, don't have the same success rate, partly just because the conditions are much less common. If the number of false positives for there conditions is the same as for Down's syndrome, but the true positives are much less frequent, then the probability of a positive test result being accurate drops dramatically. So some of the tests the article discussed had false positives in 80-90% of positive test results. It's just math.

So I guess one could ask, how useful is the test if a positive result in wrong 90% of the time? How valuable is a diagnosis of such conditions compared to the distress caused by the false positive results? I would think the doctors ordering such tests and the providers, should be telling the patients about these statistics before carrying out the test, and maybe should have a standard follow-up protocol for every positive test result. But if further testing is the consequence of any positive test, is there really a point to the test? Or is there something that can narrow the field, a way to identify increased risk for a rare condition? My guess is that many patients getting such results have a limited understanding of the statistics and what they mean, and may not have much understanding of the conditions, either.

It seems that some care should be taken in making recommendations about such screening tests, and some deep discussion about clinical value is needed. Does widespread screening for very rare conditions help anyone? I mean besides the companies doing the screening tests. From the point of view of value to society, how do we balance the increased knowledge gained from the screening with the dramatically increased stress for those who get a false positive result, and have to worry over whether it is real or not until they get a more reliable result, along with the stress of worrying over complications from the more reliable by higher risk testing to determine if the first result is true or false? We should, I guess, add in the value to all the people who get true negative results that their babies don't have these rather serious conditions, but before the screening, hardly anyone worried over those conditions anyway because they are rare.

It doesn't seem like any easy question to me. Maybe we need to introduce Artificial Intelligence or an Expert System, or something, to helps with such decisions. I hear those are pretty good.

A Calm Beginning

 I looked at the website that reports the global satellite temperature data every month. I wasn't sure there would be an update yet, as it is 2 January, the day after New Year's Day, and a weekend day, but the new data were posted. December 2021 was 0.21 degrees C above the thirty year average the site is now comparing to. That is up from November, which was 0.08. 2021 as a year came in at 0.134, placing it 8th in the list of warmest years. Six of the seven that were warmer have been since 2010. The exception is 1998, which still comes in as the third warmest year, and is the basis of quite a number of people claiming that there has been no global warming since then, even though 2016 and then 2020 were warmer in the satellite data.

Last I looked, 2021 was expected to finish as maybe the sixth warmest year in other data sets. NOAA and Copernicus and the Japan Meteorological Agency all use data from surface level thermometers, looking not just at air temperature but ground and water at the surface as well, so their numbers are a little different. All these global temperature data sets show increasing temperatures over time. The satellite data have a linear regression slope of 0.14 degrees per decade, which is up over the last ten years or so from 0.12 degrees per decade. I don't know if that change is statistically significant. But the slope is, and is steeper than the longer data sets, which go back to the late 1800's. That could suggest that global warming is accelerating, which I understand some models predict. Or it could just be a difference in data due to source and local effects.

The new data are not a surprise. I expect 2022 will continue along the same general trend as the last few years. It is probably significant that December had an increased anomaly compared to November despite the La Nina conditions. I think 2021 is in the top two years for La Nina years, but not certain, and don't feel the need to check as I have no readership. Maybe the algorithms will correct me if I'm wrong.

Just Watching

 I am tempted to make predictions about the year we have just begun, but I think I will not. I know some things that will happen this year. There will be an national election with updated congressional districts, and I expect I will follow the campaigns to some extent and I will vote, but I don't plan to predict the outcome, at least not for some time.

In 2020 some acquaintances suggested I "put my money where my mouth is" when I predicted that Trump would lose his re-election bid. I did. I put money in an online election market, buying contracts for Trump to lose. I made a few hundred dollars, more than doubling my money. That was an easy bet.

The 2022 election seems less predictable to me at this point. Republicans are optimistic because President Biden isn't particularly popular and the sitting president's party usually loses seats in Congress in the midterm elections, so history is on their side. Their primary worry, according to some reports, is Trump, who is still making noise and attacking everyone he thinks doesn't love him enough. And there are those investigations to consider. If enough is learned about Trump's illegal actions, and those of his supporters, support for Trump supporters may decrease.

There are other factors that could matter. Covid is still a problem, and now people are turning their anger and frustration toward President Biden for not solving all those problems since he is president so everything bad is his fault. I know that the general thinking of the American public isn't quite that simplistic and unrealistic, by sadly it is a close enough approximation to have meaning and use in making predictions. But that could change, and things could move more toward normal with regard to public health. And the economy could change. And Congress might get a little more work done. If any or all of those things happen by April, Democrats have a better chance of maintaining majorities in Congress.

The Senate map is close, according to those who handicap such things. The House is too unsettled, with many states still working on redistricting plans, and some plans apparently being challenged in the courts, like in Ohio. I think it would be nice if the courts held that the redistricting plan in Ohio is illegal, considering it makes a mockery of the referendum supporting less partisan redistricting here, but I have little faith in the process. I expect I will end up in a gerrymandered district again and my unqualified nobody of a representative will win re-election. He may start competing with Jim Jordan for Ohio's Most Famous Ass in Congress, but I hope not. For now, that is my only prediction for the 2022 election.

I expect we will hear a few stories about the Webb Space Telescope. I expect temperature trends for average global temperature will continue on their current path. I expect extreme weather events will occur and will spark some discussion of the role of global warming. I expect the Winter Olympics will take place, and that most planned sports events for leagues around the world will take place, and that some of the winners will be surprises and some less so. General trends in human activity don't often change quickly. 2020 was an anomaly.

I think I will try to focus on events closer to me than on global trends and national politics this year. I like my life, so that seems like it will be more fun.

Happy New Year!