Beliefs vs Reality

In Map vs Territory we saw how wrong I have been in the past owing to the lack of sync with my belief and the reality. Namely I burnt 46000 euros. Hmmm, this can be costly. Maybe only sometimes!

  • “If only I bought a Benz, my life would start kicking ass”

My cousin in Dubai gave me a first hand account about how he thought buying a Benz would start kicking ass. He said,” The first month was nice, but after that I didn’t feel a thing”. You work all your life, you save money all your life and spend it with the hope that the Return on Investment is going to be killer. I am afraid this is not the reality. Novelty of Material things wears off, we get used to a product and its not that shiny thing we wanted in the beginning. Same goes, “This IPAD would make my life awesome”. 400 - 600 $ later, you are pretty much the same.

  • “I think I can finish the work by today”

That was pretty much what I thought at the beginning of the day today, let alone all the other previous times that I don’t have a proper account for. I didn’t finish my work at the end of the day. Planning fallacy some say.

  • “Life will be great once I go to Netherlands”

Sure. We know how that went.

  • “Life will be awesome once I have a girlfriend”

And then they lived happily ever after ;).

  • “Let me just to to FB for a few secs and I promise I will write like a bitch after those few seconds”

I fall for it every single time.

  • and the classic, “I will lie on the bed for a 5 minutes and get back up and write like a bitch”

  • “I will wake up tomorrow morning and go to work early”

Never, I am just in time for the stand-up meeting at work every single day. Why would you trust that you would go early the next time?

  • One of my biggest and worst ever , “I will chill today being Friday. Tomorrow I wills start my work at 9 am. Period.”

Right from about 1 months back to now, when I needed to wake up early and start work on weekends, I have invariably drifted off, waking up late, cooking and then ending up starting writing at say 2 or 4 pm, and yet every Friday I say the same thing.

  • Despite the fact that people raise their shields every singe time you speak to them about their fallacies in life, I still tread that path knowing fully well this conversation is useless and work on providing them data or reasons.

We are in the truth finding business. We want to make the best decisions, with the information we have. We want to be able to predict what decisions we currently need to make for having the future we need. We want to make decisions such as what is the best way, to maximize impact on society. We want to know what we should be doing in the future to make shit loads of money and start planning from right now. And for those kind reasons, all beliefs shall be proven true before being accepted as reality. We cannot have another Netherlands massacre.

Astrology

Astrology is a construct, where certain people known as astrologers, are able to attempt to predict the future of things in general. It has managed to convince too many people that it wields amazing powers. Wow! It must be true if it has convinced several people! Alert! Alert! H&B’s back off. The astrologers have many “tools” with them of which one of the common ones is called the horoscope. A horoscope is a diagram which is derived solely from your date and time of birth, thats it. This horoscope is used to predict things such as, who to get married to, if “good things” will happen to you in the coming months, what should be your batting line up for a cricket game, if you are going to have a good day, whether you are going to get money soon, if it is a good time to invest, is it a good time to get operated and so on. Interesting! why trust financial gurus, cricketing geniuses and doctors when you have horoscope, astrologers and their pseudo-science. Why trust in experienced professionals when we have pseudoscience? The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon articulates quite well the stupidity involved in believing in Astrology’s Zodiac signs and its the associated predictions.

penny: okay - i’m a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know.
Sheldon: yes - it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.
-big bang theory

Anyways the point remains, Why should anyone believe in astrology just by faith, whether or not there exists other better principles to predict the future? Is it good enough to believe in it, just because you were raised in a family that believes in astrology? From Map vs territory, we know that our belief and reality can be totally different and that this could cost us when we discover that our belief and reality are out of sync. We also know that when several people believe in something, our brain thinks its normal and the “Correct” action. Are we fooling ourselves by not questioning the belief?

Burden of proof

If someone has the powers of predicting the future, he should at least prove them to us. The burden of proof is on he who claims that he can predict the future. If someone came to you and said there is a flying spaghetti monster his backyard, you can’t see it smell it or feel it, but you have to believe in it, its that persons duty to prove its existence to you and not the other way around. Similarly when asked if God exist? Theists, please prove it to me. I don’t have to prove that god doesn’t exist. In fact I can’t prove that Unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters or the flying teacups don’t exist as well. Doesn’t mean they exist right? Why is God, Astrology or for that matter, any belief beyond questioning?

Proof

A simple test could be to go the most revered astrologer and ask him to make predictions on your future. These predictions need to be falsifiable, i.e., it should be possible to know definitively that an event has occurred or not. The astrologer says to you, “You will have a great day today”. This is not falsifiable. Its a wague statement. It cannot be disproved. If he is able to predict now the exact headline of all the newspapers dated tomorrow, then we have something going. In the wikipedia article on astrology, the very first citation claims to disprove Astrology, when they make falsifiable statements.

But

Along with this article, a little digging in, and knowing that the burden of proof is certainly on astrology to prove if it is real, we should pretty much be able to spit on the face of astrology, but yet we find people saying astrology works. Every time a prediction is right (mostly by fluke or by making weak claims such as you will have a good year, or unfalsifiable statements) the faith in the astrologer increases, and every time it’s not you can make excuses for it. I have some inside information that for a cricket team named CSK in India, they consult an astrologer for batting order of the batsmen. This is done so that the team can win. If it wins, 50 points to the astrologer, if it doesn’t then I guess the team makes some lame ass excuse like, even though the batting order was “perfect” as a result of astrology, the team bowling was bad or Dioni’s fitness was bad. In the first place, the team assumes that astrology works. So there is no question of disproving shit. They have made up their mind that astrology cannot be wrong, and that if the team looses its only because of other reasons. In other words there is an unfalsifiable claim from the side of the astrologer, that he will add value to the team by predicting the best batting order. By default he has done it. It upto the other stars to align so that the team can win ;). When something cannot be disproved, when someone makes unfalsifiable claims, when someone is not willing to make falsifiable prediction and take the hit, what happens? You get fooled son!

Same thing goes for the God delusion of Theists. There is no evidence to support the existence of god, and yet people hold on to it, like its the absolute truth and refuse to let go of their unfalsifiable beliefs. Where do they get the confidence from, that their belief is stone cold real. What belief is beyond question? This one? When you ask the theists where is the evidence, they say, “Science can’t understand God, one needs to feel God” and some shit like that. How did they come up with this new belief? To protect one belief, make up another belief and so on… They don’t give Empirical Evidence (EE), something that is measurable, objective and repeatable. They don’t accept that it is quite easy to fool ourselves.

In this short video Derren Brown (a hardcore magician and atheist) shows how easily he is able to convert 30 odd atheists in a room, to theists, just by making an ambiance and trickery. He shows how vulnerable everyone can be. He later informs these people that it was simple trickery, that made them believe in god all of a sudden. This was done for schooling them idiots including me. This is one the videos that helped me understand that I (an ex-theist), was vulnerable and easily fool-able. But how do you know this video is real for instance? Why do you believe what you believe? (!)

Leave that! Theists say god is all powerful, omnipotent, he can do anything. What? Thats amazing. It’s a rather simple statement to disprove.

Ask god to make a stone that he can’t lift. He makes it. Then you tell him to lift it. If he lifts it, then he didn’t make a stone that no one can lift in the first place. If he doesn’t lift it, he didn’t make a stone which he cant’t lift in the first place- been told this by a friend, very popular

With this video, other educational material, the fact that the burden of proof is on the theists and so many other falsifiable statements, it should be possible to start discontinuing the belief in God, just like we don’t believe in unicorns or the flying spaghetti monsters. I can imagine it is going to be quite hard to quit a belief. I remember how I got de-converted from theism. My friend unloaded a shit load amount of facts and I went home and cried. It was quite hard to have my reality (beliefs) shattered. To know that I was loved by God earlier and to have that taken away from me, was painful I guess. Nevertheless it needed to be done.

Despite all this if you still keep saying God exists, you don’t need proof and the like, well then you don’t want to change your beliefs. You want to hold on to them, despite reality seeming rather different. The number of beliefs I hold are all expected to be put under the same rigorous scrutiny. In Batman Begins there is a powerful dialogue which I think makes sense here:

Ras al gul: Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share. Batman: Thats why its so important, it differentiates us from them.

Despite all of the above evidence your friends, parents can still continue to do what they are doing and hold on to their beliefs, but not you. You cannot look the other way or rather you should only look in the direction of evidence. I need to change, I need to deal with the reality, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As each and every decision of mine is going to be costly AF.

Good at EE

Now that I know so much about EE I must be good at this game right?

Today I came across a video, and I have been seeing videos like this on Facebook. A song runs in the background, a very meaningful song, that always brings me to tears. This song is backed by beautiful montages of this guy bowing down, folding his hands and so on. All these indicating his loyalty to a certain x-chief minister. I sort of went on with it, meanwhile creating beliefs that he must be a very nice humble guy. All of this based on a video? It was pointed to me, later that these are sponsored. And then I woke up from my trans. You won’t believe it, even as I am writing this article on the importance of empirical evidence, I went with the flow and started believing the image of the person it was casting. Let me off the hook, what if the millions of people watching this, fall for this? And end up voting for someone whom they believe to be of certain characteristics?

I believed that global warming was taking place as a result of human interaction. Today it was pointed to me that something that I took for granted, that humans are causing global warming, might not really have a whole lot of science behind it. My takeaway is that I need to get back to the facts before assuming certain things.

Glad these were brought to my notice. It informs me much more about how I am being fooled by the Map. Question Question Question. EE, EE, EE.

Opinions

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion
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Nope. Be it your political beliefs or your faith. Nothing is beyond question. Ask people to make exact falsifiable predictions and test it with EE. Period!

Summary

Our beliefs and the reality seem to be quite different. We are in the truth finding business and Empirical Evidence will help us stay close to the reality. EE stands for evidence that is objective, repeatable, reproducible. The moral of the story is that we need to test our beliefs by making falsifiable predictions and looking at the evidence to determine if the belief can be kept or not.

Astrology, God, superstitions, ghosts, ‘Masturbation fucks with your health’, alternate medicine, homeopathy, sidhha etc., are some of the popular beings that manifest itself as though they have Empirical Evidence. But rest assured, there isn’t any. This would mean only one thing, to kick it out of our system for good.

God Bless! ;)

It’s not about the end goal, it’s about who you become by consistently pushing to the edge of your limits. -Robin Sharma

Kill me!