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Staying Sane Is Hard Work

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Sliding down into delusion is seductive, easy, and fun. Modern information technology is making it ever harder to resist. Staying sane, on the other hand, is hard work—and it is getting harder every day.

The internet has made it possible for infectious ideas to spread faster than any physical disease. For a virus to circle the globe, you need mutations and air travel. To become infected by fake news and dangerous ideas, you need only a Wi‑Fi connection. Modern technology exposes us to vastly more information than ever before, much of it unhealthy, and every time our neural networks are exposed to bad information, it feels a bit more sensible to us—even if we know it is fake. Mere repeated exposure wears ever‑deepening grooves of familiarity into our brains. The more we see, hear, and click on a claim, the more reasonable it feels. Eventually, insidiously, it becomes self‑evident—common sense that seems inescapable.

In the past, news was filtered through human editors and gatekeepers. They certainly had their biases and blind spots, but at least someone was nominally responsible for quality. Today, sources like Facebook, Fox News, YouTube, podcasts, X/Twitter, and even our government have largely abandoned any obligation to fact‑check before amplifying. They create the illusion of informed reporting but are often almost completely untethered to reality. Their algorithms and personalities have one overriding job: keep you engaged. They notice what you watch or click and then say, in effect, “If you believe that, then check this out!” They do not care whether they are feeding you solid science or the latest conspiracy theory; they only care whether you will stay tuned in and click some more. The responsibility to sort out well‑supported information from unsupported claims, sound logic from specious arguments, is pushed entirely onto you.

That would be a tall order even if our brains were perfectly rational. They aren’t. Imagine you are curious about a fringe idea like Bigfoot. You type “proof of Bigfoot” into a search engine or social platform, intending to investigate skeptically. You will quickly find articles, videos, posts, and even reality shows arguing that Bigfoot is at least plausible or even real. Because you clicked, the algorithms learn that Bigfoot content “works” on you and begin to serve you more of it: more sightings, grainy photos, confident testimony. Before long, your feed is heavily populated by Bigfoot believers. From your perspective, it starts to look as if there is an enormous body of evidence out there. Everywhere you look, people treat the idea seriously. If so many people think there is something to it, there must be something to it.

In reality, you are being drawn out onto ever thinner and more dangerous limbs. The algorithm nudges you along in little steps, each of which seems perfectly solid and reasonable. This process does not just happen with Bigfoot. It happens with vaccine myths, climate denial, election lies, cultish political beliefs, and every other infectious or click‑inducing idea. The result is that many people come to feel they have made a careful, “objective” study of an issue when in fact they have been drawn, step by step, down a rabbit hole into an Alice in Wonderland alternate reality.

We cannot redesign the global information system by ourselves, but we can develop habits that make us harder to capture. One simple practice is to explicitly search for the reverse of whatever you are investigating. If you search for “proof of Bigfoot,” deliberately also search for “debunking Bigfoot claims,” and click on those results often enough that the search engines learn you will reliably choose that kind of content too. This at least gives you some exposure to different perspectives. Both sides might still be exaggerated, but you are less likely to be left with the illusion that everyone agrees with one side only.

Another, related technique is to always look back to first principles. If you only consider that next little step out along the branch, it will seem safe and sensible. But if you stop and look back at how far you have wandered from the solid trunk, you quickly realize that you are dangerously far out on a limb. Having acknowledged that we do occasionally discover new species, must really therefore admit that a hitherto undiscovered tribe of Bigfoot might actually exist?

It also matters where you spend your time. Just as like‑minded people congregate in person, different online communities attract and cultivate different kinds of thinkers. Choose to frequent healthy online environments. That is not to say you should avoid diverse ideas; but if rumor, outrage, and unvetted claims infect the community or the platform itself, you will become infected. Seek out vibrant but serious gathering sites where people demand citations, scrutinize sources, and correct obvious nonsense. If you stick to them, your own brain will become better at recognizing sound evidence and logic, as well as specious arguments. If the level of discourse on a trusted site degrades, you should leave and stop exposing your brain to it.

Given all the infectious information we are unavoidably exposed to, it is no surprise that people sometimes slip from belief into delusion. Beliefs, at least in principle, are subject to change. We might hold them strongly, but new evidence can persuade us to reconsider. When a belief becomes impervious to change—when no amount of contrary evidence, no matter how strong or consistent, is allowed to matter—it has crossed over into delusion. Using that word makes many professionals uneasy. In a clinical setting, “delusional” has a specific meaning and diagnostic criteria. Nevertheless, in the generally accepted lay domain, delusion is the proper word to describe thinking patterns that have become impervious to evidence or reason.

When a person or a movement has fallen prey to delusional ideas, when contrary facts are dismissed out of hand or reinterpreted as attacks, we no longer function in the realm of honest disagreement. We are locked into a self‑reinforcing mental world that will not adjust to reality. In a culture where influencers dominate the discourse, the rest of us are put at risk. Delusions can be comforting, energizing, and politically useful, but facts always assert themselves in the end. Reality does not care if you believe in it.

As a result of so many infectious ideas being disseminated so quickly, we are currently suffering from a global pandemic of delusion. We cannot wipe it out, but we can protect ourselves and try not to contribute to its spread. We can monitor our own information diets, seek out counter‑evidence, choose better communities, learn to better assess claims, and be more precise in our language. We can and must resist being nudged toward delusion. As susceptible as our brains are to misinformation, they can also be trained to better assess the soundness of claims and to detect specious arguments.

The way repetition reshapes our memories and our very perceptions, the way algorithms exploit our pattern‑seeking brains, the way beliefs slide, inch by inch, into full‑blown delusion—all of these dynamics, and many others, are at work in our politics, our media, our religions, and our personal lives. In my book Pandemic of Delusion: Staying Rational in an Increasingly Irrational World (see here), I unpack those mechanics in much greater detail, with concrete examples and practical tools for recognizing when you, or someone you care about, is being nudged away from reality. If this short essay inspires you to want to bolster your defenses, the book will provide you with a practical field guide: offering insight as to why we are so susceptible to misinformation, how to recognize it, and how to immunize yourself against it. It will give you a fighting chance to stay sane when the world around you seems determined to drive you crazy.

Star Trek Reality Check

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Star Trek and Star Wars offer visions of the future that have become so familiar that it’s all too easy to over-credit the plausibility of the technologies they present. But how much of what they depict is plausible science fiction and how much is implausible science fantasy?

Modern physics is incomplete, but not in the sense that it’s going to casually overturn core constraints like the light‑speed limit, energy conservation, or causality. Any future theory will still be bounded by those hard limits where we’ve already measured them to absurd precision. So betting that some future “breakthrough” will make Star Trek‑style tech real is not cautious skepticism; it’s wishful thinking.

First and most fundamentally, let’s start with the Vulcans visiting Earth. As much as we like to fantasize about technologically advanced aliens visiting us now or ever, to help us or to destroy us, this is implausible. As I discuss in my book (see here) and in this blog article (see here), aliens certainly exist, but they can never visit us. There is only an extremely remote chance that we could ever even detect signs that they existed somewhere, at some time, in the distant past.

Yes, you can always wave your hands and say “maybe some unknown physics will let them come here,” but that’s not reasoning, it’s magical thinking. Given what we already know about distances, speeds, energy, radiation, and biology, the probability that flesh‑and‑blood aliens will ever cross interstellar gulfs and happen to visit us is effectively zero. Not small, not unlikely, but zero.

I wanted to communicate that most strongly as it is so critical to understand. And of course since no alien could possibly ever visit us, it is equally implausible that we could ever visit them. The only remote possibility could be sentient machines who could survive inhumanly long and dangerous journeys. In this sense, the Transformers franchise (those in which organic makers are canon) could be the most plausible science fiction. I also depict such a plausible “space travel” science fiction in my short story The Dandelion Project (see here).

So while virtually everything that follows in Star Trek cannot happen, let’s set aside the basic implausibility of interstellar space travel and look at some of the other fictions that writers concoct to make it all seem plausible once we grant the possibility of space travel.

First, there is warp drive which overcomes the inconvenient reality of time and space. This is science flavored magic. While the physics of faster than light travel may have some plausibility at the mathematical level, it has zero plausibility at practical scale. Faster‑than‑light travel isn’t just “very hard.” It clashes directly with the way spacetime is structured. To get around the speed limit you have to either break causality (allow time travel paradoxes) or rely on enormous quantities of exotic matter that may not exist in any usable form. When a “solution” demands both magic materials and broken causality, that’s not serious speculation, that’s fantasy dressed in equations.

This is similarly true of the magical energy sources that the science fantasy writers concoct to make the fantastic power requirements seem plausible. They construct anti-matter reactors stabilized in a dilithium matrix. Again, even where anti-matter technologies are theoretically plausible they are effectively hopeless in any practical sense. Antimatter is real and ridiculously energy‑dense, but producing and storing it in useful quantities is so far beyond plausible engineering that it may as well be sorcery. Talking about “antimatter reactors” powering star cruisers is like proposing a jet engine that runs on bottled lightning captured in jars. You can write that into a script and make it sound theoretically plausible but you simply cannot build it in this universe.

The implausible power requirements involved in fantasy space travel also apply to weaponry. Hand phasers and similar variations are simply implausible. Directed energy starship weaponry is somewhat plausible, but certainly nowhere remotely near the hull-slicing power depicted in the shows.

And speaking of weaponry, even if hand phasers were plausible, they would at best fire invisible millisecond bursts. Phaser gun fights would never happen. Advanced weaponry would have computer targeting and essentially never miss. One could certainly never “duck” out of the way of an energy beam. A hand‑held weapon that fires at or near light speed, with computerized targeting, does not produce Western‑style shootouts. Once the weapon can lock onto you, your chances of side‑stepping a beam that crosses the distance in microseconds are exactly zero. The only real “dodging” is not being targeted in the first place—and that’s a software and sensor game, not a reflex test.

The same logic destroys the idea of starship dogfights. If you ever had vehicles throwing serious energy around at interplanetary ranges, the fight would be decided by who detected whom first and whose fire control software shot first. It would last seconds, or less, and the human crew would learn the battle was over when the computer informed them that their enemy had been destroyed.

We don’t need to imagine futuristic AI to see the problem. Even today, guidance computers outclass human pilots in reaction speed, precision, and ability to juggle massive sensor inputs. Scale that up to space combat and the idea that a flesh‑and‑blood pilot is “flying” a starship in combat is as quaint as imagining a locomotive engineer sprinting ahead to lay track by hand.

In that vein, there would be no possibility of human (or any organic) navigators or tactical crew members. Computers would certainly handle all the piloting and targeting. There would be no time for a real-time Captain to shout even one order as he’s flung around the bridge. Han Solo would not be able to pilot the Kessel Run safely in even a fraction of the time it would take a computer-controlled ship, if at all. Operating any function of a star ship would not be a job for humans.

As to other technologies, transporters, replicators, “subspace” radios, and hard‑light holograms all have the same problem: each one quietly assumes away a core rule of the universe. They don’t just extrapolate technology; they ask you to believe that information, energy, and matter can be shuffled around with a casual disregard for limits that we’ve already measured in laboratories. That makes for great science fantasy, but it is not remotely plausible science fiction.

But there are a few places where I suspect they get the possibilities more right than wrong, even if only for practical production and storytelling limitations.

There is the plausibility that many alien planets would be so familiar to us. Given that life can only evolve in a very limited set of conditions, and that the rules of physics, chemistry, and evolution are the same throughout the universe, I don’t find it implausible that many environments, and even many alien species, would be quite familiar or at least quickly understandable to us, both morphologically and biologically (see here). Life that can build radio telescopes is probably confined to a very narrow zone of temperatures, chemistry, and environmental stability. Under those shared constraints, evolution is pushed toward a limited set of workable body plans—limbs, mouths, sensory organs. So yes, there are good reasons to think that intelligence elsewhere might evolve a shape that is surprisingly close to our own. That doesn’t mean “humans with cranial ridges,” but it does mean that “unrecognizable swirling gas entities” are probably rarer than TV’s familiar human-like bipeds.

Also, one thing that Star Wars got right was recognizing that in the future all medical diagnoses and procedures would be performed exclusively by medical droids. I can understand that it would take all the fun out of the fiction if they also admitted that Han piloting the Millennium Falcon or Luke manning the gun turrets would be just as obsolete, even with The Force assisting him!

There is a fashionable kind of optimism that treats science as an unbounded well that can eventually make anything possible if we just “don’t close our minds.” That’s not how science works. Science narrows possibilities by discovering hard limits. We don’t say “maybe one day we’ll find a way around conservation of energy” or “maybe light will decide to go faster.” We already know that won’t happen. The technologies I’m calling fantasy aren’t just impractical; they lean on the hope that the universe will overturn its own rules to realize our fantasies.

Just to say, I love these science fantasy shows. If they depicted a more plausible Sol-bound future with computers basically running everything they would be a whole lot less inspiring and engaging. But just as with a good horror or superhero movie, we can love the fantasy while still fully appreciating that it is mostly fantasy.

Often the distinction between science fiction and science fantasy becomes blurred in a world where science seems capable of such magical and limitless achievements, but it is still critical that we recognize science fantasy as just that. If we fail to do so, we become susceptible to imagining that some fantastical future science will save us from actual threats like climate change that demand real solutions right now.

AI Can Only Regurgitate Information

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Although I have urged readers to spend some time playing “AI Why” instead of just surfing YouTube for “guy gets hit in balls” videos (see here), you do occasionally find that amazing gem of a video that makes random surfing a truly rewarding treasure hunt.

What inspired me to point this out was recently running across one such treasure. It is a video of two street performers in Santa Monica doing an interpretation of “Another Brick in the Wall” by Pink Floyd (see here). Both musicians were amazing. Dovydas (see here) is fantastic enough, but particularly jaw-dropping was the incredible performance of the young violin prodigy Karolina Protsenko (see here).

Technically she is absolutely magnificent. But more amazing is the fact that she had never heard of Pink Floyd let alone Another Brick in the Wall. She was improvising an accompaniment with no preparation whatsoever – and it was incredible.

But this introduction is only meandering toward my main topic. You see, watching (and rewatching) their performance inspired me to play AI Why with my AI tool Perplexity to discuss Another Brick in the Wall. If you happen to be a young Ukrainian who, like Karolina, has never heard this rock classic, know that it has been interpreted by many as an anti-education rant.

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave them kids alone

When I asked Perplexity what songwriter Roger Waters intended for the song to convey, it quickly clarified that Waters was only cautioning against the kind of authoritative, abusive, and humiliating schooling he experienced in 1950’s Britain that focused on obedience over learning (see here). His teachers employed sarcasm and punishment to keep kids obedient rather than teaching. He wanted the song to be a sharp and pointed condemnation of this kind of “educational” system. He wanted it to have a visceral impact, which it did.

But for many, particularly those who did not hear it in the full album context, that visceral impact was one of disgust and horror toward the song itself. They took it at face value as a rant against education. Some even successfully pressured local radio stations to ban the song. At the same time, other people adopted it as their “screw the establishment, screw education” anthem.

So I asked Perplexity another follow-up question. What was its postmortem analysis of the actual impact of the song. Did it achieve Waters’ goal of cautioning against the perversion of real education, or did it do more harm than good by fueling anti-education bloodlust and deepening divides?

Perplexity gave a mixed review. In said that in retrospect it was a strong and effective “signal” but very “leaky” in that it was susceptible to unintended interpretations leaking in and out. It reached large audiences in a very powerful way, but its message did not stay intact across that entire audience.

To support the conclusion that the song did produce some undesired and undesirable outcomes, Perplexity stated that:

Waters has said outright that even “intelligent writers” misread it as anti‑education and that the song is “misunderstood,” which is as close as you get to the author conceding the surface reading pulled many people away from his actual target.

Perplexity was pointing out that Waters himself acknowledged that the song was widely misinterpreted which is implicit evidence that the song had an undesired impact on many people. In reading the referenced materials I did not find any such inferential assessment. So I followed up again and asked Perplexity if this inference was something it had found and was repeating or whether this was a completely independent inference it was making.

It replied:

That specific inference was mine; the raw ingredients came from sources, but the “postmortem” framing is an inference. I connected the dots: if Waters acknowledges that intelligent critics took the surface reading and calls the song misunderstood, that functions like an author implicitly conceding that the catchy surface interpretation pulled a lot of people away from his intended target. That interpretive step—treating those quotes as a kind of design‑tradeoff admission—is my synthesis, not a line I copied from any one source.

And now I finally meander up to the titular topic of this article. To all of you folks who like to claim that “AI only repackages and regurgitates stuff from the Internet,” I say to you that you grossly underestimate what current AI technology can do. That fact of the matter is that AI can reason and think and infer conclusions as well or better than many of us humans most of the time. To minimize or dismiss this as not a big deal is like yawning and falling asleep during a performance by Karolina Protsenko.

The Secret Rain

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Upon the dusty road that assaults the skin,
where sweat crusts in salt upon the brow,
and the air transmutes into iron, pressing down—
the traveler bows low beneath thirst’s oppression.
There, even haughty princes in bejeweled robes
would ransom kingdoms for one moment’s grace
beneath its cool, flowing caress.

At the silent poles, where marrow freezes,
and the soul hardens into ice,
the body craves not gilded halls
nor velvet cushions or opulent feasts—
but melts only beneath a humble miracle
heat that neither sears nor burns,
touch that neither bruises nor pricks,
but tenderly melts those icicles of bone.

To linger beneath is rebirth—
rivuletted fingers caress every fold,
each sorrow, each exhaustion,
with patience more tender than any lover.
It finds the hollows where longing huddles,
the crevices where memory clings,
and washes away, yet does not erase,
leaving one luminous and reborn—
a desert that at last remembers spring.

What banquet, what marble palace,
what perfumed chambers of emperors
could rival this steamy embrace?
The satiny bed is for forgetting;
this rain of liquid rapture
is for exalting, naked,
body and soul rejuvenated.

Yet how fragile the covenant—
once, waters fell aplenty
to lavish themselves upon our skin;
tomorrow, perhaps, the cisterns echo hollow,
and their gift is offered no more.

So cherish it.
Filter, gather, pour again, unending.
Treat each drop as a jewel,
the last note of a never-repeated song.
When the sky withholds its kindness,
and Earth’s wellsprings but distant longings,
recall how it felt:
your secret rain within four walls,
solace no monarch could command,
joy, intimate and infinite,
vanished, but never mercifully forgotten.

How We Liberals Destroyed Democracy

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The title of this article is intentionally provocative. But for good reason. Democrats should at least consider their shared responsibility for destroying our democracy. I’m not trying to be fair and balanced and comprehensive here. I and others have opined ad nauseum about the flaws and dangers of conservative thinking. But in this article I wish to focus on the role of liberals.

Regardless of what we will admit to ourselves or to others, the Supreme Court immunity ruling and the subsequent reelection of Trump has effectively ended our long noble struggle to hold on to our democracy in America. I don’t believe it is hyperbole to acknowledge that we are now firmly, and probably intractably, marching along the path to becoming just like Russia, a brazen kleptocracy flaunting a thin facade of democracy.

And whether they will admit it in that way to themselves and others, half the country is effectively OK with that. It would not have been their first choice for our fate, but they would rather live in a dictatorship than continue to tolerate the excesses, real or perceived, of many democrats, at least of those driving the agenda. I predicted this based on game theory a while back (see here).

To be fair, conservatives have largely tolerated if not embraced a stunning amount of social change since the 1960’s and even before. The end of slavery was social change, women gaining the vote was social change, a sweeping host of equal rights practices was social change, interracial marriage was social change, women entering the workforce and arguably taking half the jobs in the country away from men was social change, the changing expectations of men in the home and in society was social change, accepting gay pride parades and gay marriage was social change. Those are just the broadest reminders of the incredible social change that conservatives tolerated if not always embraced.

But democrats weren’t satisfied. They pushed too hard, too aggressively, too gleefully on social, race, and gender issues mostly. I would suggest that the critical point at which their incessant pressure turned dark and counterproductive was the cancelling of Al Franken. It continued with a cancel culture that vilified everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Matt Damon. It took the form of policing gender pronouns, rallying behind gay wedding cakes, drag queen story hour, transgender surgery, bathrooms, and military service. The entire year leading up to Trumps election I watched liberal women on MSNBC fixate on women’s issues and overtly tell men they should support us or shut up. The list goes on and on and on.

So don’t tell me that democrats are purely the victims here and conservatives are the bad guys. I revile much or even most of what conservatives stand for, but democrats kept making more and more extreme demands until the point at which conservatives said, I’ve had enough of even trying to make this marriage work, I’m out.

One can continue to insist that all those demands were just and right. But even granting that, one must at least question the tactical wisdom of how we went about fighting for them. One can argue that regardless of the provocation and pressure, upending our democracy is a self-destructive and disproportionate response. True enough. But if liberals are capable of any self-examination they must consider their own hubris and lack of restraint in forcing this response.

In the media today there is a lot of coverage of democrats gleefully saying “I told you so” to conservatives in reference to the disastrous actions of Trump. But perhaps conservatives are also justified in saying “I told you so” to the democrats who have been so incessant and extreme in their long history of cattle-prodding conservatives into ever more unpalatable concessions without any apparent expectation of the extreme blowback that was virtually assured to come… and now has.

National Defense and Social Security Myths

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Most of us Americans figure we’re pretty well-informed about the realities of our national economy – at least in the big picture. Here are the Top 5 budget categories that you’ve probably seen cited everywhere by most every expert and trusted source:

  1. Social Security: $1,354 billion
  2. Medicaid (also NIH, CDC, FDA and more): $889 billion
  3. Medicare: $848 billion
  4. National Defense (direct budget only): $820 billion
  5. Unemployment (and most family and child assistance programs): $775 billion

Lists like this are usually invoked in order to provide support for a particular (false) mainstream narrative.

Mainstream Narrative: National Defense spending is not where we should be concerned. Rather it’s those big social entitlement programs that are the real problem, and the most worrisome of all is Social Security. In fact, we need to take immediate drastic action to prevent Social Security from bringing us to economic ruin!

But bear with me while I call that narrative into question.

First, that National Defense number of $848 billion is far too low. That only includes certain budgeted expenses. It does not include Supplemental Funding (which pays for most of our wars). Veterans Care and Benefits, Overseas Contingency Operations, Additions to the Base Budget, Interest on War Debt, and many other separately allocated costs.

To understand how misleading that is, imagine trying to convince your spouse that your gambling budget is only a very reasonable $200 per night. But that is just your betting limit. You neglect to include your Vegas hotel, limo rental, meals, bar-tabs, payments on the debt incurred by your previous losses, lost work, and additional payment for any “special deals” that you just can’t pass up.

Similarly, if we tally up all the buried line items that should fairly be included under National Defense spending, the total cost is far higher. The actual figure depends on which items you choose to include, but a conservative total of about $1.7 trillion is what my AI-assisted research came up with. No matter how you cut it, a more honest accounting puts National Defense spending well above Social Security levels. It should be number one by a large margin on any honest list.

Also, military spending has incredibly low stimulative value. While it provides some jobs, it does not stimulate secondary growth as does say a bridge or a building. It is essentially “lost” economic value except for the relatively few who extract wealth from it. But I digress. Maybe I’ll expand on that in a future blog article.

In any case, that addresses the first half of the false narrative, the deceptively low figure cited for military spending. Now let’s shift to the other half, Social Security spending. The figure of $1.3 trillion spent on Social Security is arguably just as misleading as is the figure for military spending.

People paid into their social security fund. Virtually all of that $1.3 trillion is money that is simply being paid to people who invested into it. There is only a relatively small deficit which amounted to $41.4 billion in 2023. That deficit was entirely paid out of the social security trust fund; excess revenue that was set aside in previous years to cover future shortfalls.

Now, those of you who are sophisticated about these things might say – wait a sec. Social Security is not like a savings plan where individual contributions are set aside. Instead, each working generation must fund the benefits paid to the retired generation.

But I contend that that explanation is another part of this false narrative. Regardless of how it is managed, Social Security is for all intents and purposes a savings plan. And isn’t that how all savings banks work? None of them literally put your money away in a lockbox. The money you deposit is used to fund withdrawals by others. When you eventually decide to withdraw your savings, that money will in a sense come from those future depositors.

To provide another analogy, what would you say if you went to take out your savings from your local bank and they tried to explain to you that they don’t have enough revenue coming in to give you back your money? You see, they say, it’s really not a savings plan as much as it is a pay as you go plan. You’d say that’s not acceptable.

We should not be manipulated into thinking of paying into social security as paying for others current benefits, but as paying for our own future benefits. But we tend to buy into the former perspective because we’re worried the funds won’t be there for us. That’s another part of the false narrative.

While it is true that, if we make no changes, Social Security will become “insolvent” in 2033, that is intentionally made to sound more scary than it is. It only means that at that time we’ll have to reduce benefits or increase revenue. It doesn’t all just collapse like some Ponzi scheme.

In fact, it isn’t that hard to “fix” Social Security. Just in the last few years there have been multiple bills proposed to keep Social Security solvent through the population wave. These include the Social Security Fairness Act, Biden’s 2025 budget proposal, and the You Earned It Act. All of these were voted down.

These legislation, and the many that preceded them, were not voted down because they would not work. They were voted down precisely because they would work. Just as with the border crisis, too many lawmakers don’t want to fix it. They want to keep fear mongering about it failing, and they cannot do that if they actually were to fix it.

Even worse, for some legislators it is more like their management of the Post Office. Their interest is in seeing it fail. They wanted the Post Office to fail so that their private business donors could profit from this business. Similarly, their big donors desperately want to get their hands on all that social security money. To those Privateers, Social Security funds are like Blackbeard’s Lost Treasure Hoard.

If President Bush’s full-court press to privatize Social Security had not failed in 2005, all of our Social Security funds might be invested in Bitcoin futures right now. Don’t think for one moment that the Privateers have given up on getting their hands on Blackbeard’s treasure.

If I sound conspiratorial, I’ll admit partially to that. While I don’t believe that a Capitalist cabal of billionaires sits around smoking big cigars and plotting the pillaging of our Social Security trust fund, I do believe that these efforts arise naturally as an emergent collective behavior borne of a lust for profit.

As did those before us, we need to wisely continue to resist these efforts to siphon wealth from the general population into the hands of the few. Toward that end, here is my alternate narrative that I hope you will consider.

Alternate Narrative: Those in power strive to bury, obfuscate, and minimize our level of military spending for many reasons, but mostly just so the population will not push back against it. One method they use to distract from military spending is to compare their fake accounting against social spending numbers, numbers that are also at times misrepresented. Social Security is both their most shiny object to distract us from their levels of military spending and the greatest prize for Privateers who want to control those funds. For our own sake as well as our posterity, we need to resist both excessive military spending and the privatization of critical social services.

The Harris-Trump Debate Debate

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Last night many of us saw the 2024 Harris-Trump Presidential Debate on ABC. What any clear-minded viewer should have seen was a stark contrast between an eminently smart, qualified, and ethical woman with a passion for public service who was forced to enter into debate with a stupid, disqualified, and completely unethical wannabe dictator to whom public service is no more than a grift in service of an unbounded appetite for self-aggrandization and settling personal scores.

Let’s be perfectly clear, while some of Trumps’ statements might have contained some arguable grain of truth, or might be sane-itized in some fashion to sound coherent, he was substantively lying or mistaken about practically everything he asserted.

That is not to say that, as someone who is generally Liberal on most issues, I was perfectly satisfied with Harris’ performance or positions on every issue. Contrary to what some on the Right might like to think or claim, she is certainly not my personal wet-dream of a candidate.

Following are some of the particular things that disappointed me about Harris’ performance and positions in last-night’s debate:

  1. On guns, Harris forcefully emphasized her support for guns and for the 2nd Amendment. I would have liked her to vow to begin reducing the number of guns in private hands and to rationally reinterpret the calamitous 2nd Amendment, or better yet support repealing it completely.
  2. On the military, Harris emphasized her desire to ensure we have “the most lethal military in the world.” I would prefer that we aspire to having the most efficient, effective, and ethical military in the world.
  3. On the pullout from Afghanistan, rather than merely touting what a great job we did, I would have liked to have seen Harris express some of the deep sense of loss that any military commander-in-chief should feel when they lose soldiers and commit to doing everything in her power to prevent the loss of life on both sides while acknowledging the inevitable losses that will occur in military conflicts.
  4. On Gaza, I would have very much preferred if Harris stopped playing both-side-isms on this issue and differentiate herself from the Biden entrenchment of unqualified support and unlimited military funding for Israel, with only platitudes for the victims in Gaza.
  5. On abortion, while it was good that she clarified that post-birth abortions are not actually a thing, Harris left hanging the issue of late-term abortions by so obviously avoiding it. It is disappointing that she, like most of the abortion community, fuel unwarranted paranoia about the frequency of late-term abortions by failing to address it head-on with actual facts.
  6. On fracking, Harris’ support felt like pandering to Pennsylvania. I would have preferred that she accompany her support for fracking with an initiative to improve the industry by helping it to reduce the unnecessarily high levels of methane emissions throughout the entire fracking pipeline.
  7. On taxation, I would have preferred that Harris stick with the more progressive Biden taxation levels and other fiscal policies for the ultra-rich.
  8. Harris disappointed me by failing to adequately call out Trump’s insistence that a tariff is not a tax. She did refer to it indirectly as a Trump-tax, but she was not clear that she was referring to the tariff. The moderator did a better job of fact-checking Trump on this very important and insistently repeated false claim.

All of this is not to nitpick Harris, but to point out that her positions aren’t entirely in line with my own on important issues that I care about deeply. But presidential candidates hardly ever align completely with our own views on every issue. And often it can be a difficult calculus to decide which to support.

Harris is also very moderate leader. I wish we could elect a more positively radical leader to tackle things like climate change and wealth inequality more aggressively and more quickly. But radical leaders, even those who are radical in positive ways, can’t get elected in a healthy pluralistic democracy. And we certainly should never seriously consider electing a dangerously radical leader like Donald Trump ever again.

So regardless of how your issue-by-issue calculus works out, and regardless of your deeply felt priorities, it is not even a legitimately debatable question about who to support in this election. This election is about whether you are willing to recklessly risk your nation and your future on someone who is utterly corrupt and destructive, merely because you like some of his positions or don’t like some of hers.

Our Automobile Obesity Problem

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In his “press conference” today, August 8th, Donald Trump regurgitated too may lies to reiterate here. And there is no need. Most of you are sane enough to know that virtually everything Trump says is either factually wrong or a bold-faced lie. However, I do want to talk about his particular lies regarding electric vehicles, as his stupidity or dishonesty on this topic may not be immediately obvious to everyone. Also, talking about these particular lies of his sets the stage to discuss the problem of automobile obesity.

This wasn’t the first time Trump has spread misinformation about electric vehicles (see here). He has been doing so for quite a while. Today he repeated false claims that electric vehicles are “twice as heavy” as comparable gas-powered vehicles. They are in fact a bit heavier because of the weight of current battery technology, but at most by only about 30%.

As one example, our family car, the all electric Mini Cooper SE, weighs 3,175 lbs. The otherwise identical gas-powered version weighs 2,813 lbs. This is a difference of under 13%. Cars with longer range are heavier, but the maximum difference is under 30%. For Trump to round that up to 200% is technically called a lie, whopper, or, colloquially, bullshit.

Moreover, the electric version is far cheaper to operate, has far lower maintenance costs, is far more convenient to charge up, performs far better, spew far less carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere, and can utilize far greener sources of electricity now and in the future.

But Donald never settles for just one lie about any given topic. He then went on to repeat his claim that if we “all” had electric vehicles we would have to rebuild “all” our bridges in the country lest they “all” collapse under the added weight of electric cars. This is, unsurprisingly, yet more nonsense. Our roads and bridges are built to support caravans of 80,000 lb semi trucks. The weight increase of electric vehicles would be relatively insignificant and responsible engineering organizations have tactfully characterized this claim as “massively overstated” (see here).

Trump assuredly did not come up with these bogus claims on his own, but he is clearly unable to assess the validity of wild assertions before he repeats them, or he just doesn’t care to do so.

But if we take Trump at his word, and take seriously his worry about all our bridges collapsing because of an added load of 20% or so, then shouldn’t Trump also be urging everyone to simply buy smaller cars to save our fragile bridges?

This transitions us to the topic of our big, fat, gas-guzzling American cars.

Have no illusions. American cars have gotten really fat and are only getting fatter. American cars have grown a foot wider, two feet longer, and much higher just over the last decade. Their average weight has increased over 1000 lbs since 1980.

In comparison, European cars are roughly 27% leaner than our fat American cars. This difference is on a par with the weight difference that Donald Trump is so concerned about in going to electric.

And let’s be clear, Europeans need, use, and love cars just as much as Americans. They just like them lean and mean, not fat and bloated. We don’t “need” big pickup trucks that we hardly ever carry anything in, or giant SUV’s to take that yearly trip to the mountains. We could buy small and rent to meet occasional needs. Overall that would be far more financially sensible than buying and maintaining a huge vehicle you hardly ever fully utilize.

The EPA estimates that for each 100 lbs added to a vehicle, the fuel economy decreases by 1-2%. That adds up to a lot of money.

But smaller cars are not only economically sensible, they are environmentally sensible. In fact, it’s hard to think of any single thing you could do as an individual to fight climate change more significant than to buy a smaller car, whether gas or electric.

Due to their greater size and weight, American cars consume from 11% to 23% more gasoline than do their equally satisfying European counterparts. That results in a literal ton of carbon dioxide. You could reduce your personal CO2 footprint by over a metric ton per year just by buying a lighter, smaller car.

Frankly, you are not doing much for the environment by buying an electric Hummer or Escalade or F-150, or even our new normal of ballooned up Civic. We should buy electric AND buy small to gain the most benefit not only for the environment but for our own finances. If you buy small and electric, I guarantee you will not miss your gigantic boat of a car for very long. You’ll quickly come to love your small athletic electric and will likely find that it meets all your needs very well.

Buying small also means not being so obsessed with range. Usage studies show that most drivers don’t actually need anything near the battery range they think they do and demand. That added battery weight only gets lugged around unused creating more CO2. Our Mini has a 100 mile range and that has been plenty for us and statistics confirm that it is plenty for most consumers. Again, if you need to travel farther you can easily rent or take mass transit.

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have given up on making smaller cars for our gluttonously upsized American car market. But if we create demand the supply will quickly follow. The government as well as environmentally responsible carmakers should do everything it can to incentivize a national automobile diet plan for America.

I know we’re addicted to our huge cars and we think we can’t live without them. But we can. I know we can. Believe me, you’ll feel so much better after you lose that extra 1000 lbs of car fat, and you’ll be helping save the planet to boot.

Shallow Science Reporting in The Atlantic

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On June 3rd, Jonathan Lambert published an article in The Atlantic entitled “Psychedelics are Challenging the Scientific Gold Standard” (see here). The tagline was “How do you study mind-altering drugs when every clinical-trial participant knows they’re tripping?“

I’ll first mention that articles relating to psychedelics are always attractive clickbait. That’s not necessarily bad. One might hope that such clickbait will attract readers enough to impart some more generalized science knowledge and insight.

But sadly this article instead spreads serious misinformation and creates harmful misconceptions. The other day my wife, who is an accomplished epidemiologist, shared her frustration over the many misinformed and misleading scientific arguments presented in this article.

I’ve already written quite a bit about the issue of terrible scientific reporting in this blog and in my book, Pandemic of Delusion (see here). So in this installment I’ll try to use this as a learning opportunity to share some more accurate scientific insight into clinical trials as well as to correct some of the misinformation presented in this article.

The author claims that the study of mind-altering drugs presents new challenges since participants can easily tell whether they are tripping or not. Being aware of which treatment you have received could result in a distortion or even an invalidation of the results.

But this is hardly a new or even remotely unique challenge. There are a wide range of non-hallucinogenic treatments that have side effects that are also easily apparent to the participants. In fact it is an extremely common situation for epidemiologists, one that they have dealt with successfully for many decades in any study where the treatment has noticeable side effects like nausea or lethargy.

The author then goes on to present this as a fundamental issue with Randomly Controlled Trials (RCT) as a clinical study design strategy. An RCT is a widely-accepted and well-proven practice of ensuring that participants are assigned to the different trial groups being tested and compared in a completely random manner. As Mr. Lambert correctly points out, RCT is the “Gold Standard” for clinical designs.

In his article, the author attempts to make a case that this “gold standard” is insufficient to meet the challenge of studies of this kind and that “We shouldn’t be afraid to question the gold standard.” This quote came from a source, but it is still being chosen and presented by the author to support his conclusions. I would be highly surprised if his source intended this comment to be interpreted as used in this paper. I know my wife is often incensed by the way that her interview comments were selectively used in articles to convey something very different that what she intended.

As an aside, I want to mention that generally when journalists interview scientists, they expressly refuse any offers to "fact check" their final article, citing "journalistic integrity."  I find this claim of journalistic integrity highly suspect, particularly when interviewers like Rachel Maddow commonly start by asking their guests "did I get all that right in my summary introduction?" This only improves, rather than compromises, their journalistic integrity and the accuracy of their reporting.

In any case, while every study presents unique challenges, none of these challenges undermine the basic validity of our gold standard.

But to support his assertion, the author incorrectly links RCT designs with “blinding.” He states that “Blinding, as this practice is called, is a key component of a randomized controlled trial.“

For clarification, blinding is the practice of concealing treatment group assignments from the participants, and preferably also from the investigators as well (which is called double blinding), even after the treatment is administered.

But blinding is an entirely optional addition to an RCT study design. Blinding is not a required component of an RCT design, let alone a “key component” as the author asserts. Many valid RCT designs are not blinded, let alone double-blinded. For more details on this topic I point you to the seminal reference work by Schultz and Grimes published in 2002.1

The author makes similar mistakes by conflating RCT designs with placebo effects. To clarify any misconceptions he has created, many, many studies, including randomized trials, do not include a placebo group nor are they always necessary or sensible. In many typical cases, the study goal is to compare a new drug to a previous standard, and a placebo is not relevant. In other cases, the use of a placebo would be unethical, such as in trials of contraceptives.

Next the author advocates for new, alternative study designs like “open label trials” and “descriptive studies.” But neither of these designs are new nor are they in any way superior to randomized trials. In fact they are far inferior and introduce a host of biases that an RCT is designed to eliminate. They are alternatives, yes, but only when one cannot economically, technically, or ethically conduct a far more rigorous and controlled RCT study.

Non-randomized trials can also be used as easy “screening” studies to identify potential areas for more rigorous investigation. For example, non-randomized studies initially suggested that jogging after myocardial infarction could prevent further infarctions. Randomized studies proved this to be incorrect, probably due to other lifestyle choices made between those who choose to exercise and those who do not. But again, their findings should be taken as tentative until a proper RCT can be accomplished.

And there are many options that trained researchers can utilize to study hallucinogenic drugs, as they do with a wide range of detectable treatment scenarios, without compromising the sound basis of a good randomized trial design. As just one example, they could administer their control group with an alternative medication that would cause many of the same symptoms, even tripping! This is done fairly routinely in other similar situations.

There are many other criticisms one could and should make of this article, but I’ll wind down by saying that psychedelics are not “challenging the scientific gold standard.” We do not need to compromise the integrity of good scientific methods in order to study the efficacy of hallucinogens in treating PTSD or any other conditions.

And further, we should push back against this kind of very poor scientific reporting because it propagates misinformation that undermines good, sound, established scientific techniques. The Atlantic should hold their authors to a higher standard.

  1. Kenneth F. Schultz and David A. Grimes, “Blinding in randomized trials: hiding who got what,” THE LANCET • Vol 359 • February 23, 2002 ↩︎

The Vatican Combats Superstition

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The Church has always worked tirelessly to portray itself as scholarly, rational, and evidence-based. Going way, way back, they have tried and largely succeeded in marketing themselves as a bulwark against false gods, superstitions, and dangerous beliefs.

In “The Demon-Haunted World,” Carl Sagan told about Jean Gerson back in the 1400’s who wrote “On the Distinction Between True and False Visions.” In it, he specified that evidence was required before accepting the validity of any divine visitation. This evidence could include, among many other mundane things, a piece of silk, a magnetic stone, or even an ordinary candle. More important than physical evidence, however, was the character of the witness and the consistency of their account with accepted church doctrine. If their account was not consistent with church orthodoxy or disturbing to those in power, it was ipso facto deemed unreliable.

In other words, the church has spent thousands of years fabricating pseudo-rational logic to ensure that the supernatural bullshit they are selling is the only supernatural bullshit that is never questioned.

Their pseudo-rational campaign of manipulation is is still going on today.

Just recently, the Vatican announced their latest marketing initiative to promote themselves as the arbiters of dangerous and confusing supernatural claims (see here). They sent their salesmen out in force promoting it, and if their claims were not accepted by the media with such unquestioning deference, I would not need to write this article.

Just as did Jean Gerson in 1400, the modern Vatican has again published revised “rules” for distinguishing false from legitimate supernatural claims. But unlike most of the media, let’s examine a few of these supposedly new rules (or tests) through a somewhat less credulous lens.

The first requirement, according to Vatican “scholars,” is whether the person or persons reporting the visitation or supernatural event possess a high moral character. The first obvious problem is that anyone, even those of low moral character, can have supernatural encounters. So what is this really about? The real reason they include this is because it’s so fuzzy. It gives them the latitude to dismiss reports inconsistent with their doctrine based on a character judgement, and it ensures that if they are going to anoint a new brand-ambassador, that person will not reflect poorly on the Church.

They include a similar criterion involving financial motivation. Again, while a financial interest should make one skeptical, it is not disqualifying. And the real reason this is included, I suspect, is to provide the same benefit as a moral character assessment. It provides further fuzziness to allow them to cherry-pick what sources they want to support, and which they want to disavow.

But the most important self-perpetuating rule is the next one. The Vatican explicitly gives credence to any claims that support church theology and the church hierarchy, and expressly discounts any claims that are not in keeping with Church doctrine as ipso facto bogus.

In other words, since Church doctrine is the only true superstition, any claim that is not in keeping with Church doctrine is logically and necessarily false. This is the exact same specious logic put forth by Jean Gerson in 1400. The Vatican clearly knows that a thriving business must keep reintroducing the same old marketing schemes to every new generation.

Rather than dwell further on the points the Vatican wishes us to focus on, let’s think one moment about what they did not include. Nowhere in their considered treatise on fact-based thinking do they ever mention anything remotely like scientific or judicial rules of evidence. Nowhere do they mention scientific-style investigation, scientific standards of proof, or any establishment of fact for that matter. They emphasize consistency with Church doctrine, but nowhere do they even mention consistency with known universal laws. And certainty nowhere do they suggest a sliver of a possibility that any of their existing beliefs could possibly be proven to be incorrect by some legitimate new supernatural phenomenon.

I won’t go on further as I like to keep these blog posts short, but I hope this is enough to help you see that everything in this current Vatican media campaign is more of their same old, “we are the only source for truth” claim. It’s the same strategy designed to hold an audience that has been adopted successfully by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and any number of cults.

The Church is essentially a money-making big-business like Disneyland, selling a fantasy experience built around their cast of trademarked characters with costumes and theme parks, and big budget entertainment events. Imagine if Disney spent thousands of years trying to retain market share by assuring people that they are the only real theme park and that all the rest of them are just fake. Then further imagine that Disney went on to promote scholarly articles about how they are the only reliable judges of which theme park characters are real. That’s the Church.

Disneyland and Universal Studios are just a feel-good entertainment businesses and they admit it. Disney doesn’t insist that Micky Mouse is real and Universal Studios doesn’t claim that only the Autobots can save us from the Decepticons. What makes the arbiters of truth at the Vatican either liars or delusional or both is that they never stop working to convince everyone that their divine mission is to protect us from – all those other – false beliefs.