In2SciFi

A recent article by Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine in the Los Angeles Times makes some very interesting points about belief and how we’re all affected by it.

Michael is talking here about ‘Confirmation Bias‘, which is a tendency to interpret new information as confirming our beliefs and prejudices or to avoid information which might contradict them. Several examples including Jim Jones’ Jonestown mass suicide and others are great examples, but the more subtle examples he raises are far more important for us directly.

The article points out how, for example, Republicans and Democrats both tend to read and listen to news that supports their views … in fact how we all do. We look for and try to find ways to support our own thinking without giving other ideas a fair hearing. We ignore or avoid evidence that we might be wrong. Unfortunately, that’s the sort of thinking which gets us and everyone else in trouble.

I was trained in a Jesuit University and saw first hand this sort of thinking contrasted with real Critical Thinking.

I want to say Thank You to Richard Chappell for saying something that needs to be said. In his blog, he posted a short comment about Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to speak. I’ve seen so much comment on this selection by people who I thought understood, but obviously didn’t.

The problem with politics and in fact any discussion in this country is that we’ve lost the ability to disagree without getting nasty about it. We need to be about OPEN discussion and not polarization. With so many commentators talking about how bad polarization is, then getting upset with Obama over this choice, I think we’ll have a still harder time getting people to talk.

Unfortunately, politics isn’t about doing the right thing for the country, it’s become about winning. So much time and money is spent winning that everything else gets lost. If we don’t get over it, then in a few hundred more years, we’ll be written up in the history books as the ‘failed experiment’ and written off in history’s backwaters as one of the shorter lived civilizations.

Ever since I was a little kid, it’s always been fun to page through an Encyclopedia and read part or all of the articles I find. Sometimes, I would just grab a volume without looking, let it drop open and just start from wherever it opened up to. I’ve updated that now using the ‘Random article‘ on Wikipedia’s menu to look at a random selection of articles.

When I’m browsing like this, I’m just enjoying seeing new things I would NEVER have thought to look up. I’d never heard of ‘Samuel Ekeme‘, a Cameroon Football player until his entry came up randomly. Sometimes I’ll come across something I’m familiar with, like ‘Application gateway‘.

Sometimes a random article will turn up something interesting that I want to know more about, such as Caucus about political meetings. I’ve never been to one, so during this political season, it’s a term I’d like to learn more about. As I read through the article though, I also learned that my concept of caucus was too narrow. The term in fact also applies to facilitation and mediation. I didn’t know that. It also mentions Alternate Dispute Resolution. Since I read the blog article ‘Apple and Psystar agree to Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR)‘, I’m going to followup in Wikipedia and learn more about it. Why? Because I NEVER expected Apple to agree to something like mediation. They’ve taken so many people to court, even people dedicated to Apple and it’s products, that this article really hit me. No one knows why, but I hope to know more about the process they’ll be going through.

Still another time I was just browsing, I went thought a whole bunch of interesting short articles, and wound up on King Arthur. Now I lived in England for several years and I took every opportunity to visit Arthurian sites, or at least sites thought to be related to what is expected to be the Arthurian period. Further, three of my favorite novels are the Warlord Trilogy from Bernard Cornwell about Arthur.

Some people will think of this as a strange occupation, but I find it fascinating to bring up random articles on things I’ve never heard of. I read enough to define the word or phrase or name, and then usually click on for another random title. Stopping, like I did for caucus and following up on links and other connections expands my knowledge, keeps my mind active, and generally helps me to keep from going crazy at time. Since most of my work is on the computer, this is a great way to break my mind out of a rut. If I’m writing something, I can break out, play in Wikipedia with random searches for a while. Sometimes just browsing like this will bring new ideas to mind that I can go back and work into what I’m doing.

Do you have a way to get your mind out of what you’re writing and refresh it on something completely different from what you’re doing?

So why start another blog?

No reason except for myself. I’ve kept a journal for many years, sometimes daily, sometimes not. However, I wanted to muse some more on a number of topics and see if I could find people who would muse with me.

This blog grew out of a joint project my son and I planned together. We were going to build a web site dedicated to Science Fiction, but his medical condition worsened and we never got it started before he died. Since that time, www.in2scifi.org has existed as a remembrance of my son. This is going in a somewhat different direction. I have a number of things I’d like to get done:

1. Frequently in reading Science Fiction, I run across quotes that impress me as having real life implications. I’ve always wanted to collect them somewhere. This will be my place to collect and comment on them.
2. Particular stories impress me and I want a place to comment about them. I put SOME comments in my paper journal, but this will be a better place to put them.
3. SciFi raises a lot of interesting questions I’d like to muse on. Some of my favorites are older stories that raise issues that the author thought we’d already have dealt with.

There are probably lots of other things I’ll come up with, but this is a good start.