Book: 20230520 to 20230814, "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan

20230520 - Preface: My Teachers

Mr Sagan's parents are amazing, especially his father. Can I keep writing the numbers from 1 to 1000 so my child could take bath? Knowledge is not as important as attitude/methods.

United States have normal primary schools and high schools, which are as bad as other countries. But they do have brilliant professors in amazing Universities.

Carl Sagan is talented and lucky.

20230522 - The most precious thing

Pseudoscience is the first step of religion, I think.

Why is it so easy for people to fall into pseudoscience? 

1. Because we are lazy. We don't want to spend time and energy to think it through. We just follow our gut feeling and quickly get conclusions.

2. Many people are uneducated. They don't know how to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience. When someone tells us that Earth is a huge ball and "float" in space, it sounds just as weird as we imagine that we live on the back of a giant turtle.

An example: if we boil water for more than two weeks, is the water still edible? Will it be converted to heavy water? So many people believe so.

This is the reason that everyone need to learn basic science, so they can verify the ideas from other people/books.

20230524 - Science and hope

Be humble. Don't be lazy. Get rid of wishful thinking and verify our ideas.

Anything we cannot verify, is in doubt. No matter where the idea come from.

20230605 - The man in the moon and the face on mars

Most of people don't understand randomness and probability, so they cannot find a reasonable explanation of those coincidents.

Our perception system is not designed for so much information.

How should we handle it? We need to verify the theory we created or got.

Another difference is, the right theory can be used to predict the future, and the wrong can only be used to explain the past.

20230607 - Aliens

Large scale hoax is a type of Meme. Our gene accepted them in the past millions of years, which make us vulnerable to those hoaxes today.

How to avoid them? We need to trust scientists, and wait for solid proof before accepting them. We need to be humble, and admit that we don't know what they are.

20230608 - Spoofing and secrecy

It's good to putting yourself in their shoes. What the president of USA would do if UFO was true?

He will not cut the budget of NASA, surely.

The whole world is connected. If Aliens were there, alive or dead, the whole world is going to change quickly. Huge amount of money will be poured in to do the relevant research. There is no way to keep everyone involved to keep their mouth shut.

Apart from what the books says, it's highly likely that aliens would bring virus to us, and kill most of people in the world, like the virus Europeans brought to America.

20230609 - Hallucinations

The reflection of fireplace on window can only be seen when outside is dark. Just like the stars during daytime. p106

The is the best metaphor to explain meditation. The fireplace and stars are always there, we just cannot perceive them.

But what do we get if we can "see" them whenever we want, through the practice of meditation? Maybe we can avoid being fooled by external environment. Most of stuff are not important at all.

How many "fireplaces" are hidden from our consciousness?!

Microscope, Telescope, X-Ray, MRI, etc. help us to see what we cannot see before. How much stuff Meditation can help us to see?

Use medicine to avoid UFO abduction? Brilliant! p110

20230618 - The demon-haunted world

There was no UFO report before 1947, and almost all UFO reports came from North America.

Every age and different area has its own supernatural ports. From Witch to Daemon to Alien.

What we need to do is asking a question: can you prove it? Our eyes and mind are not reliable.

20230619 - On the distinction between true and false visions

Our mind is so unreliable. Without verification, anything we see or hear could be illusion.

Nowadays, more and more cameras are installed everywhere, and people communicate through computer more and more. That helps a lot.

But unfortunately, Internet also brings people with similar illusion together, and amplify the false perception. Those people confirm each other's imagination, which make things much worse. How can we fix that? The Community Notes from Twitter is a good idea.

20230620 - Therapy

This one reminds me of the "social distance" from COVID-19. We got reliable data from Diamond Princess cruise by the end of Feburary 2020, why those medical experts still believe that COVID-19 is so dreadful? Only Sweden dare to face darkness directly?

What should we do to avoid similar mistake happen again? From what I can see, governments and those medical experts still believe that they did the right thing.

Jared Diamond's "Upheaval" is disappointing. Is it because that he is not a historian? Even great economists made big mistakes when they try to understand history ( https://redian.news/wxnews/244530 )

Psychologists are doing good job in general, but how about those psychiatrists? If they are skeptical of the memory from patients, I think they are good.

20230629 - The dragon in my garage

If someone only has memory and emotion about some past experience, should we believe him/her?

I think it's quite hard to not be able of finding any proof. And, because our memory and brain is so unreliable, I won't believe such type of memory.

20230629 - The city of grief

How many people don't understand what Carl Sagan said about alien? 10%? 30%? 70%?!

Can the Community Notes from Twitter help?

20230701 - The fine art of baloney detection

Don't follow our instinction to judge the things we don't know much!

If we are not sure, then start from the first principle, looking for proof.

20230711 - Obsessed with reality

Why people are so gullible? I think this weakness come from our gene.

500 or even 50,000 years ago, the one who doesn't believe theories easily, and always try to verify it, are more likely to die first. The cost of verification is just too high. It's much better to believe some theories to avoid potential harm.

The book "Who Moved My Cheese?" suggests us the same approach to solve problems. This strategy has many issues, but in most of the time, it works, or at least don't bring us much harm. Not many people die or get injured from believing alien hijack.

Surely oligarchy rule the whole society easily because of this gene feature. But, from gene's point of view, that's not a big problem. Survive is much more important than grow.

In modern society, for any individual, the situation is quite different. We need to recognize this weakness to expand our own society. The cost of verification of those theories is still high, but most of people can afford it when they have doubt.

20230713 - Antiscience

We are all "Brain in a Vat". Science is what we can do to explore the real world in that situation.

Verification is the most basic strategy.

Science can be verified, but pseuscience cannot.

20230724 - Newton's sleep

Do we have courage to embrace the truth? Would it be better if we don't know it?

Not a problem to me. Curiosity is good. It increases the chance for us to survive.

The more we know, the more we need to rely on ourselves, instead of God or something else.

We just need to get used to that.

20230724 - When scientists know sin

We have to rely on common sense here. If we are not sure, we'd better be cautious.

Science progress generated atom bomb, gene editing and AI, which may lead to unexpected disaster.

But this is not an excuse for us to throw away science. Pseudoscience had caused huge harm to people.

20230727 - The marriage of skepticism and wonder

Rene Descartes: Science is a tool and not an end in itself. p298

Well said. If we want to compare science with religion, we should ask, "Which tool is better?"

Can AI combine skepticism and wonder perfectly? For any individual, it's almost impossible. Previous generation is always skeptical to anything new, and only next generation is happy to accept new theory.

20230728 - The wind makes dust

Superstition is critical. It's our guess without solid proof.

More or less, superstition is like gene mutation. Most of the mutation brings in negative effect, but without mutation, organism cannot evolve.

This is why the Chinese proverb says: "水至清则无鱼"

We need to tolerate some bad or stupid ideas. That helps science progress.

20230804 - No such things as a dumb question

Questions should not be just "what", but also about "why, how, and so what".

These are the questions we should ask regarding anything suspecious.

Why most of people don't ask them? I guess they are controlled by their subconscious.

20230805 - House on fire

The solution implied by Carl Sagan is quite naive.

What's the best solution? First, we need to keep unemployment rate low; second, we need to convince people that image and video make us dumb. We need to spend more time on nonfiction books, and discuss them more in school and public space. How to convicne people? No idea.

Maybe AI can help a lot. But if AI can push people to become curious about the world and ask good questions, then AI can do maybe any work we need.

20230806 - The path to freedom

The official education from Year 1 to Year 9 is very important. But, do we need everyone to go through Year 10 to Year 12? I doubt it.

College? I think it's waste of time. Most of people should learn the relevant knowledge while working.

Curiosity and critical thinking is much more important than knowledge. We should focus on that part in school.

20230806 - Significance junkies

Randomness creates illusion. We need to be careful about that. Asking why and how can help us avoid most of the mysteries.

Most of celebrities don't know much about science. I guess most of them, to some extent, believe pseudoscience, such as Tom Cruise. I don't think they have the capability to promote science.

Internet is much better tool. There are many people who like science, knows a lot about science, and can make relevant videos to teach whoever have interest. The one who like science can learn whatever they want from internet. However, Internet is resource to only those who take actions proactively.

Starlink is really useful to people who live in poor area. When people can get useful knowledge at low cost, they have oppotunities to change their destiny.

Too bad that Carl Sagan died in 1996.

20230812 - Maxwell and the nerds

How much should government invest in fundamental sciences?

To find higgs boson particle, we need government invest US$13B to build Large Hadron Collider(particle accelerator). But how much did government spend to get Maxwell equations and General Relativity?

If government is happy to spent $13B in Large Hadron Collider, should we blame them that they stopped supporting SETI which is less than US$3M?

To some extent, human cannot afford larger scale spending to support basic research, just like we may not be able to spend more to build silicon chips which at less than 2 nano meter level. Next level photolithography machine will be too expensive even to Apple.

Will AI save us from this challenge? Can we emulate real world experiment in supercomputer?

20230814 - Science and witchcraft

What's the role of science in game theory? Catalyst?

High speed brings us fragility. But, in Prisoner's Dilemma, do we have choice?

I guess we just need "buffer" and alternative solutions. If something goes wrong, then we won't lose everything.

That's why we need Colonization of Mars.

However, I doubt how much help that would be when AGI rise.

20230814 - Real patriots ask questions

The most important thing is always Freedom of Expression. It's the foundation of everything.

"Life 3.0" is mainly about AGI. But we also need to worry about other parts, which can be resolved by Freedom of Expression: allow the people you hate to say something you hate publicly.

That can help us avoid "The Demon-Haunted World" in the future.