March 10, 2012

Scientific worldview mostly wrong, but don't panic

Not everything is important. There can't be a large number of very important issues that deserve getting worked up about. There can't even be any for the average person who can't do anything about them, only personal issues about what's immediately in front of them, food, clothing, shelter, whom they're going to be around that day, etc.

Part of how this works is that the mainstream scientific conventional worldview is wrong about a lot of things, especially things involving prehistory, so that a lot of the excitement about scientific debates and a lot of conventional science-based fears such as about medical issues are completely wasted effort. It's not that Genesis is right. That's even more wrong taken literally. It's that scientific conventional views, no matter how reasonable, don't include enough imagination that they can be wrong and missing major parts of the picture about things they say happened thousands, millions, or billions of years ago, including the time scale.

The conventional scientific worldview is all built from extrapolation from things like a chipped rock to tell the story of people before history or better examples of human art or artifacts. Some redshift of galaxies and a background temperature of deep space is spun into the story of the Big Bang. The furthest reaching extrapolations or speculations that stand up to reason as possibilities given the limited evidence win in the marketplace of ideas. The alternative that
prehistory is unknown and there's too little evidence to judge or say for sure what happened within orders of magnitude on the time scale is ignored as not really seeming like a competitor. Ideas about geological and biological history build up into a grand story over billions of years to which individual scientists just add pieces.

So worries about viruses and the supposed need for vaccination with toxins (an originally superstitious not scientific practice, to inject a batch of toxins) are mostly wrong in a way that's been debunked, while worry about harm from vaccinations is also often overblown, but some of that harm is real. There is an underlying reality after all where physical causes trigger physical effects, such as that sticking a concoction of biological junk and toxic preservatives called a vaccine directly into someone's bloodstream triggers strong reactions in some individuals.

The story of AIDS has been debunked. How much simpler to say that having some sorts of sexual activity and drugs often, or some dirty injected heroin, or malnutrition with diarrhea in Africa, causes some individuals to have a condition that includes higher reactivity of their blood components to some supposed HIV test, a condition that then looks like full-blown AIDS if they're treated with the same extremely toxic drugs as other AIDS patients were out of desperation and fear that they had an incurable fatal disease. The actual story of who was said to have AIDS or HIV and how they were treated is much more complicated than that. Even debunking the scientific conventional view, it's easy to sound like one is proposing an alternative grand story, instead of saying it's all a muddle where the supposed disease entities or categories involved are shifting social constructions, and yet some people actually are sick, for various real reasons.

The importance of this kind of thing to the individual is not to be a political activist about such issues, it's to learn not to worry about things that have been fed as fears by the mainstream media and schools, while also taking reasonable care of one's health by looking out for one's body.

So what about political issues? Are there issues that are important for people to know about and express opinions on, as voters or good citizens? Some would say a person should be informed about anthropogenic global warming, pollution, extinctions of species and biodiversity, war in general and specific areas of conflict such as Israel and neighboring countries, the energy crisis and which sources of energy to support or use, nuclear energy and the balance of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation, economics at the international scale enough to take seriously news of debt crises and countries in rapid growth and foreign aid, and understanding various
other issues on a scientific basis, including the need for more and better science education in schools to make everyone else more informed too.

It's all useless. It just isn't possible in human affairs for there to be issues that private individuals should be informed and active on, other than knowing which way the wind is blowing to take care of themselves, because this is a planet with billions of semi-intelligent people all trying every day to solve the problems that are in front of them and, when they have the opportunity, to solve as many other people's problems as possible for profit or fame or honor, or for the intellectual thrill of it, which is the motive that gets the hardest technical and mathematical problems solved.