Letters To Troubled Youth - Excerpt 4: Just Stop Idiocy

One of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them of the greater rewards found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a blog post on its own stranding.

Excerpt 4 – taken from Letter 20: Just Stop Idiocy

In an old blog post from about 10 years ago, about the costs of terrorism, I once calculated the less obvious but still significant associative costs in terms the millions of hours of time robbed from innocent citizens having to have extra security checks, extra queuing, etc. And this should be brought to mind with the Just Stop Oil lunatics right now. It’s not just the mere inconvenience and stupidity of holding up sports events for a few minutes – it’s that event organisers will respond by imposing much more rigorous checks on spectators/customers on entrance.

Once you calculate how many thousands of wasted hours and robbed time that will amount to every year for innocent citizens (on top of all the other costs associated with blocking roads, destroying property, wasting police resources, court time, and so forth), it becomes obvious to me that these stupid, destructive acts should incur a mandatory prison sentence for the offenders. The only way to stop it is to properly disincentivise with punishments commensurate with the costs.

Just Stop Oil members, especially the under 25s, think of themselves as rebels, engaging in freedom fighting to win a climate war against the bogeymen of capitalism. In reality, they are doing nothing new - their absurd behaviour resembles every other former cult and lunatic fringe group that has ever existed, and its members have fallen for the same old con tricks, skewed narratives and suppression of intellect that has bedevilled every cult group that preceded it.

As someone who has listened to their arguments, observed their behaviour, and even spent time with them, it's easy to recognise the same patterns as we see in just about every other crazy sect. You see the inadequate ways they present their arguments, the underlying incentives, the need for attention and to be accepted and listened to, the psychopathology that underwrites their paranoid mindset, and the credulity with which they uncritically swallow up any old nonsense. Once you've seen one of them, you've seen most of them; and once you've seen most of them, it's easy to spot the next one.

But these Just Stop Oil chumps don't just emerge from a vacuum - they are the natural result of a world in which the majority of the most powerful and influential people are so power hungry, self-interested, narcissistic, narrow-minded and short-termist that you can't actually believe they get away with it, and elicit such widespread support for their actions. On top of that, the media drives the continuation of the elite's top down influence, and social media and our education system ensures that young people are caught in the net from the earliest age possible. This is the birthing pool for insane groups like Just Sop Oil, and numerous others like them - the world has been so misdirected by the magician's sleight of hand tricks that they have missed what the hand does while focusing on the deck of cards.

Climate alarmism is another of the conjurer's classic misdirection tricks - by averting your eyes towards the distraction, they make you lose sight of what's fully happening. The tactics are the same as ever; they get you fixed on costs while ignoring benefits; they stir you up with virtue signalling and guilt-trip with bogus ethical proclamations; they grossly exaggerate the negatives and ignore the positives - while all the time many of the most powerful organisations and political establishments continually lodge supporting information in their brains to the point where the truth becomes so abstruse that few know how to find it, and where to even start looking. You'll have noticed how the biased mainstream media and social commentators get everyone focused on images of floods, wildfires, struggling animals in the wild, as though that's the whole picture. This is the magician's sleight of hand again; he wants you to be distracted by the small picture so you miss the bigger picture.

The behaviour and misjudgements of groups like Just Stop Oil are not original or unique, and the provenance of the misguided rhetoric they spew out is easy to analyse once you realise that what they do typifies the same patterns seen in countless other groups just like them, in a world that is run by people who readily implant this stuff into their minds for their own personal gain. It would be quite boring pattern recognition, were it not such a damn nuisance.

 

Information, Reality & Mind At A Deep Level

 

Let’s talk about information, mind and reality at a deep level. Consider pi - the irrational number 3.14159… and so on. Not only is pi the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, it's a pattern that appears regularly throughout nature in many other ways; for example, in the equations governing the wave function in quantum mechanics, in the time period of a pendulum's swing, and in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, to name but three. Nature has various physical constants (the speed of light, gravitational constant, Boltzmann constant, etc) that are mathematically consistent, and pi also runs right through physics in the form of constants, such as the forces that knit matter together, like the strength of the electromagnetic force that governs the behaviour between electrons and photons.

So, pi appears in nature in the physical substrate, but it also appears as a number with an infinite series. That is to say, if you tracked the decimal digits of pi beyond the sequence 3.14159, you'd find the number series would carry on infinitely. Humans currently have the computational ability to calculate pi to over 13 trillion decimal places - which is impressive - but that is only a minuscule number compared with the actual n sequence in its entirety. What this points to is that when it comes to human perception of reality, there is a logical discontinuity between the actual and the theoretical. In mathematics, we have a clear conception of infinity. We can conceive countable sets, which are sets with the same cardinality (number of elements) as some subset of the set of natural numbers where every element of a set will eventually be associated with a natural number. We can also conceive uncountable sets, which are sets that contain too many elements to be counted.

Once we step back and have a reality check, we are entitled to find infinite sets a bit peculiar. What does it mean for finite physical human minds locked into a finite physical nature to be able to deal with infinities? Consider a simple illustration to show what's particularly strange here; if you were able to step outside the universe and drop in a grain of sand for every digit in pi, you would run out of space in the universe long before you ran out of sand. That's an astounding thing to grapple with, and leads to other interesting questions, like what does the ability to abstractly conceive an infinite pi representation mean, and what does it mean that a computer can calculate to 13 trillion decimal places? It appears to mean that theoretically if the computer kept on calculating, then the computation can map to a size greater than every particle in the universe and still be far short of the whole pattern. In other words, as far as human perception goes, we are contemplating the logical discontinuity between the actual and the theoretical, and finding that that is most likely because the physical aspect of reality is only a tiny fraction of the far broader and complex mathematical reality.

Physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind once proposed a theory of a pixelated universe: a theoretical model of the universe as being comparable to how a newspaper dissolves into tiny dots as one zooms in on the fine detail, as if nature is ‘pixelated’. We know in our attempts to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics that the more we dig down granularly the harder things are to measure or even detect, and the less like macroscopic reality things apear.

A few years ago, I wrote some material of my own on how the pixelated universe idea is a good illustration for how we humans deal with information theory, and how the universe itself is a mathematical object that is ultimately reducible to lots of single bits of information. The logical corollary of ‘t Hooft and Susskind’s pixelated universe model is that the universe is a physical 2 dimensional set of patterns that are brought to 3 dimensions when light bounces off them (much like what happens with the holograms on credit cards). In terms of the universe, we are thought to be experiencing holographic projects (our 3D world), that without minds would be a 2D series of pattern storage. Actually, the newspaper illustration is a particularly good one with a deeper meaning. Technically a newspaper can be expressed as millions of single bits of information that come together as an aggregate whole in the form of words and pictures that then take on newly invested meaning. Both the newspaper and the universe have something important in common here - there is a necessary relationship between information and sentience. A newspaper is merely paper and ink without a mind able to expend its resources on interpretation of the content of the paper and ink.

Or take something like DNA, which clearly contains a lot of information. As we increase our knowledge of the human genome, the surprises it contains become fewer. Now of course we can be quirky and conflate observer and observed - the ribosomes that construct proteins do not know the system informationally like we do, but they receive messages from the nucleus where DNA resides. So, if you were a ribosome, you'd contend that the quota of information in DNA is always complete.

To expand the model from DNA to the universe, as far as we are concerned, when we conflate observer and observed, we find we are in a universe that in theory can be informationally complete with full knowledge of the physical system. But once we start to think in terms of measurement and possibility, we find that the information content goes into infinite realms again. So if the nexus between the physical and the theoretical is "information", then the physical is dwarfed by the theoretical, making information more like a canvas and the physical more like a painting that the canvas hosts. But then we go round again, because information is the observed only relative to an observer.

Or think of thermal energy and how in the form of heat it always flows spontaneously from regions of higher temperature to regions of lower temperature. This heat flow reduces the state of order of the initial systems, and this process is an expression of increased disorder. Here’s an analogy to express how information flow has commensurability with what we’ve been discussing. Although the universe is one interconnected whole, our abilities for computation are reduced to regional capacities (known as horizons). We are causally attached to a horizon because light emitted from our vicinity of the cosmos at the point of the big bang has only reached a distant surface in space, so as far as our endeavours for computation apply, information flow limited to that region has a correlative computation system with the same limitations.

This is also commensurate with our modelling disorder in the cosmos. If you imagine the horizon expanding with time as light moves outward into space, you’ll infer the fairly obvious corollary that that region would have had less capacity for computational resources in the past. This is because each horizon contains a finite number of particles, and quite naturally the computational capabilities reflect this, where fewer particles equals more parsimonious computation. If one thinks of the horizon at the point of Planck time just after the big bang, then the computational scope would have been essentially non-existent, because increase in computability increases with increase in disorder. Using the stretched rubber band model – which is that, as the rubber band expands, the distance between any two points on its surface increases - we actually find that the universe is already reflecting this model in how the distance between galaxies in the universe increases as space itself expands.

At a fundamental level, the universe is a mathematical object of information - and this can give us profound insight into the deeper nature of reality, because whether we are talking about information in Shannon terms, or even as a more generalised concept, information can't reasonably be treated as some kind of vitalistic property lurking in the system itself. It's essential that information is seen as an extrinsic property of a system. That is to say, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. For example, a computer program, a set of songs, or a bunch of holiday snaps shared on social media is information only inasmuch as it consists of patterns that can be used by that computer as instructions to be perceived by sentient minds. Likewise, a universe only contains information by virtue of its relation to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the patterns though cognitive instructions. Ostensibly we have a universe of patterns awaiting their informational content when interpreted by minds.

So, to recap; it's best to talk of what we habitually call 'information' as pattern, and those patterns as being 'information' only when related to minds that have the capacity to correctly interpret the patterns. And the informational property of the universe's patterns is not intrinsic to the pattern itself; it exists extrinsically by virtue of its relation to agents of perception and conception.

We've also seen that nature probably is pixelated, and that every part of physical reality is amenable to be described in informational terms, where its constituent parts can be broken down to n single bits of information, where n is as large as its informational content goes. But given that the n of the informational content of even the whole physical universe is dwarfed by the informational content of just the pi sequence, the only reasonable conclusion, I think, is that mathematics belongs to a reality far broader and more complex than the physical reality we physical beings inhabit. It’s almost certainly the case, then, that the conceptual and the physical aren't at odds with one another - the conceptual infinites are examples of our interfacing with the fact that mathematical realty is much more primary and grander than physical reality, and that mind is even more primary than mathematical reality.

All this is to say, at a deep and profound level, there is good indication that nature only reveals the topographical secrets with which we are created to interface. I believe it might be like T.S Eliot conveys in his Burnt Norton, especially:

 Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility.

And.....

The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

And given that mathematics and rules of numbers seem to be contingent on sentience perceiving them, combined with the fact that the universe consists of patterns with evident mathematical constraints imposed on the system (see here for a far more detailed analysis of that observation), I think we can fairly safely conclude that we are perceiving patterns generated by a Cosmic Mind capable of orchestrating highly unrepresentative constraints, to which the attribution of God’s genius is wholly appropriate.

This seems to be one of the ways where human minds and God's mind meet - in engaging with the patterns and mathematical raw material, and bringing them to life, a bit like how an artistic genius might exhibit his craft to a nascent audience. And that we can view those patterns through so many lenses (mathematical, poetical, imaginative, artistic, scientific, psychological, philosophical, theological, etc) highlights that even the entirety of physics is simply one lens of reality among many. Hence, it makes sense that if God is the Creator and observer of this information, we would expect the fundamental asymmetry between the physical and the theoretical, because mind is more expansive than its physical properties (as even a human mind shows).

Bayesian Apologetics

What Christians should be mindful of when presenting truthful apologetics (providing a competent defence of the Christian faith) is that, even though what we say is the truth, there will usually be a presentable counter-argument available to the atheists that sounds just as convincing to them from their perspective. At first glance, that may sound obvious – it is nearly always possible to provide some kind of counter-argument to nearly all propositions. But it may strike some Christians as strange, and perhaps disconcerting, that we can churn out strong Christian perspectives that speak truth to the world, but find that atheists always have contrasting perspectives, and often seem impervious to the strength of our apologetics. But I think that just says more about the nature of the discussion, and underscores the complexity of God’s created world, that even truths about Christianity presented in rich and elegant propositional prose are not often compelling enough to convince most objectors and bring closure to the debate.

I suppose, although strange in the sense just implied, it shouldn’t be that surprising really; a good Christian apologist might reasonably expect to be able to present their own hypothetical counter-arguments to their work - in a steel-manning, ideological Turing test-kind of manner – and in being able to do so, resolve to understand the strength of their own position with even more confidence. And if we can do it to our own offerings, it is perhaps to be expected that others will too, even if what we say is the truth.

It’s also important to recognise in Christian apologetics that what we are doing, and what the atheist is doing too, is employing a Bayesian framework, which is a combination of probabilistic reasoning, statistical modelling and though provocation, in order to build a coherent and internally consistent worldview based on numerous subset propositions. To that end, the debate about every proposition is a threefold; 1) the base rate in terms of the probability of a proposition being true regarding the information or data contained; 2) the probability that the evidence can be explained with the affirmative hypothesis; 3) the probability that the evidence could be explained better with an alternative hypothesis.

That is to say, the fundamental starting question concerns assessment of prior probability, and the following questions concern whether the claim is more likely to be true or false given the evidence presented. From that we try to ascertain the strength of the opening position, and whether further consideration of the evidence strengthens the initial claim or weakens it. Whether or not the participants are aware of it, this kind of Bayesian analysis is at the heart of every matter under discussion.

And I think this is the answer to the little conundrum stated at the top. Yes, there are always possible counter-arguments that can be offered, but the more strictly we adhere to the principles outlined above, and the more stringent way we can be in weeding out bad and extraneous arguments, the stronger the dialogue will be. The point is, having acknowledged that it’s always fairly easy to offer a counter argument - even to the most truthful statements – there is individual responsibility to ensure that you are not just making bad contributions and being fooled by their merit on account of your being able to make them so readily. Just because it’s always easy to conjure up a counter-argument, it doesn’t mean those counter-arguments are proficient or accurate rebuttals.

Let’s Face It, Maybe Atheism Just Isn’t Very Interesting Anymore

Atheism, like many other beliefs, undergoes social and cultural selection pressure in a way that resembles biological evolution. If atheism is taken to simply mean a lack of belief in God, then there is little about it to hold external interest. So, a slightly more interesting version developed into a positive view that there is no God, and with all of the subsidiary counter-apologetics and Promethean fantasies about a semi-utopian post-faith world of science, reason and rationality (especially in the past 50 years, where technological advancements have given rise to unprecedented, improved living standards, and greater global connectivity).

But these are superficial anticipations based on shallow considerations – nothing of the sort has happened or will happen. Quite the opposite, in fact; the attempted erosion of the Christian faith has created a deeply unsatisfactory void; a kind of spiritual vacuum that has left people discontent and spiritually hungry, where substitutes brought in to fill the void have shown themselves to be intellectually hollow, spiritually empty, morally inadequate, and an assault on many of the long-standing metaphysical qualities (like truth, facts, knowledge, freedom, purpose, meaning and wisdom) that form the bedrock of our Judaeo-Christian-Aristotelian culture.

Consequently, because atheism fails to provide the solution to the deepest and most profound human needs and desires, it becomes less and less interesting the more it persists - to the point where, for most of its loudest and most strident commentators, it’s really become an ideological and spiritual wasteland left in the hands of cynical, myopic individuals who seek attention and validation, and whose primary way of making atheism seem compelling is to lash out at religious belief with dismissive resentment, mockery and scorn. And the more the atheists sense in desperation that what they have to offer is not very interesting anymore, the more resentful, mocking and scornful their comments become in order to grab the attention and conceal the mediocrity of their arguments, all in the service of trying to stay relevant and interesting.

Why Otherwise Intelligent People Believe Nutty Things

I watched this fascinating discussion between James Delingpole (who I really like) and David Icke (who seems so far in his own crazy world that it's easy to write him off as a nutter). David Icke is one of these people who is clearly intelligent; and who is probably right about some things that a lot of people are wrong about. But in the stuff that he's wrong about, he is wrong in ways that make him look like a crazed conspiracy theorist wacko.

I find the same issue surrounding David Icke that I find about many people like him - why do intelligent, thoughtful individuals believe absurd things that make them look so foolish and ridiculous? It's not much of a mystery why so many young people are confused and hysterical about some of the more complex things in life (economics, politics, the environment, religious belief) - they've been severely led astray by what the surrounding deceitful forces have pathogenically implanted into their minds. But once people make it into greater maturity with more life experience, why do they still swallow some of the absurd beliefs they hold alongside an otherwise fairly competent mental artillery?

It ought to strike us as strange that, say, mature Christians with lots of life experience and thoughtful, intelligent minds swallow things like young earth creationism. And equally strange that academics, with similar life experience and thoughtful, intelligent minds, would succumb to the delusion that men can become women (or vice-versa) - or that they would block the traffic to protest about climate change because they believe in some kind of preposterous end time cult of doom. No one would have any trouble thinking of many other examples. But I don't think it's necessarily that obvious why these folk adopt such rash views, and are so blind to how thoughtless and daft they appear in doing so.

It's clear, then, believing nutty things doesn't necessarily make you a nutter, because smart people believe nutty things. So, what's really at play here? Well, commonalities often help draw clues - so what do they all have in common? One thing is that in virtually every case these people don't believe the absurd thing as an expert in the subject, or with any degree of competence - they believe it because others have told them that's what they should believe (although, strangely, this isn't self-evidently the case with David Icke). They've formulated those opinions by trusting others too much, and not applying enough of their own unique perspective and critical thinking to the matter. And this leads nicely to the second commonality; virtually none of them could incisively defend their nutty views against an intelligent critic who adequately understood the subject matter.

So, even intelligent, thoughtful people believe absurd things - and they seem to do so because it's what they've been told, and because they are not equipped to defend their position under intellectual scrutiny. Add to that the very powerful quadripartite driving forces of tribal affiliation, self-preservation, courting status and seeking attention, and it becomes even less of a mystery.

And, of course, this combination manifests itself differently among individuals. Some people prefer to keep their nutty beliefs close to their chest, and will deflect to avoid conflict; whereas others (like David Icke) will unabashedly parade them for everyone to see, risking mockery and ridicule as they do so. It's a funny old world, but at least it's never dull.

Intelligent Conversations About God

 

The following propositions are true.

P1: There are a lot of highly intelligent Christians.

P2: There are a lot of highly intelligent atheists.

P3: There are a lot of low intelligence Christians

P4: There are a lot of low intelligence atheists.

P5: Given P1 and P2, we know from experience that there are a lot of high quality conversations going on between highly intelligent Christians and highly intelligent atheists, where each party has given the matter serious depth of thought, and is capable of contributing to highly intelligent dialogue on the subject.

Conclusion: Given P1-5, any atheist out there disrespectfully rubbishing Christianity, not taking it seriously, and saying it’s only believed by foolish people, is usually just signalling to everyone that they are either a low intelligence atheist, or that they are too emotionally immature/damaged to apply the necessary intelligence and competence to the subject.  

The Benefits Of Making Listening An Art Form

There are some well known imperatives for couples to adhere to in optimal marital communication – such as; ensure you connect beforehand if what you’re saying is important and requires attention; make contact with each other to establish mutual attention and deeper connectivity; allow each other to speak uninterrupted; whenever possible, use ‘I’ statements to express your thoughts, not “you” statement; avoid generalisations “You never”, “You always”, etc; and after your beloved has spoken, reflect back what your heard (this has the mutual benefit of confirming you have understood what was said, and helping you remember it too).

In addition to the basics, the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a fine book called The Art of Listening, in which he lays out more psychologically profound methods to achieve an optimal listening relationship. The key principles he outlines are roughly this: 

1)    Listening is an art form that requires our full attention, in order to be present and empathetic. It is practicing the art of profound engagement, where you can connect with the speaker’s emotions and the subtext of their words. 

2)    Genuine attention, empathy, and presence. It involves much more than just hearing words; it's about deeply engaging with the person speaking and understanding their emotions and underlying messages. 

3)    Doing your best to engage with the words you hear in an open, non-judgemental way, to ensure your own critical faculties are optimally attuned. 

4)    Paying attention to the context, tone and body language, as well as what is being said. 

5)    Encouraging the speaker to feel safe to express whatever they feel they need to. 

6)    Use the listening experience as a path to self-discovery, where you can gain insights into your own motivations, desires, and fears.

Art is perhaps the highest of all human creations, and I think we can profoundly enhance ourselves and our marriage if we treat the ability to listen and engage as an art form, in which the union of love is treated like an exciting adventure, ready to reveal more and more of its topographical secrets to those who pay close attention to its maps and landscapes.

Rational Irrationality

 

The economist Bryan Caplan popularised the idea of rational irrationality, based on two types of rationality; epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality means doing your best to seek the truth and assent to facts, and instrumental rationality means adopting a strategy to achieve certain goals (some of which may make truthseeking appear inconvenient). Caplan’s rational irrationality posits the idea that an individual could be epistemologically irrational to achieve instrumental rationality. If holding a particular belief is convenient for your aims - perhaps for tribal, social, or cultural reasons, or for mere personal expedience - and the marginal cost of falsehood is low to you in this case, then you may have an incentive to be irrational on so-called rational grounds.

There is a demand curve for rationality and irrationality, and ascertaining the steepness of the demand curve is like asking whether incurring a cost for being wrong will be sufficiently bad to engender deeper personal negativity. Measuring the slope of the demand curve for irrationality is equivalent to measuring the deterrent effect of the cost of wrongness – and when the cost of wrongness is low, the individual has higher demand for it. If, for whatever personal reason, the cost of being wrong is especially low, then you can find yourself with an absurd demand for irrationality if it provides a social incentive or a cushion for areas of discomfort in your life.

There are many areas of life where rational irrationality is prominent, especially in some political and some religious beliefs. It appears so frequently in political and religious beliefs because they are the beliefs that often come with the most familial, cultural and tribal duress, and that impose the fewest costs on the individual if they lower their truthseeking and cognitive standards in order to minimise conflict and retain favour and acceptance in the in-group.

Let me be clear, I am explaining the cause of rational irrationality – I am certainly not advocating it, nor suggesting we let ourselves off lightly if we compromise truthseeking with decreased cognitive standards. In most cases, it will do us no good in the end.

Perhaps the viewpoint that best appeals to individuals for reasons other than epistemic rationality is socialism. I think it’s principally for three reasons:

1) Economics takes a lot of effort to learn and understand, and not putting in the time and effort to learn it is a much easier path, especially as being ignorant about it does not stem the flow of people’s willingness to opine about it. It is not really possible to become competent at economics, strive to tell the truth, and still say the things most of our politicians say on a daily basis.

2) Socialism enables people to channel their resentment of the rich into a virtue signalling charade to express consternation for the poor, and make themselves feel just, noble and virtuous. I suspect most socialists do not really care deeply about the poor, because if they did, they would not espouse so much ill-informed economics that makes the poor worst off of all (this is one of the big contradictions at the heart of socialism).

3) Being on the left tends to create deeper social bonds than on the right, because the proposed fight for justice and inequality, and being spokespeople for the underdog, is often quite a unifying phenomenon.

Consequently, then, I believe that being a socialist isn't really about championing redistributionist policies for the poor (if it were, the socialists would be espousing more market-friendliness) - it is about tribal affiliations and virtue signalling and envy against those who have qualities that the socialists lack.

It’s also the case, I think, that people don't tend to work out what they believe and join the political party that most closely identifies with those beliefs - the causality is usually the opposite of what people think: that is, the cart of party politics usually gets there before the horse of political beliefs. We do not live in a society full of ultra-rational agents. People prefer to believe what they think will enable them to fit into the particular group that will benefit them most.  

Two Kinds Of Miracle

 

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.

P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.

P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.

C: Therefore, there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.

P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.

P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.

C: Therefore, there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

In my view, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2. Here's why. If miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the most frequent people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them God exists. 

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such things as red experiences, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

The Good Cop, Bad Cop Post-Covid Analysis

 

In 1963, a psychologist called Bob Rosenthal conducted an experiment in which his assistants placed rats in mazes, and then timed how long it takes the rats to find the exit. They were housed in two pens: one for the smartest rats and one for the ordinary rats - and when released, the assistants thought that the smartest rats found the exit more quickly than the ordinary rats. In reality, there was no difference between the two groups of rats – it was the assistants’ expectations that tricked them into believing smart rats solve mazes more quickly.

This plays out in many walks of life – we are surrounded by self-fulfilling prophecies in the making. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are smarter than they are probably will observe them doing better than expected. A teacher who treats his pupils as though they are hopeless will likely see the opposite effect. If you treat your husband or wife as though they are the most valuable person in your life, you will see more of the value in them than if you treat them as though they are not your priority.

This is known in psychology as The Pygmalion Effect, after Ovid’s Greek myth, where a sculptor called Pygmalion regards his own statue as beautiful, falls in love with it, and it comes alive. When we have high standards and high expectations of others, we get better results; when we have low standards and low expectations, we get poorer results. People are inspired or uninspired by how we value them.

Similarly, placebos (positive) and nocebos (negative) become self-fulfilling prophecies too. If you believe you’ve taken a pill that has a positive effect on your well-being, you might act as though it has. If you believe a pill has negative side effects, you may feel those side effects based more on your belief than on any real side effects. If you believe your bank is going to collapse, you might bring about a bank run, which then causes the bank to collapse. If the Prime Minister forewarns a recession, he might engender a recession, as people could become nervous about spending money, and be reluctant to invest in others.

Applying all that to Covid - over the past 4 years, just about everyone has wondered whether the government's policies to tackle Covid have been worth the cost. Those who say that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people so we didn’t need all those government restrictions may be missing the point that it might be because of government restrictions that Covid hasn’t been that serious for most people. It could be fallacious to use the successes of the restrictions as an argument against the restrictions, just as it might be foolish to argue that the lack of nuclear warfare in the past 50 years is a good argument as to why we don’t need nuclear weapons (it may be that it’s because of nuclear weapons, and the deterrent effect, that there hasn’t been nuclear warfare in the past 50 years). 

But that said, there has been a book recently published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, containing research by Johns Hopkins and Lund University that casts quite a few aspersions on the efficacy of the lockdowns during Covid. The lockdowns appear to have reduced Covid deaths by a lot less than one might have hoped, given their astronomical costs.

Now, I’m not going to state the obvious cases for and against the government’s Covid policies. Anyone can work these out for themselves, and decide how they feel about the decisions based on their own personal preferences. But many people rightly insist that individuals are better equipped than the government to know their own individual risk calculi, and how much they value things like going to work, seeing family, socialising with friends, going to school, attending weddings and funerals, etc. For this reason, they argue that the government had no business making such life-changing decisions on the nation’s behalf. Many others seem quite glad that the government took control and made such bold decisions, and feel that things could have been a lot worse without the strict policies imposed on us. The best argument for the government’s decision seems to be that the NHS couldn’t have coped if everyone had remained free to undertake their own risk calculi.

On that basis, an argument that could be made in favour of that proposition is that we could be living an even more dismal reality had we not have lived through this strict regime. An argument against the proposition is that the reason we aren’t living an even more dismal reality is because we adjusted our behaviour accordingly to compensate for the increased risks, and could have done so without the government’s decision to impose such a massive financial and social cost to the nation. There’s no question that, for Britain, the NHS factor makes the matter much harder to resolve.

Aside from the stability of the NHS argument (which isn’t trivial), I really can’t think of a good argument that trumps the argument for the liberty of individual choices on how they behave during a pandemic. One counterpoint is that we didn’t know just how bad the virus was and how great the risks, so we needed the government to make that decision for us. But it’s not a very convincing argument. If your car has a squeaking sound on the morning you are about to drive across the country to see your family, you don’t know for sure whether you should risk the trip, stay at home, or pay extra and go on the train. It might not be an easy decision, but it certainly won’t be the case that outsourcing the problem to the government will make them better equipped to decide for you. No politician knows enough of the factors to act on your behalf on this matter.

This logic also applies in response to the other common objection - that without the government to impose restrictions, then by socialising you may well infect people who didn't want to be infected. But in the vast majority of cases, that argument doesn't hold. It's true that if I went to church, or to Frank's 60th birthday party, or to the snooker club, I might have infected others. But the people at those events also knew the risks of attending, but did so anyway, presumably because they took the benefit of attendance as being worth the risk in terms of their own personal utility. Besides, if your argument is that socialising during the pandemic is reckless because those who socialise do not bear all the costs of their decisions to socialise, then it may have slipped your notice that the politicians imposing all the restrictions on us, and decimating the UK economy in the process, bear virtually zero costs for their actions. When those politicians were caught breaking the rules they imposed on the rest of us, their actions suggested that they weren't especially bothered about the risks of catching Covid, and that they had little respect for the efficacy of the laws they imposed on everyone else.