Short Review of "A Culture of Conspiracy"

“A Culture of Conspiracy” by Michael Barkun is by far the most coherent, scholarly material I have ever read on the contentious issue of “stigmatized knowledge.”

It is not a book written to “expose of the TRUTH” about the hidden reality of… whatever. It is also not a debunking of the conspiracy theories that abound about everything. The problem with the fringe, as I have said, is that the stuff out there is contradictory, so at best one of the competing voices is right… and it’s a lot easier to generate that crap than it is to debunk it. A definitive volume that debunks every conspiracy theory would be impossible. And the people to whom it would be the most use would denounce it as more propaganda from the conspirators anyway.

Barkun’s book is a sort-of natural history of crazy memes. The results are fascinating. The world views that people hold are… amazing, really. There are people in our midst battling literal demons in the moments leading up to the end of the world. That’s right now. Not fiction. They are living it. And it feels important to them.

Barkun sums up nicely: “A growing number of people believe that a super-conspiracy commonly referred to as the New World Order is on the verge of consolidating world domination, possibly in collaboration with malevolent aliens.” Or, I would add, in collaboration with the Devil. “The conspirators allegedly operate through so wide ranging a network of confederates that they have co-opted authority figures in every sector of life. Through this control, in turn, they shape the information available to the general public and thus conceal the conspiracy’s existence and activities.”

Well, that presents some epistemological/metaphysical problems for the rest of us.

Dean argues that there is no longer a “consensus reality” according to which contested questions of fact can be resolved.  She suggests that on such subjects as alien abduction and political conspiracies, there are multiple contending realities, which keep contested issues from being decided…Dean’s position, while extreme in its suggestion of epistemological anarchy, is sufficiently reflective of the material considered here that it must be taken seriously.

So, can we all live in radically different parallel realities? Do we need a consensus reality? Who would get to enforce it if we do need it?

That’s the real philosophical question at the heart of this strange stuff. It underlies the “culture wars” and C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. I think it’s an issue we’re going to be dealing with a lot over the next century. What I’m afraid of is that the conspiracists and the orthodoxists (I just made up a word!) will get the limited attention of the intelligentsia and the fundamental issue will get overlooked. Or, worse, The Jester is right and nobody cares at all.

-Peter

Wasabi receptor is the ammonia receptor: Lysol Sushi anyone?

So, according to this guy, Prof Makoto Tominaga, the wasabi receptor is the same as the alkaline/ammonia receptor. So… does that mean lemon lysol a good substitute on sushi?

“It has the first report showing molecular entity for the alkali-sensor. You could feel pain when you eat too much WASABI with Japanese Sushi. We found that this pain sensation is the same with that caused by ammonia”, said Prof Tominaga.

For those of you who have never had whiff of ammonia or tasted wasabi, there is a remarkable, nasal clearing similarity. I had read some time ago that the active chemical was an isothiocyanate and wikipedia backs me up. I gather that info comes from Wasabia. In any case, don’t snort it. If you really want to see a bad decision in action, feel free to watch the mistakes of others.

-Peter

Eggcorn collection

For several years now, I have been collecting eggcorns.  Eggcorns are words and phrases that make sense, but are not technically correct. The name comes (supposedly) from a child who asks how to spell “eggcorn,” which is how she had interpreted the word “acorn.”  Acorns look egg-shaped, and starting in the “E” section of the dictionary it would be hard to find the entry that would dispel the misconception.

So I would like to share some of my collection. I caught all of these in the wild.

  • “to rage war” (from “to wage war”)
  • “I would like to relay a story” (from “I would like to relate a story”)
  • “To breach a subject” (from “to broach a subject”)
  • “to interfear with the government’s terror campaign” (from “to interfere…”)
  • “Exception to the rulers” (from “exception to the rules”)
  • “I beg to dither” (from “I beg to differ”)

Comment and add your favorites!

-Peter

The rare individuals and their new role in science

The film “Unbreakable” builds on the premise that there may exist a human who is virtually invincible, but who does not know of his ability. After all, who would want to put that to the test?

It is an interesting premise from a  scientific standpoint. How might one go about finding such a rare case? It’s a different take on the so-called “Black Swan Problem”. If we study the averages, we come out with a picture of “how things are” that works most of the time. For instance, the average person’s temperature is 98.6 deg F. If a person has a temperature of 100 deg F, you would suspect something is wrong with them; that they are sick. For most people it would be true. But I think that it is likely that there is someone out there (in a population of 6 billion) whose normal body temperature is 100 degrees F.

Here’s another one. Let’s take it for granted that someone, somewhere, is totally immune to HIV. How would you go about looking for them? Certainly, it would be unethical to go trying to infect random people and examining the cases for whom your attempt fails. But it would be OK to look at high-risk individuals who (statistically speaking) should have been infected but were not.

Here’s the thing: that takes a lot of data. A lot of data requires a lot of money. No two ways about it. But given that, we can do some amazing things. The old way to look for a cure was to study the average, normal disease progression (that takes a lot less data). Once it is understood, an appropriate intervention can be made (drug, lifestyle, diet, etc.). It worked for scurvy, it worked for Malaria (to a degree) and it worked for erectile dysfunction (go Pfizer!). This new way is different. This suggests that to cure a disease, we should take a huge collection of data, sift through and find the cases where a cure has arisen spontaneously. Then, understand this spontaneous cure and propagate it.

Via slashdot, here are two stories that purport to do just that. In 2004, doctors looked for people with natural immunity to HIV. In 2006, a man was given a bone marrow transplant to treat leukaemia; the bone marrow donor was a known carrier of such natural immunity. The bone marrow recipient was HIV free as of 2008 without anti-retro-virals. Bone marrow transplants do not constitute a viable treatment for AIDS (with a reported 30% mortality rate). But it’s a start of a whole different paradigm.

-Peter

Color Percetption and Linguistic Effects – Our words affect what we see

 

I just went looking for a story I heard about years ago.  Some tribes don’t have words for all of the colors that have names in the English language.  The upshot was that, as a consequence, they are unable to discriminate between the two colors that are lumped into the same linguistic category.  Blue and Green share the same word, and so they look the same.

I think this is the person who found that data (from the American Psychological Association):

University of Essex psychologist Debi Roberson, PhD, and others … have found results that … suggest that there are differences–small but nonetheless significant–in the color perception of speakers of different languages.

“These kinds of categorical perception effects seem to be language-dependent,” says Davies, who has collaborated with Roberson on some of those studies. “If an African language doesn’t mark a blue-green boundary, then adult speakers don’t seem to show categorical perception across that boundary, whereas English speakers do.”

I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that they controlled for genetic effects. Obviously, if this tribe happens to have a high incidence of inherited color-blindness, then they would lack words in their language for colors they can’t see.

But I think it’s really an interesting thing to consider.  Could we see more colors if we invented names for them? Would that enrich our lives?

Using color-language as a metaphor, how much could our world-view change just by modifying our “mental vocabulary”?

-Peter