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Tuesday, December 20. 2011
Who you are determines what you do, right? And what you do determines what is going to happen in your life, right? Or at least, that is what most of us like to believe - that we have some control, some say in what happens to us.
The thing is that the map from our birth to our death is infinitely (well, almost) complex and we have no clue what happens beyond each turn in the road, each decision we reach, each step we take. Everything, including what we have for breakfast, sets us further on our path to our death. The problem is that we don't know how.
Even the statistics we see every day in the media are careful not to be too specific. If you smoke, you are 8 times as likely to die of lung cancer as someone who doesn't. Not that non-smokers don't die - they just die of something else. They don't even live that much longer: the difference is less than the difference between living in different neighbourhoods in the same city.
That is statistics, and statistics are easy. When dealing with a single person, things are more complex. Let's take someone who becomes a vegetarian because it is "healthy". Eating only vegetarian meals while dying for a piece of steak is stress on the body. When the person finally dies, who will take the responsibility to say whether healthier eating and added stress had an overall positive or negative effect on his health and life? This is even without talking about nebulous things like "quality of life".
Which brings us back to the beginning. Had that person eaten meat, eating meat would have killed him. Without meat, he still died - and who is to say whether it was sooner or later.
"Give me the serenity to accept what I cannot change..."
Old Longhair
Tuesday, December 20. 2011
We all live with a rather interesting, but rather misguided impression that we actually have some power to control our future. Very cute for a bunch who cannot even see it, let alone change it.
The best we can do is statistics. "People who do X are 100% more likely to have Y as the result". Which means that if you do the math, one third of the people who get Y did not do X to get it. And yet, they lived thinking that they would never get Y because X was not on their list of vices (or virtues). And what about all of the people who did do X but failed to get Y as a result? Are they to feel cheated?
Unfortunately, this statistics-based approach to free will is not only pointless, it is dangerous. It gives us the feeling of control where there is none, and it gives us the false right to judge others who did not exercise this nebulous control. Examples abound. People in the streets are blamed for their failure to keep a job (or get a job) when they had done everything they could do and it just wasn't enough. Patients with just about any sort of disease are blamed for doing whatever it was that could have statistically made them less likely to get it. Not actually prevented it, but made it less likely. What about those who did do everything to be in the minority dying of the same disease?
The reason for all of this "free will" stuff is that we all need someone to blame. Not necessarily to thank - but always to blame. Everything has to be someone's fault, we can never accept that some things just happen.
Free will presumes control. Fate presumes intent and a pre-etermination of events (in a sense, someone or something else's free will). And then, there is the third option - "neither". But we fail to even see it as an option, so intent we are on seeing some reason for everything. We spend much time and much money seeking more detailed statistics and more reliable ways to be in the right "group" where good things happen and bad things don't.
Why can we not just accept that some things just happen. Some of them are good, and we should celebrate with those they happen to (if we like them, of course). Some things are bad - and we should show sympathy instead of "of course - you should have abstained from . We should be human beings to other human beings: that will make the world a better place. Finding whose "fault" everything is will not.
Old Longhair
Tuesday, December 20. 2011
What is it with our species that we always look for meanings, for explanations, reasons, where there may not even be one? No other species ever does that. Everything lives for as logng as it does, eventually dies and gets assimilated by something else, all the while just accepting things as they are and not questioning them.
In the grand scheme of things, it does not really matter if we ever answer that question. Life will go on whether we understand why or not. Let's suppose that in tomorrow's paper, the headline announces that the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything has been clarified beyond "42". Now what? Will you change what you do? Will I? Will what was important to you today become less important? Will whatever the meaning of life is now supposed to be become your new reason for living?
The chances are - nothing will happen at all. Life will not get any easier, or harder. Perhaps we will have another reason why we feel as failures - because we have not lived our lives according to the newly-discovered meaning. And soon, very soon, both the meanng and the resulting guilt complex will be used by those with the means and the talent of perverting everything - used to control us, to turn what was initially an abstract dscovery into a tool, or a weapon.
Let the meaning forever be a mystery. Let us wonder, let us discover the meaning of our own lives - it is enough of a question for one person.
Old Longhair
Sunday, September 05. 2010
Fear is a powerful tool. I wrote about it a while back, but I failed to provide an antidote other than to be aware of the motives and to think critically when faced with an attempt to scare us into unnecessarily giving up our freedoms in exchange for a promise of security and safety.
Time passed, and I have a better suggestion.
Fear is an emotional response - and while often justified, often it is not. When faced with an emotion we want to control, our only options are faith or facts. Faith is often controlled by emotion and it is hard to maintain the faith in the face of fear, so it is not always the best ally in the fight against fear (although it often works). Facts, on the other hand, are not influenced by the emotions and are great as a reality check.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the facts presented by those trying to scare us may not be complete, or even accurate. Partial statistics, or numbers without relevant baselines, or misleading graphics are often used to make things look worse than they are. For example, if I told you that 80 people were killed in city X this week, accompanied by an emotional story about one of them, and followed up by another story on another victim next week, and next - soon you will be under the impression that you, too, are in danger. What if it turned out that city X is one of the largest cities in the world and 80 murders a week means it is the safest large city in the world? The thing is, this second fact is not going to just "turn out" - you would need to discover it for yourself.
And that is the antidote. If something looks scary, look for the facts - besides the scary news story. Thanks to the Internet, research is pretty easy. The governments publish statistics, trustworthy most of the time. Numbers of deaths from each cause are available. You can always compare your chances of being affected by whatever is supposed to scare you against other things that you know are pretty rare, and against other things that you know are fairly common. For example, compare your chances of dying from an unprovoked attack by a dog (pick your breed) against your chances of dying from a fall down the stairs - ideally, before deciding on embarking on an anti-dog or anti-breed campaign in your community. Or look at the real numbers of child injuries or deaths caused by the now-recalled cribs against those same falls down the stairs. In many cases, you will see that the issue trumpeted as the huge killer of adults and children alike is really a non-issue, statistically insignificant although unquestionably tragic in each particular instance.
And then, stop waisting time, effort and emotion on fearing the things which have negligible odds. Lightning strikes, terror attacks, mass murderers, most other front-page news fall into that category. In vast majority of those cases, you (or your loved one) are more likely to intentionally kill yourself than to fall victim to one of those real but extremely unlikely causes of death. Which makes those fears more akin to phobias, irrational and not supported by any logical evidence. We all have enough true phobias (mine is a fear of heights, for example) - no need to add imagined ones to them.
Sunday, September 05. 2010
Great article in today's Vancouver Province on the dangers of asbestos and how the WCB leaves those dying of mesothelioma as a result of the long-term exposure to asbestos in the workplace without any support once they are retired. Second installment to follow on Tuesday, apparently.
I have no issues with the direction of the push - in the workplace, there are dangers which are immediate (injuries) and those which may not show up until many years later. While WCB is (arguably) there if you get hurt, it does not support those who get sick many years later, especially after retirement - according to the article, coverage ends after retirement age. I totally agree that coverage should continue, providing those who were exposed to known long-term dangers during their work with the support they need. I also have the greatest sympathy for those who have spent their lives working in dangerous environments and are now hung out to dry by the government - and their families.
However, the tone of the article seems to suggest that the issue is vastly more prevalent than the numbers indicate. Hence the headline - if you want to scare people stiff, never tell them that the issue is actually quite rare.
I have two issues with this article.
First, and most obviously - it gives the worldwide predictions for annual deaths resulting from asbestos exposure - 90,000. While this seems high, it is the global number. For a country like Canada (roughly 33 million) it works out to 495. Again, 495 deaths is horrible if you or your family member is one of them. However, it pales in comparison to most other causes of death - suicides alone will take the lives of 3300 people in Canada in the same period (Statistics Canada: http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/health30a-eng.htm). Even homicides, quite rare in our country, beat the asbestos-related number quoted in the article.
Second, in order to make the issue scarier for everyone and not just those who worked with high amounts of asbestos for years, the article quotes the same doctor as saying that he had seen cases where disease occurred after a single exposure to asbestos. No doubt he has. There are also cases of mesothelioma (just under 10%) which are not linked to asbestos exposure at all. But this quote seems to be used to indicate that anyone who has ever been exposed to asbestos (the article mentions pretty much any construction occupation, mechanics - and then includes those doing home renovations on their own home) is in grave danger. Hardly - not only is there no indication that those once-exposed cases are related to that one exposure and not part of the 10%, even with heavy exposure the rate is 495 per 33,000,000 - 1.5 per 100,000 - the standard statistical measure.
There is no question that heavy, long-term exposure to asbestos (or formaldehyde, or any one of a huge number of other substances) is bad for you. There is no question that those who are affected by the exposure they sustained as part of their work should be supported after retirement. But justice is one thing - and fearmongering is another.
Old Longhair
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