Close-minded Experts Get It Wrong

My brother, David, sent me this synopsis on how and why "experts" get it wrong so much of the time. It has to do with certainty in one's beliefs--experts are so certain they're right, they are prone to overlook results that do not uphold their hypotheses. Here's the report:

During a four-year study, a pool of amateur forecasters of future events beat experts with classified information, and the amateur "Super-forecasters" were more accurate than the team of experts by 30%.

Conclusions from research published in Philip Tetlock’s “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction,” included the following:

• The most careful, curious, open-minded, persistent and self-critical—as measured by a battery of psychological tests—did the best.
• “What you think is much less important than how you think,” says Prof. Tetlock; superforecasters regard their views “as hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded.”
• Most experts—like most people—“are too quick to make up their minds and too slow to change them,” he says. And experts are paid not just to be right, but to sound right: cocksure even when the evidence is sparse or ambiguous.

You can read more about this in the WSJ article "The Trick to Making Better Forecasts."   While the story focuses on monetary predictions, the approach to reasoning and decision making applies to our everyday lives.

				The Trick to Making Better Forecasts The Intelligent Investor: A new book suggests that amateurs might well be less-hapless forecasters than the experts—so long as they go about it the right way.
				View on www.wsj.com	Preview by Yahoo

Here at the Simple Explanation blog, we strive to look at scientific findings with a fresh eye. This is not ignorance on our part--it's the way forward to fresh discoveries.

Dad's 1939 Vacation Pith Helmet

In 1939, when my dad was 20 years old, he took a road trip with his family from Colorado to Tijuana and back, stopping at many sights along the way. As it says on the top of the helmet: "A grand trip through 11 states, 2 national parks, 1 national monument, 1 outside nation, 1 Pacific Island playground, and a movie studio."

Dad recorded his trip on a pith helmet he took along. The pith helmet serves as both a map and an autograph book. I imagine that everyone who signed this helmet has long since passed over to the great beyond. I am very happy to still possess that souvenir.

(You can click on any picture to see it bigger--please do!"

This part of the pith helmet map shows the trip winding through Yellowstone National Park, where he meets up with the Morgans. There's a cartoon of two stick figures = martini glass which reads: "Hi, Morg." "Hi George," (equals) "Hi Ball." That joke has always cracked me up.

Dad's trip began on August 7, 1939 and ended August 31, 1939. The drawings on the hat begin at the START point and wind all over the pith helmet until the END. A caption reads, "Length of trip 5081 miles. Approximately as far as from Home to New York City and back to Los Angeles."

"A week's stay in Los Angeles--Mausoleum, Catalina, Auto Races, Warner Brothers Movie Studio, Santa Monica Beach, Venice--Fun House, Tijuana"

Here's the Oregon coast, where he stopped at Reedsport--"more curves than between Durango and Mancos." In Northern California he visited the "Italian Swiss Colony and Winery," then stopped at the "World's Largest and Oldest Living Things--the Redwoods." There's a cartoon of a giant redwood tree with a tiny stick figure underneath it which reads, "Us. Small, like little white lice." A little farther on there's a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge and "Treasure Island--Isle of Sore Feet." 

The brim reads: "The Five Forgotten Footworn Followers of Fame and Fortune Who Forged Forward Furiously to Frisco and Back to the Foothills of Home."  There were five signatures, now faded by time, but you can still make out my father's name, "Bill Puett" and "Dill," dad's step-dad--Dillworth Halls. Frances, his mother, would have been on that brim, too.

There are more cartoons, more signatures, more little jokes, more sights described.  I'll post more of them if anyone's interested. Just let me know...

Wolflike Genes in Dogs

This nifty graphic first appeared in National Geographic magazine in 2012. Geneticists analyzed the DNA of 85 breeds of dogs and categorized them into four categories according to how wolf-like they are gentically. The graphic below displays the dogs in order of their genetic similarity to wolves, from the "wolflike" breeds at the top of the chart, through "herders," "hunters," and "mastifflike." The color red represents percentages of wolflike genes.

"WOLFLIKE

With roots in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, these breeds are genetically closest to wolves, suggesting they are the oldest domesticated breeds.

HERDERS

Familiar herding breeds such as the Shetland sheepdog are joined by breeds never known for herding: the greyhound, pug, and borzoi. This suggests those breeds either were used in the creation of classic herding dogs or descended from them.

HUNTERS

Most in this group were developed in recent centuries as hunting dogs. While the pharaoh hound and Ibizan hound are said to descend from dogs seen on ancient Egyptian tombs, their placement here suggests they are re-creations bred to resemble ancient breeds.

MASTIFFLIKE

The German shepherd’s appearance in this cluster, anchored by the mastiff, bulldog, and boxer, likely reflects its breeding as a military and police dog."

{from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/02/build-a-dog/dog-families-graphic} 

A Poem--When the Old Dog Dies

I wrote this poem a few months ago when my dog, Zoey, died. Her lifetime companion and littermate, Franny, died on Saturday. We are now without dogs or cats for the first time ever. My animal friends have always been my best friends and I look forward to seeing them again someday. 

Here is a poem I wrote when Zoey passed on, which I have now edited to include Franny's passing.

Zoey

 Franny

When the old dog dies

I will no longer have to step carefully over her sleeping form

As I rise from bed and feel my way to the toilet in the dark.

When the old dog dies

I can take the ratty old blanket from off the couch

where we sit for hours watching classic movies and eating popcorn.

When the old dog dies

No one will insist I go for walks twice every day

And no one will pull me out the door into rain, into snow, into blistering August heat.

When the old dog is gone

I can eat my meals in peace and quiet

And not have to share bites off the edges of my toast.

When the old dog dies

I can take the beach towels off the car seats and vacuum out all the fur and return the the van from a rolling dog house

Fit for human passengers again.

When the dog finally dies

I can put fancy cheeses in the refrigerator drawer that now houses two pounds of raw, four-meat canine blend from the butcher shop and and a variety of half-chewed bones.

When the dog is gone

I can go to the mall all afternoon and maybe even take in a movie

Without wondering how she is doing home alone.

When the old dog has gone

I won’t have to search for missing shoes

she has carried from the closet and stashed in odd piles about the house.

After the old dog dies

I can sleep until noon if I want to

And no one will jab me with a cold, wet nose over and over and over again until I give up and get out of bed.

After the old dog is gone

I can get dressed in peace

Without her barking and dancing in happy circles as if my life’s purpose was to take her out for a stroll or a ride in the car.

How much quieter, roomier, cleaner the house will seem without her constantly by my side.

Quantum Spookiness Demonstrated--Karma at a Distance

Back in May of 2011, the Simple Explanation blog posted an article called "Quantum Entanglement and Karma."  At that time, I described quantum entanglement and and suggested it as a reasonable mechanism for karma. 

From that 2011 article:

"Karma is the mechanism through which the consequences of behavior inform future potential. Karma is a force of influence that arises out of the decision-making history of every unit of consciousness in the universe. Each UC generates its own karma. We are all affected by one another’s karma. The more a unit of consciousness has in common with another UC, the more it is affected by the other’s karma. Our aggregate karma affects all of creation."

To this definition we can now add quantum entanglement:  Your actions affect not only you, they affect me to the extent we are "entangled." And, because of entanglement swapping, not only am I affected by you, but so is everyone else who is entangled with me, and everyone else entangled with them. And so on, and so on, and so on." A Simple Explanation of Quantum Entanglement and Karma" 

I am happy to report to you that the claim of action-at-a-distance was scientifically verified last week. There is now no scientific reason that Karma at a distance cannot operate in the same way. Read the article below to see how they proved it.

"This latest experiment involved physicists from the Netherlands, the UK, and Spain, who entangled pairs of electrons separated by a distance of 1.3 km. Led by Delft University of Technology researcher B. Hensen from the Netherlands, the team then measured one of the electrons while a group immediately observed whether its partner was affected.

This is a take on the classic 'Bell experiment' devised in the 1960s by Irish physicist John Bell to test whether there was a more sensible explanation for entanglement. According to the rational view of the world, after a certain distance, the correlation should cease to exist as the particles are too far away to communicate with each other. But according to quantum theory, there will be no distance limit.

Over the past 30 years or so the Bell experiment has been attempted many times, always showing that quantum theory is real. But in all those experiments there have been loopholes - usually the fact that most researchers entangle photons, which are hard to pin down and measure due to their super-fast nature, so as many as 80 percent are lost before being measured, making results inconclusive.

In an attempt to close that loophole, many physicists use entangled ions instead of photons. But this opens up another loophole, because these ions aren't kept far enough apart to rule out that they aren't somehow influencing each other by communicating information normally - in other words, at a rate less than the speed of light.

The new experiment managed to close both those loopholes by combining the benefits of photons with electrons, which are easier to measure. To do this, the team entangled the spin of two electrons with two different photons. Those two electrons were located in labs 1.3 km apart, while the photons were sent off to a third location and then separately entangled with each other.

"As soon as the photons are entangled, BINGO, so too are the two original electron spins, seated in vastly distant labs, reports science writer Zeeya Merali over at FQXi blogs. "The team carried out 245 trials of the experiment, comparing entangled electrons, and report that Bell’s bound is violated."

So that means that there really is some freaky quantum behaviour going on, and the results can't be blamed on some kind of loophole.

"Our experiment realises the first Bell test that simultaneously addresses both the detection loophole and the locality loophole," the authors write over at arXiv, where they've published the early results. They're now refining the experiment for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. 

"It’s a very nice and beautiful experiment, and one can only congratulate the group for that," Anton Zeilinger, the leader of a rival team at the University of Vienna in Austria, who wasn't involved in the research, told Jacob Aron over at New Scientist. "I expect they have improved the experiment, and by the time it is published they’ll have better data ... There is no doubt it will withstand scrutiny."  from an article entitled: Quantum spookiness has been confirmed by first loophole-free experiment.  It's official: reality is freaking weird. by FIONA MACDONALD 31 AUG 2015  Science Alert http://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-spookiness-has-been-confirmed-by-first-loophole-free-experiment

Simplicity Is Not Reductionism

Every once in a while, someone I'm talking with reacts poorly to the very notion that complex concepts should or could be simplified--as if this Simple Explanation blog contributes to "dumbing down" science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. "Your theory is nothing but pure fantasy and speculation," I hear them say.

Well, I've got news for them-- All axioms are fundamentally unprovable. This is true in science, in logic, and in math. Fundamental propositions are assumed to be true. All of these axioms are in fact intuitive. So the criticism that the Simple Explanation is intuitive is a false criticism, as the same can be said of all science, logic, and math. According to U.C. Berkeley's Understanding Science website: 

"All of science is based on a few fundamental assumptions that transcend any individual experiment or study."

Understanding Science goes on to explain that, while the fundamental propositions may be assumptions, they generate testable hypotheses that can verify the assumptions. The Simple Explanation is not unscientific--it verifies its hypotheses through observation and by mining other people's research findings, amply demonstrating its theoretical robustness.

I talked this over with my brother, Bill, the philosopher, and he felt it was very important to explain the difference between "simplicity" and "reductionism." So here goes.

Simplicity is not reductionism. 

Simplicity as I use the term involves stripping away layers of linguistic and cultural particulars to reveal underlying universal patterns. According to the Simple Explanation, once memes are lifted out of their familiar linguistic and cultural expressions, their universal applicability can be readily discerned.

Reductionism, on the other hand, narrows the focus of exploration by pursuing information from smaller and smaller objects, as in the way physicists look for ever smaller particles and wave forms to explain the composition of our universe. Hand in hand with this pursuit is the assumption that an object can be reduced to its tiniest components and that this will reveal its underlying nature.

I'm happy to see that according to wikipedia, Bill and I are not alone in our distrust of reductionism. Apparently reductionism doesn't go over so well with ecologists or systems theorists, because interactive systems can't be described by their smallest objects but must be described in terms of relationships and interactions. From the wiki article on reductionism: "Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.^[24]"

So, while conventional science believes itself to be thoroughly pursuing truth through reductionism, the Simple Explanation would say it is more like they are trying to describe the haystack by counting the number of its molecules. Yes, it is a measurable result, but meaningless.

Again, from wikipedia: "Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance's boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks and leptons, perhaps) would be even better. Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super~theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Here at the Simple Explanation, simplicity means "elegance"--the simplest theory that explains the most evidence. But unlike methodological reductionism, the Simple Explanation does not restrict truth to the tiny.The simplicity pursued by the Simple Explanation is of an entirely different kind--a true theory of everything looks for the underlying reality of our cosmos, irregardless of where it is to be found. 

A Simple, Animated, Gnostic Cosmology

Be sure to watch this full screen!

I've taken the Gnostic Cosmology schematic that I posted last week and animated it in PowerPoint. A bit technically crude, but it's a start.

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. The entire schema above is described step-by-step in my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated.

Gnostic Cosmology Artwork

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here. 

A Simple Gnostic Cosmology by Cyd Ropp, Ph.D.,

according to the Tripartite Tractate

Meanwhile, can you tell what is happening in the story above?

Dark Matter Cartoon

Yearning for the Pleroma

Notice: There is now a separate blog dedicated to the New Gnostic Gospel. You can get there by clicking here.

Other words for the Gnostic word "pleroma" include the "Fullness," the "All," the "Totalities," and "the circle of divine attributes," which gives you a pretty good idea of what pleroma means. The way wikipedia defines the term is much more challenging and kind of discouraging because of its complexity, especially the section on Gnosticism. 

Only one book of the Bible mentions the Pleroma--a letter written to the church in Colosse by the apostle Paul. In the translation of Colossians 2:9 below, Pleroma has been rendered as "the fullness."

"For in Him [Christ] dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power" (Col. 2:9).

The footnote under this verse in my edition of the New King James Version goes on to completely misinterpret the meaning of the statement in its rush to dismiss the Gnostic implications of the verse. The Nelson editors contend that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of angelic beings, the last creating the material world. In contrast, Paul says that the fullness of God exists in Christ... This contradicts the Gnostic idea of  the inherent evil of physical bodies and the claim that Jesus is merely a spirit (p. 2014, Nelson Study Bible. 1997).

While I do agree with the opening premise that "the Gnostics thought the fullness of God had been divided among a number of ... beings," there are at least four misrepresentations I see in the Nelson explanation of the verse.

First, the idea that the fullness can't be both completely in Christ and at the same time divided into aeons. No need to say, "In contrast," since the two traits are not mutually exclusive. Let's imagine how that would work.

Did you know that you can click on any blog picture to see it larger on your computer screen?
Here are the first four phases of Gnostic Cosmology, according to the Tripartite Tractate. Upper right corner: God the Father represented as the background paper of the entire poster. Upper left corner: I've represented the Son as a diffuse cloud of will. Middle: the Pleroma/the fullness represented as the Son's cloud with distinct lines representing the aeonic traits. The pyramid at the lower right represents the individual aeons after they have named themselves and differentiated the Son's will into hierarchies of traits and powers.

We begin with the Father, since this is the ground state underlying all else. We all know that the Father is unknowable. Too big, too exalted for us mere mortals to contemplate directly. The Father is the Immortal One who never changes and without whom nothing would exist. The indisputable buck-stops-here God. This being is pure consciousness, without form or distinctions, all quiet, eternally undivided. This is the One Who Is; the Great I Am. In my drawings, the Father is represented as the paper that makes up the poster--all other manifestations arise as images upon the paper and are fully contained by the paper.

The Son is represented by the starburst cloud at the upper left, although the starburst is not really light energy, since this is before the creation of Light. This entity is also called the First Aeon, the Root, the Single Name, and The Form of the Formless. The Son contains all of the qualities of the Father, but in a circumscribed form. In today's lingo we would call the Son a holographic representation of the Father, where a small fragment perfectly emulates the larger image. You could think of the Father as the ocean, and the Son as a big bucket of ocean water. It's the same fluid. And if the bucket remains immersed in the ocean, then not only is the water within and without the bucket identical, the ocean continues to fully contain the bucket of water.

The Tripartite Tractate describes how the Son is part of the Father, and then goes on in the same verse to declare the Son as the cause of the Pleroma:

"He exists by the Father having him as a thought--that is, his thought about himself, his sensation of himself and of his eternal being... He possesses power, which is his will. For the moment, however, he holds himself back in silence, he who is the greatest, being the cause of the generation of the members of the All into eternal existence" (56).

By this one verse we can see that the Son is within the Father and he also contains the Fullness, in full agreement with Colossians 2:9.

My second problem with the Nelson notes is their description of aeons. Aeons are not the same as angels--they're more like features or capabilities. The Tripartite Tractate describes them as "the properties and qualities in which the Father and the Son exist" and equates them with the pre-existent Church (58). 

"His offspring, the ones who are, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father... The Church exists in the dispositions and properties in which the Father and the Son exist... Therefore it subsists in the procreations of innumerable aeons" (59).

While some Aeons are beings with their own self-aware personalities, other aeons are best described as traits and capabilities of the Father and Son.

"...they were unable to know the depth in which they were; nor was it possible for them to know themselves, nor for them to know anything else. That is, they were with the Father; they did not exist for themselves. Rather, they only had existence in the manner of a seed... like a fetus... not yet come into being" (60, 20-35).

Third, the Nelson Study Bible footnote confuses Jesus, the physical incarnation of Christ on Earth, with the eternal spirit of Christ, the first Son of the Father, whose image and dwelling predates the Earthly appearance of Jesus. 

"Now the Savior in fact was a bodily image of something unitary, namely the Fullness" (116).

The Gnostic gospel I've been studying has no quibble with naming the physical person of Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior of the entire Creation. Lest the wary Christian doubt the Gnostic's gospel, the Tripartite Tractate ends with this eulogy for Jesus Christ:

"...the praise, the power, and the glory, through Jesus Christ, the Lord, the Savior, the Redeemer of all those who are embraced by the mercy of love, and through his Holy Spirit, from now throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen" (138).

And finally, the Nelson editor contends "the fullness of God [that] exists in Christ" ... "contradicts the Gnostic idea of the inherent evil of physical bodies." The editor apparently reasons that if Gnostics claim physical bodies are evil, and Jesus incarnated as a physical body, then Gnosticism would imply that Jesus Christ was evil.

There are a couple of problems with this logic. First, my reading of Gnostic writing reveals that while material reality may have started out as "evil," the situation was quickly rectified when the Son and the Pleroma intervened to establish an "economy" that regulated good and evil inclinations through "repentance." Here's a brief description of that process:

"After conversion followed the remembrance of those who exist and the prayer on behalf of the one who had returned to himself by means of what is good" (81).... "This prayer and supplication helped to make him turn toward himself and toward the Fullness, for their remembrance of him caused him to remember the preexistent ones, and this is the remembrance that calls out from afar and brings him back" (82).

"To those who belong to the remembrance, however, he revealed the thought ... with the intention that it should draw them into a communion with the material. This was in order to provide them with a structure and a dwelling place, but also in order that by being drawn toward evil they should acquire a weak basis for their existence, so that, instead of rejoicing unduly in the glory of their own environment and thereby remaining exiled, they might rather perceive the sickness they were suffering from, and so acquire a consistent longing and seeking after the one who is able to heal them from this weakness" (98, 99).

"The first human, then, is a mixed molding and a mixed creation, and a depository of those on the left and those on the right, as well as of a spiritual Word, and his sentiments are divided between each of the two substances to which he owes his existence" (106).

"What our Savior became, out of willing compassion, is the same as that which the ones for whose sake he appeared had become because of an involuntary passion: they had become flesh and soul, and this holds them perpetually in its grip, and they perish and die... For not only did he assume their death for the ones he had in mind to save, but in addition he also assumed their smallness, to which they had descended when they were born with body and soul; for he let himself be conceived and he let himself be born as a child with body and soul" (114, 115).

Secondly, the very fact that Jesus did incarnate as a mortal man is what made salvation through Christ possible, for it was by the Savior's perfect "error correcting algorithm," superimposed upon an otherwise error-filled humanity, that salvation entered the world. 

I'll end this article with a clear gospel message straight from the Tripartite Tractate regarding exactly what one must come to believe in order to be saved, in case you're curious. 

"... there is no other baptism apart from this one alone, which is the redemption into God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when confession is made through faith in those names, which are a single name of the gospel, when they have come to believe what has been said to them, namely that they exist. From this they have their salvation, those who have believed that they exist. This is attaining in an invisible way to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an undoubting faith" (127, 128).

That seems to be the underlying core of the Gnostic salvation message. No other arcane rituals are needed; no gnosis other than believing that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (the Fullness) existed before you. Other ancient gnostic texts claim that this is the true essence of the gospel that Jesus preached. 

Keep in mind that these are the very texts considered so distracting by the early church Fathers that they were buried in the Egyptian desert in the 4th century AD to protect them from being burned as the work of heretics, keeping them safe until their reemergence in 1945. The cat is definitely out of the bag now.

Okay, back to the Pleroma. In case you haven't guessed, the Fullness is where we all wind up eventually. By the end of the universe, most everyone's souls will have come on board Team God, so to speak, and then the fruit of the Pleroma will have returned home to the fold, to live happily ever after amidst the unending joy and love of the Fullness, all tucked up inside the Son who lives inside the Father.

"Once the redemption had been proclaimed, the perfect human [the Savior] immediately  received knowledge so as to return swiftly to his unity, to the place from which he came. Joyfully he returned back to the place from which he had originated, the place from which he had flowed forth. His limbs, however, needed a school... until all the limbs of the body of the Church would be united in one place and would attain the restoration together... so that the Fullness obtains its redemption" (123, 124).