Is it any wonder that I find this mentality….lacking? No one who knows me is surprised, I’m sure. I hate everything, I’m told.

What is the world, though, when the completion of tasks is more important than the task’s purpose? As usual, I can’t help but ask, “why?” Naturally, this goes over like a lead balloon in the harried, “efficiency-driven”-yet-woefully-inefficient corporate bureaucracy that is my workplace. Where the motto is “I need it yesterday no matter how impossible and no matter how completely I botched the process before handing it off to you.”

As new crises and “challenges” trickle into my inbox, I’m struck with a deep-seeded need to find the root problem. I can’t help but stare into the mountains of miscalculations that led to the inevitable crisis we now face and ask why those errors were made. I can’t help but suggest ways to avoid those errors. And yet, I’m faced with “git ‘er done.” There is never time to address the root cause, because we are so harried with a need to resolve the issues caused by the root cause. It’s frustrating, is all.

It’s like Superman arriving upon a disaster scene and being told to work crowd control. “Or I could make the earth spin backwards and prevent this disaster from ever happening.”

“…just make sure these folks don’t go under the tape, hot shot!”

Would a little introspection be remiss in the modern world? Would it hurt if, instead of asking what we are going to do, we instead asked why we are doing what we do? To what end? For what purpose? And for what need? Albert Einstein said that “bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” It’s possibly true for a creative process, but I can’t help but think an efficient bureaucracy is the last defense against the failings of any non-creative process necessarily involving humans.  And efficiency is achieved, not by doing without question in order to “git ‘er done,” but by evaluating each action for it’s value before acting.

Unfortunately, my bosses don’t agree.

                          

THEY LIVE!

All this builds up to my skepticism in viewing this article in the Telegraph, which basically states that a poll showed that 20% of respondents believed that aliens existed and were walking among us right here on our very own planet Earth. I mean, come on! One in FIVE?!?! The first thing I checked was the sample size…it might be tiny.  Turns out it’s 23,000. That’s a pretty robust poll. But there the data on this poll ends. The article gives no information about who conducted the poll, or the methodology.

Google reveals a scant few articles about this poll, with most simply dropping the 20% number in a quick blurb along with a sensationalist headline and moving on to other things. I finally discovered that it was Reuters which commissioned the poll, and found their initial article about it. They also don’t reveal the methodology. The polling firm, Ipsos, has a little blurb about it but says nothing about the nature of the poll or how data was gathered.

So, bottom line? The information is interesting. If the responses correlate with the actual public opinion, then the findings are downright scary. Frankly, I don’t find them that hard to believe. People believe weird stuff. If accurate, then nearly 45% of Indians and Chinese think aliens are among us! They Live!! Additionally it says something interesting about relatively secular and socialist countries like Belgium, Sweden, and The Netherlands. Only about 8% of them put any stock in the idea. But all this is pointless if the poll was biased or flawed. Where is the careful reporting on this subject?

Now that I’ve blathered on about how silly polls can be, here’s one for you. Have at it….what’s your take?

View This Poll

                          

He was a little crass at times, but the world needs more outspoken atheists like that.

You’ll be missed, George.

                          

Okay, spooky stuff, huh? I actually was first alerted to this video a few months ago, when one of my favorite podcasts (SGU) mentioned it and offered a few theories about what it is.

So… I recently ran across a guy calling himself “Captain Disillusion,” who has some excellent youTube debunking videos! Yeah, he’s a bit weird, but he knows his stuff. The vids are actually very entertaining, so I thought I would share. Here’s one about that very same “Blue Ghost” from the clip above.

If you enjoyed that, you can look at some of his other debunking videos here. Keep up the great work Captain Disillusion!

                          

So, basically what happened was this: I began noticing that chipmunks were omnipresent around me in school. They often appeared randomly outside my window as I worked diligently on papers. They would run suddenly across my path as I walked around campus. Sometimes they would even stop directly in front of me, in a worshipful reverence. The conclusion, I was acting God to the chipmunk community on my college campus. As I revealed this hypothesis to my friends, they too began to notice this extraordinary phenomenon! What a revelation!

So the question becomes, what powerful effect could bring a group of educated people to believe something so whacked? The answer, I recently found, is something called “confirmation bias.” Ta daa! Okay, so confirmation bias is a very common psychological effect that basically results in people looking for data to support a pre-established conclusion. In this case, the conclusion was that I was God to the chipmunks, and people would find evidence for that and use it to support the hypothesis. So, with that hypothesis in mind, every chipmunk sighting was carefully catalogued into peoples’ memories, as long as I was around, and events involving chipmunks without my presence were forgotten. The result is that people began to notice those events, and mistakenly catalogue them as evidence of my deification.

Okay, so my friends might not have been as credulous as I’m leading you to believe here, but I’m making a point about the way people record memories and use them to support beliefs. This in turn can be linked to hundreds of real world phenomena, and can explain how people come to believe strange things. The point? I’m not a chipmunk God (go figure) and chipmunk experiences declined rapidly in conjunction with my subsequent move to heavily urbanized New York City. Perhaps the chipmunks were appearing for other reasons, and my own bias led me to my fallacious conclusions. Or, maybe the chipmunks still worship me from afar, thinking I will return someday (a second coming, if you will) to lead them to the great acorn in the sky.

Thanks to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe for helping me to understand confirmation bias and how it led me astray.

                          

The process is as follows: the prosecutor for a certain set of charges presents whatever evidence they have, the jurors are allowed to ask questions of witnesses (through the prosecutor), the charges are read by the prosecutor, and then the jury deliberates and decides if there is “legally sufficient evidence, and reasonable cause to believe” that the defendant can be indicted for those charges. It should be a very straightforward process… since the laws (as is the nature of laws) are very clear on what is required to charge an individual. Where the system falters is with the jurors, funnily enough.

The first thing I noticed is that most people don’t seem to have any grasp of relevance when it comes to what evidence is being presented. The question period, where the witness leaves the court and the jurors are allowed to ask the prosecutor any questions they want put to the witness, is particularly painful! Fortunately, the prosecutor acts as a legal advisor to the jury, telling them what questions are legally proper. In one case, an undercover officer was describing taking part in a drug bust at a certain location. He described the deal taking place at two cross streets (say 95th and Atlantic, as a hypothetical) and explained the rest of the process, such as the exchange of money and the search of the suspect resulting in the finding of 500 pills in separate baggies (narcotics). After the witness left, we were asked if there were any questions. Several members of the jury seemed concerned that 95th street didn’t intersect Atlantic, and the prosecutor was forced to call the witness back and clarify. Yep, he misspoke, it was 93rd or something. Totally irrelevant. The witness had testified that the bust took place in Kings County, and that was all that really mattered, as far as the law was concerned.

On to reading us the charges. One of the charges was possession of a controlled substance with the intent to sell. Well, no one seemed convinced that these 500 pills were intended to be sold! WHAT!?!?! “Well, maybe it was a prescription,” said one juror. I had to argue with her to convince her that pharmacists don’t hand out 500 pills at a time….particularly not of a narcotic drug! Furthermore, they don’t dispense drugs in little plastic baggies. The charge was hotly debated, since most didn’t think it constituted “proof” that the individual was planning to sell the drugs. A bunch of Law & Order fans, no doubt. We don’t have to have proof, just “legally sufficient evidence, and reasonable cause to believe.” This was lost on most, and the charge was dismissed. Yikes.

Another juror decided to excuse herself from the voting process on all charges, because “you guys are throwing these kids in jail! That’s someone’s SON!” Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure that every criminal on the planet (and every non-criminal, for that matter) is someone’s son (or daughter). Not to mention that the Grand Jury doesn’t throw anyone in jail, they are simply indicting them on charges, which will bring them to trial. And all these weird happenings are taken entirely in stride by the system! No one monitors the proceedings (they have to be conducted in secret, with only the jury in the room), and charges are held and dismissed on the whim of a group of people that seem to have no grasp of logic or reason, let alone law.

Well….they do day that justice is blind.

                          

Now, I know as well as anyone that the word isn’t gibberish. Of course language is useful, and it serves a purpose, but it’s a strange sensation for a word to fall apart in your head and turn into a sound. It’s almost like hearing a foreign language. Often, the same thing happens when staring at a written word too long. Recently, I wrote the word “summer” in a sentence. It looked like it was spelled wrong, and the more that I stared the more wrong it looked. Now, I’m not a total idiot, I know how to spell ‘summer,’ but it just looked wrong. If you try this, make sure it’s a word that’s longer, but that you know without a doubt how to spell.

What does all this mean? Not sure. I think it’s a demonstration of the frailties of our perceptions, if that makes any sense. Are objects and ideas really described by our speech and language? Or is that connection tenuous at best?

My head hurts.