Skepticism, Atheism, and New Keyboards

Giving the new keyboard a whirl- let's hope the old keyboard was the problem, and not the port...

In a recent episode of HOUSE, a patient says "If there's no reason for all the bad things that have happened to me, this isn't a world I want to live in." House calls her an "idiot", which is right and wrong.



The episode deals with the Death Cat phenomenon. The episode does a good-ish job of explaining the "phenomenon"- the explanation being the cat seeking warmth. I'd like to extend this a bit.

DEATH CAT is a common happening, look online and you'll run into a psychic cat who can predict death. The problems with this reasoning are many. One, everyone dies, so anyone the cat lays down next to will die, eventually. Second, it's usually at a nursing home, a leper colony, or somewhere else where the likelihood of dying is vastly greater than normal- meaning the likelihood of randomly "predicting" deaths will be higher, too. Third, confirmation bias rears its ugly head- who remember everyone the cat lays down next to? So, the cat lays down to poor old Mrs Murphy and she dies three days leter, it's spooky. The cat then lays near old Werner Von Bruneiner, and he dies a week later. The cat next lies near Peggy for a night, and Penny for a night, and Gladus for a night, and nothing happens- but Peggy dies three years later, and Penny four and a half years later, and Gladus dies a decade later (because they're fucking old and decrepit enough to be in a Nursing Home!). Those three are non-events, when six months later, the cat lays next to Jonas McGrery and he dies the next day, everyone remembers Werner and Mrs Murphy; but they forget about Peggy and Penny. Or when the cat has a night by Mr. Davidson, and then he dies 3 months later, they remember the night the DEATH CAT slept with him. These aren't "predictions" they're coincidences, and the logical fallacy is confusing chronology (the order of events) with causality (how events influence one another).

Causality and chronology are different, somewhat obviously. The cat lays down next to the Elderly, then (on an ambiguous time line) the Elderly die, and it's less obvious for some people. Just because someone spilled salt (a widely used seasoning, used billions of times a day by people around the world) today, doesn't mean that's what caused them to break a finger the next day. What about the other hundreds of millions who didn't break finger, or the tens of millions that nothing very bad happened to, after they spilled salt? The fact is that bad things happen, and there are a lot of seconds in the day, and a lot of people in the world, for bad things to happen to for no reason. House says, about the cat, it's not really a phenomenon as there are millions of nursing homes, and tens of millions of cats at nursing homes, and it's no wonder that one of them coincidentally sleeps next to a couple of people who die.

Same goes for all superstitions- or other supernatural reasons (i.e. God, Satan, prayer)- for why good/bad things happen. The math is pretty convincing:

More than 6 BILLION (6,000,000,000) people on the planet, at the moment.
86,400 seconds in one 24 hour period (somewhat less than an actual day, astronomically speaking; but still)

That means, there are (# of People TIMES # of possible seconds for something to go bad) 518,400,000,000,000 chances for something to happen to any one person any one second, each day. (518.4 TRILLION)

If there's a 0.000000001 (that's one billionth) chance that something "unimaginably" horrible happens to any one person, any one second. (This would be extremely rarely bad: 1 in 1 billion chance.)

Which would mean, it could happen 518,400 times EVERY DAY.

Half a million horribly unimaginable events Every Day.

That's completely ignoring intelligent motivators- people wearing seatbelts, people using condoms, people generally doing things to consciously avoid horribly bad accidents; and the people actively trying to force unimaginably bad events onto someone else, by shooting them, for example.

Still, the sheer numbers are staggering. Even if it must take a full minute, there are 8.6 trillion chances; an hour makes it 144 billion; a day makes it 6 billion...

In other words, for an event that takes a whole 24 hours, if it's a 1 in 1 billion event, it happens 6 times every day, on average.

Whether that's a lot or a little would seem to be an extension of "the glass half full" debate.

House was wrong on one point, the girl isn't an idiot. She's stupid. Willfully, or perhaps even unintentionally, incapable of understanding- House gives her multiple examples and explanations throughout the show, which she then dismisses with some hokey bullshit.

I believe House is wrong on another point- he gives her shit, provides facts to refute her bullshit, and then makes his point, at which time she essentially says "but I still believe" and he just looks at her mysteriously and leaves. Why not say "So, what you're saying is 'Despite your facts and proof, I refuse to acknowledge reality?' Okay, that's fine, stupid. I refuse to believe you're sick, despite all the evidence to the contrary." Obviously that fucks up the narrative, a little, but he doesn't even begin the rebuttal, he lets her slide, giving her the last word. Which is chicken-shit true-believer pandering by another name, in my view.

Finally, I'd like to address her actual statement...

Uhm, holy fucking cock-smack by the penis of a million foot tall Zeus, Batman!?

It would be astounding if it was just a bit of "poetic" dialog on a TV show I watch. It's fucking unbelievably retarded, and scary, that I've heard people say that before. It's worse that they were proud of saying it!

How narcissistic do you have to be to refuse to live in a word that isn't about you? How selfish to need all of reality to be focused on you!

And don't give me that shit about "I don't think it's about me, I think it's about all of us!" or the more science-fictiony "I think it's about all conscious living beings" or the even more hippy "I think it's about all living things". That's not altruistic sentiment, because by being about a group (life, or conscious living things, or us) the speaker is a part of, it's about the speaker.

I swear these people don't go back and think about things even AFTER they spew them out of their pecker checkers! ("Mmmm, mmm, this one tastes fine!" for anyone lacking the proper mental visual.)

It's bad enough not to THINK BEFORE SPEAKING; how much worse is it to not think even AFTER speaking?

The people who say that kind of shit aren't serene peaceful supplicants, yearning for truth. They're arrogant fucking whores, demanding reality conform to their wishes. They're spoiled brats who never really understood that "Life isn't fair", and they are not princes/ses. These are people who don't fundamentally understand the difference between make-believe and reality. The exact same kind of people who strap bombs to their chests for some arbitrary number of sexually inexperienced children to molest in their fantasy cloud palaces.

I advocate not letting these people get away with feeling good about themselves. I advocate sticking it to them, and forcing people to deal with reality, not their misguided and warped perception of it. I advocate ridicule of anyone who refuses to acknowledge objective evidence and rigorous proof. I advocate scorning those who are too intellectually lazy, and/or dishonest, to try understanding the crap they are spewing.

There's a reason "god is in the gaps" and it ain't 'cause he makes sense...