What grinds my gears

Oftentimes the human mind works in rather curious ways. For example, let's assume this hypothetical situation: A new flu pandemic has appeared that's especially nasty. About 1% of all people who contract it will die. (This is not unrealistic because such flu pandemics have happened, at even higher mortality rates.) You are pretty much guaranteed to get the flu unless you live a really isolated life. A vaccine is developed that prevents contracting the flu completely. Later it's discovered that approximately 0.1% of people get a serious chronic disease from the vaccine. What happens in this situation? A significant amount of people will refuse to take the vaccine, instead opting for the 1% probability of dying. It doesn't matter how much you explain the probabilities to them, they won't budge. But why? The highly contradictory reaction that many people have to this becomes even clearer if we assume two alternative hypothetical situations: Instead of the va...

I like Stephen King's novels like anybody else. He really is a master at writing in a really interesting and engaging manner. However, there's one aspect of many of his books that I don't like that much. Please don't misunderstand. I don't have any problem in supernatural elements being used in fiction, as long as it's interesting and support the fictitious reality of the story. In fact, quite many of King's books containing supernatural elements are just fine, when it's precisely the supernatural element that's the very core of the story. (Classic examples of this include Christine , Firestarter and Pet Sematary .) However, in quite many other of his books the supernatural elements seem completely out of place, and artificially tacked on. They feel like not belonging to the otherwise interesting story, and they actually detract from it. King is a master of writing suspense. Many of his novels start in a very suspenseful and mysterious manner,...

The world is full of people who believe in all kinds of irrational supernatural ideas, such as the paranormal, the "spiritual world", the supernatural powers of the human mind (that only wait for them to be unleashed via proper training), and so on. Well, people are (and of course should be) free to believe whatever they want. The problem is, lots of other people are cashing in on this psychological phenomenon. In the same way as many people believe in such things, there are others who are willing to sell them such beliefs for money. Just here in Finland, which should otherwise consist of relatively highly-educated civilized people, there exist several organizations that sell books and other material, and offer "training courses" related to the supernatural, the paranormal, and all kinds of such nonsense. And they are not doing it for free either. The thing is, these organizations and people are using their websites to advertise their material, and these adver...

Apparently there are people who really, honestly think that the Earth is a flat disc, and that all we know about astronomy is just a bunch of lies (perpetuated by a gigantic, world-wide conspiracy.) And I don't mean just a few lunatics rambling in their basements, but a relatively substantial amount of people who take it seriously and actually try to rationalize it. They have websites, forums, books and "documentary" films on the subject. The funny thing about it is that when you read their web pages and online forums, and watch their videos, it's really, really hard to tell if they are being serious or if it's just a parody. ( Poe's law is in full effect here.) However, apparently at least some of those people are really being serious about it. What's even funnier is seeing how they have to struggle to argue their position. As more and more undeniable evidence has come forth during history, they have to keep changing their arguments. In the distan...

In my previous post I talked a bit about the high standards of evidence that skeptics demand before believing in something. A bit more on that subject: As I said in the previous post, evidence is valid only if it passes the rigorous test of science and peer reviewing. However, there's still another aspect of this that also has to be considered: Just because the evidence has been verified as valid, that still doesn't actually tell us what it's evidence of. We should always be cautious to avoid jumping to conclusions even if evidence turns out to be completely valid. The next big question should be: "What exactly is this evidence of? What's actually the cause behind it?" Let's take an example: There's undeniable, verifiable and repeatable evidence that stars in galaxies rotate at orbital velocities that do not match the apparent mass of those galaxies. Normally the orbital velocity of a star should diminish the farther away it's from the center o...

There's a really widespread misconception, both in real life and in fiction, that skepticism means "the conviction that everything must have a natural explanation." The common picture of a skeptic is a stubborn old fart who denies anything seemingly supernatural out of principle, and refuses to even consider any possibilities. No, that's not what skepticism means. One narrow definition of the term in colloquial language might have that meaning, but that's not what it means in terms of the philosophy of science. What skepticism means is "not accepting extraordinary claims at face value without valid evidence" . Personally I would also add to that "and passing the rigorous test of science" . Skepticism is not about denying some explanations on principle while accepting others just because they are more "sciency" and "natural." Skepticism does not, in fact, have any preconceptions on what the true explanation for somethin...

While not the first zombie movies ever made, the original "zombie trilogy" by George A. Romero is by far the most influential set of movies of the genre in all of movie history. They popularized zombie movies, and they set all the major "rules" of zombies. And on top of that, they are really good movies. Perhaps the best characteristic of these movies is the extreme realism they depict. Of course I'm not talking about the very existence itself of zombies in the movies' universe, but everything else. The only "supernatural" thing depicted in the movies is that the bodies of dead people, for an unknown reason, get reanimated. The bodies are still dead, they just move and have some minimal brain functions. Everything else follows very physically plausible laws, such as: The bodies decompose over time due to natural processes, because there's little to no immune system fighting the micro-organisms that consume dead meat. This can be clearly se...