You Were Serious?

I deleted my Facebook account today.  I had been on the platform since 2009, and in the early years, and for a good long while, it was a mostly-decent vehicle for keeping in touch with people and spreading the word about stuff.  On the other hand, I did find the platform to be immensely frustrating, in a boiling frog kind of way.

I decided to leave Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg release his video about how he was ending fact-checking on the platform, and would instead adopt Twitter's "community notes" model, which, surely, is fine.  No problems there.  Beyond all the technical, aesthetic, and ethical problems I had with with the platform, and its parent, Meta, this heel-turn, embracing the MAGA, was the last straw.

While I had been planning my departure from Facebook -- I wanted to make sure I collected all my posts and whatnot and transferred administration of a group I managed -- I was reminded of another departure I did, back in 2009.

I was working as a systems administrator for a young SEO/SEM firm... well, not "a" systems administrator... "the" systems administrator.  As the outfit grew, I was given more and more responsibility, which one should kind of expect in a growing firm.  There came a point, though, where the number of hats I was balancing on my head became more than I felt I could reasonably bear.  Also, from the standpoint of "business continuity" if I got hit by a bus, sure, stuff would probably continue running just fine for a few months, maybe a year... but... there was nobody else who knew the systems like I did, because nobody had to.  I decided to write a letter to my boss, who was the CTO.  By this time in the company's growth, I was the only individual contributor with a C-Suite person as their direct manager.  A little weird?  Yeah.  Maybe.  

I wrote a letter to my boss, enumerating my concerns, specifying 8 weeks as what I considered to be a fair time-frame to show some progress toward addressing my concerns, and if there was no indication of progress by the end of those 8 weeks, I would turn in my resignation.  I hand-delivered the letter to my boss in his office.  He gave it a quick scan, and said, "Yeah, I can't do anything about this."

I continued to do my job as though nothing had changed for 8 weeks, and then I went into my boss' office again, this time with a different letter in hand.  I said, "So, it's been eight weeks... Have you had a chance to work out a plan to address my concerns?"   He reiterated his dismissal.  I slid my resignation across his desk to him.  

He had the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to say to my face, out loud, with actual words, "Oh.  You were serious?"

This, after working for him for almost five years.  "If you don't know me by now..." indeed.

"Yup."  

I was serious.

Two weeks later, I left the company, only reaching out to them again occasionally to try to cash out my shares, which finally happened in 2020, when the company was acquired.

I try not to make idle threats.  I try not to make threats at all.  But if I'm put in a position where I have to make a choice whether to continue to engage with someone or not, and I arrive at "not", I commit pretty deeply, and follow through.  Rarely do I ever go back on those decisions.

So I feel pretty confident that this departure from Facebook (or as I'd come to call it in my last few weeks on the platform, "Fascebork") is permanent.

I am on Mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@TaoBear) and BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/buckbbagawk.bsky.social).  I have established 2 topic-specific accounts to correspond with the pages I maintained on Facebook for NewsUndies (https://bsky.app/profile/newsundies.bsky.social) and RIBBBITN3RDing (https://mastodon.social/@ribbbitn3rding).  Also, my blogs are still a thing.  Oh, and I'm nominally on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-tourville-984b121a2/)

Alex O'Connor walks through "The Existential Crisis Iceberg"

 Alex O'Connor walks through "The Existential Crisis Iceberg"

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkR83fxKOFs

 

I don't know what it says about me... that I'm a sociopath, or that I'm dead inside, or what... but.... I've considered most of these problems a long, long time ago, and arrived at the tentative conclusion that they're not problems.

I would classify these items thusly:

For the things we don't have access to, for example, whether reality operates on the A or B theory of time... The answer is out of reach.  We can speculate, which might be fun while stoned... but all the evidence available to me suggests I can't know, and I can't change it.  The best solution I have come up with for a situation like that is:  Work the problem based on the evidence you have.  If more actionable evidence comes along, modify your plan accordingly.

For the things that are, at least superficially, undecorated navel-gazing... the "Why is there something rather than nothing?" questions... I'm an atheist and a mereological nihilist, so... I naturally fall toward the answer, "There's no evidence I know of to suggest there's a reason other than that this is what matter and energy do at these temperatures and pressures."  It's outside of my ken and control.  Accept the world as it presents itself, and stop trying to smear your hang-ups all over it.  Work the problem based on the evidence you have.  If more actionable evidence comes along, modify your plan accordingly.

For the things which follow the pattern of, "What if there's no afterlife?" I can't help but arrive at the conclusion that the person who considers such a question is really, really, really overthinking it, and making unwarranted assumptions about the world and their place in it.  Work the problem based on the evidence you have.  If more actionable evidence comes along, modify your plan accordingly.

For things like "Being born before immortality" and "Simulated universe conjectures"... I put these mostly in the "You're overthinking it" pile.  This also seems to connect with the justification for not pulling out of Afghanistan or Iraq (or Vietnam) much earlier than we did: "Nobody wants to be the last one to die for a mistake."  Personally, I'd much rather be the last one than just the next one.  Work the problem based on the evidence you have.  If more actionable evidence comes along, modify your plan accordingly.  

For the things I would regard as "obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it for 10 seconds", like "everyone has their own complex lives" and "acknowledgment of death"... yes, and?  What is to be done about it?  This may seem callous or detatched, but... that's where I'm at.  Work the problem based on the evidence you have.  If more actionable evidence comes along, modify your plan accordingly.  

As far as "the big questions" are concerned, I'm a methodologigcal naturalist, and a pragmatist seeing the world through faintly Tao-colored glasses.

I tend to use what I perceive to be "external reality" as the grounding for my understanding of just about everything, except what's going on in my own skull.  As a result, I immediately have a problem when people try to propose that metaphysics has primacy over physics.  Idealism and the "you have your reality and I have mine" crowd do not impress me.

Your thoughts?

Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself In The Car

 Condensed thoughts on the Christian god.  (2024-04-08)

Jesus may have existed.  I'm happy to grant that he may have existed.  Not that he did, definitely, beyond a shadow of doubt, exist, but that he may have.  That doesn't get the Christian anywhere with me, though, because for his life in the first century to be consequential for me today, he has to have actually, factually, definitely existed, AND he has to have had either some supernatural aspect to himself, or some supernatural assistance from another being. 

I often hear Christians (and other religious people) talk about how there's no more verifiable historical evidence for Julius Caesar or Alexander The Great than there is for Jesus.  That may be.  I haven't actually done a thorough census of the evidence for each, but I'm happy to grant the point for the purpose of this discussion.  As I said, I'm happy to grant that Jesus of Nazareth may have been a real historical figure, as an ordinary man, just as I'm ready to grant Julius or Alexander may have been real historical men.  Under that grant, Jesus has just as much current, immediate importance to my life as Julius or Alexander.  For Jesus to matter to me, here and now, in a way much more immediate and dynamic than in possibly embelleshed reported speech from millenia past, Jesus needs a supernatural assist.  It's the supernatural assist to which I I object, as it is unsupported by available objectively verifiable direct empirical evidence.  To this charge, religious folks will often raise the spectre of "Historical Science" and "Historical Science" is a sham.  It's not, but that's irrelevant.  If Jesus is supposed to have a current  dynamic, and interactive impact on my life right now, then "Historical Science" don't enter into it at all, and the demand for objectively verifiable direct empirical evidence stands.  Hic Rhodus, hic salta.

Of course, the god of Abraham is supposed to have created the Universe we observe by speaking it into existence, and be currently superintending it (and us) with its tri-omni magnificence.  Speakers, including William Lane Craig, Frank Turek, Ken Ham, Todd Friel, Greg Koukl, and J. Warner Wallace (among a sea of other, less well-known imitators) use the same threadbare rhetoric as their their forebears to frighten listeners into believing that there is a god to whom they owe everything, and which will send them off to Hell for eternal punishment for finite (and, in some cases, to the secular mind, laughably petty) "crimes" (shrimp cocktail, anyone?).  Despite their handful of "arguments" whose premises are universally unsupported by objectively verifiable direct empircal evidence, nothing they have predicted has come to pass (with any more reliability than simple chance), nothing supernatural that they have claimed to exist has ever been demonstrated to actually, meaningfully, materially, consequentially exist with objectively verifiable direct empirical evidence.  Heaven, Hell, souls, spirits, angels, demons, devils, gods, saints, miracles... all claims without supporting evidence.

The proposition that Jesus was ... connected, somehow... to the god of Abraham... either he WAS the god of Abraham in human form, or he was the son of the god of Abraham, or he was a regular man chosen by the god of Abraham to represent him on Earth... is unsupported.  Given that the god of Abraham has not been demonstrated to exist, any supposition that Jesus is in the god's "crew" is so far unsupported, if not flatly absurd.  Upon that unsupported stack of assumptions, rests the claim that the god set Jesus (who may, according to some interpretations of the literature, actually be the god himself) up to be killed as a sacrifice to himself, to serve as a loophole to get humanity out of punishment for rules he, the god, created and could suspend if he chose... and it turns out the salvation only works if you join the right version of his fan club, and keep up on your dues.  ...and you'll never know if you really have the right fan club until after you die.  Talk about selling an invisible product!  

Finally, there's the matter of the so-called "empty tomb".  Since Jesus (whom you may remember has not been solidly, factually demonstrated to have existed, but whose "mere human" existence I am willing to grant for the purposes of discussion) is supposed by Christians to have been "bodily resurrected" following his crucifixion and burial (which are also, thus far, mere conjecture.  There is so far no known objectively verifiable direct empirical evidence of these events) -- there are varying, and mutually conflicting accounts of who discovered the tomb to be empty, and a variety of details, but let's set that aside for the moment.  There are points which work against the aggregated, smoothed-over "empty tomb" narrative.  The "gospels" offer accounts of people returning to the tomb, and finding it empty.  Collectively, these accounts are the_claim that Jesus rose from the dead.  There are additional claims about what he supposedly did after rising from the dead, but nearly every Christian apologist will point to the "empty tomb" as the coup de grace which irrefutably shows the truth of Christianity.  Of course the "empty tomb" narrative is just as dependent on all the undemonstrated drivel discussed previously as the rest of the Jesus story -- gods, supernatural realms and powers, souls, and so on.  Without all that being demonstrated to be real, the best I can offer is, "Cool story, bro."  The gospels are the claim, not the evidence to support the claim.  One person telling you an obvious bullshit story is unbelievable.  Two people telling you roughly similar obvious bullshit stories should be no more convincing.  Neither should four be.

To the supposed god of Abraham and all its pretended minions and realms, I say, "Hic Rhodus, hic salta."

A Conversation About NASA, The Moon, And Alien Visitations

What follows is half of an online conversation I had with a friend about "aliens".  Out of respect to him and his anonymity, I will leave interpolation of his responses as an exercise for the reader.  I expect the general gist and flavor of his responses should be clear.

I responded to his original post promoting the book “Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA” by Richard C. Hoagland, with, "...is this something you take seriously? ...or is this a bit?"  

[He responded]

I don't take seriously claims about ancient aliens, modern alien abductions, moon hoax, evil NASA, flat earth, Roswell was a crashed alien spacecraft, et cetera. It's not that I'm specifically prejudiced against these particular claims, it's that they are extraordinary claims which, in many cases, contradict the available evidence, require "unconventional interpretations" of some facts, and acceptance of other unsupported claims to be believed, and bear the hallmarks of supercharged suspicion on the brink of paranoia, and a desire to be seen as having "secret knowledge". Sure, people are corrupt and power-seeking and greedy. I'll happily grant that. I think that the way that the overwhelming majority of people are actually corrupt, power-seeking, and greedy is far more mundane and tedious than all these overly-elaborate red-yarn-and-pushpins conspiracy conjectures. I am concerned that otherwise level-headed folks embrace these elaborate schemes, because 1) they vote, and the same mind they use to think up reasons why Neil Armstrong was a shill for Monsanto because ancient alien pyramid architects is the same mind they use to elect Senators, Representatives, Presidents, school board members, and dog catchers; and 2) they get distracted from the real corruption that actually affects people's real lives when they worry about Hunter Biden's laptop and the nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant; and 3) they don't seem to have their Baloney Detection Kit properly calibrated (or functioning at all), and leave themselves open to "learning" fake "facts" which they use as context for receiving and interpreting new information. In short, I don't like it, and cannot in good conscience support it.

[He responded]

I suspect that if we shared a back yard and anything bigger than a softball landed in it, especially if it was a functioning spacecraft of some sort, we wouldn't have time to consider whether to keep it a secret, because the swarm of blackhawks, apaches, and windowless vans that would show up immediately... or possibly before the "visitor" would ensure that all "threats to national security" would be isolated and rendered non-threatening in short order.

...and as far as "truths" go... I don't know, man... When I hear people say things like "I have my truth and you have yours"... I lose a little more hope for humanity. ...and lemme tell ya... I don't have a lot left to lose.

[He responded]

We apparently employ different definitions for the words "truth",'fact", "belief", and "know", and that makes serious conversations difficult. Colloquially, I may say I "know" something, when, in fact, I believe it, or maybe I just suspect it to be true -- I try to be conscious of my usages, but sometimes I screw it up. People tend to get really tired of having every term defined and every remark qualified. It takes a lot of time, and people often feel like they're being talked down to. I try to have evidentiary warrant for the things I claim to know, or suspect to be, true. Claims are not facts and they're not evidence. This is something that comes up All. The. Time. when atheists ask theists to present the evidence they have to support their claim that a god exists, and they point to Bible verses... the Bible verses are claims. They may be different claims, that, were they demonstrated to be true, might support the original claim, but until such time they are unsupported claims, apparently offered as a diversion. I don't know of enough evidence... actual objectively verifiable evidence... to support claims that extraterrestrial life exists (intelligent or not). It seems that, statistically, it is almost a certainty that life started somewhere else, too. Whether that life got a foothold, and whether selection pressures and mutations produced beings with anxiety about an imagined superbeing watching them masturbate... I don't know. That seems less likely to me. That such beings evolved further, and developed such fantastic technology as vehicles that can traverse space at superluminal velocities without the relativistic side effects and arrive at Earth with a penchant to mutilate cattle and anally probe humans seems, I must admit, unlikely. Is there advanced, space-exploring life out there among the billion-billion stars? Maybe. Are they visiting Earth? That seems very improbable. It's hard for us mere humans to really comprehend the enormous distances at play in the universe. Do you realize that the moon, our nearest neighbor is about a quarter of a million miles away. It takes light (and radio signals) about a second and a half to travel that distance. The sun is over 370 times as far from Earth as the moon, and the nearest star other than the sun is over 28,000 time[sic] farther still. Recent studies suggest that planets are much more likely than previously thought, but whether planets are common which can support life that depends on liquid water as a solvent and gas exchange to fuel the business of life and take away its wastes... that has yet to be demonstrated beyond Earth. Other biological systems which depend on liquid methane or ammonia as a solvent may be possible, which would open up the range of environmental conditions which might support life. but we don't know. We haven't seen life that uses anything but water as its principal solvent. One thing that seems pretty certain is that the behavior of materials seems to be consistent across the observable universe. Carbon has the same number of valence electrons in the Anrdomeda galaxy, two and a half million light years away, as it does here. Carbon behaves chemically in the Andromeda galaxy as it does here. We are confident of this because electromagnetic emissions from stars in the Andromeda galaxy, some of which pass through gas clouds, allow us to identify the same patterns of emission and absorption of energy we observe in our labs here on Earth (adjusting for frequency shifts due to the relative velocities of the two galaxies), As far as anyone has been able to tell with any level of reliability, the "laws of nature", that is, the observed patterns of behavior of matter and energy, are the same everywhere we can see what's going on. The four fundamental forces we know about are doing the same business in the same way every place we look. All of this is to say, not that aliens are impossible, but that the chances that /we/ are being visited by extraterrestrials with vastly superior intellects and technology is very, very improbable, and it would require significant direct, empirical, objectively verifiable evidence to persuade me that we were being visited.

I don't know if I made a difference, but, sometimes, I just can't let things stand, and I have to say something.  Did I make myself out to be a crank?  Did I disrespect him?  Did I disrespect you?  I don't know. If I did, I'm sorry.  I'm not sorry I spoke up.

The Prodigal Sun Returns (?)

Well, hello. To those who know, and those who are about to know, I've been absent for a while.

Me, today.  Yeah, I know.  It's been a time.... a whole thing.

I used to blog here pretty regularly, and then I bought a house, and set up my own WordPress instance at home, and really leaned into the whole self-hosting thing... then, I got a virtual server and move my WordPress instance there... and that actually turned out to be a pain... I may try it again some time with a different provider. Who knows? ..and then I started using Facebook. It became my primary social media thing... I tried Twitter, but it never really did what I wanted, and I never really felt like I belonged there. Facebook was good for a while. It's become a cesspool. I plan to retain a presence on Facebook, but I really have learned to loathe Meta (the parent company of Facebook), and have found Facebook as an entity to be intrusive and belligerent. Facebook as software is maddening.

So, I return now, to the place where I began. Yes, I know Blogger is a Google, and Google has given up on "Don't Be Evil"... so... I don't know... Maybe I can trust it... Maybe I can't. My intention is to write offline, save locally, then paste into Blogger... So I keep my receipts, and if Blogger ends, I still have my writings.

A while back I started a new blog here to share my progress on various technology projects... my RIBBBIT65 computer, and my RMVOD server (GitHub repo here), for now. I was pleased to see that Blogger had retained all my old stuff from almost 15 years ago and beyond.

I'm on Mastodon, if you're interested, at https://mastodon.social/@TaoBear.

My plan for the time being is to write/post here, and point to here from FB and Mastodon.

To all my FB friends, I'm not going away. I'm just not going to be around as much. FB has become a very frustrating environment to me, and I've reached a point where I can do without the drama. I'll pop in now and again, but I'm not going to be one of those "always on" people.

We're Moving

After a couple years on Blogger, The Bare Bear is moving... home.

I've resisted the urge to completely revamp my old website and I'm done resisting... I heard somewhere it's futile, anyway.

The Bare Bear now lives at http://www.ursuspacificus.net/blog/?cat=4.

All new posts will appear there.

Thanks,

Paul

File sharing. Oooh. Scary.

So, the RIAA still thinks it has a good idea on its hands. Well... we all fall victim to our delusions from time to time, I suppose.

This editorial in the LA Times draws an important line of distinction between, say, downloading MP3s of the songs from an album without paying for them, and just pinching the CD from 666Buy.

A major difference is that the "record company" still has the music after you download a copy. You have not reduced the inventory of the record company or the store. You have not reduced the availability of an intrinsically scarce resource. You MAY have reduced the demand for an artificially scarce product.

I would go a step further. File-sharing technology, such as BitTorrent, is a tremendous enabler for the Free and OpenSource Software community, and other legitimate online communities. There are countless legitimate uses for BitTorrent, et al.

The RIAA, and its ilk are ramming the demonization of file-sharing IN GENERAL down the throats of lay people who have no personal stake in the issue, but watch the TV news and vote.

I do think it's kinda funny, tho, that the US Government is all about this "free trade" thing... yet they continue to allow the RIAA to conduct its witchhunt and propaganda campaign against what might be the freeest trade of all. Funny in a sad kind of way... It would be funnier if I could watch it from a safe distance, say, the moon.