End-Times Beliefs Unlikely to End

Archeologists working in the Guatemalan rainforest have discovered an ancient mural room evidently used by Mayan scientists, on which extensive calendrical calculations had been written.  The newly discovered instances of Mayan timekeeping are older than earlier calendars recovered from ruins of the civilization – the ones that notoriously end after the thirteenth baktun, or four hundred year cycle, and that convince some New Agey people that the world is scheduled to end seven months and nine days from now, on December 21^st, 2012.

Those expectations are ostensibly undercut by the reporting on this new discovery of what you might think of as a beta version of the super-long Mayan calendar.  When the coverage of this story proves not to change anything, though, I think it will convey a worthwhile lesson about nature of people’s beliefs.  The longer false information is reinforced, the stronger the eventual revelation needs to be to push people to the breaking point of abandoning irrational ideas.

This Mayan calendar speculation has been going on for so long that there are certainly people out there who accept its credence even though they know nothing about the context of Mayan timekeeping, or even about the Mayan civilization in general.  It’s common knowledge, or rather common bullshit, to the extent that it’s been used without explanation in recent ad campaigns.  Of course, that same fact indicates that people are immune to the reference.  By and large, they either reject it out of hand without having to argue the point anymore, or they accept it but have accepted it for so long that waiting for the end of days has become about as engaging as waiting for one’s number to be called at the DMV.

People can become absolutely committed to the craziest beliefs just by virtue of proximity and repetition.  As somebody who’s been prone to a good deal of mythological thinking and esotericism myself, I don’t rush to judge the so-called Mayan calendar prophecy as crazy or stupid, but it is pretty well divorced from anything that could be construed as objective fact.  Speculation isn’t an intellectual crime, per se, just as long as you recognize that you’re speculating and that it won’t take much additional evidence to discount your ideas altogether.

That’s what a lot of people don’t understand, and it is a serious problem for the entire belief structure and process of rationality in the minds of some people who are otherwise capable of great intelligence.  I’m certain that some such people still think that the world might end on the winter solstice, and I’m equally certain that the mere fact that their sole piece of evidence for that has been directly refuted by the same 3000 year-old dead civilization that had been the source of it in the first place.

Breaking points are by their very nature hard things to reach on one’s own, and much harder to bring about in others.  That’s what makes them either so damaging or so satisfying, depending on the outcome.  That’s also why they ought to be confined to matters of principle or behavior or ideology, and not factual information.  It is an unfortunate complication to rational dialogue when the breaking point for one’s genuine understanding is pushed back by the fact that he insists on stubbornly clinging to beliefs that were based on pure speculation in absence of the factual data that is to become available later.

In this sense, I’m looking forward to a sort of meta breaking point in social psychological trends, one that encourages people to dispense with their need for a breaking point in issues of pure fact.  Fact, theory, speculation, and opinion all need to be relegated to their own spheres.  If any significant number of people persist in conflating those categories so much that they believe that recurrent speculation is knowledge, it is that much more difficult for the public to have effective discussions about opinions that can’t be outright disproven but can – and should – be broken.

The Best of Traits

I've mentioned Cracked.com on this blog once before. I've been reading it regularly in recent months, because I like to have some of the information I acquire couched in humor. The funny thing is that if I cut all entertainment out of my life, I would still seek out information in equal measure, but I would find the act of gratifying my curiosity to be something of a tedious slog to try to keep up with the demands of my brain for an undefined purpose.

And that strange observation ties directly into the topic of a recent Cracked article: 5 Unexpected Downsides of High Intelligence. Now, I don't know how intelligent I am. I often feel that my intellect has been diminishing steadily since adolescence. But at the same time, I know that I have demonstrated a tendency to underestimate my competence at learning new tasks and succeeding at carrying them out. So I like to think that the Dunning-Kruger effect influences my own assessment of my intelligence, as well. But then, even allowing myself to entertain the idea that I might be smart throws me into an entirely different series of personal guilt trips about the threat of arrogance. I'd like to believe that there's an upside to all of this neurotic over-analysis.

I think, however, that virtually everyone with intelligence enough to read an information-based humor website tends to take observations about negative traits associated with intelligence as comforting suggestions that they might be able to allot themselves a small measure of praise for above average cognitive ability as a way of alleviating their worries about bad habits and unhappiness.

Regardless of the particulars, and regardless of who gets to include themselves in that category, it does seem to clearly be the case that intelligent people have a lot of problems. The above article makes mention of a greater degree of emotional instability, dishonesty, self-destructive behavior, a higher incidence of depression, and, significantly, a lesser likelihood of reproducing. It makes me sad to think of these various correlations, but it's not because of the effects on individuals, and not because I think the observations may apply to me.

What upsets me is the sense that these tendencies make intelligence seem unappealing and evolutionarily disadvantageous. It upsets me to think that there is a definite gulf between intelligence, which I believe is an objectively good feature in any given human being, and a multitude of other features that are desirable and useful. But - and again, I may be privileging one side of the topic - I think intelligence is perhaps the single most worthwhile attribute a person could hope to have. It's not fair that it should require such a terrific sacrifice in the way of happiness and health. And it doesn't have to. It seems to me that intelligence, by its very nature, should allow its possessors to learn how to overcome its negative side-effects.

So I'm looking for that as a breaking point - a time when the most intellectually astute among us stop letting our best characteristics impact us in markedly negative ways. And this goes equally for anyone whose courage leads them to reckless bravado, or whose strength leads them to over-exertion and the early breakdown of their bodies. But again, intelligence is unique in that it should contain its own safeguards against its ill-effects. And if a person cannot use his intelligence to compensate for what might destroy him or keep him at the outer edge of the gene pool, he is not using it to its full effect.

Don't Look Now, Because You're Completely Blind

This editorial stunningly took its place at the very top of the environmental news on Google yesterday. It is that lovely sort of commentary that infuriates me with every single paragraph of opinionated bullshit and abject disregard for reason. I can’t even write a satisfying general rebuttal to the entire piece, so I’ll quote it and go point by point.