Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

The amount and understanding of evidence goes up as the level of risk from the claim goes up. If it requires so much evidence just to put a good amount of your money down, imagine how much evidence it would take to believe someone about an eternal soul and eternal damnation. So I’m sorry, but as level of risk involved with being wrong about something increases, the amount and accuracy required of the evidence also increases. Pascal had his wager backwards.

If you’re going to risk your eternal soul, eternal suffering eternal magic man in the sky ass kissing… then you should require the as close to absolute proof as possible. Unfortunately the more you get into definitions for a creator, the farther you get from reasonable evidence.

Let’s say for some reason you’re playing poker and for some reason you put not only all the money you have and all the money from selling your assets on the table for this one hand, you also will end up owing a bookie your life or $10 million. You have no idea what is in your hand, and no idea what is in anyone elses hands. One of the people put all in, if you put all in you’re risking your life and everything you have, for the chance to at least double your money. Given that you have no evidence at all that you will win or even have a chance to win, do you go all in? Probably not. However if you had four kings the decision might be a little more difficult because the chances that someone can beat that hand is extremely low. There is evidence that shows that getting a getting four of a kind are extremely low. Let alone that even if someone else has four of a kind, they still won’t likely beat four kings. I think the decision would be difficult, but the odds of you losing a hand in a fair game with four kings is lower than the chances you’ll die in a car crash. You don’t base your evidence on that someone just said that the odds are extremely good, you base you evidence on what can be mathematically proven, and though you’re playing the odds, in the case of four kings, your odds are almost sure, as close as 99.9%. So: if you’re putting your own life on the line, you don’t trust anyone, you make sure you understand the risks completely and make sure the evidence is as accurate and sure as possible.

Let’s say you’re looking for something that has a moderate value, you would probably require moderate evidence. Say you’re asking your nerd buddy whether you should install Linux or not. Now if your friend is lying is to you, this will cause some minor irritation so instead of no evidence, you should ask for at least some kind of evidence. So your friend goes on and on about how awesome Linux is and how some versions are easier for newbs and you can even play most Windows games easily in Linux… blah, blah, blah. You take him at his word because you trust him. I think that with this level of importance, trust is a perfectly decent level of evidence. Because: 1) if your friend is lying, it does little harm, maybe a day of wasted time and 2) your friend is usually right when it comes to computers. Anyway: trust is only a good enough form of evidence if the trust in the claim will likely only cause a little bit of harm.

The burden of proof is essentially the responsibility of the party that claims something to be true to provide the evidence that led to that conclusion. It is also often said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think we can give a quick judgment as to whether the evidence satisfies the requirement by just evaluating how much the claim is useful to us.

On the low value end the burden and evidence requirements are almost unnecessary. If some one comes up to you and tells you that they had a tuna sandwich for lunch, you wouldn’t require evidence of any kind. Why not? Because it’s not important or useful. Even if the person were lying, it doesn’t affect you at all. Maybe a tiny bit if just the mention of the sandwich gives you a little craving for one. The point is: if the claim has little to no use to you, you require little to no evidence.

If someone comes up to you and says I don’t believe in unicorns, it doesn’t matter at all to you because whether the person believes in a mythological creature or not doesn’t affect your life. It affects it even less of the person doesn’t believe. It requires no evidence at all to say that you don’t hold a claim. The thing is that there are those that will try to claim that the lack of belief in a certain god (the one they irrationally believe in), causes harm and therefore should be fixed. The claim that no belief in something causes harm is a positive claim that requires evidence, while just saying that you don’t believe somethings requires no evidence.

Of course in the end, I have no problems and don’t demand any evidence of those that keep their beliefs to themselves. If I go around telling people they should believe in any god, you’d be damned sure that I’m going to be bringing in evidence and logic to the conversation, just as I demand of those that go around telling me that I need to believe in a god.

Why did humanity even create god? This is not a rational post, this is purely speculative. I just thought I’d get that out of the way before you waste your time if you were looking for something solid. I will cite and reference some things, but they are not good references. Again, if you’re looking for something useful in anything other than philosophy, don’t waste your time here.

Early in humanity, we asked questions, probably because wanted to know how to avoid things we didn’t like. When you know that fire hurts, you can avoid getting hurt… at least by fire. So what happened when we didn’t know the answer to things? Apparently we just started making shit up. The earlier religions were based around multiple gods, a god for wind, fire, storms… a god for pretty much everything, eventually even a god for the gods.

So what is the point of this speculation? I think that gods filled the void of the unknown in order to focus on more important things… I mean that knowing how lightning works isn’t that useful to people that need to hunt mammoths for food, however knowing that lightning comes from clouds could be a useful way to avoid getting killed by lightning.

Nowadays god is useless. We don’t need a god to explain the need for morality because we can conceptualize, understand and enforce it ourselves. We don’t need a god to explain nature because we have science. So what do we need a god for? Death. That scary word that almost everyone is afraid of. We have a short existence and most of us don’t want it to end. But believing that we exist for eternity does little to benefit anyone.

Fear of eternal punishment doesn’t stop people from doing bad things and hope for eternal rewards doesn’t make people do good things. So why do we still bring up god as an answer?

Whenever the U.S. government saw something that people can’t live without get out of hand, people in the government stepped in on behalf of the people. Water, electricity and phones are all good examples… of course gas is a bad example. Our society cannot survive without the water that pumps into your houses and gets flushed away or the electricity that keeps your water heater, fridge, air conditioning and heat on… well some people can survive but the amount of people that this country supports could not be supplied with potable water without the government regulated system. Since people cannot live without water, it would be profitable to keep raising prices and without someone to speak out for the people, we all (well all us not wealthy people), would be suffering for people to just make a profit.

What does this have to do with health care? Well we have all been living much longer than we would have without our medical advances, many people that contribute to society would be dead by 30, and hardly any of them surviving to 60. With this increased age, we are all experiencing the side effects of living longer by showing many health problems that just wouldn’t there if you were dead by now. The short answer is that we need health care to live, just as we need potable water and electricity. Should we not as a people be demanding that like other basic needs, the need to live should have advocates and regulations to ensure that all of us can have it?
Social programs do not a socialist empire make. Just because a nation has social programs, it doesn’t mean that the country is socialist. Just like when a country has capitalistic programs it doesn’t make the country capitalistic. The problem is that we are all a part of this society, this society that makes us all interdependent on each other in so many complex ways. So let’s try to think of it in basic terms: we do not all hunt for food for ourselves, we do not all farm for ourselves, we do not all fetch water for ourselves and we do not all build our own houses. That means we are all dependent on other people to play their part in our society, that also means that other people are dependent on you. If you want to reap the rewards of our society, then you should be expected to reward others as well.  The everyone can help themselves attitude is not what built our society to this point, it only hurts society… and by proxy, you. Unless you’re very rich.

The truth is that we all need to help each other so that other people can help us. When a factory worker gets injured, we lose that piece of society until they come back to work. If that factory worker can’t afford to get better in order to get back to work, then we lose that piece of society permanently. We lose that person’s ability to spend money, the products that person was working on… pretty much everything that person was contributing to society. Let’s say the cost to get that person back is a $50,000 surgery… sounds like a lot, but this person was making $40,000 a year. Now the factory worker wouldn’t be able to pay the medical bill straight up, but his contributions to society are about the same as his wages, so he will pay society back in less than two years… if he/she can work. So I see a one time surgery of $50,000 a bargain in the long term.

What is the greatest difference between knowing something and thinking something? What is the difference between opinion and reality? What is the difference between a proposition and a theory? What is sufficient evidence? Often when we as humans use these terms, we have a very different meaning in mind than the scientific community. Our ideas of these terms are even very different than you’d find in legal documents. But the problem is not that people’s definitions and conceptualization of these terms are so different than that of professionals, the problem is of scope.

Knowing Vs. Thinking

On a personal level knowing something and thinking something are the same: you think what you know and you know what you think. The problem is that we are not isolated to ourselves because we as humans have discovered that by communicating with, learning from and teaching others, we can rapidly become more technologically advanced and protect ourselves. When another person relies on your knowledge or you’re relying on the knowledge of someone else, knowing something and having an opinion starts to become more different the more people that are involved: if you’re talking to just one person, you may not need to have verified your opinion at all, but when you’re speaking to a large group of people then it becomes very important to have verified your opinion. The context is equally important to the amount of people you’re talking to. If it’s well understood that you’re just expressing your opinion, then it isn’t very important to verify it, however if you’re taken as an authority on what you’re talking about, then it’s very important that you verify your opinion.

So when can you say that you “know” something? You should only say that you know something after you can demonstrate predictions, show the facts that back up your opinion and have shown that someone other than yourself can verify it for themselves. Also after both you and others have attempted to discover an alternate explanation for the predictions.

Propositions Vs. Theory

The difference between propositions and scientific theories is the same as the difference between the common use of the word theory and and scientific theories. The common use of the word theory is used as a possible concept of how something works… a proposition if you will. While a scientific theory uses gathered facts and is used to explain why those facts happened, the theory is heavily tested against other possible explanations as well as predicting the cause of the facts as well as how the things will happen. A proposition is like an untested theory, while a scientific theory is an accurate representation of reality.

The reason why we bother with scientific theories is so that we can fix things, make things better and avoid bad things. So the next time you hear someone say, “it’s only a theory” let them know how wrong they are… unless they’re referring to the Layman’s definition of theory.

Sufficient Evidence

Some people say that the idea of sufficient evidence is a constantly moving goal post that can never be attained. So what’s the point? The point is that not only do you need to have evidence for your ideas, you also have to be able to connect that evidence to a theory. Like the theory of gravity. No one can provide absolute proof that everything falls to the Earth, I mean have you tested everything on the planet? I didn’t think so. Have you witnessed the beginning of gravity? I didn’t think so. So what gives you confidence in this scientific theory? Evidence. Not just hearsay.

You can test out the theory of gravity yourself: measure some spot a specific distance from the ground… say 15 feet from a roof, and release a somewhat dense object that will encounter little resistance from other forces… like a rock. Then release the rock and time how long it takes to reach the ground. Anyone who has a mild understanding of gravity will be able to tell you how much time it will take for the rock to hit the ground, because the theory provides predictions. Some one with a better understanding of gravity will be able to tell you how fast the rock will be going when it hits as well as it’s acceleration. Without even having to watch your specific experiment. This is known as verifiable and demonstrable evidence. If you want to challenge the theory, you must first show where the theory is wrong and be able to demonstrate your evidence. So to challenge the theory you need to have a good understanding of the theory.

Bring It All Together

The purpose of all this is not to sound smart, isolate the uneducated masses or to trick people into believing things that are false. The purpose is to provide everyone a better understanding of reality. The purpose is to prevent people from just saying things that sound like they make sense. Everyone that is interested can research and test out any scientific theory. If you can’t understand a concept, do not worry, there are authorities that you can question. I have yet to meet a person that is not enthusiastic to find people genuinely interested in increasing their understanding of the field they are researching.

TLDR: The purpose of evidence is to ensure that we all have the most accurate understanding of reality that is currently possible.

Objective morality is a moral code of conduct that has consequences that exist outside the known universe and that can be applied the same to all people in all circumstances. The Ten Commandments are and example of what is intended to be objective morality. “Thou shalt not murder” is an example of something that most people will agree is always wrong, however there are several problems with this that don’t include the times the god of the bible told his followers to murder people. What is murder? Murder is killing someone without the need to kill them, killing in self-defense is not considered murder, killing in war is not considered murder but killing someone just because he said something mean to you is considered murder.

Let’s continue with the subject of murder and break it down to it’s moral basics. Defining the word murder in a way that separates it from other forms of killing is, in its most basic form, creating a moral standard around killing. Killing is the action, the reasons to kill are the morals. So saying that killing is ok in some circumstances but not in other circumstances is showing that the moral code is not objective, but subjective based around the circumstances. To clarify: if justification is allowed around the reasons one kills, then the action is not an objective moral.

Of course this line of reasoning is based around the concept that an action in itself is not moral or immoral. This concept derives itself from reasoning: when one discusses what is moral, one discusses the action itself very little and discusses the consequences of the action in great detail. This means that the action has very little to do with the moral decision, only the consequences. Of course the action is very important because, without the action, there can be no consequences. So in the commandment about murder, the morality is not the action of killing, it’s the justification for killing.

Now for the evidence. There is no evidence that there is any objective codes of conduct. None. Where do people get the Ten Commandments from then? From a bible written by men. Yes, the bible was written by men and not by a god. Men claim that the moral “laws” came from god, but the same commandments existed long before the bible came around, giving evidence that the god of the bible is either a plagiarist or the men that wrote the bible were. Not to mention there is no one coming back from the afterlife to let everyone know that a god did in fact give men a set of moral codes that have consequences after death. There is evidence that men wrote all the books of god, however there is no evidence that god had anything to with the books. The inaccuracies, contradictions, concepts in defiance with the known world and loss of material only serve as evidence that the books are not from a god, but from men.

Now a much easier question: how can one who blindly follows a set of morals without regard to situations, call themselves moral? In short: they can’t. They in themselves are acting without a moral conscience, they are acting out a script that was written for them. If god did tell them to always or never do a set of actions and those people acted without consideration of the consequences of those actions or inaction, then they themselves are not a morally conscious being. Those who act without respect to the consequences to their actions are immoral. So the question of their morality falls not to how they behave, but to whether or not it’s moral to blindly follow the rules of authority. In the case of the people who lied to Nazi Jew hunters, I don’t think that anyone would say that blindly following the authority of the Nazi’s would’ve been the good thing to do. So we can see that blindly following authority is not always good. So what makes following rules supposedly given by a god any different than rules given by other authorities? The answer is: blindly following authority means that you are acting immorally.

So how does one, despite the overwhelming lack of evidence, declare that objective morality exists? On faith. Because the “objective” morals themselves are subjective, there is no evidence that the morals come from some other source than humans and blindly following instructions is amoral: objective morality does not exist.

Hate, ignorance and hypocrisy… I’ll just label this as stupidity.  So how does one fight such a powerful foe? How does one defeat such a resilient enemy? If you don’t think stupidity is a prevalent and dire disaster in a bottle, just try to talk to some people, watch TV and/or listen to the radio. There are people that listen and believe these public personalities just because they’ve been brought up to never question certain things. People will fight you hand, tooth and nail defending the most ridiculous ideas spawned from mere speculation and confirmation bias just because it’s said with confidence.

How does anyone fight confidence? The biggest problem is that these radio personalities are bluffing… bluffing that they know what their talking about, bluffing that the majority of people will call it out and bluffing with a big bank against small fries. Of course they can fail many hands while the greater public goes all in and loses. You want change? You want things to stay the same? You want us all to jump into a time machine to find a long lost past that only truly existed in your diluted memories from infancy? Well it takes more than “I want the country the way it was when I was growing up” and other appeals to emotion. It takes reason well founded on the best evidence available, obtained without a course of action derived before researching.

Of course I’ve said nothing to help this problem. Seeing the world for what it is, throughout all known history… we as a human race have come far, so I have no doubt that we won’t reach the lofty goal of enlightenment, reason and peace one day… I just think we all can speed it up a little. Question authority. That is all it really takes… well that and listening.

Of course merely questioning authority isn’t enough just as that, there are some guidelines. Question all authority, it’s not enough to question the authorities you don’t agree with, the most dangerous authority is the authority you don’t question. Remember authorities should be authorities because they know what they’re talking about. Questioning someone who knows what they’re talking about should never be a problem (unless they have clearly answered the question several times), they should be able to explain it… if they can’t, then they’re not an authority worth shit. Not only should any trustworthy authority be able to explain their reasoning, they should be able to provide examples and in most cases cite research and/or facts that support their conclusions. I’ve seen too many times where some jackass will say they’ve “done the research” but fail to provide any kind of reasonable source for that “research” and more pathetically: fail to provide the points of data that lead them to that conclusion.

You don’t have to be rude, you don’t have to be nice, you don’t have to be neutral… you just have to be there. Don’t try to fight stupidity with fire, fight it with questions. There isn’t a liar around that can clearly explain their reasoning through many questions and there isn’t a question that an authority shouldn’t be able to clearly explain.

First of all, guns shouldn’t be smoking. Second of all there have been really bad snow storms that pretty much prove that global warming is a fraud concocted by aliens to try and terraform our planet by removing “greenhouse” gasses from the atmosphere because it’s poison to the aliens.

It’s so obvious it’s irritating that more people don’t see it! Let me spell it out to you:
10) It’s cold and snowing really bad so global warming is a fraud
9) Global Warming being a fraud means that thousands of scientists are lying
Since scientists wouldn’t just lie, it means that someone is controlling them
7) The only people powerful enough to control scientists are aliens, corporations or the shadow government
6) Corporations will have to innovate and spend time and money to adapt to green technology so they wouldn’t do it
5) The shadow government doesn’t need scientists to control things because they just kill people
4) So aliens are only ones with the means and motivation to create such a huge fraud
3) Aliens want to conquer other planets but they’re not just attacking us so they need to do something first
2) Since they’re more advanced, the only thing they’d need to do is terraform our planet
1) And since Global Warming is a hoax, “greenhouse gasses” must be poison to them

Since all the points are pretty steadfast after my first point, I’ll just offer up my evidence for why global warming is a hoax: It’s cold right now and snowing a lot. It’s like when you’re on trial accused of being a serial killer, you can just say, “If I was a serial killer, then why aren’t I killing right now?” Because that is the best evidence right?