Things I Know Now

Preface

*** DRAFT ***

In the midst of a recent existential crisis, it occurred to me that I could while away some of my remaining hours by writing a letter to my past self, that is, to the person to whom I've sometimes addressed the sentiment, "I wish I'd known then what I know now."  Of course, I cannot reach that person (absent a breakthrough in time-travel technology), but maybe there is a kindred spirit out there somewhere who would get some value out of it, even if that person isn't the former me.  So this blog/book/whatever-it-turns-out-to-be is about all of the things I wish someone had told me back in the day, things that I mostly had to figure out the hard way.

Since you don't know me as well as my past self would, and chances are I don't know you at all, let me start by introducing myself: my name is Ron.  I was born in Germany, but emigrated to the United States in the late 1960s as a young child.  I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went to college in Virginia, got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science.  I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California as an AI researcher for 12 years, then went to work for an obscure little Silicon Valley startup company called Google.  That gave me the freedom to do a bunch of stuff like traveling, making a movie, and writing this blog.

The reason I'm telling you all this is not because I want to aggrandize myself, but because of one of the first things I learned the hard way: people will sometimes tell you things that are not true.  I learned this at a summer day camp when I was about six.  One of the camp counselors told us in an offhand way that there were cars that ate other cars.  These car-nivorous vehicles were called "cadillacs" and their modus operandi was that they would swallow other cars whole, chew them up, and then spit out a part.  The camp counselor who told the story knew this to be true because, he told us, it had actually happened to him.  He was fortunate in that the cadillac decided to spit *him* out and so he lived to be able to warn others who might not be so fortunate.  Sometimes the cadillac would spit out the steering wheel, or a hubcap, and the inhabitants of the car were never seen again.

Of course this story is patently absurd, but you have to remember three things.  First, this was the early 1970s.  There was no internet.  Second I was six years old (or so, I don't recall exactly).  And third, in Germany, where I had grown up, there is (or at least was, I don't know if this is still the case) a vibrant mythology around ogres, and the German word for ogre is "menschenfresser" which literally means "man-eater" and is also the word for cannibal.  I had no reason to believe that "menschenfressers" didn't exist (my earliest memory, in fact, is having vivid nightmares about them) so I was already predisposed to believe that there were things out there that would eat me.  So why not a car?

There was another wrinkle to the story: cadillacs were not indiscriminate about the kinds of cars they devoured.  They preferred certain makes and models over others.  And their absolute favorite, as it happened, was Volkswagens, because they were cheaply built and hence easy to chew.  And, of course, my family, being recent lower-middle-class immigrants from Germany and not yet having developed an appreciation for the role that cars played in American culture, drove Volkswagens.

For two weeks I refused to ride in the family car until my father was able to find an actual Cadillac in the neighborhood and made me read the name plate and see that it was just a regular car without any apparent means to eat much of anything except gas.  (Leaded, of course.)

In retrospect, that experience scarred me for life in a way that I never realized until I started writing this.  It turned me on a dime from gullible to an extreme skeptic.  If a grown up would lie to me about predatory cars, what else might they lie to me about?  For a long time my default assumption was that everything that anybody told me was, at least potentially, a lie, and I wasn't shy about saying so.  Needless to say, that approach did not serve me well.  But at the time the only alternative I could see was to continue to be a rube, and that didn't seem very attractive either.

Of course, just because people will sometimes lie to you doesn't mean that they will alway do so.  In fact, most of the time people will tell you the truth, or at least what they believe in good faith to be the truth, or something that turns out to be a reasonable facsimile of the truth.  The story I have just told you about my experience at summer camp, for example, could be a lie.  I might have made it up out of whole cloth.  I didn't.  I'm not that creative.  But even if I didn't make it up, I could just be mistaken.  This happened almost fifty years ago, so my memory of the events could be wrong, especially in some of the details.

In this particular case it doesn't really matter.  The point is that, at least in German and American cultures, adults tell tall tales to children, and sometimes children believe them, so even if I'm outright fabricating the details of my particular experience, it makes no difference.

Here is a second story.  This one is also true.  When I was about 12, my parents again sent me to summer camp, but this time it was not a day camp.  It was a two-week-long sleepover camp, and it was run by the YMCA, the Young Men's Christian Association.  And being in the South, they took the C part of the acronym very seriously.

Now, my parents were secular Jews, and I still had not outgrown my cadillac-induced skepticism of all things I could not directly observe with my own eyes.  I had lived a very sheltered life with respect to religious indoctrination.  I was aware that the other children in the neighborhood couldn't play on Sunday mornings because they had to go to this thing called "church", but I had only the vaguest notion of what went on there.  So I was uniquely unprepared to spend two weeks being relentlessly proselytized by Southern Baptists.

To make a long and painful story short I will skip over the details and just tell you that after ten days I had gotten sick and tired of being teased, bullied, and ostracized, and so I decided to accept Jesus into my life.  It was a transformative experience.  For the first time ever I was accepted as part of a tribe.  It felt wonderful, like nothing I had ever experienced before or since.  I felt a sense of euphoria that to this day I describe un-ironically as feeling the Presence of the Holy Spirit.    It is a feeling I cannot render into words.  You have to experience it to know what it is like.

I returned home and told my parents the Good News and my father, to his credit, did not freak out.  Instead, he sat me down with a Bible and pointed me to some of the more interesting parts.  My father, it turned out, was quite the Biblical scholar.  He had grown up in Israel, and studying the Torah is a standard part of every child's education there.  It didn't take long for my new-found faith to crumble before an onslaught of apparent contradictions and utter nonsense, and once again I was a lonely (and, in retrospect, rather obnoxious) skeptic.

Then I noticed something odd.  It had taken me just a few days of Bible study to go from full-on believer to hard-core skeptic.  And yet I was surrounded by people who were reading the same text but continued to believe it (or at least they professed to believe it).  How was that possible?  It just seemed so *obvious* to me that the Bible could not *possibly* be the work of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving God.  But it was obviously not obvious to *them*.  Why?  The only explanation I could come up with (and that many in the secular community still subscribe to) was that they were stupid.  And yet they didn't seem to be stupid.  Many of them were my peers in advanced math and science classes, and they seemed pretty smart.  Many of them actually seemed to be able to navigate the world better than I could.  Maybe there was something to this religion thing after all?

I set out trying to reconcile this apparent contradiction, and that sent me down into a deep, deep rabbit hole, the insides of which I am still exploring today.  But at the heart of the rabbit hole is one fundamental question: how do you decide who to trust?  And I'm not referring here just to people you actually meet, but also to the authors of books and blog posts.  The vast majority of the information that you will have access to in your life will be mediated in one way or another by other people, so you have no choice but to face this question and answer it for yourself one way or another.

One possible answer to this question, the extreme-skeptic's answer, is to trust no one, to not believe anything that you have not verified with your own senses.  But this is not a great strategy for three reasons.  First, by completely giving up on trust you may be cutting yourself off from a very valuable resource.  If there are trustworthy people, and if you can figure out how to reliably identify them, then you can save yourself an enormous amount of effort by leveraging their work and experience.  Second, your senses are not 100% trustworthy.  There are, for examples, sensory illusions where you think you see (or hear or feel) something that isn't actually there.  And third, if you really don't trust anyone, you'll end up being very lonely, and that sucks.  So being able to reliably identify trustworthy people is a very valuable skill, one that is worth putting some effort into cultivating.

Helping you develop this skill will be the central project of this blog.  Fair warning: it will be a long row to hoe.  What I'm writing here is the product of forty years of study, thought, and attempts to render some of these ideas into words, which attempts to date appear to have largely failed (or at least failed to reach a substantial audience).  This is one reason I'm writing this.  Maybe by going back to the beginning, I can finally get it right this time.

Let me give you a little preview of what is to come.  The project before us is to figure out who is worthy of trust, which raises an obvious and seemingly insurmountable problem: why should you trust *me* to tell you the truth about this?  Maybe this blog is itself an elaborate con.  How can you *ever* escape this doubt?  Surely at some point you have to make a leap of faith and accept some foundational assumption, a "root of trust", in which to ground your reasoning?

Well, no, it turns out that you don't.  Let me illustrate this with an example: Look around you (or, if you are blind, feel around you) and you will see (or feel) a world full of *things* -- tables, chairs, cars, computers, cats, cows, and other humans.  Moreover, if you talk to these other humans you will find that they see (and feel) the same things you do.  If you are in a room with a bunch of humans and (say) a chair, then all of the humans will *agree* that there is a chair.  They will agree on where it is, roughly how big it is.  If someone is sitting on the chair, everyone will agree about that.

And there are other regularities you can observe in the world around you.  For example, if you see a chair, then that chair will tend to remain where you see it unless some other thing comes along and moves it.  It will also continue to be a chair.  It will not spontaneously move or wink out of existence or grow or shrink or morph into a cat.  You don't have to take my word for any of this.  If you are a normal human, you experience all of this first-hand every day of your life.

Note that the world did not have to be this way.  In fact, only part of your experience actually exhibits these kinds of regularities.  If you are a normal human then there is another part of your first-hand experience which is very different: dreams.  The objects in dreams do *not* behave with the same regularity that they do in non-dreams.  Chairs in dreams *do* move and grow and shrink and wink in and out of existence and morph into cats.

Philosophers sometimes ask the question: how can we be sure that what we call "reality" isn't itself a dream?  This question actually has an answer, but it's a little early to get into that.  For now I just want you to just consider *as a possibility* that the *reason* that our waking world exhibits the regularities that it does, the reason everyone agrees that there are chairs and cars and cats in particular places at particular times, is because there are in point of actual fact chairs and cars and cats in those places at those times, and our perceptions are an accurate reflection of that reality.

It may seem a little odd for me to hedge in this way, because it's just *obvious* that this actually *is* the correct explanation, that the reason we perceive chairs and cars and cats with properties that remain constant over time is that there really are chairs and cars and cats with properties that remain constant over time.  It turns out that it is actually *not* the correct explanation, but it will be a long time before we get to that.  For now the important thing is that we can all agree that there *could* be chairs and cars and cats (and in fact there probably are), and that no one has to take anyone's word for anything in order to reach agreement on that.

That agreement is the rock upon which we will build our church.

If that's not good enough for you let me offer some advice from Deuteronomy (18:21-22):

"And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?  When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken."

That is my favorite verse in the Bible: if a prophet makes a false prediction, it is a false prophet.  Substitute "theory" for "prophet" and you have a succinct (and poetic!) description of the scientific method.

I invite you to judge my words by that standard.