More on the African plains ape

I'm reading Misbelief, by social psychologist Daniel Ariely.* As bizarre conspiracy theories blew up on the Internet during the Covid-19 pandemic, many of them placed Ariely at the center of the global plot by Bill Gates, George Soros and the Illuminati to manufacture a fake pandemic and fake vaccines so they could inject people with microchips, damage their brains by making them wear masks to cut off the oxygen supply to the brain, and impose a dictatorial one world government. Or something like that. 

Ariely sets out to explain how people come to fervently hold such insane beliefs. He relies rather to facilely on those notorious social science experiments in which a small number of U.S. college students are subjected to weirdly structured situations, which then get generalized to all humans under circumstances which may superficially resemble the experimental conditions. Most of the time, attempts to replicate these fail. However, these are not the only grist for his mill and the broad story he tells is credible.

Essentially, the cognitive apparatus we inherit from the Pleistocene savanna doesn't work properly in the modern age. In fact it hasn't worked well ever since the neolithic revolution, as you will know if you've been reading the Bible along with me. Powerful elites and greedy tricksters have been manipulating people's beliefs for as long as we've had he written record to know about it, and people have been fooling themselves just as eagerly. But the problem has just gotten worse as the social world becomes more complicated, technology becomes more powerful, and the human impact on the planet threatens catastrophe. Acquiring the basic scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills to maintain a strong grasp on reality in the present environment is the privilege of a minority.

So, in coming posts, I'll go into a few specifics of how the cerebral cortex can lead us astray, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

 

*Ironically -- I suppose that's the word since he specializes in the study of dishonesty -- Ariely has been accused of scientific fraud. I acknowledge this because a reader may have heard of it. One case appears to be simply an inadvertent inaccurate presentation of a statistical analysis, that didn't really affect the conclusions. (That happened to me once, I just published a correction.) Another was the old story of attaching his name to a paper a senior author, completely unwitting that the post docs had fudged the data. The third is a rather murky story about some insurance data that the company claimed, years after the fact, that it had not in fact provided. In any case none of this should affect our evaluation of the book.

Wednesday Bible Study: More of the same

I would skip Chapter 29, since it's mostly just a restatement of the pervasive theme of the siege of Jerusalem, the kingdom falling on hard times, and then being restored. However, just to demonstrate that people take this stuff to mean whatever they want it to, Joseph Smith claimed that verses 11 through 14 prophesy the Book of Mormon, which he supposedly discovered on gold plates that only he could read, and which then conveniently disappeared.

Two notes: Ariel is a name for Jerusalem, not Shakespeare's sprite or The Little Mermaid. 

Verse 22 is puzzling to Biblical scholars, because there is no event in Genesis that corresponds to the "redemption" of Abraham. However, there is such an event in the Book of Jubilees,  an apocryphal text written around 160 BC, which recounts Genesis with a great deal of added material. It also explains the mystery of where Cain got his wife by saying she was actually his sister. Ditto with Seth. I guess that would have to be the answer. Anyway, all that suggests that this is a later interpolation.

29 Woe to you, Ariel, Ariel,
    the city where David settled!
Add year to year
    and let your cycle of festivals go on.
² Yet I will besiege Ariel;
    she will mourn and lament,
    she will be to me like an altar hearth.^[a]
3 I will encamp against you on all sides;
    I will encircle you with towers
    and set up my siege works against you.
⁴ Brought low, you will speak from the ground;
    your speech will mumble out of the dust.
Your voice will come ghostlike from the earth;
    out of the dust your speech will whisper.

⁵ But your many enemies will become like fine dust,
    the ruthless hordes like blown chaff.
Suddenly, in an instant,
⁶     the Lord Almighty will come
with thunder and earthquake and great noise,
    with windstorm and tempest and flames of a devouring fire.
⁷ Then the hordes of all the nations that fight against Ariel,
    that attack her and her fortress and besiege her,
will be as it is with a dream,
    with a vision in the night—
⁸ as when a hungry person dreams of eating,
    but awakens hungry still;
as when a thirsty person dreams of drinking,
    but awakens faint and thirsty still.
So will it be with the hordes of all the nations
    that fight against Mount Zion.

⁹ Be stunned and amazed,
    blind yourselves and be sightless;
be drunk, but not from wine,
    stagger, but not from beer.
¹⁰ The Lord has brought over you a deep sleep:
    He has sealed your eyes (the prophets);
    he has covered your heads (the seers).

¹¹ For you this whole vision is nothing but words sealed in a scroll. And if you give the scroll to someone who can read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I can’t; it is sealed.” ¹² Or if you give the scroll to someone who cannot read, and say, “Read this, please,” they will answer, “I don’t know how to read.”

¹³ The Lord says:

“These people come near to me with their mouth
    and honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
    is based on merely human rules they have been taught.^[b]
14 Therefore once more I will astound these people
    with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
    the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish.”
¹⁵ Woe to those who go to great depths
    to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
    “Who sees us? Who will know?”
¹⁶ You turn things upside down,
    as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
    “You did not make me”?
Can the pot say to the potter,
    “You know nothing”?

¹⁷ In a very short time, will not Lebanon be turned into a fertile field
    and the fertile field seem like a forest?
¹⁸ In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll,
    and out of gloom and darkness
    the eyes of the blind will see.
¹⁹ Once more the humble will rejoice in the Lord;
    the needy will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.
²⁰ The ruthless will vanish,
    the mockers will disappear,
    and all who have an eye for evil will be cut down—
²¹ those who with a word make someone out to be guilty,
    who ensnare the defender in court
    and with false testimony deprive the innocent of justice.

²² Therefore this is what the Lord, who redeemed Abraham, says to the descendants of Jacob:

“No longer will Jacob be ashamed;
    no longer will their faces grow pale.
²³ When they see among them their children,
    the work of my hands,
they will keep my name holy;
    they will acknowledge the holiness of the Holy One of Jacob,
    and will stand in awe of the God of Israel.
²⁴ Those who are wayward in spirit will gain understanding;
    those who complain will accept instruction.”

Footnotes

1. Isaiah 29:2 The Hebrew for altar hearth sounds like the Hebrew for Ariel.
2. Isaiah 29:13 Hebrew; Septuagint They worship me in vain; / their teachings are merely human rules