A Conspiracy Theory

I will start with a confession: I have a tendency to create elaborate worst-case-scenarios in my head. It happens when I need to confront a problem or a decision. This automatic response causes me to freeze instead of tackle the problem, and had often caused me to delay or avoid necessary actions.

But I am not the only one who creates those elaborate scenarios. Most conspiracy theories are created by people who decide to ignore Occam's Razor principle, and create unnecessarily complicated, scary and often silly scenarios in order to explain world events. As a result, we end with theories such as "JFK was killed by the FBI", or "The Mossad was responsible for 9/11", as well as a fairly recent one about how "The CIA and Israel were responsible for Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami". If you think that any of these theories were invented by me, you can google each and every one of them.

All these theories are wonderfully complex and make a lot of sense. Every detail in them can be explained and every linkage made in these theories has a purpose, in order to achieve the goal of creating an alternate reality. But what happens If the conspiracy theorist gets some of his facts wrong? He will often ignore it, or blame the media for bias or participating in the cover up. Does this kind of behavior reminds you of anything?

And then there are "predictions", on how a certain small group is working to achieve world domination or control over politicians/resources/us, and the cunning ways it's going to use. In the olden times, we would call them prophecies, but now we call them scenarios. And they are usually worst case scenarios, in which most of them we end up being ruled by either corporate or communism, and under the open eye of some kind of a high tech version of the Orwellian Big Brother. Also in many of these scenarios we end up dead or even worse: having to eat American fast food, every day for the rest of our lives.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that however improbable they are, they will always find someone to believe in them. To make things worse, they tend to spread and perpetuate themselves, often being updated over the years. The prime example for that is the The Protocols of the Elderz Of Zion, which even though was disproved and condemned on numerous occasions, is still in print and considered non-fiction by many. It was first printed more than a 100 years ago. It's almost impossible to stop them, regardless of the use of logic or actual facts. Conspiracies uses our sense that the world is intricate and we cannot possibly understand what makes it tick and moves it.

But the truth is usually simpler, in very much the same way that evolution is much simpler than creation. The truth will comply with every fact you already know and those that you will discover in the future. The truth is consistent. Conspiracy theories are none of these: they are usually complex, they will ignore facts or distort them, which makes them inconsistent. I rather find out the truth, even if it's disappointingly boring or simple, because only this way you can understand how the world works. Inventing our own theories about is at best silly and at worst dangerous.

So what's my conspiracy theory? Most conspiracy theories are made up by people who are either have no life, or prefer blaming others for their own failures. I belong to the first group.

Not magical

It's a trend now, using words like "magical", "mystical" or "god" to try and explain or describe things that are neither of these three. Sometimes it's being done for promotional purposes, like Steven Jobs' keynote speech about the iPad, when he described it as "magical". Just to make thing clear, it's really not. The iPad is just a user friendly slate with limited capabilities and a few millions lines of clever code running on it. But to be honest, no damage was done here. No one actually believes that Apple replaced the ARM processor with tiny midgets or the C++ code with fairy dust. At least I hope so.

Sometimes however, using supernatural description can be damaging. The world invested $9 billion in CERN's Large Hadron Collider, which was built in order to discover the Higgs boson. I admit that my knowledge of quantum physics is amazingly limited, but if I understand correctly, the Higgs boson is a theoretical particle which separates matter from energy and if discovered, it will be a huge step in the long journey of realizing Einstein's dream of a unified theory. This information is quite dull, so in order to create some public interest, the American physicists and Nobel prize laureate coined the term "god particle"m to raise public interest.

Ever since this nickname appeared, countless of religious types have pointed their fingers towards scientists and atheists, saying "A-ha! See? Even your precious science turns to god when it seeks answers". There were even a few books and documentaries made about how at the end of our scientific research, we will find out that god exists. In my opinion it happened because most of us know close to nothing about advanced physics, and as soon as someone mentions a concept we are more familiar with like "god", we will immediately feel safer and choose to stay in this comfort zone.

This really has to stop. The iPad is not magic, it's just very nice and fun to use. The Higgs boson is not godly, it's just a very illusive and expensive-to-find particle, which may actually not exist. "Intelligent Design" is not a scientific theory, it's just an idea built to undermine the theory of evolution. Homeopathy is not an alternative to pharmaceutical drugs, it's just pseudoscience which protects itself not by using proper experimental methodology, but by claiming that scientists are closed minded.

When a scientific theory is being suggested, it's either "failed to be rejected" or "rejected", it's never a definite "yes" or "no". This kind of uncertainty is not comfortable, but this is how the real world actually works. But at the very least, science is facing this reality. And if I'm wrong and magic and god do exist, I'm certain that science will eventually fail to reject them too.

But in the mean time, please, stop referring to science as another kind of religion or mysticism.

The future of... an attack on Iran

If Israel has nuclear weapons, why shouldn't Iran?
Most of the world assumes that Israel has a substantial amount of nuclear weapons (some estimates go as high as 400 warheads), and therefore this question is being asked. The answer is quite simple: Israel has never threatened to annihilate any other sovereign nation, not even its worst enemies. According to some sources, the only time Israel was close to using its nuclear arsenal was in late 1973, when both the Syrian and Egyptian armies invaded it and there was a real threat to the nation's existence.

There is an opinion that like it happened with China, Iran will also become more moderate and rational when they get nuclear power. I am not sure if this is a similar case, because back in the 1960s, China was mostly isolated after it severed its ties with USSR. Iran on the other hand, gets support from Russia, China, North Korea and some south American nations. As flimsy as this support is, it does reduce Iran's incentive to become more tolerant towards the West.

Should Iran be attacked?
I hope not. Wars are never a good idea and may cause instability, however the difference here is the fact that Iran already causes instability by itself as a part of their foreign policy, either by themselves or by proxies like the Hezbollah. If there will be a military attack it will to be large, in order to completely stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program: the enrichment and production facilities are scattered all over this large country, many of them fortified and underground which makes aerial bombings very difficult and mostly ineffective. The main reason for an attack is that diplomacy has failed abd sanctions have mostly failed as well, and we're close to the point when we will have to use what Clausewitz called "the other means".

If an attack happens, who should conduct it?
The country that has most to gain from an attack on Iran is obviously Israel, even if it will suffer from consequences like international protests, Iran-sponsored terror attacks and direct retaliation in the form of missiles attacks. Unfortunately Israel simply doesn't have the means: its fleet of F-16I and F-15I attack airplanes, ballistic missiles and submarines, won't be able to go through such a large-scale, long-range attack. Ideally, it should be a coalition of those who Iran threatens, meaning US, EU, Arab and Israeli forces. This obviously cannot happen, and we will need to remove Israel from this coalition. An American-European-Arab coalition was formed in 1991 against Iraq, which was a far weaker enemy, which received far less international support than Iran. My best bet will be just a coalition of the US and the EU, without official Turkish or Arab involvement.

And what if the Iranians are telling the truth, and do not develop nuclear weapons?
Ironically, that reminds me of how Israel objected to international supervision over its nuclear facility in the 1960s. If Iran has nothing to hide, why would it object so much to international supervision? The UN made it clear that nuclear research, energy production and weapon development are not internal affairs. Israel was at least honest about it and refused to sign the nonproliferation treaty. Iran did sign it but refuses to cooperate and remove suspicion. Let's face it, this behavior does not induce confidence.