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.

T - 366

According to a popular meme, we have one year to go. The world will end exactly one year from now, just a little after the winter solstice of 2012 (also known as 21.12.2012). The Mayan said so, the Internet says so and even Ronald Emmerich, the great documentary director said so. So who are we disagree?

The problem is to begin with, that the Mayan never said that the world will end. All they said is that their 4Th era will end and the 5Th one will begin. They actually see it as a cause for celebration, in very much the same way that we saw the beginning of the new millennium as an opportunity to party and replace our IT equipment.

Update: Actually some say that the end of an era is the end of the world, which means that the Mayan civilization is similar to the Western civilization in one respect: we can't seem to be able to agree on anything.

Some epocalyptians would say "Yeah, but look at what happened in 2011. Natural disasters, revolutions, economic collapse, the death of Steven Jobs". I agree, it was quite an eventful year, but how is that related in any way to the concept of "the end of the world"? Well, It isn't. Economic hardship always causes political unrest and natural disasters happen frequently at various magnitudes in various locations around the world. The sad truth is that the only difference this time was that it happened in one of the most developed countries in the world, so we got live video streams.

I can predict what's going to happen in 2012: some people will die, but more will be born. Some leaders will get elected and reelected, others will be lose their positions. Some people will still struggle to get enough food to eat, others will have to struggle with the choice between the McLaren MP4-12C and the Ferrari 458. Many people will find the answers to all of their questions in god, while major scientific discoveries will be made. Apple will release more products that their names start with an "i".

Maybe I am wrong and the world IS going to end exactly one year from now, but I do have good news: 2012 will be 2.74% longer than 2011, so we have one more day to party.