Skeptic: A Dirty Word

Throughout most of my life, whenever I heard the word "skeptic" I immediately associated it with "cynic" - someone who just didn't believe in anything; someone who hated everything; thought everything was bullshit. Well, now I'm both of those things, and the descriptors that childhood me pulled out weren't actually that far from the truth. But now, when I say proudly that I'm a skeptic, I still often get looks from people that might normally indicate that I just whipped out my dick and pissed on them. What what does it really mean to call oneself a skeptic?

The word skeptic is conditional, meaning that the existence of people who call themselves skeptics is dependent on the fact that most people are not skeptical. For example, there is a not a word for people who don't believe in Santa Clause or for non-astrologers. The label exists because there is a marked difference from the rest of the population - it indicates a subset. Just like the word atheist wouldn't exist if there weren't theists, skepticism is an outlook on the world built on the credulous shoulders of lay folk. 

Now, it is worth clearing up the difference between a skeptic, a conspiracy theory, and an anti-realist, since these three are often mixed up. A skeptic is someone who values evidence, and considers it the primary basis for truth. A conspiracy theorist is someone who is paranoid and generally believes the government is covering up the truth of what's really going on. They usually talk of secret societies running the world, such as the free masons and the illuminati. They may believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, that global warming is a conspiracy, or that Barack Obama's birth story is false. An anti-realist is someone who has such a high bar for "proof" and "truth" that essentially nothing could ever be true or real to them. This leads to a view known as solipsism, which essentially makes it impossible to have a conversation with such individuals.

Being a skeptic is seen as a negative thing to many people because it implies doubt, the opposite of belief, and belief is a thing that we like. We like it so much that we think people should just believe in things all the time for whatever reason they want. We say things like "faith is a virtue", which by definition is the belief in something without--or in spite of--evidence, often to the contrary. Being a skeptic means you take up this radical view of like, wanting proof and stuff. Aliens? Sure. Where's the proof, brah? Until then, take your cryptozoology and shove it.

"So, what do you believe in?"

I could get into an argument about how the word "belief" is misleading, but it's easier to say what I don't "believe" in. Here's a nice list.

So go on, continue to lament me for having a personal relationship with reality. The truth is you all value proof more than you think.

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what so ever." - Sam Harris

The "Good Ol' Days" Are Less Good, More Ol'

Whatever your social media site of choice, you have no doubt encountered some infographic that intended to inform you how much better shit was back in the day. It probably rattled off a list of arbitrary things that were popular during that time and ended smugly with some assertion of how, because of this random shit, therefore, all shit was much mo' betta. It may have looked something like this:

But were things really better than just because that's when you happened to be a kid? There doesn't seem to be any good reason to think so. What is funny about most of the people who post things like this, is that they weren't even born until the mid-to-late 90's. I was born in 1987, do I call myself "an 80's kid" - fuck no, for two reasons: First, it's stupid and unnecessary and stupefyingly pretentious to claim to be better in anyway because you were born at a time, something need I remind you that you had zero control over. Second, because even if I were to buy into the bullshit, my life had nothing to do with the 80's. I GREW UP in the 90's. So, yes, I do remember all the stupid bullshit that these kids pretend to get nostalgic about. Were there cool things in the 90's? Sure, but it's really easy to talk about the few shows you miss without remembering how much everything else sucked. This is a matter of something known as confirmation bias. It amounts to remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. So if we want to paint a pretty picture of the 90's, we write about all the shit that we miss (which, we actually still have access to, thanks to the fucking future technology developed post-90's, you unthankful little shitbags), and we forget about all the shit we don't miss, such as this:

So when you post stupid shit like this,

probably FROM an iphone you spoiled little brat, then go trade it in and complain that your parents didn't get you a little piece-of-shit, black-and-white keychain "virtual" pet that required zero input to  get any actual output.

Where the fuck does this elitism come from? I'd almost be wiling to say, "You're not a real 90's kid if you don't fucking shut up about how much it rules to be a stupid fucking 90's kid", but alas it's not just those born sometime in the past 13 to 22 years. Because I've also seen shit like this:

This sounds more like 80's white-trash to me. What I love is the caveat of "still turned out okay", as opposed to what? Every person raised by domestic violence and actually thinking they're not okay? No, everyone thinks they are their imaginary God's gift to fucking humanity and owe it all to the crappy fucking childhoods they had, which they can now in their ripe old age turn back to and say, "Yeah! I had the best shitty childhood and it was awesome!" No, you are bad and you should feel bad about yourself. Everyone thinks their youth was awesome and the rest of us just don't get it.

We've all heard old people (like, real old people, as in grandparents and scary homeless people) talk about how great the "good ol' days" were. Same fucking thing happening here. Do you want to know the answer? It's confirmation bias combined with the fact that our memories are mostly fiction, and being a kid is awesome because you don't know how to filter out what is and isn't useful. So you have a memory of your childhood/youth/whathaveyou being sweet, when it was rarely that at all. Every generation will say the same fucking thing, but their childhoods sucked just as much, but because they were fucking stupid, worthless kids, they couldn't fucking remember it, and now that they're old enough to reflect, they'd rather bask in elitism of whatever happened to be their youth, than just admit that shit today is better than it ever was in any of the ways that really matter.

Labels: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I often complain about how unnecessary it is that we feel the need to label everything, especially our relationships. Often when two people start seeing each other, they will eventually reach a point where deem it necessary to DTR (define the relationship), which amounts to putting a label on it. The label serves two main purposes: it helps the couple understand what they are, and it lets outsiders know how to cognitively categorize them. The problem with these labels is that we have a tendency to not ascertain that the agreed upon label shares the same qualities to each person. If I ask a girl, "So are we friends or dating?" and she responds, "We're dating." - I could take that to mean we are going on dates, while she means we are in a romantic relationship. There is a world of difference between these two conceptions of "dating", and yet we throw the word around and expect people to immediately understand which version (I'm sure there are even more) that we're talking about.

It is worth asking what the purpose of these labels is at a broader level. Labels serve their purpose by taking a continuous variable and making it discrete by restricting the range on that variable. Think about how age works. Is there a difference in a person who is 20 years and 364 days old, and someone who is 21 years old? Not really. But we have to draw the line somewhere in order to get coherent categories. Without categories, we'd be lost on many subjects. Similarly, this distinction of labeling is how we take a piece like this and draw an arbitrary line where blue ends and green begins:

But you could also argue that there is a third color in there between them. Or maybe there are five colors. If you looked at any individual pixel, it would look indistinguishable from its neighbor, yet we can see the gradient changing colors. This is both the purpose and problem with labels. When you want to paint your house teal and the only listed options are green or blue, what do you do? Imagine that everyone can see the middle of the gradient, but there was no name for teal - and teal was what you wanted. So clearly this act of labeling becomes problematic sometimes. What about in relationships? What is it that defines the label we get it? I'm going to propose how things are currently (for most people), and then how I think they should be. 

People get their own idea of what constitutes a relationship from their experience. You witness your family, friends, and fictional characters entering and leaving various relationships throughout your whole life. In the same way that we learn the meaning of most words without ever being told directly, we form a schema of a relationship. A schema is a set of characteristics that defines something. It is similar to the word concept, except that each schema is filled with other schemas which link to other schemas. If that sounds confusing, maybe this confusing picture will help:

Imagine that the word "relationship" is in the middle. Each person is going to have a different set of other schemas branching out, which means that each person's idea of what a relationship is, is going to be fundamentally different. Now, a relationship is a trickier and broader concept than an egg. So when two people decide to be "in a relationship", they're bringing different schemas to the table. The problem is, rarely do people ever define the word "relationship" when they define the relationship. 

What is desired from the labeling is a concreteness that is otherwise fleeting. When discussing abstract concepts such as thoughts and feelings, there is no object in the world that we can point to and say, "This! This is what I mean!" in the same way that we do for physical objects. Because we cannot do this, we are left hoping that we use these words in the same way when we frequently do not.

What I instead propose is that relationship categories should be defined based on their qualities, not the qualities based on the relationship category. To make the example simple, imagine that there were five qualities relationships could have:

1. General interest [y] or [n]
2. Physical intimacy [y] or [n]
3. Priority over other individuals [y] or [n]
4. Exclusivity [y] or [n]
5. Living together [y] or [n]

If you just have (1), then it sounds like friendship. If you have (1) and (2), you probably have some form of a friends with benefits. If you have (1), (2), and (3), then it sounds something like a polyamorous "main" or an open relationship. If you have (1), (2), (3), and (4) that sounds like a traditional committed, monogamous, romantic relationship (CMRR). If you have all 5, then that sounds like a possible engagement or marriage, or it could just be a CMRR living together. The point of this all is that relationships are built on qualities, qualities that far outnumber the ones I've listed here. I didn't even include the other possible, non-sequential combinations such as (1) and (3), maybe we'd call that best friends.

The issue is that the number of categorical labels we have is finite in practice, whereas the the number of possibilities is infinite in principle. The labels we have just don't cut it, and they're not informative. This is partly why I eschew them altogether when it comes to my relationships. Everyone is a "friend" although I do varying things with each of my friends. But no one else feels the need to get different labels for "the friend I go shopping with" and "the friend I play video games with" - they all collapse into friend, which we generally understand. It's when sex gets involved that we want all sorts of labels - and it's where I disagree that sex is important enough to warrant the change.