Challenging Pseudo-Skepticism, its Agency and Cultivated Ignorance
Wind Whispers
These are all original apothegm from The Ethical Skeptic.
I did not know. I went and looked. Everything else was vanity.
Philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of comprehension by language or process.
Inference is a martial art.
A pretense of knowledge used to soothe uncertainty is indistinguishable from an appeal to God.
If you don’t want to know, don’t look — and be sure to smear those who do.
You shall know them by their habit: they first redefine words as violence, so that they may justify the use of violence against words.
The fabric of our reality carries intent, and unwise is he who ignores its ever-present whisper.
It takes integrity to discern what the fool refuses to see.
I would rather risk being wrong than cultivate ignorance.
Human dissonance and intolerance of complexity are far more difficult to contend with than science itself.
If both the devout theist and the staunch atheist forbid you from studying a subject, then that is precisely the subject you must study. Their embargo is a partnership.
Narrative is an inference which consists of 20% induction and 80% awesome insistence.
Faith is not a matter of doctrinal beliefs or polished deeds of virtue. It is the quiet art of living small lives with patience, love, and integrity.
Science is not about truth, it is about control. One is not a scientist until they apprehend this.
While politicians will at least haggle over the price—academicians sell their souls wholesale.
Accurate, is simple. But that does not serve to make simple, therefore accurate.
Among explanatory alternatives, elegance is always preferable over simplicity.
If it is simple, easily understood, and widely believed yet remains unexamined—then it is most likely wrong.
Don’t mistake simplicity in expression for simplicity in principle—a whole lot of stupidity can be stated quite simply.
Knowing the truth is not a prerequisite for spotting a lie.
Science that is enforced by an army of thugs, is not science.
Love is a currency that, no matter how much is minted, neither dilutes nor inflates.
Reality is the science fiction no pen could ever surpass.
Faith, like love, is nurtured over time, through small acts and the resolve to stand in the gap on another’s behalf.
Penalty systems rarely fail, while reward systems are dispositioned to do so.
Always prefer the straightforward yet complex, over the simple yet complicated. Much of what we believe to be true, is complicated, wearing the mask of simplicity.
Never commit the mistake of suffering mediocrity, even and especially in your vices.
A virtue may keep us steady, but it’s a vice that drives us to grow. Virtue sustains; vice transforms.
Bridgman Point – the point at which a principle can no longer be dumbed-down any further, without sacrifice of its coherence, accuracy, salience, or context.
A huckster is someone who does not comprehend the field, but rather, comprehends the audience.
When human intervention is the critical feature of a hypothesis, human intervention to a priori obfuscate that hypothesis forces it into becoming the null.
An idea cannot be a conspiracy theory if it is also the null hypothesis.
If science won’t conduct the experiment, society will force the experiment. One can only embargo an idea for so long.
A claim that risk is necessary is the most extraordinary of claims.
Quashing dissent is a coward’s game.
When every voice begins to sound the same, language ceases to inquire and begins to indoctrinate. The mind goes fallow through lack of use.
We are all religious; the holiest order being those who swear they are immune to religion.
Reliable sources are not the issue. A serial killer is reliable too.
A vice with just enough orchestration behind it will pass for a virtue—especially if no one looks too closely.
Fear is rarely the doorway to knowledge.
The loudest truth is often the biggest lie.
Infinity is as deep a well of logical transmutation as the ad hoc convenience of God itself.
Blood-earned wealth is inherently inflationary.
Where the heart leads, one’s treasure will follow. The mind just makes posturing noises, as if it had a say in the matter.
Here’s the deal: if you feed the demonic what it craves, it will reward you with what you crave—unless of course, you are what’s on the menu.
Dissent takes aim at the issue; the liar, knowing his truth to be hollow, fires at the man.
Faith has nothing at all to do with belief or performative fanaticism.
The claim that one need only think inside the box is the most extraordinary of claims.
An ignorance of risk/uncertainty or absence of risk strategy, is itself a risk strategy.
Once plurality is introduced under Ockham’s Razor, it cannot be dismissed by means of skepticism alone.
If the right term does not exist, then it must exist.
I’m not in the business of selling Pollyanna.
Truth and facts are like estranged kinfolk living in the same town—never on speaking terms, yet forever gossiping about each other.
Are they truly informative—or just info-mative? Informative means looking at the data and drawing your own water. Info-mative means dipping your bucket in the neighbor’s well, slapping on a brand label, and calling it science.
The pseudo-arguer is never moved by inquiry, truth, nor any actual interest in the subject; their purpose is singular—to extinguish your voice.
The surest way not to find something is simply not to look for it.
DNA is a strategem of warfare and conquest. God, by definition, has need of neither.
A state of absence or even absence of intent itself can be a matter of intention.
Power is confirmed in one’s ability to force a lie into becoming the truth.
To confidence bound an answer to a poorly defined domain or question is not science — it’s sales.
If your aim is to silence or punish dissent, you neither possess nor represent science.
When someone invokes averages to explain complex systems, they’re either intellectually lazy—or they think you are.
Through induction, one may infer falsehoods as readily as truths — risking the oversight that lies surpass truths in kind, with science often reduced to little more than a stew of induction, seasoned with a dash of hyperbole.
If clever apothegm and rhetorical deflection have led you to this mental prison, why do you insist on foisting them upon everyone else?
Complexity created solely for appearances or exclusion is nothing more than needless complication.
The level of quality placed into scientific work and/or inference is inversely proportional to how much it is called ‘The Science’.
That which is the official narrative bears the greater burden of proof.
Most virtues started out as vices that got dressed up and learned to behave in public.
Cronyism is nothing but capitalized profit coupled with socialized risk.
When the act of simply remaining neutral (skepticism) itself constitutes magical, heretical, or conspiracy theorizing – one has broached despotism of the narrative.
An ideology that cannot be defended by means of evidence and deductive logic, will inevitably be enforced by violence.
One cannot be a victim of what they have earned.
Wallowing in rhetoric is one step below ignorance. The difference is that ignorance can be cured.
Blame was the original cryptocurrency. Virtue signalers simply seek a way to make it fungible.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the victim-virtue complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Inside a political climate, science can never be settled. Science must ever operate inside the public trust.
The direct derivation of belief from mere ‘fact’ is one level of competence below ignorance.
In order to skillfully distort the truth, one must first also know it.
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
My being subjected to your preferred propaganda outlet does not serve to make my media exposure more ‘balanced.’
It is not only the counter-evidence, but also the lies of the Narrative, that must be accounted for in one’s deductive reasoning.
We live in a world of purposely crafted illusion. Defending narrative does not make one erudite, just the latest clown in the circus act.
Only the truth demands active, trained and organized suppression. In a free thought and information society, lies will eventually falsify themselves. Suppression of an idea usually involves fear of some element or form of truth.
One’s implicit claim to have proven the null hypothesis, especially by means of an absence of evidence, constitutes the most extraordinary of claims.
Inductive thinking involves following the script. Deductive reasoning requires a disrespect for the script.
If opposing ideas are being actively silenced, clinging to the Narrative isn’t wisdom—it’s cowardice. And if it turns out to be true, that truth is of no credit to you.
In those places where direct observation is in short supply, experts will abound.
When a person says, “Where’s the evidence?”, they are not wanting any evidence at all, as only fear and narrative compel their will.
In the face of looming trouble, it is not the alarm of believers, but the silence of deniers, that speaks loudest.
Passive apothegm skepticism is dissonance-based denial, nothing more.
Skepticism is unrelenting, disciplined, incremental, and critical path foolishness. It is the eye of neutrality, inside the mercenary tempest of curious passion.
Wisdom is not the refusal to believe — it is the patience to comprehend what belief alone cannot fathom.
If you want to truly know a man, observe his family.
A history that is erased, obscured, or rewritten is destined to repeat itself.
A true researcher is defined by the critical path of probative questions they ask, not by the club that rubber-stamps their answers.
Pseudo-theory is a mandatory notion that explains anything, everything, and nothing, all at the same time.
Reward most always outweighs uncertainty or miscalculated/ignored risk.
Exploit stakes seldom go uncaptured.
There is always a bigger fish.
Error is an aspect of scientific endeavor, fragility is not.
Those unable to define the problem will substitute virtue in its stead.
Consilience trumps heuristic, while experience trumps both.
Stakeholders placed at risk, are peers in its review.
If a scientific field refrains from testing its preferred hypothesis, it is petitioning for royal status.
Before there was money, envy was the root of all evil; even moreso after.
The least scientific action one can undertake is to actually believe the null hypothesis.
We are all madmen, just some are more honest about it.
To achieve assent via logical deduction means your case is powerful, but to manipulate assent via coercion or rhetoric means that you are powerful.
Give me reason to ponder it, and I will. Give me two reasons, and I will not.
Steel is not forged through the impact of one great tragedy; rather, enduring a life-long climate of trials—and emerging successfully out the other side.
If you gain your understanding from a clique, you are at the bottom of that clique.
Those who enforce a definition of the term ‘God’ upon us all—ranging from impassioned and vague boundlessness to cynical and abject empty set—are claiming expertise in God. Know this, there are no experts in God.
Coincidence is the mother of ignorance.
Rhetoric is a dish that its chef can never quite taste.
If you want something known, tell one person in confidence. If you want it concealed, tell parts of it to many persons.
If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.
When one tenders an authoritative claim as to what is incorrect – one must be perfectly correct.
The greatest error in quality control is the faith we place in the error checking mechanism itself—concealing its errors inside authority.
Fact-checkers err most when they believe themselves the entity least prone to mistake.
Novelty is the soul of will.
The true genius shudders upon coherence of a clear next step.
The supreme test of a descriptive model resides in its ability to accurately predict what fraudulent actors will need to do in order to make it show the wrong answer.
Anything but the thing…
Nothing worth having is free. You can spend your time creating value within a healthy economy, or you can spend it—along with a bit of your soul—waiting in long lines for things labeled as ‘free.‘
Do not fear being wrong, fear not being informative.
Those who speak most about risk are often the least willing to have it measured.
Anyone can craft an interesting notion, but the evidence is the true author of a hypothesis.
The gatekeeper bears the greater burden of accountability. Anonymous gatekeeping is pseudoscience.
Fanaticism must inevitably live on top of any significant cultural discovery from antiquity. Humanity, it seems, is more opaque than the dirt itself.
Erasure, dysphoria, cancellation, and gender elastration are the primary weapons of modern genocide.
Prequels, sequels, reboots, remakes, and remixes are not the mainstay of thriving creative culture.
When virtue-shielded systems fail, their devotees are always the last to know.
Nothing is more rewarding to a coward than to watch a brave person fall.
The greatest evil is the one that dumps the problems of the entire world on your back—and then hands you the bill.
A virtue posed too frequently becomes hollow and cheap. It argues against you.
Time renders the truest of peer review, surpassing the collective savvy of all experts.
Evolution of the data reveals far more secrets than does the data alone.
A mildly inductive stand-alone statistical study is one level of confidence below ignorance. One hundred of the same, a level of confidence below that.
If they are willing to censor you, they will certainly stoop to falsifying their data as well.
Resist the complicated—embrace the complex—discern the difference.
A lack of faith must be adorned in the most ironic and dazzling of attire.
Much of the past can only be understood by engineers.
A lack of competence must be adorned in dazzling heuristic and clever apothegm.
Problems are complicated, solutions are complex.
It is amazing how those with a distaste for the complex, will luxuriously wallow in the complicated without hesitation.
One cannot launch a new world by means of old world thinking.
We must resist the temptation to rubber-stamp all science as automatically correct merely because it invokes the terminology of evolution.
Nothing is more dangerous than combining unlimited money with a lack of experience in unintended consequence.
Each solution comes with its own set of problems.
‘Simple’ is often ‘complicated’, wearing the most clever of disguise.
Almost anyone can debunk almost anything; it’s no special skill.
The proponent dies but once, while the denier must die a thousand deaths.
Be reluctant to declare that which is good, for no sooner is this done than evil will kill it and wear its skin as a virtue or religious costume.
Pull what they may need, but push what they really want.
Nothing asserts one’s divine authority better than pointing out another person’s sins.
The person who acts with integrity will also necessarily be authentic.
He who boasts of his tools first, bears little knowledge as to how they are best used.
This expression stands as proxy for a principle of wisdom so profound that we dare not utter it.
Ridicule is the bitter end of one’s line of argument.
Theft is the truest form of appraisal.
The right kind of people don’t require your apologies, while the wrong kind will take advantage of them.
Don’t complain, don’t explain, don’t blame. Instead, stand resolute and bring the pain.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat you and leave you bloodied on the pathway to your doorstep.
The inauthentic persists by the finest veneer until they’re tired, tested, or there’s money on the table.
One insightful creator outweighs forty idle critics; the worthwhile life demands more than a series of nattering ‘nuh-uhs’.
The number of persons willing to lie in support of the prevailing Narrative far exceeds those willing to lie in dissent. A conspiracy is not required.
Those who argue by means of making others look foolish are often the most subject to anchoring bias, driven by their own fear of appearing foolish.
Nothing betrays one’s intellectual and emotional shortcomings more than being threatened by competence.
If the flaws observed in another were truly genuine, compassion would be warranted; instead, rage betrays that these flaws are mirrored within oneself.
The angle, draft and camber of the sail remain foolishness to those who seek to control the wind.
Posing a complex issue in its most articulate, basic, and transparent form – is our responsibility. Entertaining the masses by means of something familiar to them – is not.
Do what you are tasked to do, and let that be enough; otherwise, nothing will ever quench the shortfall within.
The best revenge against a difficult life or circumstance is to respond with love and joy—denying fate the satisfaction it craves.
If you want to know who rules over you, observe the most ubiquitous advertisers.
The most skilled criminal is the one who forbids a name be coined to describe their crimes.
If the highlight of ethical achievement in one’s life constitutes standing firm for the Oxford comma, self-reexamination is neglected, crucial and inevitable.
AI has already replaced millions of people in their jobs, and the fact that neither these employees nor their employers fully realize this yet serves as a prime example of why.
Taking a middle position does not inherently make one more objective; instead, it often suggests that one is merely a prisoner to the same bifurcation they are pretending to buck.
The detractor, in declaring every thought and action of their quarry wrong and regarding every least little sin as mortal, remains unaware that they have lost the conflict.
True skepticism asks: ‘If I was wrong, would I even know it? If I was wrong, would I be enabling harm?’
Where one is corrupt in their skepticism, there also will they be corrupt in their heart.
Those vaults which are constantly filled does their currency ever fade.
A greater illness hunts those who seek no illness at all.
The perpetual victim schemes tirelessly to inculpate their oppressor.
Access to performances is metered by those who cannot perform.
Equity is that which is apportioned by those with their thumb on the scale.
Equality is demanded by they who wish no equal.
Egalitarianism is a virtue imposed by those of the highest caste.
Truth is the destination which possesses no journey.
The weapon of supreme destruction also holds its wielder hostage.
Inflation is the state where margins flow to neither value provider nor risk bearer.
There is always a hidden Royalty.
Loan to a fool and you inherit a fool’s wage.
Work attracts stability like enslavement attracts flies.
Quality is not an add-on feature.
Never accede to the plaintive pleas of God or Science’s representative on Earth. Rob them of their problem, or you will become subject to their solution.
The cleverest of thief does not steal mere possessions.
The study of evolution has led humanity to the brink of many realizations, among the least sound of which is the notion that there exists no imperative to fathom the mystery of his own sudden and talented emergence.
Fanaticism is the best method of obfuscation.
Cynicism is the first telltale symptom of midwittery — the refuge of those too clever to believe, but not wise enough to understand.
Pseudoscience may be a fallacy, but syndicate science is a pathology.
Virtue mocks its devotees long into their white washed sepulchers.
Be serious about your craft, or go play video games. Don’t half-ass it and blame the shortfall on everyone else.
I don’t hire B-students. Every success is theirs and every shortfall is yours.
There are students who have never failed at anything, students who know how to manipulate the system just enough, and students who require a higher purpose than a mere grade. The world is run by the first two.
Fascinate fools while discrediting dissent, and you have consensus in the making.
Blood money rots everything it touches—most of all, the heart.
If the essence of your culture involved herding sheep over a fifty-year lifespan, stoning people to death for having had sex, and sacrificing animals to appease deities, then I am likely going to reject your claim to spiritual authority.
They say you can’t take it with you. However the envy, vitriol, and disrespect dispensed to gain celebrity and profit become one’s immortal entourage.
All things being equal, when faced with two alternatives, the Pollyanna choice is not only likely to be incorrect, but also most likely harmful.
There exists a practical difference between subject fixation and working the problem. Some people spend their entire life in the former so that they don’t have to do the latter.
The deficiency of a philosophy is most evident in its reliance on recruiting the young.
A philosophy that necessitates proselytization is probably not genuine.
In reality, a religion is defined not by what it accepts as true, but rather by what it embargoes as unworthy.
Beware of those whose argument gets better as ignorance gets worse. Lies always possess everything they need.
Beware of any ‘faith’ or ‘reason’ which thrives progressively as ignorance increases or information is expunged.
We forgo resilience for stability, at the cost of both.
Never take criticism from someone you wouldn’t take advice from.
Consensus is the best science money can buy.
One whispered secret, scarcely a part per million, has the power to overturn the world.
When everyone is required to dumb everything down, everyone gets dumb really fast.
Free money is always Plan A.
The only person who is always wrong is a straw man.
When they blame you for the weather, they are just one cognitive step away from justifying atrocity against you.
Science starts with asking a question. Unfortunately, too often that question is “How can I best confirm my correct answer?“
Businesses succeed and fail upon innovation and disruption, but the truly exponential business exploits the fashion of ignorance.
When you mollycoddle the worst of society, don’t act surprised when they show you no mercy in return. No good deed goes unpunished – but misplaced virtue punishes everyone.
Those who cannot influence others through respect resort to using fear.
Fear the hand once, but fear the tongue always.
Unlike insistent narrative, neither its victims nor any dissenting assembly is an echo chamber.
The discerning investigator recognizes the distinction between science and political technology.
Perhaps the most robust predictive confirmation of scientific endeavor is the level of vitriol, coercion, and insult which comes from The Narrative camp. You have disrupted their delusion.
No greater compromise exists than fanaticism itself.
Goodness shows what you want others to think you are. Faithfulness shows who you really are.
Exploitation of self-loathing guilt, shame, and blame is the primary tactic of illegitimate office.
Those who frame dissent as hate, will also justify enforcement of their edicts by means of violence.
Orthodoxies run anathema to innovation; they merely know how to profit from or rule through it.
Comlicatedness is but a false simplicity imposed upon that which is complex.
Civil War arises when criminals, those normally held accountable by the law of the land, instead become the drafters of that law.
Doubt, free of discernment, soaking in every debunking and narrative, is an irresponsible approach to skepticism and life.
Regardless of its depth, nothing is more hollow than an artificially adopted, second-hand view of existence.
Sometimes, the most terrifying thing which can happen, is nothing.
I hold this suspicion, this dawning reality—the notion that fulfillment within the realm of need is met through a single litmus: all we have to do is ask. Thy Kingdom Come.
One can only play a shell game for so long, for the spider patiently awaits the inevitable ensnaring.
Fanatical obsession is the most sincere form of disbelief or dishonor.
Dissent and error can be deliberated, but oppression must be opposed, despite its boast to holding facts.
The authentic person acts without need of compensation. In order to be motivated towards evil however, one typically must be compensated.
The speed of science is far too slow to have a positive impact during a black swan event. It merely apportions history after the fact and according to what the victors want.
No single soul can deliver the essence of science by themself; your duty lies in functional skepticism, not in claiming to convey truth.
Spirituality is acting on faith in matters beyond the mind’s comprehension, rarely capable of being framed in terms of familiar trope.
Every philosophy of the poseur is borrowed, every inorganic apothegm promulgated in unquestioned disdain.
One of the primary purposes of military conquest is the erasure of history.
When the null hypothesis is “It’s a mystery, but we chose not to look any further and instead just assumed the usual suspects,” know that you are dealing with pathological pseudoscience.
Compliance to format is the method by which dumb persons make themselves appear smart, intimidating others through trivial critique. Large language models only served to prove how much a charade this indeed was.
The assumption is the model. Everything else is window dressing and virtue.
You don’t have to be especially intelligent to be a good detective — just clever enough to spot a red herring before it starts to stink.
There’s no fact or figure alive that a good dose of fear, a wisp of smoke and mirrors, and a well-rehearsed rant can’t beat into submission.
When someone claims to represent science at the outset, I automatically assume they bear a conflict of interest—and await solid evidence to the contrary.
If your faith erased history as part of its growth strategy, it is not a faith. Faith abides.
Conform your product to what everyone demands, and soon you will have a product which no one wants.
Science is the deductive handiwork of detectives, not the inductive privilege of Bayesian lab techs.
Grace is the gravy which makes life palatable.
We must always remember that the speed of darkness rivals the speed of light.
When authority makes a mistake, all post facto science will show that mistake to be of little to no concern.
Leaping off a cliff with your arms outstretched does not mean that you’ve invented human flight.
Driving your car off a cliff and tracking the great gas mileage you got on the way down, is not a success story.
While the grizzly is ferocious, the polar bear is determined to survive. I’d prefer to encounter the former over the latter any day.
I am not impugning anyone’s character nor creating harm, simply through the act of not taking their word for it.
In the grand scheme of things, wonder proves to be far more impactful than mere knowledge.
The past always involves giants, of both stature and lore.
Given enough alcohol, we are all famous and wealthy.
The beginning of a lie is always a singularity in simplicity. It gains and imparts complicatedness over time.
The doorway to fraud typically opens when an accountant begins to subconsciously believe that the money they administer is their property. This also applies to science, government, and religion.
The presenter of the paradox is actually peddling its premises.
Gnosticism is a hard-earned and ethical stance against illegitimate forms and abuses of power, whether human or spiritual.
When entering a room, always maintain an awareness of those who are threatened by competence.
One cannot vote their way out from under tyranny.
Those who create the value and bear the risk are often strangers to those who claim the credit and reap the reward.
Blame is the most valuable currency which no one wants.It’s greatest value comes in the form of giving it to those who have not earned it.
An implicit claim to be the virtuous custodian of official history is the ultimate assertion of supremacy.
The reasons offered are seldom, if ever, the true reasons.
Pseudoscience is the act of ignoring the deductive evidence and the next salient question.
Incompetence is neither a conspiracy nor a theory.
No qualification grants you the right to demand my ignorance.
A fundamental requisite of a self-appointed god is to conceal anything that predates your authority.
Envy finds fault in the trivial, while a concealed truth intoxicates.
It is critical to discern the laughter of dissonance, for within in it resides a hint of the truth.
Pretend science is indistinguishable from malice.
When those who pretend to represent science claim that something does not exist or never happened, you can bet good money they’re wrong.
In any given subject there is always someone dying to let you know that they know more than you do about it.
It is not the possession of facts, but what you do with them that demonstrates your prowess.
Philosophy is the exploration of how the human mind contends with reality and what resides beyond both.
The truth is often buried beneath a rubble pile of reason.
One will find that when orthodox religion and narrative science team up, the offspring of such a union are often the grandest of lies.
Any implication that one personally represents democracy or science informs me that, in fact, you do neither.
If you foster an environment that produces lone extremists, then they are not lone extremists.
I would rather hear original thoughts, even at the risk of being wrong, than endure once again canned thinking that risks no scrutiny.
No expertise is as profound in its depth as the expertise required to determine what not to know.
Those who control the vote, will inevitably control the voting as well.
Science misses details, except when it plans to do so.
A consensus of cowards can never be science.
It may take a researcher three decades to adequately prosecute a mystery. Peer review is designed to ensure that those decades never happen.
What you learn at the regular county fair is that every game is rigged—and the easier it looks, the more rigged it has to be.
Do not be deceived, one’s addictions will follow them into the beyond.
If you do not have access to the truth, then neither can you be held responsible for the choices therein.
More than a dozen people claim credit for the quip: ‘There’s no limit to how far one can go if they don’t care who gets the credit.‘
An epiphany drawn from evidence is inspiring, but an epiphany emerging from a collapsing stack of lies is world-shattering.
If the terms ‘symbolic,’ ‘hunter gatherer,’ tomb,’ and ‘temple’ were suddenly eliminated, the humanity of archaeology would cease to exist overnight.
Then what is this bleating of sheep in my ears, and the lowing of cattle that I hear? Evil cannot withstand even the slightest non-compliance. One break in the spell and its power collapses.
The purpose of a hoax is not to fool the gullible, but to fool the rational through its exposure.
The genocide will not be streamed.
The most effective component of the scientific method consists of the implicit and explicit threats towards those who dissent.
No lie weighs heavier on the human spirit than the belief that one is both a burden to the world and utterly alone.
No man appears more fiercely committed to the truth than he who believes himself licensed to lie on its behalf. What he calls science is often just an orderly stack of such lies.
My religion should not require that I ignore evidence, surrender my intellect, stop asking critical questions, or compromise the integrity of my thought as prerequisites to embracing its truth.
Under the specter of censorship and reprisal, true consensus cannot exist.
If they import the very system from which they fled, they are not refugees.
Tyrannies are not born of tyrants alone, but of the sycophants who enable them.
When you’ve reached the point of blaming the weather on those you don’t like, you’ve drifted into absurdity and lost the right to be taken seriously.
One may encounter the eyes of enigma for years, and suddenly, in a single glance, comprehend it utterly and completely—a penetrating affair that renders a thousand prior gazes entirely moot.
Be cautious—those who speak frequently of God are often quietly applying for the position.
Wonder, rather than the mere amassing of trivia, is the true sign of intelligence.
Maturity means choosing a life path of enduring impact over one of fleeting glory. Wisdom is knowing the difference.
We do not have the capacity to discern good, only the potential to detect darkness pretending to be light.
The inductive conclusion that one is immortal is supported by the evidence with a probability of 0.999965. (aka, ‘my plan is to live forever, and it is working good so far’)
If they were more powerful than you, then they would not have to slowly and surreptitiously weaken you.
If you cannot perform deductive detective work, then you have no business dictating conclusions through Bayesian induction.
Two deceptions lie at the heart of the Machiavellian mind: the art of complicating that which is straightforward, and the craft of over-simplifying that which is profound.
Institutions of authority do not possess the rights of an individual and are not entitled to the presumption of being “innocent until proven guilty.”
A constituent under the power of an authority perpetually retains legal standing to seek redress against that power.
The burden of proof perpetually falls upon systems and persons in power, and does not fall upon the citizenry to prove malfeasance.
Kingdoms don’t collapse from weakness; they unravel in the grip of shallowness sold as virtue.
Those who aspire to be experts before becoming philosophers are neither.
An academic knows just how sweetly to kiss the mirror before it cracks.
The mind cannot study what the heart will not allow.
Eastern culture will steal from you throughout the process, while Western culture will act ethically to the very end, whereupon it will steal most everything. Every industry and every culture has its own special form of corruption.
Who is terrified of your voice is also of sufficient cowardice to let others conduct your genocide.
In the hands of abusive authority, ignorance is not a passive state but a meticulously engineered condition.
The most challenging strategy to develop is one within an industry where subject matter experts are pressured to publicly endorse a particular notion while privately harboring dissent.
Stories and ideas often far predate the parchment or stone upon which they are inscribed.
Hell is the place where you get exactly what you want (especially if it involves 72 virgins).
Dynamics in the data are far more informative than mere heuristics. The same principle applies to understanding people.
Whose history is concealed from them is also a slave.
The Kingdom of Heaven bears the ultimate skin in the game, intimately exposed and whispered from within. In contrast, the powers of darkness are profoundly alienated from the consequences of their awesome insistence.
As sure as your mother’s home cooking falls flat when served in some fancy restaurant, money has a way of spoiling truth.
Why on earth would I march out to fight Goliath decked in a heavy suit of armor, dragging a shield and swinging a sword—when everyone who’s tried that so far has ended up very predictably dead? Imitating Goliath? Now there’s a fool’s errand. He doesn’t fight that way because he’s clever—he does it because that’s the only trick he knows.
My favorite horror flick is reality itself. My favorite sci-fi flick is reality itself. My favorite love story is reality itself.
The integrity of your soul should match your shoes, belt, and pocket kerchief. Unfortunately, those things often only serve as compensation for something.
Clinging to the same cliché sophist formula is every bit as dreadful as camp.
The habit of the religionist is to introduce quandary where they fear certainty, and introduce certainty were they fear quandary.
They blame you for the weather, contagion, and the raving insane, right before they burn you at the stake.
Science does not possess a method which substantiates it as a form of governing.
Be very cautious of any system, religious or otherwise, which grooms its adherents to develop a taste for loosh.
You know you are having an impact when random people in discussions lecture you with your own original material.
A lie must be defended by an army. How else can it endure but through lockstep obedience and the shadow of threat? Those who employ such tactics, all things being equal, bear the greater burden of proof.
To deliver your thoughts in their most precise and striking form is, in itself, an act of respect. Relying upon oversimplified, canned quips is a subtle form of disrespect, for it diminishes both the integrity of the idea as well as its recipient.
To die is indeed gain, for the immortal yearns to realize what only mortal may venture; like a sailor adrift on endless seas, ever seeking the shore but damned never to land.
One man’s confirmation bias is but another man’s willful denial.
Occam’s Razor is not a magic wand which resurrects narratives long interred in the graveyard of falsification, merely because they are simple.
Between the closed ranks of science and the clamor of branded voices, little room remains for genuine brilliance.
God’s got the best lawyer in the business, as He’s never been successfully sued yet—even for that flood fiasco.
Comets are the cats of cosmology: you can’t herd them, they have long tails, and bad luck always seems to follow when they cross your path.
Integrity and trust cannot be established through review, redaction, and embargo.
Excessive pro forma often becomes the surreptitious playground of a corrupted soul.
Censorship is THE first method of modern science.
Power built on the backs of those suffering is like whiskey to a drunk—it’s an addiction, and the more they drink, the more they crave it.
Everyone’s got a knack for something—but the most useless soul is the one convinced their talent is telling others what to do.
In elections and finance there is no such thing as a random error.
It is not the noise of your platform, but the strength of your message and how many choose to listen.
An official lie comes wrapped in a sweet shell of smaller lies, all provided by the gullible eager to swallow it whole.
It’s not what’s dug out of the ground that tells the real story—it’s what’s purposely left buried.
The grandest triumphs of science are most often spent mending the troubles it created in the first place.
When two diametrically opposed sides both insist that you avoid examining something, that’s exactly where your attention should go first.
People seldom remember your words, but they will never forget how you made them feel.
When confronted with a novel calamity, the last person to inform you is often the one who caused it. When faced with a cataclysmic mirage, the first person to alert you is likely the one who fabricated it.
No entity hides a greater secret than the one who does everything according to the rules.
When an enforced Narrative dies, it rots from the inside first—until even its most devout adherents can no longer stomach the stench of its own putrid miasma.
Nothing discredits a truth more than the robes adorned in its name.
Occam’s Butterknife: All things being equal the naive explanation is what people will most easily accept.
If an observation prompts critical questions, then those who work to embargo it from public perception likely do not represent science, for genuine science thrives on questioning norms.
A device is indeed a system, but a system is not necessarily a device.
The academic is someone wholly unaware that he knows anything, everything, and nothing, all at the same time.
Be wary of folks who come after you just because they think you’re standing all alone. Odds are, they care little for the topic and see you as easy prey—and that’s a peculiar sort of madness worth keeping an eye on.
The art of research lies in choosing the probative-yet-imperfect over the correct-yet-misleading.
Royalty is a fine pipeline for planting well-dressed, ill-qualified sycophants into positions of power, where they can pass down the same noble incompetence to those who come after.
When a person can’t piece together a logical argument on their own, they’re left stringing together popular aphorisms—until, sooner or later, the contradictions between them give the game away.
Those who fuss over dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s are often the ones desperate to hide the fact that they haven’t the faintest idea what the sentence actually means.
God despises a dumb thief but seems to have a soft spot for the clever ones.
I’m not impressed by your destination if it’s clear you don’t understand how to make the journey.
I’ve never seen a woodchuck chuck wood, any more than I’ve seen a groundhog hogging ground. And yet, both make about as much sense as calling a person of mere functional intelligence a ‘doctor of philosophy.’
Who is stealing the cookies has the greatest interest in keeping them inside an opaque cookie jar.
You can quickly tell the difference between a stalker and someone who simply disagrees. The stalker’s glaring lack of boundaries and self-awareness offers insight into their inability to handle model constraint and sound inference.
You know your theory is strong when it consistently predicts exactly where the counter-narrative will need to insert a lie to support its argument.
Truth is a journey, not a destination. It exists independently of you and cannot be possessed or worn like a uniform.
Few things are more repulsive and discrediting than an enforced Narrative built on a lie.
An original apothegm comes from having lived it; memorized quips, on the other hand, come from those who haven’t lived at all.
Like a propped-up boxer, no narrative is more worthless than one that only has to contend with stooge-posed or outlandish opposing ideas.
No clue is more poignant or tantalizing than authority caught in a lie.
When you question a brick wall, don’t be surprised when it echoes back something familiar.
Impose too strict a close-hold embargo, and your victims will know exactly what you’re trying to hide.
Trouble arises when government sees its role as conferring truth, and scientists come to believe their role is to govern.
There’s also a purpose behind exaggeration: to push people into camps of gullibility or outright rejection—deliberately omitting and obfuscating the reality that lies in between.
Absence of observation is not evidence of having done anything of merit.
Those who possess no intrinsic value must hoard and protect wealth instead.
When Dorothy clicked those ruby slippers and came back home, she spent the rest of her days bored stiff with everyone and everything.
Misfortune should not offer a profit margin.
Celebrity is the institution where we exalt stupidity for everyone to emulate.
If God doesn’t care enough to ensure the planet has healthy children who aren’t condemned to a lifetime of suffering, I doubt He’s concerned about the outcome of your football game.
You can either inhabit an office and title or accomplish something—but the latter doesn’t leave much time for polishing nameplates.
Doctors remain baffled—right up to the moment they cash the check.
The Bible is simply a paper version of The Pope.
You can hire textbook anywhere, and cheap. We all perish from memorized wisdom.
Too dull-witted to stand as peers to the gods, yet blessed with an essence that precludes our becoming their livestock, mankind has long struggled alone in this precarious middle ground. Meanwhile, those who find this critical adolescence alluring are not to be trusted.
The problem with simple arguments is that it allows simpletons to enter the fray.
The principle of elegance lies in this: when you pull the right thread, in just the right way, the entire truth unravels and hits you like a ton of bricks.
The can opener ever mocks the bird for its inability to open cans.
If the risk of ruin comes from too many chickens, it’s probably wise to count them before they hatch.
The narcissist—always making it all about them—is someone who refuses to do what I want or behave as I expect.
Never carry the melody of a greedy musician.
A problem bears definition, a hypothesis provides a schema, models set constraints—but an enforced conclusion knows no bounds.
Sentience is that which imposes an observer load (red shift) upon the fabric of the universe. No matter its perfection in knowledge or algorithm, an Artificial Sentient Intelligence that fails to impart an observer load remains merely a computational and deterministic subset of that fabric. It is merely an image in a clever mirror and subset of our intent.
I place a novel computational load on the fabric of the universe; therefore, I am.
Loyalty, hard work, service, brilliance, and a positive attitude are mighty valuable—mostly to those who don’t have a lick of any of it.
The grandchildren of those who weaken their resolve will be slaughtered to the thunderous applause of those who claim the virtuous inerrancy of science.
Most heroes lead James Joyce lives, caught up in the unrequited tension of an Ian Fleming narrative.
Evil’s greatest mistake was in allowing persons of true brilliance and integrity to grow bored.
If your self is but a skilled impression of what you perceive others wish to see, you possess no true emotional intelligence, no matter how socially adept you may be regarded.
Your religion is defined not by what you say, but rather what you forbid to be said.
Be careful what you wish for. Once you simplify an idea for the masses, you may never be able to get rid of it.
When a bureaucracy faces budget cuts, it will slash vital services and core missions first—shielding itself at all costs. They use human shields in their form of warfare.
Once the Narrative has been falsified, the term ‘fringe’ is nothing more than a way to identify the best candidates to replace it.
The Narrative does not need you to defend it—it demands your obedience. What you choose from there determines whether you are a scientist or merely a technician. Science falsifies; it does not prove nulls.
The more you apply a logical constraint, the less potent its impact.
To claim mastery over all that is incorrect, demands that one be infallible. Such certainty is a fragile throne—eventually, a single mistake will overshadow a lifetime of correctness.
Royalty pays off the fainéant to betray the enterprise and working classes, all in the name of virtue. Celebrity beats the drum and provides the comedic color commentary.
Elegance founded on probative observation and successful prediction is always preferable to Narrative simplicity built on unchallenged assumption.
At some point, your inner self will no longer be able to tolerate a life of sound bites and tl;dr.
True research always sparks the next salient question. Lies, on the other hand, come fully equipped with everything they need in the here and now—no further questions are required.
Sometimes, our ability to resolve a mystery is complicated, not by the facts of the case, but by the noise of humans who do not want the mystery solved.
Life’s real disappointment isn’t the existence of thieves and swindlers—it’s discovering how much of society they represent.
Collectivists tend to crave enforced consensus, while individualists pursue truth. As a result, the Left often struggles to discern truth, while the Right often fails to achieve effective cohesiveness.
Without death, life forgets its purpose—deprived of scarcity, it dissolves into meaninglessness.
Those who inherit this world will be getting what their progenitors deserved.
Most social norms and conventions are crafted not to guide you, but to make it easier to lie to you — and to keep that lie in place. It takes a mature soul to see through them.
Fear of death is the fulcrum of obedience.
We fear death as an end, and thus cling to survival at any cost, even if survival means slavery. This is ultimate nihilism — the very essence of the lie sold to us by both theist and atheist alike.
Once an authority shows it prefers to nurture narrative over assembling evidence, it ceases to speak as science and starts to speak as political artifice.
The true dynamics at play in an economy are not those of price and demand, but of extraction and leverage—expressions of the sovereign appetite itself. It is the sovereign’s impulse toward war, control, monopsony, monopoly, and the purchase of compliance that underlies most economic suffering.
The stronger the evidence you present, the more determined the effort becomes to silence you.
Corrupt money will always expand to fill the void left by thrift.
The doors to a prison always open easiest from the outside.
Once Ockham’s Razor has been surpassed, the job of the skeptic is to go and look.
Corrupt money will always expand to fill the void left by thrift.
Ignorance itself is a form of loosh – perhaps more bountiful in its intoxicating potential than all our darker frothings combined.
When money comes easily through performing for an audience, and you feel guilty for having gained wealth so effortlessly, giving part of it away isn’t charity — it’s simply another extension of the performance.
When their arguments are spent and their reasoning has failed, the pretender’s last resort is to call you a liar.
There are moments when truth, no matter how dark, is the only thing standing between us and the abyss.
One can endure either the fleeting pain of having lost and left everything on the battlefield, or the lingering torment of wondering what might have been for never having tried at all.
We are to serve needs but not act as a ‘needs broker’. The market of mercy should be flat, and contain few cartel-like entities.
The first task of a man is to confront his own evil—not to adopt performative goodness. For performance is merely a gilded way of avoiding that reckoning.
A model exists to provide incremental value under constraint, not epistemic perfection; over-prioritizing the latter can erode the former.
A free person learns through immersion into the subject. Disclose the answers at the outset and all you’ve taught him is obedience.
Instruction that resists disclosure is often the wiser kind, for it honors the student’s autonomy more than the master’s authority.
Do not thirst for disclosure, for it must occur within you.
Authority can demand convention. Only value can justify it.
When practitioners fail to notice that amateurs are making sport of their discipline, they have usually answered the question of why it was so easy to pull off.
The decay of a culture is first heard in its vocabulary.
Much of science labors under model poverty, manifested through disciplinary compartmentalization. Adding more bricks and pipes will not repair a broken home – no matter how many inductive studies insist that it does.
