Grandinite

I’m having a great time tracking the chatter coming from YouTube psychics and bloggers on this so-called October 14th spaceship meme that’s been ripping through the internet for some time. A well-known psychic named Blossom Goodchild has whipped up a frenzied storm of speculation regarding an event that will happen on October 14th, the day of the Canadian Election. Maybe that’s why Harper seems so calm – his psychic stylist, Michelle Muntean has informed him that the election is moot, since our ancestors are coming home to wreak social havoc on the planet. The stock market won’t matter after a massive ship hovers over the US. Sure. All this reminds me of the Hale-Bopp comet or the “88 reasons why Jesus will return in 1988″. People make all sorts of predictions, and when they don’t happen, they rationalize them away.

What’s this prediction? How about a huge spaceship that will materialize over the United States, appear for three days to let us know we’re not alone before it heads back to the fourth dimension? Chaos would ensue, so those 500,000 troops on the streets of America will come in handy when the riot hit. But here’s the catch. In order to make this thing appear, enough people have to “believe”. That’s a convenient loophole for when the ship fails to appear; it can be chalked up to a lack of faith on humanity’s part, or explained away because humanity managed to channel enough love, unity and oneness to keep the evil forces of the world at bay. That’s a convenient exit strategy for any false prophet.

I believe that the majority of the human race is not privy to information our governments have access to. When’s the last time you listened in on a phone conversation on the Echelon network? Do you ever get to sit at a CSIS or NSA bunker to find out what Osama’s been saying? Do you get to review the satellite images NATO edits before putting stuff on google maps? Surely, as this YouTube video highlights, if our governments know stuff, they would tell us, right? We live in a democracy, and our governments would never try to shield us from mind-shattering information or secrets of any kind. Right? Right?

I mean, as we go about our daily activities, distracted by the iPhone vs Blackberry debates, the daily farce that passes for political debate or the pablum we absorb from the free newspapers on the subway, we carry out our lives in something resembling the Truman Show. Our realities are bounded by the information we are privy to, and the consensus reality accepted by the herd. Whenever someone steps outside the consensus trance to pursue alternate veins of information, we ridicule them or tease them for straying from the herd. 9/11 truthers come to mind as sheep that have gone astray of the herd mentality. When you stray too far from the norms, some self-appointed policeman will enforce the social code on you. Bill O-Reilly will invite you on his show and do 90% of the talking while telling you to shut up,. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

I cannot make this point more explicit: agents rely on information to make decisions, but our information set is bounded. Google, for example, does not define the entire internet, because there are websites that it doesn’t index. For most internet users, this tool defines the boundaries of their knowledge: if Google can’t find it, then it’s probably not worth knowing. That’s sad.

I’m willing to entertain new information that stands outside the boundaries of commonly held beliefs and perceptions. Why? It has to do with Bayesian inference, a statistical model that forms beliefs about new information based on experience with previous information. Our brains are information collectors that accumulate a set of experiences and perceptions and we form beliefs about reality based on those. However, the potential for bias exists when we select in favour of data that reinforces our current perceptions and against information that challenges our perceptions. As we encounter new events, we attach a likelihood to whether or not they’re true. In all likelihood, there will be no spaceship, and we can explain the hysteria as another case of delusions and the madness of crowds. But then again, I’d be happy to be proven wrong. Since I was four, I’ve always wanted to go for a ride in an intergalactic spacecraft.