On the subject of Glarbism

I was recently reminded of glarbs on Bronze Dog's blog. I find the Glarbism phenomenon fascinating.

Have you ever met a Glarbist? I haven't, but nonetheless, I still find Glarbism fascinating.

According to Glarbists, glarbs are flarschnikit. I kid you not.

Everything that we know about glarbs is contained in the holy book of the Glarbists. That particular text, titled The Holy Book Of The Glarbists, is apparently a long and largely boring read.

That is, unless you like the parts which just bang on about how great glarbs are. They make up about three quarters of The HBOTG. Personally, I would consider this to be dreadfully boring and self-serving. Mind you, I have to be honest here and say that I don't know of anyone who has ever read it.

So glarbs are flarschnikit. These are possibly the most amazing ultra-beings ever. Put it this way: being flarschnikit means that they would kick the arse of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic god to His Hell and back again.

Can you imagine how cool it would be to be flarschnikit? Certainly makes "omnipotence" and "omniscience" look weak.

Not only that: Deities are their minions!!!

How do the Glarbists know this? The HBOTG says so.

I must admit that just like BD, I'm somewhat doubtful about this one. I'm not even sure that I fully understand flarschnikity terribly well, but I know better not to ask a Glarbist: They won't tell you, because, as I pointed out before, glarbs are flarschnikit.

Glarbist apologists see this as the ultimate proof of glarbs. After all, if glarbs weren't flarschnikit, then glarbists wouldn't clam up on the subject, would they?

If you suggest otherwise to a Glarbist, this is where they get all judgemental about how "you'll end up bluggling in Flornath". Or accuse you of being "gobatastic".

I'm not convinced. Certainly, in glarbism, there are some weird stuff. Take the story about the prophet Humbert The Kidiphiddler. Certainly, I would have thought that he would have ended up in glorious Butnuggarts for this, but instead, Glarbist dogma has him beelittling about in deepest Num-b'Atooz.

Where then does Flornath fit in? How does one "bluggle"?

Ah, but the Glarbist has the answer for you on this: It turns out that glarbs are flarschnikit.

Not only that, but I was scratching my head at this bit in the Book of Chunder where the relatively realistic story of Peter And The Testchoob-b'Aybiz is related. Turns out that it's merely a metaphor and isn't meant to be taken seriously.

But what really gets me is later on in the Book of Chunder during the Coming Of The Whore Of Howwidstern where our metaphorical Peter proclaims the gobatastic virtues of the Whore, and is immediately spifflockated by the glarbs.

Turns out he'd forgotten that glarbs are flarschnikit. This, incidentally, is meant to be taken literally, hence my confusion.

If you wonder how Glarbists know that The HBOTG is accurate, they've got an answer to that, too: As it happens, glarbs are flarschnikit. End of discussion.

BD really went to town on this, and I have to thank him once again for bringing it to my attention. It really was interesting to go back and re-read his take on this.

Glarbism is not for theological beginners.

Clearly bored

I'm waiting for something to download, and I see that Tom and Akusai have had a crack at an old one that Bronze Dog did. So I might as well. Have fun, and join in if you're game.

Accent: Supposedly a type of Australian accent known as "ocker". FSM knows that I do try to be well spoken.

Booze: Rather enjoying this Pale Ale renaissance that Australia is going through at the moment. KitKat gave me one called Crackenback for my birthday - I give it 4 stars - very nice with a lovely fragrant hoppy aroma.

Chore I hate: Vacuuming the house. Going to get one of those robo vacuum thingies as soon as I can.

Dog or Cat: Cat. I like dogs, but cats clean up after themselves and don't need baths.

Essential Electronics: My computer(s), my Eee PC, and that's pretty much it since my Sony Walkman got lost down the back of the sofa. OK, maybe MP3 players can be too small.

Favorite Cologne: I liked Activist by The Body Shop. Then they stopped selling it in Australia. Now I've got XY by Hugo Boss. But technically these are Eau de Toilettes, not colognes.

Gold or Silver: Gold. You better believe it, although I'm rather liking oil at the moment.

Hometown: Currently, Melbourne VIC, but I grew up in Sydney NSW.

Insomnia: Negative. But I wish that I voluntarily went to sleep earlier.

Job title: Blogger, Freeloader and Minister. Oh and I have some day job in industry superannuation as well.

Kids: Too young, too poor and too immature.

Living arrangements: A three bedroom unit with my wife and (currently) our friend from the sticks who is in town working at Honda.

Most admirable traits: Standing up for one's personal ethics.

Not going to cop to: Surely this could be phrased better? I have no idea what this one is asking.

Overnight hospital stays: Broken arm, 1985. I was boogie boarding at the time and got dumped by a freak wave.

Phobias: Snakes and crocodiles. Actually, reptiles generally gross me out.

Quote: Primary school poetry: "We had fun, fun, fun, picking boogies in the sun. When the sun got hot, our boogies turned to snot."

Religion: Pretty much quality Australian Pale Ale at the moment. And the Sydney Swans Football Club.

Siblings: Two sisters, both younger, one in Sydney NSW and one in Carson City NV. She's married to my brother-in-law who is originally from somewhere in Indiana. Shit! I know this one. It might be Bloomington. My other brother-in-law is the brother of Ms Dikkii, and he lives in a place called Funkytown.

Time I wake up: Usually after I've hit the snooze button seven or eight times.

Unusual talent or skill: I do this pen-flicking thing that drives people insane.

Vegetable I love: Peas, nuked with butter and pepper. Carrots, steamed with honey.

Worst habit: I'm not putting this one in.

X-rays: Chest, teeth, foot, arm. I think that's it.

Yummy foods I make: I'm told that my chili con carne is pretty good. Personally, I don't think I've got it right, yet.

Zodiac sign: Crux Australis.

Why woo merchants cannot be trusted

I have a friend. She's a lovely girl, but as credulous as hell.

She grew up in a small country town about two or three hours drive out of Melbourne, and she pretty much accepts anything that is shovelled her way, no matter how much it beggars belief.

Not long ago, she was round at our place and she told us something that really caught my interest: Her mother, along with most of the rest of the country town she grew up in, saw a UFO.

This really interested me, because, for the first time, I thought that we had an example of that most elusive of UFO sightings: One that had been independently verified.

Sadly, after finding out the year in which it took place, a quick search of the web failed to yield any record of this event which was apparently witnessed by a town of about 1,000 people.

I had bitten my tongue throughout, but it eventually became all too much and I said, "Are you sure your mother was 100% certain that what she saw was a spacecraft of extra-terrestrial origin?"

Her first response was: "Are you calling my mother a liar?"

This is a somewhat telling response for a variety of reasons. And for the purposes of my story, we'll go with the definition of "lie" as being that where someone wilfully intends to mislead.

I didn't take it further, but I really wanted to ask her this:

1. The most obvious conclusion that anyone, including myself, can come to is that her mother, and the residents of this country town were mistaken. That is, they saw (or thought they saw) something completely different.

Science has discovered a large number of naturally occurring phenomena that could quite easily explain this "sighting". Ball lightning, low flying aircraft, mass hallucinations, mass hysteria - these are but the tip of the iceberg, there's plenty of others.

Why would I be suggesting, then, that her mother took the less likely tack of deliberately telling an untruth?

2. The definition of "liar" last time I looked, was someone who lies. Did my friend remember this?

3. Which begs the question, given that the definition of "liar" is not one who "lied" - was my friend aware of anything else that her mother had told her that would lead us to accuse her mother of having told more than one fib?

4. Given the above, could my friend shed some light on the accusation that I was calling her mother a liar, given that it is clearly not even the most likely conclusion that I could come to?

I probably like to say that there's a distinct whiff of a guilty conscience here, however, I could also put my friend's defensiveness down to the fact that she has encountered skepticism on this very subject before, and like most daughters, will not countenance any possibility that her mother is any less than honest on the subject.

But I won't. Which brings me on to my main point.

Woo consumers often try this exact same tack, and will not accept anything other than full and willing acceptance of their claims, and will be only too ready to accuse anyone of calling them liars if the slightest ounce of skepticism is shown. Despite the fact that their testimony may be suspect.

In the case of UFOs, it is suspicious that after years of sightings and close encounters, not once has there been an independently verified sighting. Suggest that a claim should be more closely investigated, and your average woo disciple will scream that their honour is being impugned.

It's not just UFOs. For years, homeopathy has been allowed to operate, despite the extreme lack of evidence showing it to be even remotely effective. Criticise the testimonial evidence of a woo practitioner, and you may stand accused of calling them liars.

A lot of this stuff has been practised for years, even centuries, yet if you suggest that someone gathers evidence showing it to be effective before claiming that it works, you get nowhere.

Bronze Dog recently blogged that after all the promises claimed by the world of woo, there is still nothing to show for it. Does acupuncture really cure colds? Does chiropractic really fix headaches? Can John Edward really talk to the dead? Why would UFO crews deliberately pick out hillbillies to try out their anal probes?

Alan Hopgood is a playwright of note in the city where I live. At a dinner I was at where he gave a speech, he told of a time when he was at Uni and a few friends of his chose to perpetrate a hoax.

A few of them got together and plotted a line out over the suburbs, calculated speeds and worked out times. Then a couple of them went and stood on a street corner in the CBD and at the allotted time, looked up, pointed and made a lot of noise about having seen something going very fast across the sky in a south-easterly direction.

This was repeated in various suburbs out towards the south east by various accomplices.

Somehow, one of the news services calculated a rough velocity based on sighting times, and a UFO legend was born. The hoax was exposed soon after. Hopgood swears that to this day, he runs into people unconnected with the hoax who swear that they actually saw the "UFO" in question on that day.

It's just too easy sometimes. But unlike Hopgood and his friends, not everyone is motivated by good intentions. Hopgood and co rode a wave of credulity and gullibility for a laugh.

It stands to reason that some will ride this wave for financial gain. And this is why, after all these years of nothing, woo merchants cannot be trusted.

Here's a wonderful hoax that was carried by some news services recently. Enjoy.

67th Skeptics' Circle

Over at the Bronze Blog, Bronze Dog has put together what could possibly be the best Skeptics' Circle ever. And it comes with an excellent mech theme.

Holding my attention from the outset were two excellent posts by Orac at his blog, Respectful Insolence:

What a lot of it boils down to when it comes to antiscience; and

Your Friday Dose of Woo: A soothing footbath of woo

I love Orac's Friday Dose of Woo series.

I've plugged Infophilia in the past, and this post caught my attention mainly due to the fact that I've recently posted about the idiotic concept that is Pascal's Wager.

Infophile puts a new spin on this ridiculous concept in this great post, and tells a riveting story at the same time. It can truthfully be called a parable:

The Greater Good

Anyway, as always there is tonnes of excellent reading for all the family.

Click here.

Pascal's diversified portfolio

I have to let you in on a secret - I don't read that many blogs. But I have a select group that I read as much as humanly possible. Which is why I get immensely pleased when I come across a blog post that I like.

This is one. And, as always, Bronze Dog does a smashing job. Which he referred to a post at PZ Myers' excellent blog (which I read less regularly), Pharyngula.

These posts are about something written by the increasingly unbalanced Scott Adams who created the Dilbert cartoon. I normally like Dilbert. Not passionately or anything like that, hell, give me Ernie/Piranha Club any day. But I find it better than some of the cartoons out there. Fred Basset, anyone?

Adams has been writing all sorts of weird shit in his blog lately, and given his comic timing (I love bad puns) in the strip, you would have to say that he is most definitely not taking the piss.

I mention this because if there is one thing that is guaranteed to make me angry, it's mention of this stupid concept.

Pascal's Wager has always been something that has annoyed me. The first tine that I heard it was at school when my roommate - who was previously an atheist from an atheist family - suddenly found religion in a big way. And this was one of the fastest transformations I ever saw - it all took place over a two week period.

Anyway, he ran Pascal's Wager by me. For those who need their memory refreshed, Pascal's Wager goes like this:

If I believe in God, and I find out that He doesn't exist, then I have lost nothing.

If I don't believe in God, and I find out that He exists, then I have lost everything.

Pascal had formulated a lot of what became known as Game Theory, and his reasoning was sound, except that he didn't realise one thing - he had made the assumption that only the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god existed.

Or, to put that another way, if God promises annihilation for non-believers, than what about non-believers in Shiva, the Destroyer?

Anyway, Dog suggests the following alternate probabilities to Pascal's Wager about a deity of which we know no details:

1. What if the deity punishes people for doing evil deeds and rewards them for doing good deeds, with no regard for beliefs?

2. What if the deity punishes people for blindly believing in him and rewards them for thinking critically and thus doubting him?

3. What if the deity rewards everyone, regardless of what they do or believe?

4. What if the deity rewards people on a random basis?

5. What if the deity only punishes those who step on cracks in a sidewalk?

6. What if the deity doesn't care at all about human beings and only thinks about them as a meaningless, uninteresting by-product of a brane/string experiment he conducted 13.7 billion years ago?

7. What if the deity just throws everyone's souls up on the roof, where they get stuck?

And so on and so forth. I thought of another possible outcome:

8. What if the deity is a liar?

Oh, the confusion that one would cause. And of course, this is before consideration of competing deities, to whom all the outcomes above might also apply.

Being the financial nerd that I am, I thought at that I'd take a view of this through the window that is Portfolio Theory. Portfolio theory says a variety of things, but the one most important thing that comes out of portfolio theory is this: for a set level of risk, you can increase your return by diversifying your portfolio.

Or to put that another way, "Don't put all your eggs in the one basket."

So let's take a diversified approach to investment in a god as proposed by Pascal:

Option 1 - Belief in god A but he doesn't exist.

Believing in a god would appear to have a rather high risk/return trade-off - the potential return is eternal life, however, your potential risk for this return is also infinite and given that there are quite a few gods out there, who knows if you've picked the right one?

Normally, you can't say that infinity A is greater than infinity B, so there is no way of knowing if the risks outweigh the potential returns, but you can say this: the chance of you picking the wrong god is enormous from the outset.

So for us to load all our belief credits into the one slot machine is obviously a high risk investment.

Option B - Belief in a portfolio of gods.

This would appear to satisfy a prudent approach to investing in a high risk asset class, which is what theistic belief clearly is. The problem with this is that there are many more gods that we can read about before we can profess a belief in them.

I should clarify from the outset that my problem with the word "belief" is another thing that Dog expressed frustration with in his post. Is it enough to just say that you believe in a deity?

Most theists would say yes to this. After all, quite a lot of them will say they believe, however they may actually believe something completely different. However, this is not what most of the rest of us understand by the word belief. The problem with this perspective is that a token statement of belief is clearly not belief, if the person who says it believes something completely different.

Most of us understand belief to be what we predominantly think is the case about something, when we do not know the answer. For example, if we're holding an apple, and we drop it, we know it's going to hit the ground. This is called "knowledge". However, if we drop the apple, and we think that a magic invisible hand is going to catch it before it hits the ground, this is called "belief".

There is nothing that could cause us to "know" that this magic invisible hand will catch it - you would have to be pretty darn sure to say that you knew that a hand or other such appendage would catch it.

So obviously, while belief implies some level of disbelief, it is an outright lie to say that you believe in something when you don't.

Which means that for us to have a meaningful definition of belief for the purpose of this post, we'll have to eliminate those who only pay lip service to believing in something.

In other words, we'll define belief as being that where we've studied the deity in question a little bit and decided that we have more than just a token level of faith that they'll be there to greet us at the other end.

So it is possible to believe in a portfolio of gods based on this approach. How do we construct this portfolio?

Those who understand portfolio theory know that there are many ways to construct this portfolio. In investment, there are active methods that look at various different criteria, all of which involve chopping and changing between different assets in order to reduce risk and maximise return.

There are also passive methods where assets are bought and held for a long time based on a number of criteria, though normally, the criterion is a popularity measure, such as a major index. These are all designed to get a return that matches the index or some other benchmark.

I propose that we appeal to popularity and create a passively managed index portfolio based on popularity. This makes it easy.

Our Judeo/Christian/Islamic god gets in first. The Taoist pantheon is next - the Jade Emperor is a particular favourite of mine - followed by Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva. The remaining spots in the core portfolio would be filled by the remaining major deities out there.

Now on to creating a satellite investments sub-portfolio with lesser deities. I've always had a thing for Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl, so they're in. And just because I'm Australian, the Rainbow Serpent gets the nod, too. Flying Spaghetti Monster and Invisible Pink Unicorn? They're in.

How much of an investment do we make in all these deities?

Reading the holy books of each and professing a belief should be enough I think. We don't want to make this too onerous.

And this is where our diversified approach cleans up - you get as many bets into different deities as possible.

It also minimises the downside of the other possibility that Pascal overlooked:

What if all the deities exist, and they have to fight amongst each other to see who gets to punish unbelievers?

What better way to do this, than to reduce those deities who are out to get you?

Of course, prudent investing also says to wait until the evidence is in before committing. For me, Pascal's Diversified Portfolio is just going to have to wait until I have enough evidence to start putting my portfolio together. I don't want to find the religious version of Enron in my portfolio.

My advice?

Theistic belief is the kind of high risk/high return investment that makes derivatives appear positively safe by comparison.

This is for ultra-ultra-ultra-aggressive investors only, folks.

Doggerel #100

Over at the Bronze Blog (formerly Rockstar's Ramblings), Bronze Dog has churned out his 100th post in this excellent series.

This is a sensational achievement, and an excellent post to boot - he's looked at "Truth" for this one.

Not being one to rest on his laurels, he's immediately followed this up with Doggerel #101, which is about the phrase, "We can believe whatever we want!"

I say congratulations, BD. Well done.

Dungeons and dragons

Proving once again that his blog is indispensible, Jack Marx has had a go at woo, "self-help" and eastern religion.

His conclusion is stated early on, and quite well:

For peddlers of pseudoscience are the most successful of all hucksters, thanks to what at first seems to be an uncanny ability to appear above criticism, but is actually just the simple fact that you can't bust a dealer when he's selling bags with nothing in them.

As far as pseudoscience goes, this statement sums it up better than anything else I've ever heard and I plan to use it heaps in the future.

The comments thread has gotten a bit out of control - you could apply all of Bronze Dog's Doggerel statements to quite a lot of them, but anyway, have a read for yourself.

Read it here:

The Daily Truth: Dungeons and dragons