Rooting for Reality

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Disclaimer: The following article contains a shameless autobiographical puff piece you can only get for free by doing absolutely nothing special. But please use the tools at the links I’ve provided and share them with others. The overall benefit of their widespread use will be not having to argue about piling rocks in classrooms instead of books:

Hopefully everyone loves run-on sentences. And things spoken to redundancy because history and facts do not suddenly change no matter how old an article of evidentiary information gets unless contrary or newer developments have occurred.

I used to enjoy “Mysteries of The Unknown” in the 80s and stuff like the crazy coast to coast callers in the 90s because of how ridiculous and wild. Until I realized in 2017 what the world was like if a large enough percentage of the population ACTUALLY BELIEVED this stuff and could be swayed by their belief in it. Oh sure, everyone has or knows someone who has a UFO or cryptid or ghost story or some combination of these, maybe an out of body experience or some other missing time story…. Nothing wrong with campfire tales until so many people believe in something so horrific that they are able to be made compliant and complicit in an act such as loading up their vehicles with polo shirts and tiki torches (which would evolve to paramilitary brand items and military surplus camping stuff and a boatload of weapons) and run through a college campus chanting horrible racist things at a rally designated to “unite” the multiple* horrific parts that comprise one of our two big tent political parties in the United states.

For the last 6+ years my Ted Saves accounts have been actively and I believe correctly sharing information on public corruption, and political opposition research. when I say that I mean the best possible evidence and fact-based research and dissemination of the controversies and red flags about competition or opponents of those I believe were necessary to help win to ensure we stayed part of a democracy. I’ve written essays and threads about antidemocratic groups, conducted the same research on allied groups before deciding my endorsement, pointed out fascist nationalist candidates and their political influencers and their shills, and checked rhetorical points and threads of friend and foe alike. Others are encouraged to check me as well. I’ve always welcomed criticism and corrected myself when actual evidence is presented. I’ve credited those who have honestly and without obviously underlying ideations or other overt motive explained why they believe what they believe with the best evidence they have. And I look for any sort of mediated consensus that includes actual down to earth professionals. I like to learn things, I’m not infallible and nobody is.

If I initially felt off or upset or excited about a source (which is never the same as just shopping around for an opinion that suits what you already believe), I don’t just tell myself “Boy this fellow is popular, I’ll tell everyone what they are saying”. I check and double check and I have been sharing the tools with everyone to check with me since day one.

As some who know my prior writing, or who landed here through my current social media links may notice, I label myself “Ted Saves {insert whatever I feel like here}”

I collect and share context so *Save everything is also what I’ve done extensively since, out of curiosity and personal concern, I began to study disinformation, misinformation, and microtargeting on different sorts of media from AM radio to Twitter to local stations and campaign solution companies and staffers to YouTube channels. (Like a slew of other properly concerned researchers).

Aside from this I keep a broad range of physical political and religious propaganda, flyers, and pamphlets. Especially the really wild ones like the religious universities mail out, but also the candidate swag and all the stickers and trinkets I can collect. I share information and facts about the more dangerous ones that I see becoming memes or hear being used across these different sorts of media such as the aforementioned religious universities and all of what might be construed as the ideologically “adversarial” things I collect. (Just like a slew of other properly concerned researchers)

As some may have noticed, and more yet ignored, I’ve stated that I was a *discrepancy checker. I manually archived sensitive health, law enforcement (not FOR law enforcement), and laboratory data from hard print into a digital archive system engineered and maintained specifically for the non-profit organization I worked for as a final line before the information was to become accessible to all the different sorts of industrial techs and medical establishments who needed it. My job was to find errors and faults and differences as well as establish that nobody was going to get injured or be liable in the future for any mistakes made by a variety of other people who submitted the pieces of each case.

A bad enough mistake could be fatal to someone down the line and create liabilities for the organization when audited (or worse if neglecting the mistake caused harm).

The way I would get my mind off of this without doing something so distracting that I did f*ck up, like playing solitaire; or by accepting, rather than resisting, desensitization is by understanding that the information I was passing on would positively benefit a range wide range of biological sciences, and possibly extend or improve the quality of somebody’s life directly, and that would eventually benefit all of us including myself one day. I’m not above being selfish while trying to do something rewarding as long as it’s not at the expense and to the detriment of others.

I decided to share citation tools and explainers of possible online and offline manipulation and fraud without ever setting up a single donor button while being a target of those who cannot even explain their intent in public, for the last six years, for the same reason.

One way to practice keeping assumptions at bay (while also allowing the shameless padding of my article about myself with a fair amount of actual information) is by learning as much as one can about deductive reasoning and empirical observation. I leave a reminder of something you probably learned as a child (regardless of when you were born unless you have a signed special pass or some other great reason why you never saw it) When Jim Henson’s double headed goblin door guards in the movie “Labyrinth” acted out a very memorable twist on a logic problem which became known as Knights and Knaves as earlier presented by Raymond Merrill Smullyan. Enjoy:

“Many of his logic problems are extensions of classic puzzles. Knights and Knaves involves knights (who always tell the truth) and knaves (who always lie). This is based on a story of two doors and two guards, one who lies and one who tells the truth. One door leads to heaven and one to hell, and the puzzle is to find out which door leads to heaven by asking one of the guards a question. One way to do this is to ask, "Which door would the other guard say leads to hell?". Unfortunately, this fails, as the liar can answer, "He would say the door to paradise leads to hell," and the truth-teller would answer, "He would say the door to paradise leads to hell." You must point at one of the doors as well as simply stating a question. For example, as philosopher Richard Turnbull has explained, you could point at either door and ask, "Will the other guard say this is the door to paradise?" The truth-teller will say "No, " if it is in fact the door to paradise, as will the liar. So, you pick that door. The truth-teller will answer "Yes," if it is the door to Hell, as will the liar, so you pick the other door. Note also that we are not told anything about the goals of either guard: for all we know, the liar may want to help us, and the truth-teller not help us, or both are indifferent, so there's no reason to think either one will phrase answers such as to provide us with the most optimally available kind of comprehension. This is behind the crucial role of actually pointing at a door directly while asking the question. This idea was famously used in the 1986 film Labyrinth.”

Stay Curious.

Still not a doctor.

-TedMD