Being a scientist in dark times.

(priliminary thoughts - under construction)

On politics

As a scientist, in principle, you are curious, but comfortable with not knowing. you wait until scientists find ways to unlock nature’s mysteries. you try to do it yourself as well. You may build theories but you wait for the data, or you search for them, that will be meticulously mined from nature and prove a theory or not. you don’t let yourself slip into fantasies, like God(s) and Satan(s), just to fill in the gaps. Same if you are researching the behavior, mind and brain of the people, as eg a neuroscientist. Underneath this behavior though is your belief that nature doesn’t lie, it has no intention to hide itself, it is under your control, and if it lies you have a way and you are free to use it in order to understand it. So you wait without knowing, actively researching. someday maybe you know or maybe you won’t, it’s fine, no one is hurt, at least because of waiting.

What happens now though when your under research system lies, you can’t get data, you can’t control it, it tries to stop you and silence you when you try to understand it, and in the mean time it does horrors that you witness day after day?

This is the state of the system that we are trying to understand today, as human beings, but you happen also to be a scientist.

You could wait until it decides to show you itself, but you know this won’t happen. You could be ok with it, but waiting hurts defenseless people and yourself with which you are not ok.

Like in the COVID era, you could tell that it was an international subjugation of people, but as a scientist you knew that knowledge takes time, makes mistakes and you waited for the vaccine to be found by scientists. Because with the vaccine people would be protected, and lives would be saved. So you were patient and accepted the to be short-term subjugation. Again you were assuming that people overall actually cared about people’s lives. Well, this ship has already sailed.

When it comes to politics, as a system you want to understand, you see that lying is its basis and not only it openly withholds data and information, but goes after you if you try to make sense of it. In this case you can’t wait for the data, they won’t allow you to have all the data. You could wait until the rich and powerful decide to expose themselves but you know that this won’t happen. You could be ok with being in the dark, as you are used to as a scientist, but your moral self doesn’t let you sleep at night.

This is when morality hits the scientist and makes her wonder what she can do.

So what can you do? You can’t have data and as a moral human being you feel the pressure of exposing the truth and protecting defenseless victims, like children and oppressed people. Waiting won’t change anything, it will only make it worse. You can’t afford to wait, you try to understand with whatever you have at your disposal, regarding data and tools.

What are the tools that you can use on the little scrambled data you have?

Again, as in history that I was saying earlier, our last resort is to study it at its interface, with human psychology and analyzing language. For example, who compares food with human flesh? Who finds funny to simulate sacrificing a baby to a devil? How can you walk a jerky beef?
and so on.

On history

An important and pressing question, that comes from philosophy of history, is how do we discern facts from narrative and propaganda.

How do we know that what Herodotus and Thucydides to today historians and media are saying has actually happened?

It’s not about the physical findings, those are also made by people as stories are made by people. History is like fiction. And as we are living deeper into the AI digital world, it will be harder to tell what really happened.

Then, only nature changes, those beyond human control, are the only objective indicators? Sadly, this doesn’t tell us much.

I see that maybe the only way to tell fiction from history is via understanding human psychology within context. The way language is used, who and when is using it, and in which context, is what matters.

For example, when the NYT write “Gazans are starving” and “Palestinians bombed Israel”, they may think that they serve the Zionist propaganda, but they don’t realize that they fall into contradiction which can be detected. When the perpetrators say we are ashamed of what we did, they most probably did it. Things said in private and confidentially, like in the Epstein files, are likely to be true. and so on.

So maybe this is the only promising method for discerning facts from narrative and propaganda, as long as there are people willing to meticulously do it.

On religion

Even the holy books must be rewritten. Is it possible for Judaism to get rid of Jewish Supremacy? for Christianity and Islam to get rid of Men Superiority? Either religions will adapt to human and animal rights or they must all vanish.

You don’t need religion, their stories, their rituals and the communities they build to believe in God, or Gods. Believing is a personal human right. Religions’ only function is to create groups distinguished to others which inevitably promotes racism. With the absurd aftereffect of the non religious, secular Jews, and secular Christians, just in order to belong in a distinguished community.

And we don’t need God(s) to be moral. On the contrary, we see over and over again how immoral religious people are.

It really amazes me how it is 2026 (even this number is religion based) and we are still talking about religions, and worse: we can’t talk about religions. Humanity hasn’t advanced yet as much as we think it has.