Many think we are living in a golden age of bullshit. That public discourse has never been gaudier or more demeaning. That respect for truth and decency has reached all-time lows. The mental pygmies that hold these opinions don’t read or think for themselves. Deceiving ourselves and others is the one thing our species excels at. Lies are the bedrock of art, economics, politics, and religion. Only two tiny slivers of human thought have ever breached the bullshit barrier and approached something that might be credibly labeled truth: hard science, and harder mathematics.
If you think I am going to praise brave men, (and bitches), of science for lighting a candle in the perpetual darkness, (Carl Sagan already wrote an entire fawning book on this self-aggrandizing theme), think again. Scientists are just as flawed and full of crap as the rest of us. Science occasionally succeeds because it has evolved protocols that correct for human bullshit. A good protocol protects us against our worst enemy – ourselves.
My Informed Naked Ape Protocol, or iNap for short, consists of eleven1 pithy maxims that force a hard ass skeptical view of things. I will manifest my maxims here and elaborate on each one in following posts.
Informed Naked Ape Protocol
- Enough people are scum.
- Trust is for imbeciles.
- “Belief” is a bullshit word.
- Assume corruption.
- Analyze the data, not the drivel.
- Demand full analytic disclosure.
- Practice relentless verification.
- Centralized systems are always corrupted.
- If you don’t control it you cannot trust it.
- Only scientific and mathematical arguments are admissible.
- Correct errors.
- Why eleven? The last time somebody tried to get the inhabitants of planet moron to follow ten simple rules it didn’t work out.↩︎
Analyze the Data not the Drivel 
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