I'm not sure where I heard this, but it beautifully summarizes an important issue:
Every explanation fits the past.
In other words, any theory can be molded to agree with previous observations. A theory's usefulness and validity depends more so on whether it can correctly guess what will happen in the future, whether it has predictive power.
edit (2026-01-30): Although I'm not certain, I vaguely remember the quote coming from Scott Adams, who was interviewed on a podcast I listen to. Scott Adams had some good ideas, lots of bad ones, some crazy beliefs, and some strange, unexplainable political allegiances. That doesn't make the observation any less valid. Life is messy.
Some time ago, I came up with a little mnemonic to remember how direction of travel affects flight times:
East to west, you'll need rest. West to east, not in the least.
That's right, flying eastbound is faster than flying westbound along a similar route. For example, flying from California to New York takes about 5 hours, but flying from New York to California takes about 6 hours. The difference is not caused by Earth's rotation, but rather the jet streams.
“We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.”
“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals—hearts, likes, thumbs up—and we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity.”
—Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Growth, Mobile, and International at Facebook, in a conversation at Stanford
I'm intrigued by Boring Report, a news aggregator that uses artificial intelligence to offer “boring” coverage of current events, free of sensationalism and clickbait. As one example, it offered the following headline:
Shakira and Lewis Hamilton Spend Time Together in Miami
for an article originally titled:
Newly-single Shakira enjoys cosy boat trip with Lewis Hamilton just days after pair were spotted at secret dinner
It's not perfect, but I like it. Imagine if all news read this way. How much more normal would the world feel?
Mick West's skeptical analysis of recent UFO videos blew my mind. It's so clear that there are reasonable, natural explanations for these sightings, yet even some in government seem convinced that something else is going on. It's a nice reminder that the government is made up of people, and people don't always think critically. We believe what we want and we ignore contrary opinions. We insist on getting a second opinion before scheduling car repairs, but we accept that grainy, black and white videos might prove the existence of extraterrestrial visitors.
As Professor David Kipping reminds his viewers toward the end of the video, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence in these videos isn't even mildly significant. Call me when we have a video of an alien pilot turning knobs in the cockpit.
“If a person had delivered up your body to some passer-by, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in delivering up your own mind to any reviler, to be disconcerted and confounded?”
—The Enchiridion of Epictetus
Even this English translation is difficult to parse. I read it like this: if we wouldn't want others to physically control us, why do we allow others to control our minds by getting under our skin?