For those of you who read my post last week about brainwashing, I have to tell you that post did not turn out the way I originally imagined it would. I thought it was going to be a silly, tongue-in-cheek kind of post. I was even working on a silly, tongue-in-cheek illustration to go with it.
But as I did my research and fleshed out my original first draft, the subject matter ended up being more serious than I expected. I realized I had a point I wanted to make, and I decided to go all in with making that point. Unfortunately, by the time I was done, the art no longer fit the tone of the blog post. At least not in my opinion. So I decided not to use it.
Even so, a fun drawing is still a fun drawing, so after thinking it over this weekend I decided to share the illustration anyway. Here it is:
I don’t know, maybe I’m over thinking things. Maybe I should have gone ahead and used the illustration anyway.
What do you think? Should I have used this in last week’s Sciency Words post, or would it have detracted too much from the point I was trying to make? Please let me know in the comments, and I’ll keep your thoughts in mind the next time this happens.
Planet Pailly 
I like the illustration. And it makes an important point. We’re always embedded in a point of view, in a set of biases. This viewpoint and biases are heavily influenced by our culture. “Brainwashed” is probably the wrong word, but maybe “indoctrinated” works.
And the problem is we’re usually completely unaware of it. The only way we have to possibly reveal it is to study other cultures, or maybe interact with people in other cultures, or with people who have radically different views.
And then there are the species level biases that are very difficult to detect, much less overcome. I suspect a lot of the ink spilled on quantum mechanics “interpretations” amounts to us primates from a certain ecological niche struggling to fit the scientific findings into our narrowly evolved framework for understanding the world.
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Indoctrinated may be a better word for it. There’s definitely a sense in which we all are molded by the cultures we live in. The idea, though, that there’s some nefarious organization controlling our society seems silly to me. I guess that’s what the illustration is meant to convey.
That’s an interesting point about species level biases. I recently saw a movie (Ant Man and the Wasp) where a character was miniaturized to the quantum scale and stayed that way for thirty years. I thought the movie handled this rather poorly, but it would have been interesting to see what everyday life might be like for a quantum-scale person.
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Totally agreed on the idea of a nefarious organization controlling things. Such an organization would have to be more competent than any human organization in history. Belief in such an organization seems similar to traditional beliefs in demons and spirits.
I saw that movie and totally agree that their treatment of the “quantum realm” could have been better, both at a sci-fi* and character level.
* I won’t say “scientific” here because Marvel movies are straight fantasy.
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I’d have used it.
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