Blog 9

Honestly, I was thinking about the topic for the post for several days. I scrolled through all social media, I asked my friends, I asked myself about something I can definitely call fake. And I couldn't. For every story I had in my mind: "Well, maybe they have their own evidence I don't know about, maybe it is not completely fake and there is something true inside". So I will try to clarify my point of view with one example.

In my culture signs (or omens) was and is an important part of living in rural areas (I couldn't find a correct translation from Russian for that word - примета), I think every country has at least one of it. One example - weather lore (an article on Wiki). But it can be not only about the weather, but also about finding a significant other, about finding a good day for work and leisure and so on. Sounds a bit like an astrology that was discussed in a post below. But here it is not always connected to a specific date, it is just a sign you see at that moment.  Sounds fake, right? 

But even in the article on Wikipedia I put above there are some explanations that show that signs can have scientific background. So not all of them are fake. Then who can prove that all others are not true? 

As a future computer scientist I prefer to believe in facts that obey the logic. In one of TED Talks I watched there was a wonderful quote "I love computer science because there you can build the whole world with pure logic". But even with that quite often you can get a situation when you run your code and you have no idea why you have that output. You observe it one time, another, not always, only in some situations, with some combinations of inputs, and then start to feel why it can happen like that. You start to build the explanation and the consequences based on observations. Most of the times later you can find the reason why everything worked that way, but it is not an immediate action.

So then transfer that logic to the signs you see. Many generations of people saw those signs and noticed that under some conditions the output would be the same. So they started to transfer this knowledge through generations, so their descendants can use it. Maybe at that time they didn't reach the level of knowledge that allowed them to reach the scientific explanation of the action they saw, but at least they noticed the pattern. Some of this evidence we can prove nowadays, with more advanced science. And some is still a mystery. So people call it fake, because they can't prove it. But who knows, maybe we didn't find the correct combination of inputs yet, maybe we still need to improve our science to prove it.

I don't argue that every "sign from above" is true, absolutely not. I just think that everything that wasn't proved to be false have a right to exist.