I’m giving an exam on Friday, so I’ve offered the students extended office hours today and Thursday, so that they can stop by and get any questions answered. Many hours of office hours. Hours in which I cannot leave. So I’m noodling about on the internet a bit, because of course none of my students have come by, and I run across this little article about Oprah Winfrey, and her new project, a show about Belief. “Oh god,” I thought, “please let a student come by to ask me lots of questions. Even to offer lots of excuses. Anything to prevent me from reading any of this.” But no students came by.
There is no god.
Free of any responsibility or obligation, my eyeballs involuntarily swiveled to the open page, and my brain slurped down the anecdote Winfrey offered. I couldn’t help myself. I read everything. I can’t not read something. I’m like a rat, who eats but has no emesis reflex, so the toxin just enters and simmers there, in my head, making my consciousness regret ever waking.
One day I was at my farm in Indiana. It was a rainy day and I was thinking, “Gee, I sure would like some tomato soup.” Soon after, the caretaker who lived across the street came in with a pot of tomato soup. I asked her: “What made you do that?” She said: “Well, honey, I had these tomatoes. So I thought maybe you’d like some tomato soup.” So I was like, Wow, if you can get tomato soup like that, what else is possible? What else can I manifest? So I started trying it with other things. I have seen it happen over and over and over again. You control a lot by your thoughts.
AAAAAAAARGH.
“I have just consumed poison,” my brain howled, “and I cannot vomit it out.” It writhed in my skull, chasing its tail and slavering frothy drool, desperate to end the agony eating away inside it. How can she believe this? How can someone so deluded be worth umpty-billion dollars?
My brain squirmed over this for a while. I could feel my neurons melting, dripping and pooling in a little puddle of sad lipids at the base of my cranium.
And then I had a thought.
I would like some tomato soup, I thought.
I had a banana for breakfast (wait, did I? I think I forgot to have breakfast) and skipped lunch and it’s late in the afternoon and I’m trapped here in my office and boy am I hungry and a nice bowl of hot tomato soup sure would taste great right now, with lots of little oyster crackers and maybe a glass of milk on the side.
Gee, that sure would be nice.
And then I thought, no, even better, I would like some French onion soup. I would chop up a big onion — no, two, I would share — and caramelize it and simmer it in a big pot with some spices, and then I would serve it with some cheese and a baguette and a nice wine, and it would be delicious. I need this. I deserve this. OK, the tomato soup would be fine, too. See, I’m a reasonable man. I’ve given the universe alternatives. My demands are so simple and inexpensive and easy, and I allow a whole hierarchy of choices that would all make me equally happy.
Right now, my brain wants nothing but soup. It can think of nothing but soup. I am a focused node of desire, and I want nothing but soup.
UNIVERSE, WHERE IS MY SOUP? I WANT MY SOUP NOW.
I WANT OPRAH WINFREY TO SHOW UP AT MY OFFICE WITH MY SOUP. And umpty-billion dollars.
You don’t have to bring the cash to my office, Oprah. You can just mail me the check, sometime in the next week or two.
See, I’m reasonable.
WHERE THE FUCK IS MY SOUP?
Now my office hours are over. I can go home.
Maybe I should make some soup.
I will be mean and note that as I read this post I was eating some yummy Covered Bridge brand Sea Salt and Vinegar chips.
It’s no surprise Oprah would fall for that kind of nonsense. If you’re as successful as she is it must mean the Powers That Be, or your own powers, or something, want you to be, right? It’s just the New Age version of the Prosperity Gospel. I wonder which came first.
Given that Oprah Winfrey is presumably familiar with the poverty of Africa — iirc she set up a school there — I wonder if she ever wonders why “Gee, I sure would like some soup … or rice … or anything at all, really” doesn’t magically work for people who are, you know, actually starving. But thinking deeply is not the strong suit of the spiritual. It cuts into the love affair between faith and intuition.
Instead, their minds are like children’s picture books, where the story is all about them and their wonderful quest to discover how powerful they really are. That is, they are powerful only if they can humble themselves enough to stop believing in only physical cause and effect. Belief is reality!
I know people who are into this New Thought garbage, which has 19th century roots. Of course, it’s only a variation of prayer and supplication to God, so it’s not even that recent.
I had to look. They do make instant tomato soup.
All you need is a hot water source in your office. Makes a good Brownian motion source the infinite probability generator. Or hot tea works as well for the IPG.
PZ
Tomorrow, I want to see a post about how much soup you actually get.
If your students know what’s good for them ;)
I’m sure if you’re as rich as Oprah is, and you have a retinue of people constantly attending to your every need, people of the sort who are trained to think good service is anticipating the needs of the people they serve, then it probably does begin to seem like your wishes can manifest themselves. But in reality what you have is a person who is surrounded by dozens of people who are hyper-attentive to her needs, and a person who is too self-absorbed to notice that that’s what’s happening. And also confirmation bias.
Something else your thoughts didn’t summon: a student to keep you from having to read that nonsense.
So the caretaker was thinking “I’ve got these lovely tomatoes, let’s see if I can suck up to the boss by bringing her some tomato soup.”
So you will get the soup you desired! That’s exactly how the Lord works, PZ!
You should have learned this from the parable about the man trapped on his roof by a terrible flood. “Please, God, rescue me,” he cried. Soon another man in a boat came by to offer a ride to safety, but the man on the roof declined …
OK. I’ll let myself out.
Didn’t Oprah endorse The Secret when it came out? And then had to walk that back a bit when people pointed out some of the ugly implications of that book (like, if you can avoid cancer by having a positive attitude, then doesn’t that mean cancer victims have themselves to blame?)
Good to see she’s learned so much from past mistakes.
PZ:
I’m sure all your students are laboring at home to prepare tomato soup and french onion soup. They’ll bring both by tomorrow along with questions to prevent you from reading more stuff on the internet that breaks your brain. Just you wait and see. The universe has a way of doing this kind of thing.
Just ask Oprah.
If you get that tomato soup, put a heaping spoonful of crumbled gorgonzola cheese in it so it gets all melty.
You can thank me later.
Typically when this happens to me, the universe conspires to bring me soup within the hour, and often even faster. ID is involved*.
CHECKMATE DARWINISTS
* I need to show a piece of identification and perform incantations to validate that the soup maker will be compensated for their efforts. What a bizarre culture we live in.
No no no, you’ve got it all backwards! You START with the soup. The Primordial Soup. Then everything else comes to you over time…
All hail the Primordial Soup!
As one of the ancient Greeks pointed out, we don’t remember all the times we wished for tomato soup and didn’t get it. “πόλωση επιβεβαίωσης.”
And, in this case, two people thought it was a soup kind of day.
All this talk of tomato soup is making me hungry for a grilled cheese sandwich.
…
And I note that nobody is showing up to bring me one.
Actually I do that experiment all the time. A pretty girl walks by, and I wish (mightily) that she will come and talk to me. But she never does.
Sometimes, though, when I wish for vague things, like tomato soup, or maybe just any kind of soup, or maybe just something to eat, or something interesting to happen, it does!
“My child, those times when no soup appeared, it was because I was eating your soup for you.” — Jesus
“No soup for you.”
Ah, but when you were thinking about soup, soup appeared to somebody somewhere. Oprah never said she’d make things appear for *her*. Just appear. I’m fairly certain every time I’ve thought about soup, some-one somewhere on the planet had soup appear.
At least I can’t prove it hasn’t.
How soon after? It takes me three hours to make a good tomato soup. Has Oprah considered the possibility that the caretaker had started making it before she had the thought?
This is the best and funniest thing I’ve read all day. Thank you!
Yeah, well I want super powers…
I’m waiting universe…
I am not asking for this for selfish reasons, you know. I want to be able to improve things for people. I want to be able to just fix world hunger, poverty and suffering of all kinds without having to worry about environmental damage or money or anything like that.
The ability to just erase cancer – make that all disease, harmful medical conditions and injuries – from existence entirely and cure everyone who is afflicted without any dangerous unanticipated effects would be great. I would also like the power to stop the horrendous practice of war and bloodshed in all its forms. No more war, no more school shootings – heck, how about no more weapons full stop? Every blade or club is transmuted to soft rubber before it can inflict any wounds, guns fire sprays of fragrant flower blossom rather than bullets, bombs act as air fresheners rather than exploding, poisons become the imbibers favourite food at the instant of consumption, and if you try to punch someone you wind up writing poetry instead.
Still waiting…
How about if I am unable to use those abilities to benefit myself at all; purely for the altruistic betterment of humanity as a whole – do we have a deal?
Annnnnd go…
Anytime now…
You really aren’t working with me here universe, you know that…?
Is this because that is too much power for any one person to possess safely? How about something more limited? How about genuine equality for women, LGBTQ people, ethnic minorities, the differently abled and all marginalsied social groups. We already talk about it all the time as a society and go on about how much we want that outcome – how about you just make it an actual, meaningful reality right here, right now? Go on, it will be our little secret. I won’t tell anyone…
What’s the hold up?
This could only be good for society, so why are you refusing to do it?
So, let me get this straight – you will provide one of the richest women in the US with free tomato soup she doesn’t need, but you won’t lift a finger to end genuine suffering and inequality?
You know what universe? You are an arsehole, and you have terrible priorities.
Gregory Greenwood,
Sorry, the universe only deals in souper powers.
screechymonkey, thank you so much for that :)
You say tomato, and I say an invisible omnipresent omnipotent being manipulated you into making tomato soup for me.
I would think that maybe Oprah’s nose is a little more sensitive than she’s aware of. The scent of the soup brewing across the street, may have triggered her to crave tomato soup. That the neighbor then offered the soup, out of generosity, is probably simply a case of “synchronicity” (where one sees significance in a coincidence).
The following of “it keeps happening” is simply the phenomenon of “deja vu”. Just because one is thinking about some event moments before a similar event happens, is not mean thought was the causal agent.
PZ:
I seriously doubt she’s deluded, I don’t think she buys into this bullshit at all. What she does buy into is the fact that millions of people will eat the said shit right up, adding mightily to the umpty-billion dollars.
There are more important things though – Mister bought fresh tomatoes yesterday, so it’s off to kitchen. I’ll reserve my fist-shaking at the universe™ over not having a gargoyle chef.*
*The Accidental Alchemist, Gigi Pandian
I must be doing something wrong, because for a long time I’ve been thinking, gee, I’d like Oprah to develop some critical thinking skills, but I don’t see any manifestation whatsoever.
What a Maroon, oblivious @23;
OK then, I can work with that. Can I at least get nutritious soup for all of the world’s starving millions? That would be a huge help in dealing with world hunger and all the health issues linked to malnutrition…
*Waits for the news to be flooded with tales of soup-related miracles*
talk about selective data and biased interpretation.
her farm which she implied she does not live on.
do they grow tomatoes on it?
her caretaker who manages the farm when she is away and lives across from the “farm house”, her (the boss) house.
the caretaker picks the tomatoes and makes the soup knowing the boss likes tomato soup.
Oh it’s good to be queen! god must have arranged all of that just for ME!
(I hate tomato soup but not as much as I hate pretensions pious bullshit.) too much of that kind of saccharin crap can give you diabetes.
uncle frogy
I wonder what mechanism she believes is at play here. Does she think she can mentally control those around her, forcing them to produce tasty foodstuffs against their will? Or is she simply willing into being delicious soup and generous neighbours?
This is why I was HUGELY non-plussed to learn on Monday that Oprah has bought a significant stake in Weight Watchers…and that they’re trumpeting this as a Very Good and Awesome Thing. Because she’s a member! She’s doing the program with us (and a LOT of help from her personal chef, trainer, shopper and other staff!)
Great…the program that touts itself as research-and-science driven is now in bed with a huge promoter of WooWoo and WooWoo Merchants–like Mehmet Oz.
Yeah…guess it’s time I find another structured/supported way to manage my weight. WW was already slanted enough towards woo-ishness around food–at least most of the best-meaning leaders in my experience sure have been.
*sigh*
You see, PZ, soup isn’t what you wanted. You really wanted something to rage about. You should validate yourself. You manifested what you truly wanted: to bump into a horribly stupid piece by some airy-fairy TV personality with umpty-billion dollars and no one to interrupt you so you could read it and tear it apart.
I know how this shit works. It’s not difficult. Anybody can do it. We’re all psychic (i.e. capable of making shit up). I’m a graduate of a psychic school (no really, long story, and of course, it’s a love story).
I got some fresh tomatoes from my garden today, and I would clobber anyone who tried to make tomato soup out of them. Mom’s salad recipe of tomatoes, cottage cheese, red onions and black pepper is a much as I will do to a fresh tomato.
It’s the magic of the free market, of course. Yes, it really fucking is! (Except for the magic bit; conformist, herd-like behaviour does the trick.)
re @31:
maybe she’s just thinking our brains are naturally (psychically) transmitters. Some are more sensitive at reception, so thinking about a desire may get picked up by a nearby receptor who may fulfill one’s desires. Tomato soup was just a recent example.
or so she’d like her customers to believe.
Gregory Greenwood @ 29
Oh no, it’s everywhere! Help! I can’t swim!
*is swept away on a flood of nutritious soup*
(Incautious wishes are a leading cause of irony-related deaths.)
Your mistake was to wish for soup. If it had been a plate of shrimp you might have got somewhere.
And here I was thinking that they were the leading cause of bad, moralizing fiction. Humph.
Also? Seconding Yazikus’ praise for screechymonkey.
Speaking of screechymonkey, do they feed rhesus pieces to you? Or are rhesus pieces what they feed the leopards and tigers at the zoo?
And more seriously: I cannot fathom how anyone can look at the universe, the unimaginably vast, hostile, and uncaring universe, and conclude that they are important in any way. Let alone so important that the universe should magic up things for their trivial whims.
i stopped by hoping that pz would have a new post up.
it worked!
It was obviously Gawd Swill that you make a
FrenchFreedom Onion Soup or perhaps your mistake was thinking about French Onion Soup instead of Freedom Onion Soup.And anyhoo I thought you were supposed to be the mean PZ Myers, Terror of the Alluvium, Dominator of Students and Mastermind of the Was Against Gawd (and Sam Harris)
OOOOOps should be “War against Gawd (and Sam Harris)”
Indeed if there is a causal correlation between the thought and the soup it is far more likely that the soup caused the thought than vice versa. That is, Oprah may well have smelled it cooking (though not consciously noting it) and that led to her thinking, “soup would be nice”.
I think tomatoes are in season still here. Perhaps this weekend I will make tomato soup appear using my mind (along with my eyes, muscles, and the results of others’ work in the form of tomatoes.)
I’m pretty sure you have to be rich enough to have a live-in caretaker first in order for her to spontaneously make soup for you. The Secret only works for those who are rich enough for the universe to align to their will.
So your desire for a new post was what prevented PZ from getting his soup. Tsk. Or perhaps the moral is that the universe likes you better and finds your desires more worthy?
I saw her promoting her series on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show and it was sickening…not just because of the adoring crowd treating her like she is the fucking mesiah, but mainly because of the “favourite bible verse” horseshit and the way she managed to turn a bible verse into something even more vague, ethereal and all encompasing. Argh, and when she said everybody believes in something, it’s just that not everybody calls it a deity, some people just call it “working hard”. Fuck off Oprah…When did humans evolve the ability to breathe under wooter?
Hmm, we have free tomato soup sachets here at the office, and I have to go to the post office tomorrow anyway…
Gregory Greenwood@22,
By a spooky coincidence, I’ve just been watching The Lathe of Heaven, the film of Ursula LeGuin’s novel (it’s only available on YouTube, and the sound quality is poor, especially near the start, but it’s worth watching if you can cope with that, although the book is better). It’s central theme is the danger of using superpowers to cure the world’s ills.
well I just have to wonder who made a bundle on weight watchers stock since the announcement of her taking a large position.
the gods of the market sure did it for someone.
uncle frogy
It’s a bit disconcerting how easy it was to find a postal address – makes me glad we have data protection laws here in Holland. Some of my colleagues were amazed and a bit apalled at how much information they were able to retreive on me…
With great power come great responsibilities.
The fact that Oprah is able to summon a bowl of tomato soup out of thin air, and that she’s not using this awesome power to cure cancer or feed the hungry (or, if she must stay closer to home : cure diabetes and make the morbidly obese healthy again) kind of makes her a criminal.
(French onion soup! Ah, PZ, that’s so much more than mere tomato soup… The difference between us, of course, being that I’m in Paris and that I can very easily have one…)
Snoof @ 31;
So the universe is a giant evil genie/magic monkey hand that uses ambiguities in wish formulation to harm innocent people? Typical…
——————————————————————————————————————————————–
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden @ 39
Oh yeah, there are legions of stories that seem to express the curious impulse to caste a desire to help others as morally offensive for some reason. It all has a slightly nasty, Objectivist/Ayn Rand aspect to it.
I understand the whole point about the law of unintended consequences and that good intentions are not magical, but the downside of any formulation of the old saw that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions’ is that it has unpleasant implications all of its own, and can easily be employed as a cynical argument in favour of callous indifference to the suffering of others – the exact kind of apathy in the face of injustice that advantages the established order and thus the elites of our society… which is of course totally just a coincidence. Yup, nothing to see here people; move along…
Simplistic, short and notionally ‘pithy’ pseudo-moralistic aphorisms are inadequate to frame truly ethical behaviour – who knew?
——————————————————————————————————————————————————
Nick Gotts @ 49;
I’ll definitely take a look at that – Ursula LeGuin is an incredibly talented author, and I am certain that her handling of this subject matter will demonstrate her customary brilliance and sophistication.
Christophe Thill @ 52;
Oprah as supervillain? Suddenly it all makes sense…
This is why my wife won’t let me buy a fire axe. It would get used way too often and computers are expensive.
And on the other topic of the post —
I too am sitting in my office waiting for students who really should come and see me so I can help them get a decent grade on their papers, but who are definitely not here. Yesterday a few showed up, but they’re the ones who would probably have gotten A’s anyway.
What’s wrong with these people?
My spouse hunts. As part of his hunting philosophy, we do our best to use everything we can from what he kills, so when he goes birdhunting, I roast, then make stock from the carcass.
He and the dogs have had a good season, so far; thus, on my desk right now, awaiting lunch, is a container of Sharptail Grouse Chicken Corn Soup. I’d be happy to share.
You’re doing it wrong. First, you have to get a caretaker; then you wish for french onion soup.
Mindflayers walk amongst us.
@janiceintoronto #54 – The I/T guy at my workplace has a ballpeen hammer which he calls “Plan B.” I think it is a true testament to his abilities that it hasn’t been used – yet.
You’re just not growing enough tomatoes.
yazikus@21, Left Handed Atheist @24, and Crip Dyke @39, thanks.
“We… do not discuss it with outsiders.”
First Law of the Supernatural:
ME, ME, ME
What do I want?
I want what Stanley Tucci’s character in The Devil Wears Prada wanted:
I want to be able to call the shots in my own life.
That is how it always goes. The students who are the most likely to get good grades are also the ones who tend to be the most anxious about their grades, sometimes to the point where it’s obnoxious. (Although usually not; I like most of my students.) The other students, the ones who actually need to come to office hours, never do, unless you require them to, which I used to do sometimes. I mean, whatever, I don’t really mind just sitting around in my office for a couple hours; but…
There are also the students who are nervous or embarrassed by their grades and end up avoiding the teacher out of misplaced shame.
Well duh…
I mean obviously none of the starving people in the world are thinking “I want food” with enough conviction.
And clearly nobody facing a fatal disease or a potential murderer is thinking “I don’t want to die!” firmly enough.
And it’s absolutely self-evident that those of us thinking “Would all you raving idiots please stop promoting such bullshit” aren’t doing so with our whole heart.
I mean, really. All it takes is to truly want things. Put them out there into the universe. Can’t you see that?
Go make soup.
Tonight, I will put lentils in my crock pot, along with onions, garlic, celery, carrots, ham, V8, and Negra Modelo beer. I will top it up with veggie broth and add a lot of herbs (basil, thyme, parsley, oregano, bay). And come morning, the house will be perfumed with an amazing smell, and tomorrow night (after the soup has had time to rest) we will dine on excellent soup.
fossilfishy@40: “I cannot fathom how anyone can look at the universe, the unimaginably vast, hostile, and uncaring universe, and conclude that they are important in any way. ”
Note, however, that simply coming to that correct conclusion does not inoculate one from drawing ridiculous corollaries from it. The Winter 1970 issue of The American Scholar (magazine of Phi Beta Kappa) reprinted the text of R. Buckminster Fuller’s “Planetary Planning” (his Jawaharlal Nehru lecture of some years previously). The following paragraph appeared on pp. 45-46 (I represent by ~ Fuller’s symbol for “approximately”, and by ^ the exponentiation operator; the bold emphasis is mine).
I spent years on Usenet asking for evidence that this fallacy—not the geometrical nonsense, but the argument that “I’m not important enough for nature to fool, therefore I’m right”—wasn’t original with Fuller. No one ever came up with another instance (much less an earlier instance). Maybe someone here knows?
@#17, screechymonkey:
Please, please write a whole version of that, either something to stand alone or something to be tacked on to the usual version.
Nick Gotts@49: “The Lathe of Heaven” is just using a literary trope, though. A Deus ex Machina that can solve all the world’s problems makes for a really short and boring story, so works of fiction always provide some kind of hidden drawback to create dramatic tension. (Traditionally the story ends with people deciding that the Deus ex Machina is too dangerous to use.)
In the real world, if you have access to a Deus ex Machina, you’re morally obligated to use it to solve as many problems as you can. Even if there’s some kind of hidden drawback – like with Atomic Energy or the Internet – there’s probably a way to arrange things so that it does more good than harm.
(I’m in a bad mood because I just finished the “Life is Strange” computer game and I’m mad about the ending. [SPOILER ALERT:] I’m sorry, but if I get the “time-rewind” superpower, I’m not going to give up and settle for the default timeline. I’m just going to rewind over and over and over and over until I’ve managed to improve *something*.)
@68 and @40
unless you are Zaphod Beeblebrox of course!
uncle frogy
I was just sitting here thinking that no one had sent me email in a while and feeling put out about that when my phone beeped to tell me that I got an email. Which turned out to be work related spam. Does that mean I have the amazing superpower of being able to induce drug companies to advertize to me?
For certain values of “the universe”. IIRC, Zaphod was only important to a simulated universe that was created in order for a minor character to have a place to wait for him. He got told in no uncertain terms that he would never have survived the Total Perspective Vortex in real life because he wasn’t really all that important.
I recently had a ‘discussion’ with someone about this magical thinking. They were lecturing me about how if you just wish *hard* enough, you can cure your own, or someone else’s cancer. Apparently it works doubly well for kids, because they are so uncorrupted by life.
This is a red-rag as far as I’m concerned*, because I took over the care of my cousin, and spent about a year and a half rebuilding his resilience and trying to get him to a fairly healthy mental state after his mother’s ugly death from particularly nasty brain tumours. Apparently if he had only wished hard enough his mother would still be here. Worse, this same person was pushing woo cures on my aunt as she was desperate and dying.
I don’t really believe in ‘evil’ as such, but the only word I have for this sort of thing is evil. I tried explaining, but alas, do not have the way with words that the hippywoowoo self help books do.
*Although I must admit, it is also a target for me to take out my anger at myself about the poor choices I, myself made when I was looking after him, which are still held against me. Non-productive, but satisfying.