Skeptic Magazine: ‘How Rachel Bloom Became a Card-Carrying Skeptic’

Source:Skeptic– Comedian Rachel Bloom, on how she became a Skeptic.

Source:The Daily Review

“Rachel Bloom (creator and star of the American romantic-comedy-drama Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) shared with us a few of the defining moments in her life that led to her becoming a card-carrying skeptic.

Tell us your story and become a card-carrying skeptic!
Learn how at:Skeptic.”

From Skeptic

I believe anyone who is a realist and just doesn’t call themselves a realist because they have some need to have people believed they’re smarter and more advanced than they really are, but literally lives by the attitude or practice of accepting situations for what they are and not over or underplaying things, but seeing everything for what it is based on the best available information at the time, is not just going to be a skeptic but a natural skeptic. As well as one of the least romantic people you’ll ever meet. Not a bad person, necessarily but not someone who doesn’t have big dreams generally.

A skeptic is Probably not a fan of romantic comedies and certainly not romance novels and not someone you want to spend a day watching a holiday movie marathon of romantic comedies on The Hallmark Channel or some other network. Not someone who is going to say, “dreams really do come true.” But instead will be the person that not just tells you what they know and what they’re thinking and will kick your butt verbally when you need it because they’ll tell you when you screwed up and perhaps tell you how you can fix the problem or problems. They’ll tell you what you don’t want to hear, because they know its medicine that you need to know to improve yourself.

According to Wikipedia- skepticism is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief. A skeptic will be the last person who is going to get screwed over by someone or something, because the skeptic doesn’t automatically take everything that they hear from someone else at face value. “That person must be telling the truth because they would’t hurt me or are not stupid.” Really? That might be true but if that person just happens to tell the same thing to a skeptic, the skeptic won’t automatically take whatever that person said at face value, especially if what that person said doesn’t match up very well with reality. Doesn’t match up with the best available facts and evidence on the ground.

I believe skeptics are people who have generally been screwed over by others in the past and simply hate that feeling to the point that they don’t want that to happen to them again. So a wealthy man lets say who perhaps isn’t the best looking man around who has a history of being involved with beautiful sexy women who later get a lot of money and other property from the man and perhaps even win judgements against the man, that guy especially if they’re still a wealthy man even after dating all the gold diggers, will have hopefully have learned their lesson. Especially after already being played by 3-5 gold diggers in the past and will think long and hard about getting involved with another beautiful sexy woman in the future, especially a younger woman and make preparations in the future. Especially if that guy already has kids who are grown up.

Now, someone who doesn’t have a history of being screwed over but has been very skeptical all along just from being on Planet Earth especially in America and knowing that there are a lot of Americans who want the truth to be better than it is, as well as having a habit for telling people what they want to know instead of whatever the truth is, that is the person that you want to get to know. Even if you do love romance and even romantic comedies and holiday movies, because you’ll always know where that person is emotionally, what they’re thinking because they’ll tell you. And you’ll end up learning a lot from that person. You also might come down with a case of depression, because a lot of news in the world and what’s going on can be tough to hear. But if you’re a mentally healthy intelligent person, you’ll not only get a lot from that person but be able to handle that information as well.

I’m not saying people should be negative or positive, optimistic or pessimistic. I’m saying they should be real and always live on Planet Earth. Unless they’re an astronaut and then I guess there will be times when they leave the real world. But seriously, always know what’s going on so you can make the best available decisions and adjustments that you possibly can. The three most valuable tools that any person can have in life are their health, time, and information. Without your health, you really can’t do anything and you might not even be conscience anyway. Without time, well you can’t do anything either because you’re always out of time.

But without valuable credible information even if you’re healthy and manage your time well, you’re going to make a lot of mistake simply because you don’t know what the hell your’e doing. A person that Rachel Bloom might call can asshole. Someone who is skeptical or is a skeptic, will simply make the best decisions they possibly can because they’re always operating under the best information. Thats all.

TIME Magazine: Julia Zorthian: ‘How To Recover From Failure’

Source: TIME Magazine– Move on and start over

“Embracing the sting of failure may not sound enjoyable — but new research shows it’s the best way to learn from mistakes.

A study in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making found that people who ruminated on their emotions about failure were likely to try harder to correct their mistakes than those who made excuses or didn’t let their failures bring them down.”

Source:TIME Magazine 

I’m not a doctor and don’t pretend be one, but from what I know about the medical profession (which might only be enough to fill one paragraph) is that good doctors at least don’t try to fix the problems without first performing a diagnosis. They actually take the time to see what is the medical problem with the patient before they try to fix the problem. People get wrong prescriptions because their doctors given them the wrong diagnosis and recommend a prescription that might fix another problem, but not the problem that this patient is facing. People get even sicker or see their physical conditions worsen simply because their original problem wasn’t diagnosed properly and therefor not effectively treated.

Giving someone an aspirin to deal with a broken ankle might give the patient short-term pain relief, but still leaving the ankle broken and perhaps it even gets worst because the patient believes their ankle is recovering. That would be an example of an extreme misdiagnosis. Maybe the doctor was drunk when they looked at the patent’s ankle, or perhaps examined the head by accident, before recommending aspirin for the pain. But hopefully you get the idea.

Another way to look at failures and weaknesses lets say is from the perspective of an addict. Lets use alcoholic as an example. I’m not an alcoholic either, but from what I’ve read and even seem to some extent that the only way an alcoholic can recover is first acknowledging that they have a problem that they’re indeed an alcoholic. They drink too much alcohol, get drunk too much and perhaps to the point that being drunk is a normal condition for them. Which I guess would be an extreme form of alcoholism. So my only point here is to before you try to fix a problem or personal problems that you might have, you first have to diagnose the problem and know what the problem is. Once you’ve accomplished step a, you can work to addressing the problem with a recovery plan.

Right-wing author and radio talk show host Eric Metaxas who I agree with as often as Los Angeles sees snow in August, but who was on BookTV on C-SPAN in I believe September (some of us actually have hobbies outside of realty TV and social media and like to use our brains) made a good point about mistakes and even screw ups. And he essentially said that we’re all screw ups. Thats not the question or the issue. The question and issue is what do we do about them.

Do we ignore them and not learn from history and keep repeating the same mistakes and seeing our problems get worst? “Those who don’t learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” Or do we acknowledge them, take them in and even absorb them and memorize that feeling to the point that it feels so bad not that we don’t want to be consumed by it and let our failures run our lives, but that we know the feeling of failure so well that we don’t want to feel like that again. Not about being pessimist or overly optimistic, but being in touched with reality so we know exactly what’s going on so we know what to do about it.

John F. Kennedy is  a political hero of mine, but one of the biggest reasons why is that he always challenged Americans to think and try to improve and move forward. Challenge the status quo not necessarily because the status quo was bad itself, but that we wanted us to be as good as we possibly can be. Which is one of my broad points here is that we all make mistakes and maybe Eric Metaxas isn’t completely right here and that we’re not all screw ups. I mean, if we were we would be nation of very stupid weak people who can’t seem to get anything right.

But Metaxas is right about at least one thing that we all screw up. And then the question becomes what was the mistake exactly and then figuring out what can be done about it. Unless you killed someone, including yourself and you’re not permanently paralyzed or are hurt so badly that you’ve been given a death sentence and will die in the short-term, whatever mistake you made there is a recovery plan to fix it. Or at least learn from it and do better in the future.

I’ll just leave you with this. For almost every problem short of killing someone and permanently paralyzing yourself, there’s a solution to that problem. It then becomes once you acknowledge that you have a problem and know what the problem is. For every mistake there’s a correction. Including horrible mistakes like running your business into the ground and going bankrupt, or making horrible investments that also lead to high debt and perhaps bankruptcy.

The alcoholism example is perfect here. Once you realize you are indeed an alcoholic and have a real problem there, you then can get treatment for it and recover. People have screwed up so badly in one profession that they can’t find any more work in that profession, but recover from that and prosper working in a different field. Take former White House Counsel John Dean who was part of President Nixon’s Watergate coverup who is now a successful author and columnist. A very successful writer now even though he was disbarred as a lawyer.

Step a, is acknowledging that you have a problem.

Step b, is knowing exactly what your problem is.

Step c, is putting together a recovery plan to fix the problem.

Step d, learning from your mistakes not to get overwhelmed by them, but so you know what went wrong and not to repeat the same mistakes. And then improving yourself so you do better in the future. Not about making mistakes in life. Of course we all do and perhaps have all made a lot of mistakes. The question is what do we do about them. Do we learn from them so we can do better in the future. Or ignore them and continue to repeat our negative history.

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