Today Beatrice skipped school to begin the first in a series of cognitive assessment tests with doctors at the Institute for Girls' Development. Before we went to the test, we had lunch at Beatrice's favorite restaurant, Panera Bread, where she had her usual, a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tomato soup.
We had a wonderful conversation, as always. We talked about exoticizing other cultures (she has been debating the merits of an upcoming field to trip to the Chumash Museum with the school principal), errors and biases in ethnography, the possibility of time travel, placebo effects and double-blind studies, and the theory behind hypnosis.
She asked me if scientists could be religious, and so I explained the difference between things being factual and being true, and that religious stories are not factual reports but rather represent important philosophical concepts or cultural ideals. I was talking about existing historical evidence for some events in the Bible and Beatrice said, "That's like the Trojan War. There's the story in the Iliad, but if you look at a map, you can see Troy was also in a really valuable trading position, so the Greeks probably invaded them for that and then the myths were a cultural story that maybe the Greeks told to make it seem like their ancestors had a lot of honor and glory instead of just people who wanted to expand their territory."
She also had an idea for a new short story or graphic novel: In the future, time travel is possible but exists only in specific, limited, and restricted ways. However, this gives rise to charlatans who commit Future Prediction Fraud by claiming to know information about the future in order to deceive others. Beatrice's protagonist is a time-traveling girl who fights perpetrators of Future Prediction Fraud.
We had a wonderful conversation, as always. We talked about exoticizing other cultures (she has been debating the merits of an upcoming field to trip to the Chumash Museum with the school principal), errors and biases in ethnography, the possibility of time travel, placebo effects and double-blind studies, and the theory behind hypnosis.
She asked me if scientists could be religious, and so I explained the difference between things being factual and being true, and that religious stories are not factual reports but rather represent important philosophical concepts or cultural ideals. I was talking about existing historical evidence for some events in the Bible and Beatrice said, "That's like the Trojan War. There's the story in the Iliad, but if you look at a map, you can see Troy was also in a really valuable trading position, so the Greeks probably invaded them for that and then the myths were a cultural story that maybe the Greeks told to make it seem like their ancestors had a lot of honor and glory instead of just people who wanted to expand their territory."
She also had an idea for a new short story or graphic novel: In the future, time travel is possible but exists only in specific, limited, and restricted ways. However, this gives rise to charlatans who commit Future Prediction Fraud by claiming to know information about the future in order to deceive others. Beatrice's protagonist is a time-traveling girl who fights perpetrators of Future Prediction Fraud.
