Looking Back at My Blogging Activity, Part 1: The Year 2013

This is the first in a series of occasional posts in which I will look back at my blogging activity during some previous year. Let me start with my first year of blogging, the year 2013. 

My blogging activity started out in May, 2013 with the first posts of this blog. I think I got off to a good start on the science fiction side. I regard my May 2013 story "The Museum" as one of my better ones. It is about an extraterrestrial planet where the culture all revolves around a magnificent museum of galactic history.  You can read the story here. Back then (before AI image generators) it was very hard to make artwork like the illustration I produced for the story, which is shown below.

My first attempt at prognostication on this blog was a stumbling one, although I think I have a good excuse for the stumble. In my post "The Coming Energy Crisis," I predicted that a crisis would soon occur. Around this time talk about "Peak Oil" was very popular. The graphs of US oil production seemed to show that it had peaked around 1970. The outlook seemed dim. Quite surprisingly, there was a huge rebound in US oil production, and by around 2018 US oil production reached levels never reached before. This surprising reality invalidated my prediction. 

I think I did a much better job of prediction in my 2013 post "Is the Singularity Near?" Based mainly on the consideration that software advances much more slowly than computer hardware, I suggested that "the technological singularity will not occur anywhere near as quickly as singularity enthusiasts imagine."  I now have additional reasons for drawing such a conclusion, including a judgment that there will be no way to make computers truly intelligent (in a comprehending sense) by mimicking any functionality of the human brain (something that is not the actual source of human intelligence for reasons I discuss on my blog here).  

In June 2013 I was writing posts on this blog at one of the fastest rates I have ever produced, nearly once a day. I wrote a riches-to-rags science fiction story "The Emperor's Escape" that is well worth a read (you can read it here). I also wrote the story "The Thirty-seventh Marina Terletsky," a very interesting tale of long-term cloning on an interstellar expedition.  You can read it here. 

My June 2013 post "A Fine-Tuned Universe" was the first post on a topic I would end up discussing in more than 50 subsequent posts. Discussing extremely improbable strokes of luck needed for our universe to be habitable, I noted "In fact, our universe somehow managed not only to land the particular 'hole in one' described in the first graph of this blog post, but it also managed to land quite a few other 'holes in one,' all of which were necessary for beings like us to exist." I think my original post on this topic holds up very well twelve years later. 

My July 2013 post "The Problem With Mind Uploading" was my first discussion of this topic. I expressed skepticism about the idea that anyone could extend their lifespan by uploading their mind into a computer. I stated this:

"Mind uploading wouldn't really extend your lifespan; at best it would mean additional years for someone or something that was a copy of you. If you want to entertain the prospect of living far beyond the human lifespan, you can consider possibilities such as biological life extension or replacing your body below the neck with a robot body or the possibility that near death experiences suggest a chance of spiritual immortality. I don't believe mind uploading is going to save anyone from the Grim Reaper."

The post holds up very well 12 years later.  I am glad that in the post I never conceded the possibility that you could actually make an intelligent individual by copying someone's brain. In later years I would come to recognize a whole additional reason for dismissing the possibility of mind uploading by copying brain contents,  which is that brains are not the actual source of human intelligence.  My comment in the 2013 post about "spiritual immortality" foreshadows such a realization. 

My July 2013 story "Superior Species" is one of my better story-telling efforts, and manages to combine science fiction with an anti-racism theme.  

 In August 2013 my post "You Are the Only You" attacked the Everett "many worlds" theory that there are an infinite number of copies of you in parallel universes.  I am proud of having got things right on this topic in the first post on that topic. I have never wavered since then in my thinking that Everett's theory is the worst kind of nonsense. 

My September 2013 post "Things We Can Never Be Certain About" is a piece of philosophical reasoning that holds up very well 12 years later. I have since come to be more confident about the reality of some of the things I mention in the post. But I think the point I originally made (that it is impossible to be 100% certain about such matters) still holds up. 

In the same month I published my post "Is There More Evidence for ESP or String Theory and Supersymmetry?" It was the first of more than 70 posts I would end up writing on the topic of ESP (telepathy).  I am proud to have got things right on this topic from the beginning. I pointed out that the experimental evidence for ESP was well-replicated, and that experiments using the ganzfeld protocol consistently showed results far above what would occur by chance.  I stated this:

"Given the abundant experimental evidence that has accumulated for many decades, and the lack of credibility in any theory that it is fraudulent, it seems that the evidence for ESP is actually surprisingly substantial. The commonly made claim that experiments suggesting ESP cannot be replicated does not seem to be correct. There actually seems to be a quite significant degree of replication. ESP may or may not exist, but there seems to be a large, rather consistent body of experimental evidence to support the claim that it does exist."

I then discussed the evidence for string theory and the theory of supersymmetry, pointing out that although such theories are popular among physicists, neither is well-supported by evidence.  I stated this:

"The evidence for either supersymmetry or string theory is actually weaker than the evidence for ESP. This is because there is basically no evidence for either supersymmetry or string theory."

My 2013 post "Is There More Evidence for ESP or String Theory and Supersymmetry?" holds up extremely well after 12 years. To this day, all tests for supersymmetry have failed, and there is still no evidence to support either supersymmetry or string theory. Since writing this post, I have discovered many other cases of evidence for telepathy or ESP, which I have documented in my 70+ posts on this topic.  ESP tests using the ganzfeld protocol continue to produce convincing results. The latest result of an ESP test is the result reported on page 62 of the year 2025 document here. It is a test of 240 participants conducted at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland's largest university), by two professors. The researchers used the long-successful Ganzfeld protocol, which for many years has produced results of around 30% to 32%,  well above the result expected by chance (only 25%).  The tests were done in a "ganzfeld laboratory" in a "quiet and secure basement room of a university building," in the years 2023 and 2024. We read that "Seventy-two hits were obtained out of 240 sessions, a 30% hit-rate," a success well above the result expected by chance, only 25%.

My October 2013 post "How to Have a Pleasant Pandemic" is one that was prescient. At the beginning of the post I imagined the outbreak of a new infectious disease in New York City. In italics I described the scenario:

"Before long you hear that hundreds of people have died from the new flu strain in New York City alone. You notice that many people on the subway are starting to wear surgical masks. You wonder whether you should do so also. But you figure that it's a rather timid thing to do, and you notice that still most people are not wearing the masks. So you decide not to wear one.

Soon the death toll in New York City rises to the thousands. At about the time when most of the people start wearing surgical masks on the subway, you start wearing one too. ...

The death toll in New York City rises higher and higher. Before long, more than 50,000 have died. Now you start wearing your surgical mask everywhere, including all of the time you are at work...You start wearing two surgical masks, one on top of the other.."

At the time I wrote this, there had been no very large infectious disease outbreak in New York City since about the years 1918-1919, the years of the Spanish Flu. In the year 2020 there did occur a massive worldwide pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the web page here, by December, 2022 there were 60,000 COVID-19 deaths in New York state, with a majority of them in New York City. So my hypothetical scenario closely resembled what actually happened. In my October 2013 post "How to Have a Pleasant Pandemic" I gave some good tips about protecting yourself from a pandemic, the type of tips that were widely repeated when the pandemic occurred. 

My 2013 post "Darwinism Fails to Explain Man's Higher Faculties" was the first of many posts I would eventually write expressing skepticism about the explanatory power of Darwinism. When I wrote the post I had not yet understood the reasons why Darwinism fails to explain the origin of human bodies. In later posts such as the one here I explained such reasons. 

My 2013 post "Cosmic Fine-Tuning Visualized" was an in-depth examination of the evidence for cosmic fine-tuning, that our universe has a very special arrangement of laws and fundamental constants necessary for it to be habitable, an arrangement gigantically unlikely for chance to have produced. Featuring the visual below, the post holds up very well as a discussion of this deep topic, and I have written many other posts on the same topic, which you can read here. 

My 2013 post "When I Trained to Be an Electron: A Physics Story" is one well worth a read, taking an extremely imaginative approach of telling a story as a subatomic particle might tell it, if subatomic particles had minds. I took a similar personification approach recently when sending two Christmas cards to siblings. I wrote my Christmas greeting as a Christmas card itself might write, if it had a mind.