Things I Learned from the Fatima Discourse™

Tl;dr we live in a bubble, guys. No, seriously, we live in a bubble.

• People vary in how much pain they feel when looking at a bright light

• People vary in how much eye damage they sustain from staring at the sun

• Some people can stare at the sun for minutes at a time without any ill effects (lucky bastards)

• Staring at a bright light in the right mindset, and then focusing on the swirling colors and afterimages, can induce experiences that match what people claim to have seen during Fatima

• There are several schools of meditation that focus on these experiences, including Kasina fire meditation and the Dzogchen tradition within Tibetan Buddhism

(Source)

• Not everyone lives in a part of the world where sometimes the weather conditions are just right, with the cloud cover just thin enough, to allow one to see the sun as a clear, pearly white disk in the sky that doesn’t hurt to stare at

Oh, and most important of all:

• Educated nerds on Substack live in a bubble and have no idea how superstitious people can be!

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For those who haven’t been following the Fatima Discourse™ on Substack these past few weeks, the story goes that in 1917, three children in the village of Fatima in rural Portugal had a vision from an apparition claiming to be the Virgin Mary. The apparition claimed that she would return to them on the 13th of each month, and that, on October 13th, she would perform a great miracle. When a crowd of about 70,000 people had gathered at the appointed day, witnesses claimed that the sun danced, hovered, and flashed a variety of colors.

Ethan Muse, a Catholic, argued that it was a genuine miracle.

Evan Harkness-Murphy, a rationalist, was skeptical.

Scott Alexander weighed in with a 30,000 word deep dive examining all the evidence.

A couple weeks later, Scott published a follow-up Highlights from the Comments post. He summarized some of the back and forth that he’d been having with the aforementioned substackers.

I am convinced that it was probably a combination of suggestibility and sungazing aftereffects. For example, I experience a small amount of visual snow in my vision. Even without staring at a bright light, the objects around me readily create afterimages. I can close my eyes at any time and see multicolored static dancing around my vision. If I stare at a bright light first, then close my eyes, the light’s afterimage combines with the visual snow to produce even more swirls and patterns. If I keep my eyes closed for several minutes, then when I open them again, the world has a greenish-blue tint for a while. If nothing else, this whole debacle has made me interested in trying Kasina fire meditation.

Meanwhile, Ethan continued to insist that thin cloud cover can’t make the sun look like a pearly white disk that isn’t painful to stare at. He claimed that there was no way that the human eye could resolve the sun as a sharp-edged disk that is comfortable to stare at without pain, because sufficient cloud cover to attenuate the sun’s brightness down to a comfortable level would also make it look really blurry. He cited some optics principles and calculated the brightness levels involved.

In the comments under the Highlights post, a bunch of physicists helpfully came out of the woodwork correct him on how bright the sun actually is, how light scattering actually works in different types of clouds, and how he did his calculations wrong.

I sat there, reading the back and forth, and shared Scott’s befuddlement that this was the detail Ethan chose to fixate on? I’ve seen the sun do exactly that, many times, while living in the mid-Atlantic US. It certainly doesn’t happen all the time - but it happens maybe once every year or two. Weather conditions have to be just right. Other commenters from the Mountain West (Utah, Colorado) confirmed it happens there all the time because the required clouds form easily.

Obviously, not everyone lives in an area where the weather does this. Which, ok, fair. Different worlds, and so on.

But Ethan was incredulous about this. He insisted that we were mistaken, that we were misremembering details from childhood, that we were falling for Scott’s suggestive wording in his informal discord poll, that every photo of the sun looking like that in fog/thin cloud cover was a digital artifact - and on, and on. It’s just... so puzzling. Why was that the detail that he fixated on and defended to death? Weren’t there other parts of his argument he could have fallen back on?

I mentioned this all to an ex-Mormon friend of mine. He grew up in Utah, so he’d seen the pale sun plenty of times. He listened to me complain in exasperation about Ethan’s digging in on inconsequential details. He nodded knowingly, in a been-there-done-that way. “Welcome to religious apologetics!”

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Richard Hanania reminded everyone that illiterate superstitious peasants are not trustworthy eyewitnesses, and that educated nerds who write on the internet live in a bubble.

One reason I don’t put much stock in the testimony of early twentieth century Portuguese peasants is that my mom’s side of the family are poor rural people from the third world. They often report on supernatural events in their lives. [...] My Arab relatives would see their deceased family members in dreams and witness miracles large and small in their personal lives, particularly during moments of personal turmoil or tragedy. They would lie constantly in order to avoid social awkwardness [...] If there was something you needed to believe for tribal reasons, you were shunned by the rest of the community if you dissented. [...]

I think people like Scott and Bentham’s Bulldog who place a lot of faith in Portuguese peasants come from families and communities that have been living in a post-Enlightenment world for generations, thereby underestimating the irrationality of those of us who come from more backwards cultures [...] they forget how precious of an accomplishment it was to build communities where they can forget what most of the rest of humanity has been like throughout history.

In my own family, I would certainly have to go back to the time of Fatima to find an ancestor who would have been similarly uneducated and superstitious. Sitting comfortably in a heated space, with electric lighting, typing at a computer, I am far removed from that way of life.

I’m not sure why Hanania had to be the one to point all of this out, however. A huge portion of the rationalist canon is dedicated to reminding us that we are, in fact, very weird. For that matter, WEIRD people in general are very weird, on a global scale. Most people do not give a shit about truth-seeking. For vast swaths of humanity, for vast swaths of our history, social reality has been more important than actual reality.

Our community is certainly not perfect. We have our share of interpersonal conflicts. But we too easily forget what the world is like outside our bubble. Civilization is fragile.

I don’t believe in miracles; I believe in precious accomplishments. This bubble we’ve built was built - by conscious effort from many individuals, over many years. It was not handed down to us from on high. But if I did believe in miracles, then the bubble we’ve built would be a miracle far, far more impressive than the sun turning pretty colors above the Portuguese countryside.