Fermi's Paradox As a Proof of the Existence of God

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It all began one day sometime in 1950 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Enrico Fermi and some other scientists were discussing UFOs over lunch. It was the dawn of the atomic age (as they all well knew, working at Los Alamos) and anything seemed possible. Consequently their conversation covered all manner of speculative topics, including the potential for FTL travel. In the midst of their discussion, and seemingly out of nowhere, Fermi exclaimed, “Where are they?” The conversation had been so wide ranging, that it took the other scientists a moment to understand that he was talking about extraterrestrials. But in that moment the paradox which bears his name was born.

It was immediately apparent that Fermi’s question had touched on something deep. As the story goes Fermi went back to his office and ran some numbers (these calculations apparently pre-date the Drake Equation) and confirmed what he had already suspected, that even using incredibly modest assumptions, we should have been visited by extraterrestrials long ago and many times over. Instinctively Fermi and the other scientists recognized that the question touched on a deep paradox, which is why this question, out of all the questions ever asked while eating lunch, have survived to the present day.

I mentioned the Drake Equation, and it’s closely tied to Fermi’s Paradox, and it might be worth taking a brief detour into the question of what the Drake Equation is. One day in 1961 Frank Drake was preparing for a meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and, according to his recollection, the equation came about during that preparation:

As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it's going to be to detect extraterrestrial life. And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy.

Drake’s equation essentially acts as a series of filters. (The concept of a filter will be very important in discussing Fermi’s Paradox.) You begin with the number of stars (technically the rate of star formation.) You then filter out any stars without planets. From there you filter out any planets which don’t have life, and then filter out that life which isn’t intelligent, and finally you filter out any life which is incapable of communicating on an interstellar scale. After filtering out all the possible stars and planets and life forms that aren’t communicating with us, you arrive at a number of, as Drake said, “detectable civilizations in our galaxy.”

What Fermi’s numbers and later Drake’s showed was that the first number, the number of stars, is so massive, (100 billion in the Milky Way) that even if you’re pretty conservative with your filtering you still end up with a big number. And even if you are very pessimistic with your estimates, and the number of expected civilizations ends up being small, another large number, the age of the galaxy, means that even if there only ended up being one star-faring civilization, they would have had plenty of time to spread out across the entire galaxy under almost any conceivable scenario.

The Drake Equation article on Wikipedia is fascinating, as is the article on Fermi’s Paradox, and I have borrowed heavily from both. In fact, rather than trying to restate everything I would just suggest that you read those articles. What I’m more interested in is viewing Fermi’s paradox through the lens of LDS Doctrine and LDS Cosmology. In the process, I don’t guarantee that we won’t end up fairly far afield, though I don’t imagine we will arrive anywhere too controversial.

LDS beliefs aside, from a broadly religious perspective it can only be viewed as fortunate that we haven’t been visited by extraterrestrials, or at least extraterrestrials of the sort envisioned by most science fiction. I don’t have the required background to speculate on the impact of such a visit on the eastern religions, but it could only be a huge blow to all the Abrahamic religions if aliens shows up and their belief system didn’t incorporate the idea of a single omniscient deity. It would therefore follow that Fermi’s Paradox works in favor of religion. In fact I would go so far as to say that Fermi’s Paradox is in fact a strong argument in favor of God generally, but, I hope to show that it’s even a stronger argument in favor of the specifically LDS conception of God.

The LDS conception of God is, as far as I know, unique among the religions. We’re basically in a category by ourselves when it comes the way extraterrestrials fit into our conception of God. To take just one example, directly from the scriptures:

And thus there shall be the reckoning of the time of one planet above another, until thou come nigh unto Kolob, which Kolob is after the reckoning of the Lord’s time; which Kolob is set nigh unto the throne of God, to govern all those planets which belong to the same order as that upon which thou standest.

Abraham 3:9

Obviously one can get pretty deep in the weeds when you start talking about Kolob and the more esoteric aspects of LDS cosmology, so I’ll try to keep that sort of speculation to a minimum. Even so, I don’t think one has to engage in much speculation to say that Mormons believe that God is an extraterrestrial, using the broadest definition of that term. Which, then means, if we follow that thought to it’s logical conclusion, that Mormons have the answer to Fermi’s Paradox. Fermi’s numbers suggested to him that we should have been visited by extraterrestrials long ago and many times. Well if God is an extraterrestrial then we have. There is no paradox. Additionally this would explain why no other extraterrestrials from visiting us (if there are other extraterrestrials in any meaningful sense in this scenario.)

On it’s face this argument seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I guess for most people it seems crazy, or impossible, or somehow unthinkable, because in all the time I’ve been interested in the paradox I don’t believe I’ve ever seen someone make this argument. (Though if past experience is anything to go by five minutes after I post this I’ll find someone making this exact argument.) I’ve have seen people come close. Interestingly one of the people who came the closest is Michael Shermer, a noted religious skeptic (he’s the founder of the Skeptics Society and Editor in Chief of Skeptic Magazine) In his answer to one of the Edge Questions of the Year he up the following:

Is God nothing more than a sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence?

As you can see he get’s really close, but he never draws the connection between this question and the paradox, or makes the leap that I’m going to make which is to say that Fermi’s Paradox could be considered proof of God’s existence. I use proof in the sense of something which helps to establish the truth, not something which is ironclad and irrefutable. This proof would go something like this:

1. Because of the huge number of stars and planets, it is inconceivable that we are the only intelligent life.
2. Because of the huge amounts of time involved it is inconceivable that other intelligent life hasn’t spread through the galaxy and visited Earth.
3. Because of the inevitable gigantic technological disparity which would exist between us and any spacefaring extraterrestrials they would appear to us as gods.
4. Therefore the simplest explanation is that the being we refer to as God exists and fulfills all of the above criteria.

I feel like we should give this proof a name. Fermi’s Paradox’s indirect Proof for the Existence of God, seems too long, maybe Proof by Extraterrestrial Exclusion? In any event if someone out there thinks they see any big holes in this line of reasoning I’d welcome the chance to hear them. But I would argue that not only are there no holes in this line of thinking, but that most of the explanations which are offered for the paradox provide indirect support for this explanation.

I just got done watching The Big Short, which covers the housing crisis and the few people who were betting it would happen, and one of the main worries of the people in the movie was that they were overlooking something. That they had missed some key piece of information. If no one else was betting against the housing market maybe everyone knew something that they didn’t. They weren’t missing anything, but they were right to be skeptical, and at this point I should engage in similar skepticism. If no one has come up with this same line of thinking, am I missing something?

To continue with the comparison to the Big Short, a large part of the blindness which afflicted the people who were involved in the housing crisis was the assumption that you would never have a simultaneous nationwide decline in housing prices, in large part because it hadn’t ever happened before. I think a similar blindness affects the people thinking about Fermi’s Paradox. When people imagine aliens they mostly imagine a sort of ray-gun-flying-saucer sort of thing. Or they imagine something so inhuman that we might not even recognize it as life. Imagining that our contact with aliens might take the form of prayer is both too mundane and too fantastic. But to offer up an adaptation to Clarke’s Third Law (and I am not the first to suggest this modification):

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a miracle.

Of course as all “educated” people know there aren’t any miracles, consequently when people involved in SETI look for signs of alien life they look for signals in the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio waves, or possibly lasers. And when they think of aliens visiting they think of something similar to Independence Day. But what should we be expecting if we really approach things without preconception or bias? (And by no means am I claiming that I am free from bias, only that I have a completely different set of biases.)

The first thing we should expect if we give any credence to Fermi is that they should already be here. This is obviously not what most people think. In fact most people have a bias towards expecting them to show up in the near future. A bias which got it’s start at the dawn of the age of science fiction with HG Wells and War of the Worlds (and almost certainly earlier than that, but Wells is probably the first author most people are aware of.) A bias which continues through to the present day with movies like the aforementioned Independence Day and the soon to be released Arrival.

But of course the chances that, in the 4.543 billion years of the Earth's existence that aliens will pick next 50 to arrive are 0.00000001%. Aliens have either already visited or they never will. Communication would appear to be different than visiting, but not really. Think about it, if incredibly advanced aliens are out there then either they want to talk to us or they don’t. If they do want to talk to us then we should assume that, given that they’re thousands if not millions of years ahead of us in technology that they should have figured out a way to do it. Accordingly even if we restrict it to communication, I would once again say that there’s a strong bias towards it already happening, or never happening. Of course I’ve completely breezed past the idea that they’re waiting for something to happen before they talk to us. But that is an interesting enough topic that it deserves it’s own post. The point is, outside of some fringe theories about pyramids and Mayans the only current candidate for extraterrestrial communication is prayer.

I understand this will strike many people as an entirely ludicrous idea. But why? On what basis do they rule out this idea? I understand I may be accused of constructing a strawman, but since I haven’t seen this theory in print, let alone any objections to it, I don’t have any actual objections to answer, so we’ll have to imagine some. Still I think these won’t be too far from the mark.

Objection 1: Prayer is scientifically impossible.

Honestly I hope they’re smarter than this, and that this isn’t one of the objections, but I could certainly imagine that it would be. Everyone agrees that any potential aliens (LDS doctrine or no) would be at least thousands if not millions of years ahead of us technologically. How do we know, at our level of development what is or isn’t possible? I could trot out a list of everything we thought was impossible scant decades before it became commonplace. How can anyone have any confidence about predicting what is and isn’t possible with thousands, if not millions of years of additional progress?

Objection 2: Prayer is not the way aliens would contact us.

For people raised on the biases I already mentioned, when they imagine alien contact they imagine a single flying saucer landing in Washington DC or a scientist working late at night at some radio observatory. What they do not imagine is communication with single individuals that appears unreliable at best, mostly involves people asking for, or expressing gratitude for mundane things and is responded to with vague feelings of peace and the occasional (unconfirmable) vocalization. But why couldn’t it be? Once again it’s dangerous to make any assumptions about what extraterrestrials can and can’t do or would or wouldn’t do. To return to the Big Short, it opens with a quote by Mark Twain:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

In future posts I’ll get more into why prayer may be precisely the way that an advanced race of beings may want to talk to us, even if it were unmoored from its religious origins.

Objection 3: Prayer is inexplicably selective.  

Similar to the last objection, but this gets more into the fact that even if prayers are answered there a certainly cases where one set of prayers are answered while another are not. Non-mormon’s might also wonder why extraterrestrials would select 15 men to receive the best communication of all. Are we to imagine that aliens are Christian? (Why not?)

I’m sure there are other objections, but for the moment let’s stop with that last one, because I think the answers are similar, and this point it may be best to turn to an examination of what we, as humans, do in a similar situation.

There are in the world, many tribes which have no significant contact with global civilization. And it’s instructive to examine how we have chosen to deal with them, but also to examine more broadly what is and isn’t acceptable behavior towards them.

The first thing that we obviously don’t do, and that no one has suggested doing, is giving them a huge dump of technology. Whether that would be, in the worst case, a bunch of guns and ammo, or in the most innocuous case a set of encyclopedias. At the moment, what we mostly do is leave them alone. Though in the not too distant past we would contact them, and while this risks getting into an argument on how best to deal with indigenous people and colonialism, etc. such contact actually was largely religious in nature. The first people to show up when a new people were found were missionaries. And what did they try to do? Give them instruction in morality, build schools, and convert them to Christianity.

Interestingly I can’t think of any science fiction novel where the aliens set up schools, or educated humans in the dominant galactic religion (though Childhood’s End is sort of in that vein.) I think this is largely because people expect religion to disappear at a certain point in a civilization's development. (I know the Hyperion Cantos keeps religion around, but his treatment of Christianity is pretty appalling.) I’m not claiming that a book written along those lines isn’t out there, but I know of no well known book written along that premise. What we mostly see are mysterious communications, or ships showing up with unclear intentions. There are of course war-like aliens, and those stories map well with the way civilization has dealt with more primitive tribes, but if there are aliens and they’re bent on war then we’re already screwed.

Let’s instead turn towards looking at how the objections to prayer might look if we applied them to contact with previously uncontacted people. The first objection was that prayer wasn’t scientific. I imagine that there are numerous ways we could use to contact these tribes which would seem equally miraculous as prayer seems to us, and remember that they’re only a few thousand years behind us in technology. We could be dealing with aliens that are millions of years ahead of us.

The second objection is that prayer isn’t how aliens would contact us. Okay, now take that thought and for a moment imagine that you’re an anthropologist studying an uncontacted tribe. Imagine that any individual in this tribe could send you a message, which would be instantly translated into your native language, and the message would describe in a detail not even available in a written journal the person’s deepest concerns, and the whole of their inner life? Yes there would obviously be privacy concerns, but for the moment put that aside (or you could assume that the anthropologist is maximally benevolent.) Wouldn’t that be the ideal way to allow that tribe to make contact? I think so. Perhaps you disagree. But I would think that you could at least see where such a system might have some significant advantages.

The final objection is that prayer is selective. Well so are we. You could certainly imagine that you might decide to contact one group of the previously uncontacted people without deciding to open the floodgates and contact all of them. You might do this because this particular group was in danger, or if they had developed a certain level of technology, or if they asked for help, or if you were experimenting with a new method of making contact. There are all manner of reasons why you might leave one group alone while making contact with another.

My point is not that prayer is so obviously alien communication as to preclude any other possible explanation, anymore than I am arguing that Fermi’s Paradox is obviously proof of God, but given how little we actually know, and given the assumptions that we can safely make, it fits at least as well as any other explanation and in some ways even better.

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Is It Finally Time to Start Thinking About Voting Third Party?

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Having spent the last several posts in a discussion of politics I thought it might be worthwhile to do one more and break on through to the other side as they say, but I promise this will be the last post for awhile on the topic. And for this last post I’d like to talk about voting. Obviously this is the key way we participate in politics as citizens of the United States. Which is not to overlook the people who attend caucuses, or go door-to-door with a local candidate, or even run for office, but not only are such people rare, they probably already have a pretty good idea how they want to vote. I think they could nevertheless benefit from what I say here, but it is still primarily directed at people whose highest engagement with politics is voting. Of course, we haven’t even touched on the significant percentage of people who don’t even do that, despite the impassioned pleas of celebrities and the desperation of political parties, and in the case of members, the Church itself. (I would be curious to know what percentage of temple recommend holders vote.) I actually don’t blame people for not voting. It’s exceedingly rare that a single vote makes a difference, and economically when you consider the opportunity cost it definitely seems like a waste of time.

Still we are urged to vote, and I have actually seen one vote make a difference. It was a local bond issue, and I voted against it. Had I voted for it, the vote would have been tied. So one vote can make a difference, though it hardly ever happens, and if it does, only in smaller elections.

Of course while being strongly urged to vote, the Church does not, despite the fear-mongering of its more radical opponents to the contrary, tell us who to vote for. They leave that to the individual, perhaps secure that we’ll do the right thing, but what is the right thing exactly? That’s what I want to explore, and I’m not confident that I’ll reach any definitive conclusions but perhaps in the act of exploration we’ll uncover some wisdom.

There are many methodologies for picking who to vote for, some obviously better than others. To get us started let’s look at one of my favorite, but most narrowly useful methodologies. Voting for people you know. Given that we are technically a republic not a democracy, in most cases you don’t get to decide what happens you only get to decide who get’s to decide what happens. And if that decision maker is someone who you can call on the phone and actually talk to, that substantially increases their utility. Lobbying is built around a very similar concept, which is why it’s so popular, even if we believe the defenders that it merely provides access not influence. For this reason, I’ll confess that this is the method I use first when deciding who to vote for. In addition to giving me a marginally greater say in the workings of government it’s also quick. Many of the methods we’re going to discuss require a lot of study and might still yield an unclear result. Not this one. As I said it’s not something I can draw on very often, and on some occasions, such as local elections, I might know both people. Thus, whatever the benefits of this method it is not universally applicable, which requires that we have additional methods to draw on.

Certainly if we can take any political lesson from the scriptures it would involve the great harm caused by unrighteous leaders. Of course most of the leaders in question are kings, and as of 1783 we don’t have one of those. But I would certainly expect that if someone demonstrably wicked was running for office that you wouldn’t vote for them. I imagine there are many people on both sides in the current election who feel like there is some demonstrable wickedness going on in the presidential race, but I’ve always had a hard time determining how righteous someone is. Without knowing their heart, evaluating their righteousness is at best inexact and at worst might result in labelling good evil and evil good. More commonly any such an attempt is subjective, and prone to an overweighting of some things and an underweighting others. For example is it better to have an adulterer or an embezzler as a leader? I would probably say it would be better to have an adulterer, but isn’t adultery a more serious sin than embezzling? Which sins do we tolerate? If we aren’t willing to tolerate a serious amount of lying then it’s going to be hard to find anyone to vote for.

Lately we have had access to more LDS candidates, most notably Mitt Romney. Perhaps if we just had LDS members to choose from at all levels that would solve the problem? Unfortunately I don’t think so. The two most prominent Mormon politicians are Romney and Harry Reid, and you are unlikely to find someone who would vote for both of them. Furthermore, at the local level you will frequently find that two LDS people are running against each other. Finally, having a religious test strikes even co-religionists as distasteful.

By this point you may be wondering when I’m going to talk about the method of just voting on the issues, well in essence this is just a very watered down version of trying to judge someone’s righteousness. And it sounds great in theory, but in practice there are hidden difficulties. First it requires you to get out of the political my team vs. your team mentality I described in a previous post. And once you really start looking at the issues and thinking deeply about them you’ll find that it’s only very rarely that a candidate lines up exactly the same as you do on every issue. Often you can totally agree with them on one issue and find their stand on another issue to be completely repugnant. Or what’s worse their stand on an issue may be unclear. And that doesn’t even take into account the strong possibility that they’ll say one thing while campaigning but do something entirely different once they're actually elected.

Confronted with the difficulty of trying to track dozens of issues, uncovering not only the candidates position but your own feelings about it, and then further attempting to prioritize all those positions in some fashion, many people give up and decide to simplify things by becoming single issue voters. If you’re only focused on one thing then your research is greatly simplified. If all you care about is whether someone is pro-life you don’t have to listen to their foreign policy speech. While this may simplify things it can also leave you in no better position than you were before. For instance in a two party system you can easily end up in a situation where both candidates have the same position on an issue. They may disagree or agree with you, but it hardly matters because you’re left in a situation where despite having a very firm position on an issue, you don’t have any way of differentiating. They’re both great on your issue or they're both horrible.

Of course there are more than two parties, and that’s what I’ve been building towards, and it’s one of the reasons why I think it’s important to get out of the my team vs. the other team political headspace that’s so prevalent. Yes, it’s almost certainly true that if you don’t vote for Clinton or Trump in this election then you have wasted your vote, in the sense that your candidate, be it Stein or Johnson or whoever, can’t possibly win regardless of whether you voted for them or not. And it can be difficult to watch the Republican-Democrat football game and not get caught up in it, to even realize that there’s another option. But I think if you are going to follow the advice of the brethren and vote you should really consider all of the candidates. Once you do, and further once you give up on the idea of wasting your vote, choosing a candidate becomes far less objectionable, and frankly more straightforward.

Now I am not going to get into dissection of the platform of the Libertarian Party or the Greens, or even the Party of Socialism and Liberation. What I am going to address is the argument that if you don’t vote Republican or Democrat that you have wasted your vote. To begin with, in practice, unless an election comes down to a single vote you have wasted your vote regardless of who you vote for. But of course voting goes beyond merely deciding the outcome of an election, it is also a way to express your point of view. A somewhat crude way, but it’s undoubtedly true that once a winner has been determined, the next question is to ask by how much they won. If someone wins by 0.2% (or loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College) they have a substantially different mandate than if they win by 23%. And of course 23% is a landslide. It’s a shellacking. It’s a pummeling.

If Clinton or Trump were to achieve that level of victory it would be historic. People would be talking about it for a long time, just like they talk about Reagan beating Mondale. But here’s where it gets interesting that 23% margin of victory I just barely mentioned actually comes from Nixon beating McGovern. Does anyone talk about that anymore? Particularly given that just a couple of years later Nixon resigned?  

My point is that if you vote for one of the two major parties your vote is going to get lost in the flood of all the other votes. And even if your vote helped Nixon to the fourth biggest margin of victory in history (and the biggest in the last 50 years) in two years it might all be forgotten. But when we turn to third party candidates the “flood” is more of a trickle and so it takes a lot fewer votes to make an impact. People are still talking about Nadar’s run in 2000 and he only ended up with 2.75% of the vote.

If you know that your vote is not going to make the difference in the actual outcome of election. That you’re only left with two reasons to vote. You can either vote because it’s your duty or because you want to send a message (or possibly both.) It doesn’t necessarily matter what message you’re trying to send. If you’re a Trump supporter perhaps, looking at the polls, you might want to make sure he doesn’t get slaughtered in a fashion similar to Mondale, or Goldwater. If you’re a Clinton supporter perhaps you think she’s got it in the bag, but you would love to make Utah a swing state.  But if you are going to try and make this statement with one of the two major parties you have to look at how much of a percentage your candidate has to get for a statement to really be made. In almost all cases your vote is going to make more of a splash if it’s part of the 2.75% than if it’s part of the 50%.

In saying this I am not saying that you can’t vote for one of the two major parties, I only suggest that if there is a third party which matches your ideology more closely that you should definitely consider voting for them. That is not a wasted vote. And if it really is our duty to vote and if it really is something the brethren want us to take seriously shouldn’t be be looking for the truly best candidate regardless of their chances of winning?

Interestingly the church structure itself bears some interesting parallels which might even point in the direction of a third party. First when people are called to a position in the Church it has very little to do with seniority. We’ve all heard of cases of bishops who are in their 20’s or Stake Presidents who are in their 30’s. When you look at the two major parties do you ever get a sense that a lot of times the candidate is just the one who’s turn it is? That’s certainly the case with Hillary in this election and I think it was the case with Romney and McCain in the previous elections. If we look past the obvious candidates when calling people to serve in Church, how much more should we do the same when looking for a presidential candidate?

And further there’s the process of sustaining people. You may think of raising your hand to sustain someone as voting for one of the two parties. Most of the time that appears to be the only choice available, but if you really feel strongly you do have the option to raise your hand and oppose a calling. I don’t recommend it unless you really do have misgivings (and I certainly think those people who are doing it at General Conference are misguided) but, the point I’m trying to get at is how impactful that is. If you’ve ever been in a local meeting where someone raised their hand to oppose a calling, then it’s a situation people are still talking about. It’s the same way in the presidential elections. When you break with the pack and vote for a third party people notice. And yes there’s a lot of pressure to not do it (another parallel) but, I would say that in elections you shouldn’t let that stop you.

In case it’s not clear the primary methodology I recommend (after voting for people you know) is to vote for the best candidate, regardless of the party. I know it seems like a radical idea, but it shouldn’t. In the Book of Mormon we read that:

And if the time comes that the voice of the people doth choose iniquity, then is the time that the judgments of God will come upon you; yea, then is the time he will visit you with great destruction even as he has hitherto visited this land.

Mosiah 29:27

I personally think we’re fast approaching that point if we haven’t already, and it’s possible that we are already at the point where if we stick with the two major parties then we have no choice but to choose iniquity. And then aren’t we partially culpable for that choice?

To be honest this post did not start out as a full-throated defense of third parties, though that does appear to be what it ended up as. I will say that personally I have never voted for one of the two main presidential candidates. I say this not to boost, but more to point out that it has been a long-standing obsession of mine. I do think we need greater third party participation in the whole process. I am pretty fed up with both the Republicans and Democrats. And If you’re not, if you have thought deeply about the issues and Trump or Clinton is your preferred candidate, then vote for them with a clear conscience and my blessing, but if you are planning to vote while holding your nose perhaps it would make more sense to look at one of the third party candidates before you do. You might find someone who makes you hold your nose a little bit less. And rather than wasting your vote you’d be sending a message at least as clear as whatever message you might send by voting for a Republican or a Democrat.

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One final voting methodology as a bonus for people who’ve read this far. If you have a system of judicial retention like we do in Utah, and I’m honestly not sure how widely this practice is used, then you should always vote NOT to retain any of the judges (unless you know them personally, see my first point). The reason for this is that for the most part judges are always retained with over 90% of the vote, and so your vote not to retain will have no impact for any judge who’s even halfway competent, but if there is a judge out there who isn’t getting 90% or at least 80% then they really should go, and by voting not to retain them you can help out that process. We had a situation just like this many years ago, in this case I had heard of the judge in question, but because I was using this method it didn’t matter whether I had heard about him or not, I helped get him off the bench. Of course this also relates to my general bias against incumbency, but we’re already pretty far into things so I’ll save that for another time.

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