Michael Larkin
Member
It's not over yet, but I've seen plenty of internet people punching back and defending their right to believe or enjoy the testimony of others or even to make their own declarations about things that have happened to them. ("Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?") Even in places like reddit where skeptics and herd mentalities rule, instead of cowering when scolded by a skeptic, people will send it right back if the person seems to be a knee-jerk reductionist who can't escape their own worldview. Even the argument, "if you don't believe in UFOs, why are you on the UFO subreddit?" is pretty damning and can shut someone up right quick. The skeptics rose up and overthrew the religious bullies, became science bullies, now they're almost pitied because more and more people can see how they've basically chosen to all agree to a belief system (and it's a Newtonian one at that! i've been watching quantum discoveries and stuff like this lately... the chance that we perceive reality exactly as it is is scientifically ZERO. We might possibly live in a simulation/probability matrix that has redundancy and built in self-correction codes? Honestly it's difficult to even take reality seriously anymore. I've been feeling really floaty. This podcast with Joseph Cambray applying a self-organizing systems model to synchronicity also intrigued me greatly.)
What's the skeptic motivation? They are addicted to telling other people that they're wrong. (Do we have the same motivation from the other side of the issue? Well I refuse to even look at that possibility. NEXT SUBJECT PLEASE!)
The only really interesting thing I took away from this podcast was how many skeptical people still had weird stuff happen to them! Also, that they really seem to want it to be true they just can't allow themselves to care about it until it hits mainstream. Honestly it kind of reminds me of discovering in middle school that "being cool" was bullshit and it was just an arbitrarily decided public agreement that could easily be side-stepped or overwritten.
(How do they not understand that these discoveries are being suppressed in the public conversation? Is there no other example/metaphor we can show a skeptic of the mainstream downplaying something scientifically evident that they now know in hindsight is true? -- I'm drawing a blank on a science example, but for example, the media and our education system will never criticize capitalism. It can get proven over and over that capitalism is unstable, but the media won't touch it and you will never get a 'mainstream consensus' when they control the megaphone.)
We all know that Shermer article with the radio, I was so excited that day I couldn't believe it. That was the greatest thing to happen to skepticism since Phil Plait, Bad Astronomer, gave a speech to skeptics called "Don't Be a Dick."
During the argument about precognition I just wanted Alex to say, "what if we scientifically discover some evidence of a type of retrocausality sending messages to the brain?" but I'm pretty sure Brian would say, "well then I will happily report that when it is accepted by the mainstream."
I don't trust the mainstream as far as I can throw it. Hey, isn't that part of their shtick? Don't trust mainstream science articles, the masses collectively know nothing about science, masses get things massively wrong, but only collectives of scientists will have the real answers to what is and what is not approved science? Something off there.
I loved the Donald Hoffman video: it's a slight pity he seems to avail himself, in part, of a neo-Darwinistic model of evolution, but apart from that, his "desktop" metaphor for what science usually takes to be reality is a memorable one. Wish I'd thought of it, but never mind: now I know about it, I'll be able to use it in future.