Look around, Who do you see?

[sadhatter]

I was just thinking of this the other day and i am wondering other people's opinion.

Lets say for a moment you were a truther, or a psychic fan, or a gellerite or a bigfoot watcher. Now you wander into the jref forums to say your piece. And you look around at your companions on the side of good.

Your average truther i am sure would find bigfoot nutty, and your average bigfoot watcher would find psychics kind of silly. What i am getting at is though there are those who believe a lot of woo, your average wooster sticks to their own kind of woo.

Now what puzzles me, is in seeing their team suit up, how don't they at least pause for a moment to consider what side they are on? I mean what are the chances that the JREF is out doing all kinds of good, and then robbing the world of the miracle of homeopathy? Or shilling to the NWO?

Does it seem more likely that we are against a bunch of bad things, but somehow we made this grievous error on your flavor of woo? ( which of course does not limit one to having multiple woo) Or that maybe your magic rock is the same as the other magic rocks we say don't work?

[ctamblyn]

If I thought the JREF were shilling to the NWO, perhaps I'd see the rest of its activities as being the perfect cover...

[sadhatter]

If you thought that i could reverse it to " if you think that about the jref how do you know ** insert alex jones clone here** isn't just using his activities for cover."

[Sledge]

This is something that confuses me about the believer mentality, that they'll defend their particular belief with reasoning that they wouldn't accept for anything else. It's not new, religion has been doing it for thousands of years, I just don't understand how people live with the cognitive dissonance of believing the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says so whilst simultaneously proclaiming all other religions as false.

Also, when you post some wacky notion about UFOs being alien spaceships or the US government being behind 9/11, wouldn't seeing the sort of responses people who agree with you post really make you reconsider?

[sadhatter]

Sledge:

This is going to come off as very elitist but i have no other way to put it.

Do you never notice that we don't really have any " trolls" on our side, or even for that matter people who are just being knobs for the sake of it?

It seems the market is cornered, almost monopolized, by the believers, the truthers, the gellerites, etc. And that is not to mention the people who really cannot formulate complete functional sentences. You know the kind i am talking about, the type of poster who at first glance appears to be writing haiku or beat poetry till you realize it is a legitimate attempt at a point.

I just couldn't see if i were one of the smart yet misguided people, looking around and thinking " yep this is the winning side of this battle".

[Sledge]

I think it comes down to people getting frustrated at not being able to convince the other side, so they try to wind them up instead. If the sceptics start getting angry, the believer gets to say "Ah ha! You're angry because you can't refute my evidence!" The sceptic doesn't have that problem or need because they're waiting for the evidence and don't have the same level emotional investment in being right. Hell, I'd love for someone to present solid evidence of aliens, or telepathy, or telekineses, or Bigfoot, or... you get the idea.

[athon]

I think it comes down to people getting frustrated at not being able to convince the other side, so they try to wind them up instead. If the sceptics start getting angry, the believer gets to say "Ah ha! You're angry because you can't refute my evidence!" The sceptic doesn't have that problem or need because they're waiting for the evidence and don't have the same level emotional investment in being right. Hell, I'd love for someone to present solid evidence of aliens, or telepathy, or telekineses, or Bigfoot, or... you get the idea.

To be fair, we can swap what you've just said and have it being equally true.

If the believers start getting angry, the skeptic gets to say "Ah ha! You're angry because you can't refute my evidence!"

Before you say 'but the skeptic doesn't have to provide evidence', this isn't the reality. Evidence is the observations a person refers to in order to reduce or increase confidence in an idea. So, if a psychic points out all the hits in a reading, the typical skeptic response is to explain confirmation bias. The psychic advocate will probably get frustrated, claiming how that can't possibly explain ALL of the situations etc. However, it's essentially the same reaction.

The frustration comes because you have two parties who approach the same observations with different sets of criteria for explaining what is seen. One is evaluating it using social/emotional thinking, while the other is assessing the evidence using critical/scientific thinking. Both are making the mistake of assuming the other is just being ignorant.

Athon

[Brattus]

Sledge:

This is going to come off as very elitist but i have no other way to put it.

Do you never notice that we don't really have any " trolls" on our side, or even for that matter people who are just being knobs for the sake of it?

It seems the market is cornered, almost monopolized, by the believers, the truthers, the gellerites, etc. And that is not to mention the people who really cannot formulate complete functional sentences. You know the kind i am talking about, the type of poster who at first glance appears to be writing haiku or beat poetry till you realize it is a legitimate attempt at a point.

I just couldn't see if i were one of the smart yet misguided people, looking around and thinking " yep this is the winning side of this battle".

I have seen a few on here that will go unnamed.
There are even some here who would say I am one.

[RSLancastr]

Randi has written before in Swift that he hears from people who "fully support" his skeptical position, except when he skewers their sacred cow. And Penn & Teller have talked about hearing from peopl saying "Of course, Rosemary Altea is a fraud. But John Edward - now he's a TRUE psychic!" I get similar emails at SSB. I think this is a very human trait. It's like theists who, in effect, say your church is a CULT. Mine is a RELIGION.

[sadhatter]

Mr Lancaster, this is one of the biggest hurdles i find in the skeptic movement. And the only way i can think of even trying to jump it is asking the question to a believer " what would show you someone is a fake?". The problem i find is the the believer seems one step ahead of my reasoning. And to date i have yet to get a rational, clear answer to this. ( to be fair i have had one answer, but it was one of the posts i mentioned that seems more like a haiku or beat poetry than a post.)

The thing that bugs me is , if the believer is a step ahead of me, then they are already thinking " if i answer this he is just going to point out that my Pet psychic/magic rock is doing the same thing as the rest.". To me anyway, this should tell them that there is something up with their particular flavor of woo. I mean in a nutshell that is how i was dragged kicking and screaming from the claws of just about every woo ever.

[Stray Cat]

And the only way i can think of even trying to jump it is asking the question to a believer " what would show you someone is a fake?".
An obvious flaw in this question is that in reality it should only ever have one answer: Evidence!

However, to me, within the framework it is presented, it does seem slightly like you are saying "I have a conclusion, now how can I prove it" instead of "Let's look at the evidence together and see what conclusion we can draw from it"

That might be nit picking but discussing woo with believers is nothing more than sport in most cases and apart from the very occasional 'convert', the polarisation of viewpoints between believer and sceptic gives the two parties no common frame of reference to actually be productive enough to convince the other party, which is very evident in the 112 'Alien's, the Evidence' thread.

[SusanB-M1]

Maybe it's because most people think of these questions as an occasional distraction. I find amongst my contemporaries that most have come to realise that death is the end, but see no benefit in thinking about it further while they're getting on with their lives

As soon as there are enough atheists/critical thinkers/humanists and people like ex-Bishop Richard Holoway to express their views to a wider audience, then things will improve. Well, I am an incurable optimist!

[Cuddles]

Your average truther i am sure would find bigfoot nutty, and your average bigfoot watcher would find psychics kind of silly. What i am getting at is though there are those who believe a lot of woo, your average wooster sticks to their own kind of woo.

Actually, this isn't true a lot of the time. Many believers roll with the "belief makes your own reality" idea, and don't care what anyone actually believes, as long as they agree that their own beliefs are true in their own world. This means that people can hold all kinds of contradictory beliefs, but still support each other against attacks from the evil skeptics, because they don't care in the slightest what is actually true, all that matters is that their beliefs aren't questioned.

Then there are other groups where the important factor is not necessarily the beliefs themselves, but banding together against a common enemy.This is particularly obvious in the conspiracy world, where it doesn't matter what conspiracies you believe in as long as you blame the government/NWO/Milk Marketing Board or whatever. Again, people with all kinds of contradictory beliefs support each other without caring, or noticing, the contradictions, simply because the beliefs themselves are not as important as the rebellion.

In fact, the biggest fights between woos tend to be infighting within a group rather than attacking other groups. The Farrant vs. Manchester saga would be a particularly amusing example of that. Homeopaths don't tend to attack other alternative medicine, even when it directly contradicts its very basis, they restrict themselves to attacking real medicine and other homeopaths who they claim do it wrong. 9/11 truthers don't attack believers in other conspiracies, but the various factions are far more vitriolic towards each other than towards the government or skeptics. The obvious reason for this is competition. Just as animals face more competition from members of their own species than from other species, woos face more competition from people who believe similar, but not quite identical, things than from people who believe something entirely unrelated.

There certainly are woos around who stick to their own and consider most other woo to be crazy, but I think they're mostly in the minority.

Now what puzzles me, is in seeing their team suit up, how don't they at least pause for a moment to consider what side they are on?

In essence, it's just "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". If the JREF is proven to be evil by its opposition to my belief, it doesn't matter how much I disagree with someone else - if the JREF also disagrees with them then they must somehow be on my side.

Do you never notice that we don't really have any " trolls" on our side, or even for that matter people who are just being knobs for the sake of it?

This isn't really true. Firstly, there's the problem that no-one really agrees on what constitutes a troll, and many people "on our side" are considered to be trolls by at least some people. Aside from that, there are certainly plenty of people that pretty much everyone agrees to be trolls. Troy would be a good example of this - he is an anti-truther who has been banned from pretty much every forum he has visited for his behaviour. He's on the skeptic side in the sense that he doesn't think 9/11 was an inside job, but he's pretty much a textbook troll. As for people being knobs for the sake of it, there are plenty of examples there as well. Pomeroo would be an obvious one - a skeptic who deliberately created a persona here for no purpose other than to attack people.

I would say that there tend to be less trolls taking the skeptical position. I suspect the main reason is that skeptics usually have evidence and reason on their side, while woos are forced to resort to logical fallacies. It's not necessarily that they're deliberately trolling, but since they have no rational arguments that they can make it often seems that they are. For example, if you claim in the first post of a thread that you have evidence UFOs are actually aliens, your only choices are to post it, admit the claim was wrong, or waffle on for thousands of posts in a manner indistinguishable from a genuine troll. On the other hand, the deliberate trolls are more likely to take a non-skeptical position simply because they'll get more of a reaction that way.

Edit: Also, SusanB-M1 has a good point. Most skeptics tend to come here because they find some of the topics a bit interesting to chat about, or have made a hobby out of something. On the other hand, many believers are, or at least think they are, defending they're most fundamental beliefs and way of life. What is nothing more than an interesting intellectual exercise on one side may be an attempt at justifying someone's entire way of life on the other. Obviously that can result in a great difference in emotional involvement, and a consequent difference in behaviour.

[Belz...]

Now what puzzles me, is in seeing their team suit up, how don't they at least pause for a moment to consider what side they are on? I mean what are the chances that the JREF is out doing all kinds of good, and then robbing the world of the miracle of homeopathy? Or shilling to the NWO?

Well, that's the thing. People are great at spotting flaws in others but introspection is notoriously bad.

[Lanzy]

Once it is a belief as oposed to an idea, it must be defended. If not then it must be counted as a mistake and I know a whole lot of people that never make those.