Ah, the skeptics, in my world
Copyright 2020, InterAmerica, Inc.
Zoam Chomsky, Robert Sheaffer, Lance Moody, Tim Printy, and
French psychologist Gilles Fernandez are amiable chaps, intelligent and not
overly belligerent; they are the fellows that I’m comfortable with, and they
are all hearty UFO skeptics.
The UFO topic (field of “study”) is an arena often calling
for fumigation, and the boys named above like to give it a whiff of cleansing
as often as they can.
But there is a problem, and it’s this: they have a tendency
to throw out the possible with the improbable, mixing the two inexorably as one
and the same.
For me, there are possible UFO contingencies that are hard
to swallow, but nutritious enough to taste, one being that UFOs are
interplanetary spacecraft from afar.
My UFO skeptics, most of them, maybe all, don’t even
consider UFOs as a viable reality, let alone spacecraft from somewhere else in
the cosmos.
That’s not skepticism. It’s hard-headed, close-minded
stubborn- ness.
If everyone was a skeptic, from early on up through our
modern age, we’d still be chasing animals with blunt, crude spears, by foot, as
we trample “possible” foodstuffs underneath our feet.
I like those guys listed above, and I like what they have to
say or write, but if they were my only friends, I’d kill myself, out of sheer
boredom and blatantly dull imaginative thinking.
Don’t get me wrong: skepticism has its place but not in the
UFO world, where an enigma, that surely exists – and has for a long time –
prevails and is grist for imaginative cogitation, unless you’re prone to take
an overdose of something to avoid the ongoing smugness of our resident
skeptics.
N.B. Image atop from https://www.trendfollowing.com/skeptics/
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, March 02, 2020
16 Comments:
Rich, when you say "skeptic" here, you are really describing "denier." That is to repeat a cheap rhetorical trick used by dogmatists and partisans.
A skeptic's starting point is doubt itself. A denier is dogmatic -- the very opposite.
Are there self-described UFO skeptics who act like deniers? Yep. Just as there UFO proponents who think the answer to every question is "aliens."
We should deplore the dogmatists and partisans. But there are many good-faith skeptics and skeptic-believers (as Jim Moseley called himself), who are comfortable with the answer "we don't know" when there is no better answer.
By
Terry the Censor, at Monday, March 02, 2020
Yah, Terry...
I agree. They are deniers, but live the part as if they are "skeptics" -- a ruse that allows them to hang out with us possibility-believers.....(you get it).
RR
By
RRRGroup, at Monday, March 02, 2020
>> Zoam Chomsky, Robert Sheaffer, Lance Moody, Tim Printy, and French psychologist Gilles Fernandez are amiable chaps ... <<
OMG I couldn't be in better company. I just wish you had thrown Terry in too!
But no, we've been around this bush before: Skeptics aren't deniers; skeptics Doubt!
Maybe to some that doesn't seem like a difference, but it really is.
I don't deny any possibility. (You're talking to one of the creators of Brane theory here. Okay?) I simply require evidence of extraordinary claims.
Sound contradictory? It's not. There is plenty of evidence for Brane theory.
And that's just the start of Rich's post .... More later
It's been a holiday weekend here, and another disaster....
By
zoamchomsky, at Tuesday, March 03, 2020
Zoam says that he doesn't "deny any possibility...I simply require evidence of extraordinary claims..." with respect to UFOs.
O.K., let's test Zoam's sincerity with a case that he cannot NOT dismiss out of hand (by his own standard) since there is some "evidence." The question is: does an evaluation of the evidence give rise to the probability that Heflin photographed something extraordinary?
The Heflin polaroids were subject to photographic analysis in the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 2000.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.552.6587&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Aside from the absence of any supports or strings, etc. the analysis clearly demonstrates that there is what appears to be "black particulate matter" trailing the UFO in Photo 3 which matches almost precisely the "smoke ring" particulate in Photo 4. So, Zoam, is this evidence for an extraordinary claim or not and, if not, why not?
BTW, to anticipate a flip-off, no one is claiming that what Heflin photographed was an alien spaceship. But he appeared to have pictures of something weird and the photo analysis appears to confirm this. If you disagree, tell us why?
By
Dominick, at Tuesday, March 03, 2020
Scientific skepticism
Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism ..., sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is an epistemological position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence. In practice, the term most commonly references the examination of claims and theories that appear to be beyond mainstream science, rather than the routine discussions and challenges among scientists. Scientific skepticism differs from philosophical skepticism, which questions humans' ability to claim any knowledge about the nature of the world and how they perceive it, and the similar but distinct Methodological skepticism, which is a systematic process of being skeptical about (or doubting) the truth of one's beliefs.
The New Skepticism described by Paul Kurtz in 1992 is scientific skepticism. For example, Robert K. Merton asserts that all ideas must be tested and are subject to rigorous, structured community scrutiny (as described in Mertonian norms).
An important difference to classical skepticism, according to religious-history professor Olav Hammer, is that scientific skepticism is not directly aligned with classical pyrrhonian scepticism, which would question all sort of orthodox wisdom, as well as the one established by modern science. According to Hammer, "the intellectual forebears of the modern skeptical movement are rather to be found among the many writers throughout history who have argued against beliefs they did not share."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_movement
By
zoamchomsky, at Wednesday, March 04, 2020
Paul Kurtz was dumber than a sack of hammers. The hackiest of the hacks.
By
Anonymous, at Wednesday, March 04, 2020
Says Maddy the irrational Internet crank, who really doesn't know spit from Spinoza.
Before you croak, Maddyboy, how about falsify the Null hypothesis for "UFO" reports.
Oh, but that's right, you can't do that; you can't produce a real "UFO" of any kind.
And so the Klass "UFO" curse will always be true: Madboy will croak knowing no more about real "UFOs" than he knows now -- which is absolutely nothing. How appropriate!
By
zoamchomsky, at Wednesday, March 04, 2020
Hey, Zoam, you execrable dimwit. When will you stop with the sad panegyrics to dead moron skeptics and face up to the fact that the whole scientific basis of your beloved PSH is trash that's been academically demolished over the past few years?
By
Anonymous, at Wednesday, March 04, 2020
"UFO" believer wishful thinking at its best! Hahaha!
Mattyboy; You may believe that but over a century of "UFO" reports of all kinds are not explained in the least by revisionist believer and/or relativist psychologizing.
Over a century--and that can be extended to a thousand years of documented manias, scares, myths and collective delusions--of various common-sense to academic social-psychological observations are not altered by a few years of postmodern obscurantism employed as a phony rationale for continued belief in the "UFO" myth.
And you're still ignoring the fact of the Null hypothesis and the failure to falsify it, the failure of ufology, and the failure of the ETH. All of which resolutely acts to validate the PSH in the philosophy of science: The simplest hypothesis which explains all or most of the evidence is the best. Occam to Popper it's still true!
You've got nothing, Maddyboy! Everything and I mean everything supports the PSH for "UFO" reports. All the rest is ufological wishful thinking, new-age religion, sci-fi pseudoscience, conspiracy mongering, and pure speculative flying-saucer fantasy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
By
zoamchomsky, at Thursday, March 05, 2020
Zoam, you bloviating nanobrain, all the midwit wikipedia links and canned talking points don't make a difference. You need to learn the distinction between explanation and description. Describing some event as a "mania" or "scare" explains nothing.
By
Anonymous, at Thursday, March 05, 2020
Oh, that is hilarious, Maddy!
You're the same sort of antiscience buffoon that would tell us General relativity doesn't explain what gravity is.
Hahaha!
By
zoamchomsky, at Friday, March 06, 2020
Lol. You goofy clown. Only you would be dumb enough to treat the made-up, non-replicable twaddle of sociology/social psychology and one of the most successful theories in *physics* as comparable, such that a negative view of the former somehow commits one to the same perspective on the latter. Not all science is made equal, Zoam, you cretin, even though the midwit IFLS content that you get your whole worldview from pretends that it's some seamlessly unified institution (physicists are highly intelligent and actually know what they're doing most of the time; sociologists and social psychologists, by contrast, the people responsible for the basis of the PSH you so adore, are pretty damn unimpressive and incompetent, at least contemporarily and over the past several decades; for the umpteenth time, the replication crisis is happening for a reason).
By
Anonymous, at Friday, March 06, 2020
No, Maddyboy, you're the idiot that said, >> Describing some event as a "mania" or "scare" explains nothing.<< When panics, scares, hysterias, manias, myths and delusions are just as concrete and well understood things-in-themselves as all other physical events and entities.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1938398459/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
There are hundreds of examples!
You've got nothing but your obnoxious contrarianism as an excuse to hang on to the utterly debunked "UFO" myth and collective delusion.
And your false beliefs about the world are not Psychosocial theorists' problem.
By
zoamchomsky, at Friday, March 06, 2020
Zoam,
First, I do want to thank you for all the entertainment. I'm almost sure you're a troll--I don't think you could really be as stupid as you act. I'm on Skype with an academic friend at the moment, and read him some of your posts when the email notification of your comment came up. We both had a good laugh.
"panics, scares, hysterias, manias, myths and delusions are just as concrete and well understood things-in-themselves as all other physical events and entities"
HAHAHAAHAH!!!!!! That bit is what really got me! Just as well understood as *all other* physical events entities!? Are you out of your mind, you gormless nimrod? Have you *seen* the replication rates in social psychology? (Of course, sociology is, on the whole in recent decades, such a crock that there are hardly any formal tests of their nebulous claims to even check for replicability.)
Here's a sentence from the conclusion of a recent (2006) paper by Balaratnasingam and Janca assessing the state of research on mass hysteria:
"Mass hysteria is to date a poorly understood condition. Little certainty exists regarding its etiology; its diagnosis remains controversial and its management requires a specific collaborative effort."
To your dust-mote-sized brain, does that seem like a well-understood phenomenon? As well understood as, say, relativity? You can't be this dumb--you've got to be a troll, as I said earlier.
The question, in any event, isn't whether mass hysteria, etc., ever occurs. The question is whether the concept actually *explains* anything in the case of whatever UFO event is under consideration. I could say that every UFO event ever was due to spontaneous, acausal hallucinations that just happened to randomly afflict people. That would be a pretty piss poor explanation, though. The bullsh*t you offer, which is to simply slap "hysteria" or some similar term on any UFO event you can, is no better. Is there any way to *verify* that hysterias, or whatever, occurred in all the cases that you think they occurred in? Do you have anything like sufficient empirical evidence to support that hypothesis? Even if hysterias, etc., were involved, can you show that they can account for all of the relevant data, e.g. convergences among reports? Since you're an idiot, or a troll (probably the latter), none of these problems ever occur to you, even though they're the basic questions that your solution would need answers to if it were to have any value.
Rather than do any of that, you choose to stay at the level of hack skeptics such as Kurtz and Klass, thinking insinuations and accusations about witnesses to some ostensible UFO incident--"everyone involved was just inflicted with temporary craziness because I say so! Occam's razor, hyuck!"--count as useful explanation. They don't, you dolt.
By
Anonymous, at Friday, March 06, 2020
Oh, there he goes again with the very same stupid ufologists' tricks: Maddyboy only wants to make it all seem more complicated than it is--the simple thing that we know it to be, the "UFO" myth and collective delusion--because he wishes to escape that determination in order to keep his "UFO" delusion alive. But it's been dead for decades.
Maddy; You're as simple and transparent as glass. You don't fool anyone with your nonsense. All your squirming and squirmy fallacious rhetorical devices don't help you in the least. You're arguing after-the-fact; still blaming others; and ignoring the facts of the World:
The Null hypothesis and the failure to falsify it, the failure of ufology, and the failure of the ETH. All of which resolutely acts to validate the PSH. In the philosophy of science the simplest hypothesis which explains all or most of the evidence is the best. Occam to Popper it's still true.
So Geez, Maddy! Do you think you ever get a clue and realize your juvenile-minded tripe will never influence the fact of the PSH? Give us all a break and get real for a bit.
Okay? Thank you!
zoam, your kindly representative of the Psychosocial Overlords of ufology
By
zoamchomsky, at Sunday, March 08, 2020
Lol. Typical pattern from troll Zoam: Falls back on bluster and bald assertion and idiotically appeals to Occam's razor right after it's been made clear that explanatory power is the very thing at issue with the PSH. And the indication of the serious problems for the concept of mass hysteria, from an academic paper that I mentioned, just gets ignored. No match for Zoam's irrelevant Wikipedia links, apparently. Funny how the clown who does nothing but repeat the same unsupported points over and over and over whines about "rhetorical devices." Again, another point for old Freud.
By
Anonymous, at Sunday, March 08, 2020
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