Comment by zoeysmithe
6 months ago
Classism in higher education, science, etc is sadly all too common. Even those in the 'correct' class have uphill battles as science very much is vulnerable to ego, politics, etc and reform can be difficult, or in some cases impossible, regardless of merit.
It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now due to these politics. I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things. There's just way too many stories and experiences to entirely write it off, but who knows. I feel like hand wavey excuses like third-man, carbon monoxide suddenly everywhere, thought experiments about brains releasing chemicals, calling everything a hallucination, intuition impossible to know conventionally just called luck, etc is the system trying hard to deny this.
> It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now
Not really, 40% of the US believes they were created (or are descendant of) by a divine being (creationism), in spite of all evidence, so pass that hurdle first
> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.
Like 20%-66% of the US believes this today? No one is experiencing the reality you are, ever, something to keep in mind, IMO.
To be exact a little under 40% believe in special creation - the mainstream Christian position (and more common even in the US) is that evolution is part of God's creation.
The US is very odd, not only in having large numbers of members of creationist churches, but also in tat a lot of members of churches that oppose creationism and Biblical literalism are quite often creationist.
The good news is that there is a downward trend in creationism.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...
That's not so odd if you take into account that a lot of US citizens trace their origins back to people that left Europe because their beliefs were conflicting with those of the established churches. And because the established churches did not have a strong presence in the United States (or actually, its predecessor) these suddenly found themselves to be the dominant religion in sometimes much larger regions than they ever could have hoped for back in the home country. And when the population boomed so did their numbers.
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Lack of evidence is not the same as contradictory evidence.
Could you point to any literature on evidence that refutes creationism? I'm not saying there isn't any. I'm just admitting my ignorance of it. Please enlighten me.
Falsifiability is pretty important here. What evidence could, in theory, refute creationism?
> No one is experiencing the reality you are.
This is a common sentiment, but it is also a declaration of epistemic bankruptcy, thus incompatible with the scientific method.
No, people don't experience the same reality, but it can still be observed and measured, which was pretty much resolved in the 1700s (Hume, others), so you might want to delve into that first.
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Not to mention flat-earthers, climate change deniers, 5G-causes-vaccines activists burning down 4G towers as they have no idea what 5G even is, etc., etc.
It's all too easy for the less skeptical to be misguided. :/
yeah, but way less people believe in those things though, still a huge problem, unfortunately
not many polls on people understanding a difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation even, who knows what people know
Reminds me. On a Greyhound cross country trip, I got seated next to this pretty, well dressed, middle aged lady, that poor college student me, hardly ever saw on such trips. We start chatting and she tells me she is a Ghost Hunter. I took her at face value due previous experiences with real freaky characters on Greyhound, and was thinking oh great here we go again, thank you Greyhound, going to be stuck for hours next to another very strange kook. That kind of put me off further conversation. Then she starts taking out her papers to read, and says - want to see something weird? Shows me all sorts of stuff about different haunted houses. And I was just blown away by how well organized and detailed everything was. Later on she told me she was a PI doing investigations for real estate companies. But for a while it felt like I was sitting next to Scully reading X-Files.
You're saying real estate companies actually pay people to investigate "haunted" houses?
That's crazy
I don't think so. In my state you get a few days to do a "neighborhood review." If you, as a prospective buyer, walk around to all your potential neighbors and they start telling you about all the ghost stories and freaky stuff that happens in your house at night, you'll probably pull your offer. In aggregate there's money lost. And where there's money lost, there are people trying to fill those gaps.
> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.
Even if the experiences becomes accepted (although i think it unlikely) but not necessarily as really being what people who believe in ghosts think them to be.
it is quite common for things to turn out to be real observations but not to be what the observers thought they were (e.g. flying saucers).
If militaries around the world are not using it, it is probably not real. See also telekinesis or ESP experiments the US Army performed [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...
"Science advances one funeral at a time.”
Max Planck
Which is ironic since Max Planck experienced a staggering amount of change in science that did not require anyone dying, took place over just a few decades here and there, and was extremely fruitful.
Born 1858, died 1947, pretty much everything known about anything changed somewhat in that time period, and he was literally part of a lot of it, and helped convince people and change their minds without them dying.
Almost like the quote is utter bullshit.
Almost like its a colloquial phrase of Plancks writings, that represents how the quantum revolution played out for so many people.
If people in the "correct" class are having trouble, that means it's not entirely classism. Only the additional trouble the people in the "wrong" class have is because of classism.
Dunno if it's classism so much that if you look at reports of odd waves or lights it's going to be really hard to filter the signal from the noise of people saying odd stuff. Photos are much better.
The problem is they never even tried to look before. Just hand waved that it was impossible and they knew better. Like bees can't fly.