Comment by JKCalhoun
5 hours ago
Sure. But often one of the two sides has an obvious agenda.
I thought of James Randi and "spoon bender", Uri Geller. I suppose if you're cynical enough you can presume that both are desperate for airtime, self-promotion and we should therefore be skeptical of both.
Randi though for me has much less to gain in exposing frauds.
Being convinced without the ability to explain the argument is troubling.
But more importantly, mainstream scientists have the "obvious agenda" (well documented by now) to avoid ridicule and mockery. So if you're willing to weaponize ridicule and mockery, you can successfully suppress scientific investigation into whatever areas you choose.
Let's not forget, the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory" to suppress investigation into illegal intelligence activities.
I mean, at some point we are convinced as a convenience. You can use mathematical formulations describing _how_ a motor works without understanding why they are true. Similarly, I don't believe that there is a grand conspiracy involving chemtrails, even though I haven't proven that all the theories I've heard are false. I'm just fairly confident that this _could_ be done, given enough time and resources. But practically, I have to get on with my life.
Being lazy incurs costs. With regard to "conspiracies" that cost is explicitly vulnerability to them.
Neither "chemtrails", "UFOs&aliens" nor "telepathy" appear particularly "plausible". But that could just as well be a statement about your method of determining 'plausibility'?
You invoke limited personal resources to justify complacency. Likely, you estimate the costs of being wrong as negligible since you never really thought about possible implications and do not know about any being particularly relevant to you. That's an argument from ignorance.
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> the CIA invented the very term "conspiracy theory"
I find the best conspiracies are supported by facts
Catch 22. The best way to avoid hard facts is to scare away scientists. ;)
But I agree, this is just garbage pseudoscience. I listened to the Banned & Reported episode, and TL;DR the Telepathy Tapes experiments had a non-blinded 'facilitator' touching the blindfolded 'psychic.' My mind immediately went to Clever Hans, before the podcast hosts even brought it up later in the episode.
Just watch any Derren Brown video to see how easy it is to 'cue' someone from across the room. This is James Randi 101, folks...