Skeptics ( Unwitting ) dupes?

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Sorry to put a dampener on this idea, but I tend to be very skeptical of conspiracy theories - it always seems to me that so many people would need be in the know that information would leak.

There are techniques like compartmentalization used in intelligence and military organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compart...(intelligence)

I agree this alone would not be totally effective .....but it is also true intelligence organizations have employed magicians and psychologists from at least WW1 ... this is not just to help detect deception but to understand 'misdirection' ...

For example ... in theory (possibly harder in practise) one way to hide a real conspiracy with be to fake numerous more sensational, false conspiracies ... alien abduction? .... crop circles? .... .. one only needs to dupe witnesses who will report it, this winds up skeptical organizations who debunk it and the machine begins to run by itself by those who know little .... none of it makes sense, perhaps because little of it was intended to make sense.... these are designed to seem implausible?

[Open Mind]

The psychology of deception, depends on the very opposite of Occams Razor. The tactic involves presenting simplicity and openness to conceal hidden complexities. Magic/conjuring depends on the same principle, the magician does something seemingly simple, a misdirection while actually doing something rather more complex. Also used in war strategies, chess, etc. ...get the rival to assume the simpler, more likely outcome is occurring, while something more complex and unexpected is actually occurring. Also used in computer viruses e.g. the trojan horse.

In otherwords, skeptics religiously following Occams Razor, could indeed be easily duped ... they should look very closely at the evidence ... not popular viewpoint.

[anonymous]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

I think we can forget faster than light missiles! Perhaps UFO's and other psi phenomena are closely related - something coming through from another reality rather than from another place in this galaxy (or even another one).

Hi David,

If ufo's come here from another reality then why can't we potentially send something starting from point A to the other reality and have it come back here at point B right over ground zero? That is potentially faster than light could travel within this universe.

I'm not saying the US or other human counties can do this today. My point is that ufo technology, if verified by the US government, would spur weapons research in other countires. If you know it's possible you are more likely to try it and succeed than if you think it is impossible.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by anonymous

Which are you saying is hard to test? Mediums or ufo's? If you think mediumship is hard to test, why do you think that?

Both are hard to test, because every event and every seance is different in various ways. That doesn't mean these things are not real - just hard to test.

For test purposes, you really want a phenomenon that can be repeated with as little variation as possible. Listening to various sensible-sounding people testify that they have observed various phenomena may be interesting, but I can't see how you can make solid progress with that. People report an enormous number of strange phenomena - some are probably false, but maybe others are true. My guess is that the true ones will ultimately be explained by psi, but before then, it is really hard to know which phenomena to believe in. OK, perhaps it is just my personal preference, but I put a lot more credence on actual experiments, such as those of Sheldrake or Radin.

Regarding faster than light craft, you either have to postulate that special/general relativity is wrong, or invoke extremely exotic physics such as wormholes. I don't know much about these theoretical constructs, but I am pretty sure bad things would happen to anyone who got close to such a phenomenon because of the high energies involved!

If may well be that UFO's are appearing on radar screens every day, but my guess is that the military are simply highly embarrassed by these events - but obviously I can't prove that.

If psi is involved in all this, it is simply not necessary to talk about physical phenomena such as speeds faster than light.

I repeat, most military installations are little other than posturing. Why, for example, bother with missile tracking, when you have strategic submarines armed with missiles that could attack back some time later - that indeed was the whole idea of the submarines. The rational for missile interception is even shakier. Suppose, for example, that Iran is hell bent on creating a few nuclear weapons and delivering them to the US. Why would they put them on missiles - that might fail or get shot down - when they could smuggle them into the US on cargo boats? The existence of global world trade makes a great deal of military work pointless - it may be a very slight exaggeration, but anyone with a nuclear bomb could deliver it by DHL with a cheap GPS gadget to determine when it had reached its destination! I think that the military of many nations want to avoid people really thinking about these issues.

David

[anonymous]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Both are hard to test, because every event and every seance is different in various ways. That doesn't mean these things are not real - just hard to test.

For test purposes, you really want a phenomenon that can be repeated with as little variation as possible. Listening to various sensible-sounding people testify that they have observed various phenomena may be interesting, but I can't see how you can make solid progress with that.

I think if you went to a spiritualist church every sunday and saw mediums in action week after week you would have a different opinion about what type of evidence is possible.

Also Proxy sittings, cross correspondences, book tests, news paper tests, scole experiemnts, etc etc are not simply anecdotes.

People report an enormous number of strange phenomena - some are probably false, but maybe others are true. My guess is that the true ones will ultimately be explained by psi, but before then, it is really hard to know which phenomena to believe in. OK, perhaps it is just my personal preference, but I put a lot more credence on actual experiments, such as those of Sheldrake or Radin.

The fact that you are not citing experiments doesn't mean that they don't exist. I still don't understand why you say they are hard to do. You seem to be saying that they are hard to do because they are not done. But in fact they are done.

Regarding faster than light craft, you either have to postulate that special/general relativity is wrong, or invoke extremely exotic physics such as wormholes. I don't know much about these theoretical constructs, but I am pretty sure bad things would happen to anyone who got close to such a phenomenon because of the high energies involved!

If may well be that UFO's are appearing on radar screens every day, but my guess is that the military are simply highly embarrassed by these events - but obviously I can't prove that.

Huh? I don't understand what you are saying. Which events? Do you think ufo's are on the screens and the military is embarrased or not. If not what is embarassing the military?

If psi is involved in all this, it is simply not necessary to talk about physical phenomena such as speeds faster than light.

I repeat, most military installations are little other than posturing.

I think this is beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory. We've seen a lot of military activity in Iraq and the military technology seemed have worked as intended. I think it is hard to test your theory. We don't know what sorts of inimical activity would have occured if we didn't have a formidable military. Are you saying deterence is posturing? It seems to me you are saying military installations are useless and ineffective. I don't see how you get to that conclusion.

Why, for example, bother with missile tracking, when you have strategic submarines armed with missiles that could attack back some time later - that indeed was the whole idea of the submarines.

You need to know where the missiles are coming from so you can retaliate, if you have time you can get the president and congress to a safe undisclosed location, and maybe evacuate some civilians.

The rational for missile interception is even shakier. Suppose, for example, that Iran is hell bent on creating a few nuclear weapons and delivering them to the US. Why would they put them on missiles - that might fail or get shot down - when they could smuggle them into the US on cargo boats?

They and other countries are developing missiles so that is the rationale for defending against them. Do you leave you door unlocked because a thief can get in with a crow bar?

The existence of global world trade makes a great deal of military work pointless - it may be a very slight exaggeration, but anyone with a nuclear bomb could deliver it by DHL with a cheap GPS gadget to determine when it had reached its destination! I think that the military of many nations want to avoid people really thinking about these issues.

David

There are radiation detectors at ports of entry. I agree there are a lot of threats that are hard to defend against. You're saying that there are huge gaps in our national defenses and the military doesn't like to have that known? Maybe you are right about that. But wouldn't they rather have a budget increase to cover all those other threats too? I don't think anyone would realistically say we should scrap our missile tracking because someone can bring a nuke in on a commerical ship so it is only in the military's interest to play up these other threats - except where that would encourage enemies to take advantage of those threats. Which brings us back to why the government would want to suppress information about ufo's.

[hoggworks]

Holy crap, this thread is unbelievable.

Rod, are you being serious? Do you actually think that the only explanations for a person disagreeing with your position are:

They're ignorant of your reasons for believing;
They don't understand your reasons for believing;
They won't consider them because they have X to hold onto;
They ARE PART OF TEH WURLWIDE CONSP1RACIESS!!

That's just ludicrous. There's the other option, of course, which is that they're coming to you genuinely sincerely and not considering the reasons you believe as adequate for them to believe. People CAN disagree with you without it requiring a global conspiracy.

I mean, wow. Talk about your ways to ignore dissenting views, and reduce Cognitive Dissonance.

Anything but being wrong, right? Anything but considering the fact that you COULD be wrong. Hell, even if the skeptics are wrong, they can be wrong because they had a different, perfectly legitimate interpretation (which happens in science all the time, even though CLEARLY none of you hear has the nearest idea what science is or what scientists are like).

And skeptic organizations are anti-research? Have you ever actually read a skeptical magazine? They actually DO go out and look at claims, looking for explanations. It happens every day, and you can see the results every month on the magazine shelf.

As to the person who suggested the litany of "proofs" that all skeptics are frauds, I certainly won't defend dishonest practices, even if it's in the name of science, but let's not forget how quickly you guys are to distance yourself from the actions of fraud psychics, mediums, and the like. Does John Edwards or Uri Geller being a fraud discount psi in any way? Does Sylvia Brown's existence and career mean that people shouldn't consider psychic phenomena to be real? If you're to be able to hold those two things in balance, why shouldn't we who don't blindly believe in everything that crosses our minds be able to do the same?

The skeptical position isn't, as you seem to think, that nothing interesting happens, and we've already discovered all of the cool stuff in the universe, and that's it. I mean, shit, they just discovered evidence that the universe may actually be flat. FLAT! Our being 3D in the way that we perceive ourselves might be an illusion. They fairly recently watched a Lamprey Eel eating and discovered that the thing actually has a second set of jaws inside its mouth, like the Alien! They routinely adjust the timeline of life on this planet and of our specific developmental cycles, but when they do all of this, it's because there's a reason to. REASON. The Flat universe stuff, which was experimentally observed with a gravity detector, was predicted. There was a theory, and it was testable.

You folks who so ardently support any of the litany of half-baked theories that float through this board often accuse skeptics of not keeping up on all of the "literature" of your community. That's certainly a fair charge, as who has time to read anything on any subject? But we DO read some of the stuff. We might read more, but for the fact that, like you, we have lives, day jobs, and other things that eat at our time.

I should think that you all would do well to keep abreast of scientific developments. How can you "know" what scientists are up to and like, and "know" what the current thinking on a given subject is if you don't read? I certainly wouldn't expect anyone to read everything, because as with us, it was an unreasonable claim. But read books by scientists with better reputations than Dean Radin and Sheldrake. Read the dissenting views, the scientists who are practicing real science. Get some basic science comprehension going on. Learn some critical thinking skills.

Am I being angry, here? Hell yes. I get snarky in conversations here, absolutely, and I call your ideas ludicrous, but I don't extend (well, I try not to) that judgment to you. I do see the opposite happening, though; I see believer after believer coming up with every half-assed reason to keep believing what they're believing, insulting me and the others here, considering dissent to be insult, disagreement to be closed-mindedness, skepticism to be, I don't know, some sort of intellectual stasis in the 1800's.

You guys all act like science and scientists are the enemy, here, like we who like reason over fancy are acting against the species, but that just isn't true. Science leads to developments. Science leads to progress. Where does psi leave? What ways are our lives -- in demonstrable, not subjective ways -- better for psi? I am alive, right now, because of science. Anyone reading this over the age of 30 is a senior citizen without scientific progress, and anyone over 40 is dead. I'm dead because there were complications during my birth, and because I, like everyone else, have needed antibiotics, and I also had my lung collapse a couple times, and were it not for that, I would be dead.

Does prayer fix a collapsed lung? Does communing with your own internal dialogue? No. Hell no. Does prayer make you better, does it cure the sick? No, absolutely not. A pinch of chemicals I can balance on my finger tip has more efficacy than all the psychics in the world.

You ask if the media is doing a better job reporting on psi than politics, but have you seen the news? Every time a balloon blows in front of a security camera, it goes on the news as a possible ghost citing, and more often than not if anyone dissents with that view in their report, it's a token showing at the end. The media reports on woo explanations for things with frightening ease.

David, you said earlier that you think the scientists are being fooled by the extreme skeptics; has it occurred to you that they're on in the same? There's not some group of skeptics sitting off in the corner doing their skeptic-ing, sending letters to scientists saying "believe this!" The scientists ARE the skeptics. You're drawing a completely false distinction.


Also, conspiracy theories fail the crucial test, which is to do what they're intended. David rightly spoke of leaks, and just about every conspiracy you can imagine has been "uncovered," with no consequences to anyone. And do you really, REALLY think that the governments of the world, which have to frequently struggle to keep basic services running, really have the coordination to orchestrate a MASSIVE COVER-UP of anything? We KNOW about all of these conspiracies, yet the people orchestrating them are ALL-POWERFUL. Kind of throws water on the notion of it, I think.

But, oh, wait, you could just say that they release fake conspiracies to keep your mind off of the real ones, or that some elements get out, so you stop looking, or something like that. But that's intellectual hogwash, about as sensical as your "well, maybe the external brain memories are stored here, then? maybe my theory fits perfectly well atop any theory you're likely to come up with ever I WIN!"

I'm not going to generalize and say that you're all closed-minded whackaloons not interested in learning, but just propping up your own deluded beliefs. You're looking for a choir to preach to. (Although when reading a thread like this it's very tempting) Aside from the obvious fact that I'd just be repeating your own claims back at you, I don't believe it. I believe that you guys are often sincere and truly interested in this stuff. You want to find answers to questions, you really do. I believe that.

I just think -- and I'm speaking for myself, here, not "all" skeptics -- that you haven't found the right questions to ask, and you haven't figured out why the questions you are asking are leading you to conclusions that don't make a whole lot of sense. I think you're wrong. I think you came by your conclusions honestly in most cases, but you predicated those conclusions, unknowingly, on bad information or misunderstandings. Does this make you bad people? Are you deserving of my scorn? No, of course not.

What DOES make you deserving of scorn, however, is being the pompous windbags you accuse us of being.



---
Also, on the side-track discussion of the arms race -- trade with other nations reduces greatly the risk of war with them, historically, because if you want something, you could just buy it, you don't have to go to war for it. It's simpler. And if you went to war to get a physical resources, there's a not insignificant chance that the war would destroy the thing you want. So weapons become an extra level deterrent, but the thinking is that it becomes largely unnecessary when trade is cheaper and more effective than war. I mean, also, your neighbors building that thing? They're already building PRODUCT, without your supervision. If you took over their country, you'd have to manage not just your own country, but theirs too.

[hoggworks]

Originally Posted by Psibeliever

I've said that skepticism, at least in its extreme forms, is a cult - and, now, it seems, they're dupes as well. And this seems to touch a raw nerve in some of its true believers.

You'll just add anything to the pile, won't you? Apparently this includes your own thoughts which you later admit are wrong, but, hold on, still count because you say so.

[hoggworks]

Also, in response to the book cited at the beginning of the thread? I have a feeling that CSI would contend that Psychic research of the type they're talking about ain't scientific research at all.

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by hoggworks

Also, on the side-track discussion of the arms race -- trade with other nations reduces greatly the risk of war with them, historically, because if you want something, you could just buy it, you don't have to go to war for it. It's simpler. And if you went to war to get a physical resources, there's a not insignificant chance that the war would destroy the thing you want. So weapons become an extra level deterrent, but the thinking is that it becomes largely unnecessary when trade is cheaper and more effective than war. I mean, also, your neighbors building that thing? They're already building PRODUCT, without your supervision. If you took over their country, you'd have to manage not just your own country, but theirs too.

I agree - trade does indeed reduce the risk of war - but it also makes a total nonsense of a lot of military posturing. If you really think your enemy is going to try to obliterate you in a surprise attack, you don't trade goods on a scale where you can't possibly check that everything imported is innocent. You could explode a nuclear bomb (or even a hydrogen bomb) on a container ship before it even reached harbour, and the effect would be almost as bad as if you carefully targeted it. No appreciable thought is given to avoiding risks like that, but billions are spent on anti-missile defense. Large parts of the military are just a dangerous con trick.

David

[Psibeliever]

As I said, never argue with a true believer over his religion.

I don't believe in conspiracy theories either, but deception and disinformation is part of the intelligence game.