From the Telegraph:


Lies, damn lies and 'counterknowledge'

By Damian Thompson

Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact,
warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book

George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection
triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from
Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat
the Aids virus.

Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid
at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is
hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures
have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities,
plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in
cyberspace.

This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact.
We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once
flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated
people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.

We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of
claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before.
One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on
painstaking measurement of the material world.

That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this,
paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to
fake information.

Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories.
You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth
that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings;
someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory;
someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales.
Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.

Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that
we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more
vulnerable than at any time for decades.

I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts"
about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-
sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed
vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel.
Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not
being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about
the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right,"
they said. "It did seem strange…"

Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September
11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a
90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New
Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-
slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their
targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings
collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and
a masterpiece of counterknowledge.

The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon;
that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland
Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were
faked using voice-morphing technology.

The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes
from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated.
Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that
leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is
lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with
strong links to the far Right.

Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than
a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the
September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11
conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a
member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President
Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing
minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might
have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible."

Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of
Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed
"without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services".
Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred
publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre".

In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating
and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts
it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can
undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all
conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and
the various crank theories of physics."

We do not normally think of creationism and maverick physics as
conspiracy theories; but what they have in common with Loose Change is
a methodology that marks them as counterknowledge. People who share a
muddled, careless or deceitful attitude towards gathering evidence
often find themselves drawn to each other's fantasies. If you believe
one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another.
Although this has been true for centuries, the invention of the
internet has had a galvanising effect. A rumour about the Antichrist
can leap from Goths in Sweden to Australian fascists in seconds.
Minority groups are becoming more tolerant of each other's eccentric
doctrines. Contacts between white and black racists are now
flourishing; in particular, the growing anti-Semitism of black
American Muslims has been a great ice-breaker on the neo-Nazi circuit.

In June 2007, the home page of The Truth Seeker, a conspiracy website,
included claims that Aids is a "man-made Pentagon genocide", that Pope
Paul VI "was impersonated by an actor from 1975 to 1978", that new
evidence about the Loch Ness monster had emerged – plus a link to
Loose Change.

Yet, as we saw earlier, more than 100 million people have seen that
film. In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to
self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream,
cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond
traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread
counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe
falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric
history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding
them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black
Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some
teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront
the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils.
advertisement

But Left-wing multiculturalists are not the only guilty ones:
entrepreneurs are turning counterknowledge into an industry.
Publishing houses pay self-taught archaeologists and pseudo-historians
large amounts to turn fragments of fact into saleable stories. Titles
are placed in the history sections of bookshops whose claims have been
thoroughly demolished – yet the publishers carry on bringing out neweditions.

The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming
increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable
that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to
affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has
persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing
information about Jesus.

Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making
huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative
medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin
supplements and "superfoods" that are unsupported by scientific
literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial
interest in selling the supplements in question.

Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who
profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit
conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine
science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect,
and therefore of risk.

The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the
worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of
parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles,
mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking
it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased
the danger of a measles epidemic.

But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge
in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have
issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to
sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have
carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000
children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their
children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.

These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval
superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines
because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are
spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories.
Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political,
intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-
Western sentiment in the developing world.

Islamic countries, in particular, have embraced counterknowledge to a
remarkable degree. In 2006, the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in
Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arabs carried
out the September 11 attacks. The majority of respondents in each
country said no. Indeed, most British Muslims – 56 per cent – also
thought that Arabs were innocent. A quarter of British Muslims believe
that "the British Government was involved in some way" with the London
terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005.

The battle between knowledge and counterknowledge is not just a
struggle to protect the public domain from bogus facts. It has
profound implications for the safety of the West. And, make no mistake
about it: this is a battle we are losing.
"

I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
dispassion...

Lance

Peter Brooks wrote:
> From the Telegraph:
>
>
> Lies, damn lies and 'counterknowledge'
>
> By Damian Thompson
>
> Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact,
> warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book
>
> George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection
> triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from
> Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat
> the Aids virus.
>
> Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid
> at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is
> hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures
> have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities,
> plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in
> cyberspace.
>
> This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact.
> We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once
> flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated
> people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.
>
> We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of
> claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before.
> One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on
> painstaking measurement of the material world.
>
> That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this,
> paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to
> fake information.
>
> Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories.
> You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth
> that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings;
> someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory;
> someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales.
> Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.
>
> Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that
> we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more
> vulnerable than at any time for decades.
>
> I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts"
> about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-
> sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed
> vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel.
> Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not
> being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about
> the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right,"
> they said. "It did seem strange…"
>
> Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September
> 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a
> 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New
> Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-
> slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their
> targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings
> collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and
> a masterpiece of counterknowledge.
>
> The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon;
> that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland
> Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were
> faked using voice-morphing technology.
>
> The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes
> from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated.
> Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that
> leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is
> lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with
> strong links to the far Right.
>
> Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than
> a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the
> September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11
> conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a
> member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President
> Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing
> minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might
> have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible."
>
> Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of
> Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed
> "without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services".
> Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred
> publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre".
>
> In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating
> and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts
> it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can
> undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all
> conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and
> the various crank theories of physics."
>
> We do not normally think of creationism and maverick physics as
> conspiracy theories; but what they have in common with Loose Change is
> a methodology that marks them as counterknowledge. People who share a
> muddled, careless or deceitful attitude towards gathering evidence
> often find themselves drawn to each other's fantasies. If you believe
> one wrong or strange thing, you are more likely to believe another.
> Although this has been true for centuries, the invention of the
> internet has had a galvanising effect. A rumour about the Antichrist
> can leap from Goths in Sweden to Australian fascists in seconds.
> Minority groups are becoming more tolerant of each other's eccentric
> doctrines. Contacts between white and black racists are now
> flourishing; in particular, the growing anti-Semitism of black
> American Muslims has been a great ice-breaker on the neo-Nazi circuit.
>
> In June 2007, the home page of The Truth Seeker, a conspiracy website,
> included claims that Aids is a "man-made Pentagon genocide", that Pope
> Paul VI "was impersonated by an actor from 1975 to 1978", that new
> evidence about the Loch Ness monster had emerged – plus a link to
> Loose Change.
>
> Yet, as we saw earlier, more than 100 million people have seen that
> film. In the 21st century, bogus knowledge is no longer confined to
> self-selecting minority groups. It is seeping into the mainstream,
> cleverly repackaged for a mass market. This crisis goes beyond
> traditional political ideology. Yes, the Left has helped to spread
> counterknowledge by insisting on the rights of minorities to believe
> falsehoods that make them feel better about themselves. Afro-centric
> history aims to raise the self-esteem of black youngsters by feeding
> them the fantasy that the origins of Western civilisation lie in black
> Africa. Last year, a British government report revealed that some
> teachers are dropping the Holocaust from lessons rather than confront
> the Holocaust-denial of Muslim pupils.
> advertisement
>
> But Left-wing multiculturalists are not the only guilty ones:
> entrepreneurs are turning counterknowledge into an industry.
> Publishing houses pay self-taught archaeologists and pseudo-historians
> large amounts to turn fragments of fact into saleable stories. Titles
> are placed in the history sections of bookshops whose claims have been
> thoroughly demolished – yet the publishers carry on bringing out new
> editions.
>
> The dividing line between fiction and non-fiction is becoming
> increasingly hard to draw. These days, public opinion is so malleable
> that a product does not even have to pretend to be fact in order to
> affect perceptions of truth: the success of The Da Vinci Code has
> persuaded 40 per cent of Americans that the Churches are concealing
> information about Jesus.
>
> Meanwhile, publishers, television channels and newspapers are making
> huge profits from another branch of counterknowledge: alternative
> medicine. Unqualified nutritionists make claims for vitamin
> supplements and "superfoods" that are unsupported by scientific
> literature; conveniently, these people often have a commercial
> interest in selling the supplements in question.
>
> Fashionable advocates of alternative medicine, and the executives who
> profit from them, are as reliant on counterknowledge as any bedsit
> conspiracy theorist. Their miracle diets and health scares undermine
> science by distorting the public understanding of cause and effect,
> and therefore of risk.
>
> The fingerprints of the alternative medicine lobby are all over the
> worst British health scare of recent years, in which thousands of
> parents denied their children the MMR triple vaccine against measles,
> mumps and rubella following the dissemination of flawed data linking
> it to autism. In that case, distrust of orthodox medicine increased
> the danger of a measles epidemic.
>
> But that is nothing compared to the impact of medical counterknowledge
> in underdeveloped countries. In northern Nigeria, Islamic leaders have
> issued a fatwa declaring the polio vaccine to be a US conspiracy to
> sterilise Muslims: polio has returned to the area, and pilgrims have
> carried it to Mecca and Yemen. In January 2007, the parents of 24,000
> children in Pakistan refused to let health workers vaccinate their
> children because radical mullahs had told them the same idiotic story.
>
> These incidents cannot be dismissed as examples of medieval
> superstition: these people are not rejecting life-saving vaccines
> because they reject modern medicine, but because their leaders are
> spouting Islamic takes on Western conspiracy theories.
> Counterknowledge, with its ingrained hostility towards a political,
> intellectual and scientific elite, appeals to anti-American, anti-
> Western sentiment in the developing world.
>
> Islamic countries, in particular, have embraced counterknowledge to a
> remarkable degree. In 2006, the Pew Research Centre asked Muslims in
> Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and Pakistan whether Arabs carried
> out the September 11 attacks. The majority of respondents in each
> country said no. Indeed, most British Muslims – 56 per cent – also
> thought that Arabs were innocent. A quarter of British Muslims believe
> that "the British Government was involved in some way" with the London
> terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005.
>
> The battle between knowledge and counterknowledge is not just a
> struggle to protect the public domain from bogus facts. It has
> profound implications for the safety of the West. And, make no mistake
> about it: this is a battle we are losing.
> "

On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:
> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
> are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
> mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
> of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
> dispassion...
>
That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people
rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about
a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
about it.

On 13 Jan, 01:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
> > are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
> > mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
> > of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
> > dispassion...
>
> That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people
> rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about
> a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
> consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
> about it.

"Man ... explores in his imagination the whole universe -- past,
present, and future --  and where he cannot or need not test the
validity of his constructuions, he builds as he is prompted by his
desires and fears."  (Englefield)

Dave

Dave Smith wrote:
> On 13 Jan, 01:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:
>> On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
>>> are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
>>> mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
>>> of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
>>> dispassion...
>> That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people
>> rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about
>> a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
>> consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
>> about it.
> 
> "Man ... explores in his imagination the whole universe -- past,
> present, and future --  and where he cannot or need not test the
> validity of his constructuions, he builds as he is prompted by his
> desires and fears."  (Englefield)
> 
Isn't it more 'desires or fears' - optimists build on the former and 
pessimists on the latter.

On 13 Jan, 16:18, "Peter H.M.Brooks"  wrote:
> Dave Smith wrote:
> > On 13 Jan, 01:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> >> On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
> >>> are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
> >>> mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state> >>> of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
> >>> dispassion...
> >> That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people
> >> rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about
> >> a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
> >> consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
> >> about it.
>
> > "Man ... explores in his imagination the whole universe -- past,
> > present, and future --  and where he cannot or need not test the
> > validity of his constructuions, he builds as he is prompted by his
> > desires and fears."  (Englefield)
>
> Isn't it more 'desires or fears' - optimists build on the former and
> pessimists on the latter.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

I don't see why. We're all affected in our thinking by our desires and
fears.

Dave

On Jan 13, 11:19 pm, Dave Smith  wrote:
> On 13 Jan, 16:18, "Peter H.M.Brooks"  wrote:
>
>
>
> > Dave Smith wrote:
> > > On 13 Jan, 01:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> > >> On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
> > >>> are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
> > >>> mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
> > >>> of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
> > >>> dispassion...
> > >> That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people
> > >> rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about> > >> a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
> > >> consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
> > >> about it.
>
> > > "Man ... explores in his imagination the whole universe -- past,
> > > present, and future --  and where he cannot or need not test the
> > > validity of his constructuions, he builds as he is prompted by his
> > > desires and fears."  (Englefield)
>
> > Isn't it more 'desires or fears' - optimists build on the former and
> > pessimists on the latter.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > - Show quoted text -
>
> I don't see why. We're all affected in our thinking by our desires and
> fears.
>
> Dave

It seems to me that dispassion is vital in some contexts. A general
who is influenced by wishful thinking will fail. A chess player who
anticipates only those moves that would allow him to win will lose. A
large part of training in many disciplines involves learning to see
the situation as it is rather than as we hope or fear it might be.

Lance

On 13 Jan, 23:39, Lance  wrote:
> On Jan 13, 11:19 pm, Dave Smith  wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On 13 Jan, 16:18, "Peter H.M.Brooks"  wrote:
>
> > > Dave Smith wrote:
> > > > On 13 Jan, 01:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> > > >> On Jan 13, 1:35 am, Lance  wrote:> I think "Hot" or motivated cognition is part of the problem. All of us
> > > >>> are reluctant to believe uncomfortable truths. In nearly every case
> > > >>> mentioned in the article the problem is discomfort with the true state
> > > >>> of affairs. So what is needed is also an attempt to teach
> > > >>> dispassion...
> > > >> That's a good point. I think it would be more useful to help people> > > >> rediscover disinterest. You can be uncomfortable, even unhappy, about
> > > >> a truth, but if you're disinterested you can still accept it and
> > > >> consider its consequenses without necessarily being dispassionate
> > > >> about it.
>
> > > > "Man ... explores in his imagination the whole universe -- past,
> > > > present, and future --  and where he cannot or need not test the
> > > > validity of his constructuions, he builds as he is prompted by his
> > > > desires and fears."  (Englefield)
>
> > > Isn't it more 'desires or fears' - optimists build on the former and
> > > pessimists on the latter.- Hide quoted text -
>
> > > - Show quoted text -
>
> > I don't see why. We're all affected in our thinking by our desires and
> > fears.
>
> > Dave
>
> It seems to me that dispassion is vital in some contexts. A general
> who is influenced by wishful thinking will fail. A chess player who
> anticipates only those moves that would allow him to win will lose. A
> large part of training in many disciplines involves learning to see
> the situation as it is rather than as we hope or fear it might be.
>
> Lance


I agree.  We need to keep considering the evidence and not get carried
away in 'flights of fancy'.  Language can be so abstract and ambiguous
that if we're not careful our thoughts can bear little correspondence
with the external world.  I sometimes think I am more of a
'rationalist' than a 'humanist'.  Incidentally, the stimulus for this
thread, Damian Thomson's book, has been reviewed by Grayling in the
Rational Association's magazine.  Apparently, Thompson is editor of
the Catholic Herald!  :>)

http://newhumanist.org.uk/1696


Dave

The problem is that often enough the conventional wisdom and generally
accepted story turns out to be false.  The twins who got married, for
example.  Total baloney, but now a factoid.  (That word used in the
original Mailer meaning.)

We all 'know' that the canoe man's amnesia was faked, but what about
the equally obvious fakery of the Lady Di crash survivor?  Some of us
do not like being fooled and so have doubts about much of what we are
told unless we can cerify things for ourselves.

My personal one is the Lynmouth/Lynton flood disaster being caused by
an experimant in cloud seeding (I actually wonder about the great smog
of London as well).  Of course people might think that thirteen inches
of rain in a few hours in Devon is not remarkable enough, but I regard
such people as the gullible ones.  The fact is, people do get up to
skullduggery.  What the heck do they think they were doing at the
common cold research centre?

As a matter of fact I also am sure that the skullduggers absolutely
love the 911, UFO and Bigfoot loonies, because as far as they are
concerned, the more conspiracy theories the better.  If the Loch Ness
Monster was not real, they would have to invent him .  Sorry, nearly
got unserious there.

On Jan 17, 9:21 pm, John Brockbank 
wrote:
>
> My personal one is the Lynmouth/Lynton flood disaster being caused by
> an experimant in cloud seeding (I actually wonder about the great smog
> of London as well).  Of course people might think that thirteen inches
> of rain in a few hours in Devon is not remarkable enough, but I regard
> such people as the gullible ones.  The fact is, people do get up to
> skullduggery.  What the heck do they think they were doing at the
> common cold research centre?
>
We discussed this recently. It is true that people who are generally
sceptical can be led to disbelieve conspiracies that really do exist,
which makes them, in fact, also gullible.

The position to aspire to is scepticism that avoids cynicism. The sort
of thought that allows that, quite probably "Once is happenstance,
twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.".

On 17 Jan, 20:03, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> On Jan 17, 9:21 pm, John Brockbank 
> wrote:
>
> > My personal one is the Lynmouth/Lynton flood disaster being caused by
> > an experimant in cloud seeding (I actually wonder about the great smog
> > of London as well).  Of course people might think that thirteen inches> > of rain in a few hours in Devon is not remarkable enough, but I regard
> > such people as the gullible ones.  The fact is, people do get up to
> > skullduggery.  What the heck do they think they were doing at the
> > common cold research centre?
>
> We discussed this recently. It is true that people who are generally
> sceptical can be led to disbelieve conspiracies that really do exist,
> which makes them, in fact, also gullible.
>
> The position to aspire to is scepticism that avoids cynicism. The sort
> of thought that allows that, quite probably "Once is happenstance,
> twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.".

Isn't it just a matter of collecting and critically examining the
evidence?

Dave

On Jan 18, 2:31 am, Dave Smith  wrote:
>
>
> > We discussed this recently. It is true that people who are generally
> > sceptical can be led to disbelieve conspiracies that really do exist,
> > which makes them, in fact, also gullible.
>
> > The position to aspire to is scepticism that avoids cynicism. The sort
> > of thought that allows that, quite probably "Once is happenstance,
> > twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.".
>
> Isn't it just a matter of collecting and critically examining the
> evidence?
>
Usually, and mainly, but not exclusively. I was reminded of the
difference quite nicely in an article recently that pointed out that a
company of people who knew nothing about structural engineering were
happy to accept a plausible conspiracy theory based on a claim that
would be obvious nonsense to a structural engineer.

We can't be experts in everything, so we can't examine the evidence as
critically as is perhaps necessary. So we have to trust experts - but
we know that experts can, and are, wrong quite often.

I think that a good example is the Shipman case. It took a very long
time for people to be convinced, despite persuasive statistical and
anecdotal evidence that something was amiss. Naturally there has been
plenty of stable door closing since then, but we have to see that it
wasn't stupidity, gullibility or wicked ignoring of the evidence that
led people not to suspect it. It was a systemic reluctance to consider
where the evidence led.

On Jan 18, 6:09 am, Peter Brooks  wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2:31 am, Dave Smith  wrote:
>
> > > We discussed this recently. It is true that people who are generally
> > > sceptical can be led to disbelieve conspiracies that really do exist,
> > > which makes them, in fact, also gullible.
>
> > > The position to aspire to is scepticism that avoids cynicism. The sort> > > of thought that allows that, quite probably "Once is happenstance,
> > > twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.".
>
> > Isn't it just a matter of collecting and critically examining the
> > evidence?
>
> Usually, and mainly, but not exclusively. I was reminded of the
> difference quite nicely in an article recently that pointed out that a
> company of people who knew nothing about structural engineering were
> happy to accept a plausible conspiracy theory based on a claim that
> would be obvious nonsense to a structural engineer.
>
> We can't be experts in everything, so we can't examine the evidence as
> critically as is perhaps necessary. So we have to trust experts - but
> we know that experts can, and are, wrong quite often.
>
> I think that a good example is the Shipman case. It took a very long
> time for people to be convinced, despite persuasive statistical and
> anecdotal evidence that something was amiss. Naturally there has been
> plenty of stable door closing since then, but we have to see that it
> wasn't stupidity, gullibility or wicked ignoring of the evidence that
> led people not to suspect it. It was a systemic reluctance to consider
> where the evidence led.

The trouble is that no one would go to a physician they did not trust.
If you thought Doctor X was likely to kill you you would
systematically avoid Doctor X. So to spend your time suspecting
physicians of murder means that you could not avail your self of
medicine. The one mode of thought is incompatible with the other. So
it would, I think, take extraordinary evidence to make most people
suspicious in a medical context. That is the reason nurses and doctors
who are serial killers seem to reach such shockingly high victim
tallies ...

Lance

Lance wrote:
> 
>>
>> I think that a good example is the Shipman case. It took a very long
>> time for people to be convinced, despite persuasive statistical and
>> anecdotal evidence that something was amiss. Naturally there has been
>> plenty of stable door closing since then, but we have to see that it
>> wasn't stupidity, gullibility or wicked ignoring of the evidence that
>> led people not to suspect it. It was a systemic reluctance to consider
>> where the evidence led.
> 
> The trouble is that no one would go to a physician they did not trust.
> If you thought Doctor X was likely to kill you you would
> systematically avoid Doctor X. So to spend your time suspecting
> physicians of murder means that you could not avail your self of
> medicine. The one mode of thought is incompatible with the other. So
> it would, I think, take extraordinary evidence to make most people
> suspicious in a medical context. That is the reason nurses and doctors
> who are serial killers seem to reach such shockingly high victim
> tallies ...
> 
I wasn't talking about the patients being suspicious. I meant fellow 
doctors and other medical professionals.

<  On 18 Jan, 04:09, Peter Brooks  wrote:

it wasn't stupidity, gullibility or wicked ignoring of the evidence
that
led people not to suspect it. It was a systemic reluctance to
consider
where the evidence led.  >

In my opinion we are brought up by parents and teachers and media
influence to believe that the worst thing in life is to be wrong, and
so are very reluctant to commit ourselves to a point of view, and even
more so to taking action.  A couple of times in my life I have come
across a situation where I had to tell someone very sternly to find a
phone and dial 999, and say that I would take responsibility, in a
situation that plainly demanded it, and I have wondered quite how long
the group of people standing stupidly in a circle round a body  would
have stayed there gawping if I had not bossed them around.  (Tip - if
it happens to you, pick out a particular person.)

In my experience though, the reluctance has been to inform a relevant
authority ('you can''t accuse someone without proof') - quite what
caused the police reluctance to investigate Shipman until the
solicitor prodded them into it is a mystery.  I once worked for an
organisation employing many thousands of people, and when I phoned up
the security head and told her that I suspected someone of being a
thief, she immediately asked me if it was .... and named the person.
So sometimes even those in authority take the pay but don't like to do
the job.

So, yep, yer right.