psychoceramics: Cult of Personality

[William Tozier <tozier @ santafe.edu>]

At 8:34 AM -0700 on 10/1/97, Nathan wrote the following idiocy:

> I don't think many of our featured kooks realize the celebrity they enjoy
> through our forum.  Perhaps we should elect someone to send out a short
> message every time we post a new cracakpot's ravings to the list --
> something along the lines of:
>
> "We just wanted to let you know that your post, entitled X, has been
> featured on 'Psychoceramics: The Mailing List for the Study of
> Crackpots.'
>
> "We're all laughing at you."

Foolish, foolish child.

Sure, it's all Bulldada. It's weird. It's often extremely and deeply
humorous. Sometimes to the threshold of sad.

People are usually really, really wrong about the world, and often tend to
voice their beliefs in a spew of noisy, overcapitalized, and exotic
pronouncements. Some of these people end up being our "subjects" on this
list. A lot of others end up being Christians or other (foolishly)
religious folks, who are no less wrong than your preferred kooks -- and in
fact these folks provide a nicely large statistical sample compared with
kooks. I laugh at them all the time -- more often than I laugh at kooks
proper. Unswerving patriots and hair-trigger Child Protectors are good for
a yuck, too, by the way.

Frankly, so are any self-righteous supercilious know-it-alls.

-- This is *not entirely* a flame, by the way. --

I -- and hopefully some few others of us on this list -- really want to
know what makes people believe stupid things (or even reasonable-seeming
things) in the face of contrary evidence. Eccentrics and crackpots are
useful for this in the same way that any class of special cases is useful
in understanding the underlying cause of a natural phenomenon. Here, the
natural phenomenon is belief.

Look at an example: Some very special and weird deaths due to a genetic
flaw led to nearly everything we know about cell membrane dynamics,
cholesterol, weight gain and heart disease. Who's to say that Winston,
Stollman, or somebody from the Urban Outfitters are Spawn of Shaitan Web
Site will be the key?

So let's just look. Let the psychoceramics mailing list be a collection --
a passive mass of accumulated kookery. A resource.

Laugh if you like -- I often do. But collect far and wide, and bring it
here to this mailing list for us all to read. Let the URLs and weird spam
and transcripts of rants flow, and fill up the psychoceramics list with the
result.

But why bother poking these folks with a "Ha ha, you're stupid" message?

Frankly, I'm doing the same to you -- for assuming you speak for all of us,
Nathan. Feel free to react the same way one of our other overconfident
subjects might.

Fondly,
Tozier

--------------                               ------------------------
William Tozier                               also: Santa Fe Institute
Biology Department                                 t--@s--.edu
University of Pennsylvania                 [Web Pages Being Serviced]

"It is better to be quotable than to be honest."
  -- Tom Stoppard