Re: psychoceramics: Cult of Personality

[William Tozier <tozier @ santafe.edu>]

Folks, this wasn't originally meant to be a soapboxer on my part. If you'd
like to skip or skim, feel free.

At 8:10 PM -0700 on 10/5/97, Matt Brown wrote:

> >>But why bother poking these folks with a "Ha ha, you're stupid" message?
> >>
> >         That truly is mean-spirited, in a way most of us were raised to
> >avoid.  It's tempting, but better we should indulge in our yucks in seemly
> >privacy.

> I was raised to avoid confrontation and to respect loonies. My father, a
> Ph.D. in Physics, seemed to attract them and treated them all with kindness
> and respect. I don't know if it was pity or a midwestern background, but
> that kindness just brought more loonies to the house. ESP, remote-viewing,
> even Uri Gellar came to the house and bent our silverware one night (BTW,
> if you ever get to dine with him, I recommend finger food.) For a long time
> I thought this was good since when they were with us, they were not
> deluding the other nuts.

I was not merely baiting Our Nathan (or any of the rest of you) when I drew
the analogy between religion--which I regard as an alternate and larger
form of kookery--and crackpotting proper. I am beginning to be suprised at
the lack of diversity among people in their ability to question their own
beliefs. Any handful of coworkers or family members turns up some fringey
belief: religious, occult, pseudoscientific, or just plain prejudicial or
mathematically illiterate.

I'm gradually coming to think, having tried for many years to help people
question their own beliefs, that any such direct project is doomed to
failure. My undergraduate students have a seemingly inexhaustible armory of
misapprehensions about how the world works. So do the (usually very nice)
missionaries who come to the door, with whom I have often tried to have
reasonable and questioning conversations. So do the crackpots that are
always calling or writing us here at the Institute. Let alone bigots, Urban
Legend Believers, the Politically In-astute, and a lot of health care
practitioners.

So it seems do most folk, if you add them all up.

"They" are "deluding other nuts," indeed. But not only. I dare you to
wander around some street or hallway, interviewing the half dozen most
intelligent and insightful people you wish, and *not* discover some deeply
questionable belief. And it probably wasn't picked up from an
overcapitalized one-page flyer about CIA antigravity robots, either.

It seems to me a belief in miracles is little different than a belief in
fairies, except that it has been pre-formed by others' stories. A belief in
the stronger stuff that Fritjof Capra or Frank Tipler have published on the
New Agey Consequences of Quantum Mechanics is little different from
Archimedes Plutonium's work, except that the former have better publishers.
If you ask an informed laboratory biologist or chemist about the
computational simulations we do here at SFI in the field of "Complex
Systems" (always Capitalized), I'll bet they'll shake their heads and grin
at the weirdness of it all.

But don't get me wrong on this -- I'm not tryng to come off as a
subjectivist or a relativist. What I'm trying to say is that there seems
some strong drive in many people to search for connections and insights,
without regard to evidence. If they're not feeling particularly creative,
they end up as traditional folk with a few unchecked beliefs; if they're a
bit more creative and maybe have a typewriter or a TV show, they're kooks.

> Now I think I was wrong. Letting people bash science and spew nonsense as
> fact degrades us all and over time gives creedence to the next loonie that
> takes one step further out of reality. Read the Skeptical Inquirer,

I have done so for many years. I am (still) left with the impression of a
sputtering and imminently drowning Dutch boy, his finger in the dike as the
waters spill over the top to overwhelm him.

What can [we in] CSICOP or the American Humanist Association or Free
Thinkers really hope for? Give me evidence that the educated are
*significantly* less prone to bigotry, rank superstition, unfounded
religion, or just plain kookery, and I'll stand with you defending their
programs.

But until someone else has clear evidence, I'm advising an observational
tack. Debunking is a one-off soup-in-a-sieve maneuver. Have you ever read
the Institute for Creation Science newsletter, to see how Dr. Duane Gish
records *his* side of the debates? The story is sad, if you're most
CSICOPs. Parallel issues of _Skeptic_ and _Acts & Facts_ are most
enlightening (and strongly recommended for a good laugh). I'd argue that
any rebuttal to someone with intransigent belief is just as ineffective.

To the point: On what do you found your strong belief that you can make a
difference by denouncing nonsense-spewing loonies? What do you really know
of how these folk think? Cite a case study. Why do people believe what they
do? Why must they believe at all? Where's the data?

I think we're staring at it, frankly. It's in the heads of these folk whose
mail we read.

Regards,
Tozier

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

"The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all
considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally
false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."
  -- Edward Gibbon