I successfully recorded the Michael Shermer presentation on "Why People Believe Weird Things." Quick synopsis: Shermer, who in the right lighting resembles actor Harry Shearer, covered pretty much the same talking points you can find in Carl Sagan's The Demon-haunted World: belief in alien abduction, inability to deal with the implications of statistics, scams like therapeutic touch, tarot, palm reading, etc.
Interesting highlights for me: Shermer is a libertarian, so he also blasted the heavily left-leaning demographics and political tenor of academe. His take on the current financial crisis is congruent with those conservatives who say, "No bailouts!" Strangely, he avoided the topic of mainstream religious traditions.
I've got more to say on this, but will wait until later.
_
Marathon
11 years ago
9 comments:
Kevin,
I don't think it's at all strange that Shermer didn't talk about mainstream religious traditions. From what I know of what he does, that's not his main interest (although he did once participate in a public debate with Dinesh D'Souza on whether Christianity is good for the world.)
Readers who are unfamiliar with Shermer might want to check out his homepage, as well as the site for Skeptic magazine, which he publishes. And here's a video of part of a talk, which may well have the same content as the one you saw (unless he prepares a different talk for each stop on the lecture circuit, each with the title "Why People Believe Strange Things.")
A couple of his things that have caught my attention in the past are an account of his visit to the Esalen Institute and this debate with Deepak Chopra.
You should also know that Shermer started out as a very devout Born Again Christian. He didn't give-up his faith until well into University study, where he realized that what he had been told was all false, or just made no logical sense.
For these reasons, he does like to discuss religion, but, he has such a different tact on that subject than most 'mainstream' skeptics and atheists.
At Dragon*Con this year, we had our second big 'Believers vs. Skeptics' debate, and the local high level Catholic priest came and joined on the 'Believers' side. So, yes, Shermer is completely willing to debate and discuss religion all day. He doesn't seem to mention it much since it, for the most part, becomes a dead end. You can't test the ideas, so why do they matter? :)
Doesn't surprise me that he spent time on talking about the 9/11 people. They end up following him around when he gives lectures and try to poison the events with their nutty stuff from the audience. It happened a lot a couple years ago, it was starting to get embarrassing for them, and the people who work so hard to put on those lectures and events. They are a group I just don't really 'get' myself.
I just don't like it when people attribute WAT too much on Bush or the fact that we thought there were WMD's in Iraq. Between 1996 and 2000 I actually was a Project Manager on a database project where I had to deal with high level security documents all about known Terrorists and WMD materials and where we knew/thought they all were around the world. Trust me, EVERYONE around the world, USA, UK, Germany, etc, etc... we all had tons of intelligence and documentation that almost made it a %100 chance that Iraq had tons of the stuff.
I still think they did, even all the way up to the couple weeks before we invaded.
Remember those TONS of big fires they had all over Baghdad? All the news people said and 'assumed' it was some form of ad-hoc smoke screen to prevent our war planes from being able to target stuff in the city. I am trained in Bio-Weapons and one of the ONLY ways to destroy Biological and most Chemical weapons without leaving a trace is to burn them. You can't even detect that they were ever there in the end.
So, I do not really blame the US, Bush, or any of the other countries who all thought it was a good idea. In the end, Saddam was NOT a good person for the world anyway, so in the end it isn't so bad he isn't in power now. But, I CAN be very angry at how everything since the invasion has been handled. :)
[Comment republished after editing.]
Alan,
With my laptop on the fritz, it's a shame I can't click the links to those debates.
Skepticality,
Ah, so his passion comes partly from a rejection of his past. I know a lot of ex-Christian Buddhists who show similar fervor. Not that that's a criticism of Shermer, but it does help me understand, at least in part, what drives him to write books, make presentations, and engage in public debates. Something like that "rejectionism" fuels my own project, I think; I started off as a fundamentalist (scriptural literalist, creationist, etc.).
Being 95% skeptic myself, I largely agree with Carl Sagan's contention that what is empirically unverifiable is "veridically worthless." I suspect, though, that untestable/unprovable things matter to less skeptical folks for much the same reason that my family's love matters to me. We can't dig around and find that love somehow written legibly in our flesh, and the philosopher's "zombie problem" alerts us to the difficulties inherent in discussing interiority at all (something Shermer himself touched on in his presentation-- he swerved toward the topic of qualia but didn't go into it in real detail except to ask about "the redness of red"). Science can't yet answer the question of whether my family loves me or is merely going through the motions. This isn't to say that the problem is insoluble; I think a true skeptic would say, "Maybe it is."
That "maybe" is, I think, important to good skepticism. People who claim to be skeptical, but who make claims with absolute conviction, are often, to my mind, crossing the line from skepticism to dogmatism. I think certitude is justifiable in a host of cases (e.g., in answer to questions like, Do species evolve? Do aliens swoop down, anally probe us, and swoop away?), but there are instances where such certitude is unjustifiable. Classic example: the claim that there is no God. While I'm not a classical theist myself, I don't see that scientific skeptics have much-- or anything-- to say on the matter.
This topic, i.e, the whole "naturalistic versus religious worldviews" issue, is ripe for further discussion; it is, in fact, something that needs to be factored into my project. More on this in an actual blog post (or YouTube vid).
In the meantime, I'll conclude with a "Point well taken!" re: Shermer and mainstream religion. I obviously need to read more of him.
But I still thought it was too bad that Shermer didn't tackle such a large and juicy target when he had the chance during the Q&A. A student asked him his opinion of popular but mistaken beliefs held by the majority of the population, and Shermer took that question as an opportunity to talk about politics. I'm pretty sure the student was trying to get him to talk about religion.
I was happy, though, that Shermer spent so much time on all that "9/11 Truther" nonsense. That stuff is way more poisonous than alien abduction fantasies.
Kevin
Skepticality (re: WMDs, etc),
Good points.
Kevin
IMHO, the discussion of skepticism frequently runs, not into paradox, but into simple confusion, because people fail to realize that the word can be used to refer to several different things.
The root meaning of skepticism is "doubt." With that said, it's important to make a few distinctions: first, between philosophical skepticism and scientific skepticism; and within philosophical skepticism, between methodological skepticism and "global" skepticism.
Let's consider "global" skepticism first, because it's the strongest form. (I put "global" skepticism first because there are a number of different forms of the doctrine, and to lump them together conflates a number of important issues; but I do so in order to keep this post short.) In the most extreme form, the global skeptic is one who denies that we have know anything. But most of those whom I'm labelling "global" skeptics are not don't actually advocate 100% universal skepticism about everything; for example, according to one fairly radical skeptical position, the only thing we have knowledge of is the immediate contents of our conscious experience at the present moment. By contrast, methodological skepticism holds merely that we should approach every truth-claim with the attitude "And why should I believe that? The methodological skeptic, unlike the global skeptic, doesn't preclude the possibility that we may have sufficient reasons for concluding that we do in fact know some things.
By contrast, the scientific skeptic (or many of them, anyway), is willing to accept the claims established through the scientific method, empirical evidence, etc. Critics of scientific skepticism are quite right to point out that, on the surface, there's something contradictory of the claims of these people (like Shermer) to be genuine skeptics, because they're unwilling to apply the skeptical method to science itself. Such critics, though, don't completely realize, though, that, for better or worse, scientific skeptics have changed the meaning of the word "skeptic"; and, as much as I have the instincts of a linguistic purist, I have to admit that such shifts in meaning happen all the time.
My own position: I am a thoroughgoing methodological skeptic. I am not a global skeptic: I believe that contemporary scientific theories, as far as they go, true; that is, they give us an accurate an useful picture of the world. Although I am a thoroughgoing rationalist, I am not a scientific skeptic. That is, while I believe that experimental science has been by far the most successful program of rational inquiry, I do not think it's the only such program.
Interesting thoughts, Alan. I want to study these terms further and do a bit of introspection to see where on the spectrum I fall.
Thanks.
Kevin
In re-reading my post, I see that my constant real-time editing of my own words resulted in a number of embarrassing typos. I hope it was clear nonetheless what I was trying to say.
Alan,
No problem reading your prose, but as I re-read your comment, I realized that I'm not so clear on the relationship between global and methodological skepticism. The global form seems simply to be a more extreme version of the methodological form; both deal with doxastic practices, but where the methodological skeptic asks, "Why should I believe that?", the global skeptic seems to be asking, "Why should I believe anything?"
Would it be correct to see these two types of skepticism as different in degree, not kind?
Kevin
Post a Comment