unigolyn
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Karma: 6
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Re:I'm gonna need some help on this, guys - 2007/02/19 10:30
First, if they're not interested in changing their beliefs at all, just let it go. Some people just don't care to think all that much.
If he is willing to have an honest discussion on one of the more crazier subjects to which he professes belief, don't start off with a litany of why it isn't true. Ask him why HE believes in Atlantis. If his reasons are anything more specific than "I just do", they can be debunked. Pick a subject that's easily disproved to start with, and see if you can get him to admit he has no reason whatsoever to believe in it.
Again, this is all dependent on whether he has any desire whatsoever to question his beliefs, or if that desire can be prodded into existence by disproving some of his more out-there beliefs. I personally think you can't convert anyone above the age of 20 to not believe in Atlantis if they haven't managed to develop enough sense on their own.
Between the ages of 11 and 14, I was fascinated by theories of aliens building pyramids, by the purported highly advanced pre-Egyptian civilizations who traveled between South America and North Africa, leaving behind tobacco and cocaine in mummified corpses. I was very interested in UFOs. But I was also curious about science, physics, and space travel, and I soon found that the latter were backed up by facts while the former were simply speculation by stupid people. I learned to apply "formal" skepticism and critical thinking later, but the desire to know the truth was always there. Some people don't want truth, they want amazement, and intellectually lazy amazement is the cheapest and most abundant kind, if you can stomach it.
As for Joe Rogan, I was very disappointed that neither Penn nor Phil Plait understood his "visible disturbance" argument enough to point out the VERY obvious error in his thinking - if you're standing in a field of grass, say, six inches high, and you mow a large oval into it, let's say 100 feet by 400 feet, and you're taking pictures in the middle of it, you won't see a goddamn thing out of the ordinary. Fly a plane over said field and point your camera down - voila, big visible disturbance. A spacecraft disturbing dust on its approach, which is NOT straight down would create a disturbance that was visible only from space, not from a low sideways angle from the ground.
I doubt this would convince Rogan, because the absolutely indisputable argument against a moon hoax is the fact that the Russians would have raised holy hell about any faked or bounced-back transmissions from the moon. For the moon landing to be a hoax, the Russians would have had to have been in on it, which is just beyond crazy.
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