Chars. and Behaviors of PseudoSkeptics - a critical review

[Arouet]

[Scepcop]

Gee I like to keep things concise. But where do I begin?

Arouet, the reason I don't respond to posts like this is because it goes around in circles and ends up being nonproductive. All you do is deny and stick to your core beliefs that "No evidence for anything paranormal exists". So what's the point? No matter what happens, you stick to the core belief.

I'm only interested in open minded truth seekers like myself, who asks questions.

Anyone can have a closed mind and deny. So what's new?

If you want to prove my list wrong, I told you before, dig up the JREF archive of thousands of articles. Show me where Randi has challenged the establishment, or where he asks big questions, or even where he has ever admitted to being wrong. Same with Michael Shermer.

None of you have. EVER. Derrida's example of astrology in the newspaper doesn't hold. Get serious. Otherwise you are playing games and always in denial and wasting my time.

So my point stands. Case closed.

[Arouet]

Scepcop, you can't possibly have read my posts in this thread and still made the comment you just did. I put forward an example for every point that you raised (at least as far as i got to). I didn't spend a terribly long time searching for each one, and I am quite confident there are more. I could go and find them, but you haven't even acknowledged the examples I did find!

This is truly mystifying. I post example after example, and you ignore them all, once again issuing your challenge to find the examples that I put forward. I've met your challenge. Will you acknowledge the examples I found? If you think some of those examples are wrong, then I'd be happy to hear why. But you can't just declare case closed when it clearly isn't.

I took the time to deconstruct your argument. Your response is to refer to derrida and astrology, from another thread? I have been serious in this thread. Why don't you be serious and actually respond to my arguments rather than ignoring them completely.

[Scepcop]

[ProfWag]

As I've already pointed out, Mr. Sloan takes people's word for things rather than physical evidence. This does not make him a skeptic in any sense of the word.

[Craig Browning]

What can I say?

I'll be back to post a link here... I've got to write the post first

[jakesteele]

I am going to show a classical example of pseudoskepticism at its worse. This transcript came from a talk Phil Plait was giving at a conference and was asked if he believed in UFOs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c75N4reUpHs

“Who’s looking at the sky all the time? Some random guy on the street looks up and sees something he doesn’t understand, that’s not surprising, right, because he doesn’t spend a lot of time looking up.

Amateur astronomers spend more time looking up than anybody. They’re all the time looking up at this stuff, and yet they never report UFOs. Why? Because they know what they’re looking at. They know when they’re seeing Venus, the Moon, swap gas, the Araura, satellites, the reflections off things. And so the fact of the matter is, if UFOs were real, if these were really aliens visiting us, overwhelming the most number of reports would be from amateur astronomers, and yet they never seem to report ‘em. And I think that indicates that, you know - - it doesn’t indicate there are no aliens visiting us, but it certainly indicates that the overwhelming number of cases reported
are just simple things being misunderstood.”


I’m going to debunk Phil’s debunking by starting out with some assumptions about amateur astronomers. I may be wrong on some of these so feel free to correct me, please.
1. I believe that amateur astronomers only look at night, which is on average an 8 hr. segment of the day (1/3 of 24 hrs. in the day)
2. I’m assuming that during that 8 hr. period that the amateurs have to take time to pee, maybe eat a quick meal, rest their eye, stretch their back and neck and possibly spending time charting. I’m going to say that at best, they spend maybe 6 hrs. per night actually looking.
3. I’m also going to assume that astronomers don’t look at stars and planets 365 days of the year. This cuts down on ‘hours looking at the stars’.
4. Astronomers “look at the skies” which means in that context stars, planets, etc., not the immediate airspace occupied by planes that fly at or near many UFO sightings.
5. I’m going to assume that through a telescope that it is more of a narrow tunnel of vision than an airplane or someone looking up.
6. I will also assume that they have poor depth perception compared to pilots.
7. If you look at this link that shows how many airplanes there are in the air at any given time, I seriously doubt that the same map with lights representing the amount of amateur astronomers would be anywhere near the amount of planes. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sust ... images/at/

Now let’s compare that with airplanes:
1. Almost complete coverage of the airspace 24/7 by many more people simultaneously.
2. Pilots are at or near the heights of reported UFOs.
3. Pilots have a much better depth perception.
4. Pilots have a much broader field of vision just staring straight ahead, let alone banking right or left, ascending, descending and even turning back around. So in a matter of a few seconds a pilot can in effect have 360 omnivision.
5. Many credible reports have come from highly experienced and trained pilots, primarily in the military and commercial applications. Military and many commercial have gone through airplane silhouette training, especially the military.

In summation, as you can see, Phil’s logic is flawed and skewed. He puts too much weight and emphasis on amateurs and virtually none on pilots. The amount of time, blanket coverage, numbers of pilots vs. amateur astronomers, field of vision, depth perception, area of focus is far greater than amateur astronomers. It’s little wonder that you don’t get any sightings from them. That, and of course, they are also susceptible to pattern recognition and confirmation bias like everybody else.

To me, this has some unpleasant ramifications in that debunkers are would like nothing better than to eliminate woo from the airwaves and schools, etc. but at the same time, in the areas of woo, they put out info that is misleading, and at times, deceptive.

That is James Randi’s legacy.

[Arouet]

Don't underestimate just how many amateur astronomers there are out there staring up in the sky and the role that they are playing in astronomy. Check out Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ where from what I understand amateur astronomers are playing a significant role in maping out the galaxy and making discoveries.

The point is, there are a LOT of them - and remember, it's always night somewhere! Phil's point is that with so many eyes on the sky, its odd with all the reports of UFOs that occur day in and day out that none of them would have reported seeing any of these objects coming from space. He's not saying that this decides the question, but that its a check in the "ufo's are not alien spacecrafts" column.

Pilots who see UFOs are seeing objects that are already in our atmosphere. And they are moving fast, focussing on other things, and won't generally have too much time really study what they see.

If an amateur astronomer saw a UFO, they'd be able to focus in on it and follow it, perhaps alerting others, and soon there would be many eyes on an approaching spacecraft.

You call Plait's argument pseudo-skepticism: I disagree. Even if he's wrong, he's still making an evidence based argument focussing on probabilities. You can be a skeptic and be wrong. He's putting forth a hypothesis and making a logical argument. Nothing non-skeptical about that.

A pseudo-skeptic argument would be someone saying: that UFO you saw, it was probably a such -and-such, without having suitable information to even begin to hypothesize about what such-and-such could be. Plait's not making an argument like that. He's simply saying that its odd, with so many eyes on the skies, that none of these amateur astronomers have seen alien space crafts, despite scanning the the skies.

[jakesteele]

[capri2]

This is a fascinating area and I am only new on this blog but I have enjoyed reading it and can only put in my own experiences. I was once in Court. The person giving evidence told the Court that one of the parties in their opinion at the time of the incident was drunk. The Barrister for that person obviously asked what right did the witness have to give such an opinion, they weren't qualified and here is my problem with all of the arguments OK, does anyone really know that is the question? Not really.
So this is debate? Essentially I would say yes, some might say no. Any debate is good debate. Maybe my logic is wrong. Still I don't really know if I am right or wrong and in reality in this field there are no true experts that could stand up in a court.

[Arouet]

Jake he's not saying that this is absolute proof against ufos being aliens - its just a check in the unlikely box.

Bringing it back to the context of this thread: in that video Plaitt clearly says that it is possible that aliens have visited the earth, and that it is likely that they exist somewhere in the universe.

[really?]