von Däniken was the original Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, aka "aliens" meme guy.
He never met an archeological artifact that didn't look like alien technology to him.
Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.
There's an important difference between facts and truth.
There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>"
After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.
Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.
We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.
I have a family member who is quite into "ancient aliens" and who has read all of von Danikens books. The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that rigor and science did not really matter and would not convince them of anything. It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize how humans went from mud to computers. They don't believe in human creativity being powerful enough to lead to modern society and think an external force was required. Ancient aliens is a convenient and fun theory for how it could have happened.
> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything
> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...
And for you, too.
Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.
Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
In regards to the space ship that people see, I've seen photos of some Egyptian pyramid hieroglyphs myself, I hear this often "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
Pretty much all such claims can be easily dismissed by pointing out that such advances
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
von Daniken's work inspired me to travel to Nazca PE and charter an airplane to see the alien landing strips for myself. Certainly a worthwhile trip. I may even have convinced the local guide I was a True Believer, of which I am sure he has encountered his share.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
I read von Daniken as a very young kid and loved it. But I read it, and enjoyed it very much, as a science fiction genre. I never bought it, but I admired the effort. And so I thank him for stimulating a child's imagination. Well done Mr. V!
And I watched The Flintstones as a very young kid and loved it. And it deeply influenced how I thought cavemen lived. Well done, Hanna-Barbera!
The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.
At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!
And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!
I was very naive when I discovered his books as a child in my fathers bookshelf. Luckily my father told me that I should be careful not to take anything as "the truth" from any of Däniken's books. It helped me a lot with keeping the necessary scepticism while still enjoying the books and I was really grateful for this advice.
>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
The most obvious problem with this article is that it assumes Von Däniken came up with this idea. Years before "Chariots of the Gods", Peter Kolosimo already had best-selling works discussing ancient aliens.
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.
Your precedence note is fair but it seems likely the whole "ancient aliens" subject was in the air around that time; pseudohistory has existed as long as history and this particular strand just emerges with the sci-fi boom and particularly the post-war fascination with UFOs.
Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.
Skimming through this item, a couple points I don't see being made:
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.
I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.
One take on this - those rare few who did the "long and hard way" were not as lazy / stupid / warlike / etc. as us mere humans. And maybe they took 750k years, or some other really longhttps://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HardWorkMontage stuff.
But a related take - if you just move the "seems inexplicable" stuff further away in space and time, then most people magically see it as being less inexplicable.
> Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.
Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.
I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.
Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.
He was the first person who introduced me to the idea that if you look at a thing with different mindsets, from different points of view, you can arrive at quite different opinions about the “true” nature of that thing.
At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place.
Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is.
Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change.
Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).
I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view
Do you really want the answer?
People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.
Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.
You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.
This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.
What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.
> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.
> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?
> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view
I've thought about this and the conclusion was:
What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.
Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.
You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.
> I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.
My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.
> To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
From what I know, and please correct me if I am wrong; it relates to fear and cognitive dissonance. First, by creating FUD the perpetrator can cause physical narrow-mindedness within the brain, the amygdala — centre of emotions if you will — takes control which reduces reasoning capabilities. Second, by introducing multiple conflicting viewpoints in that state, you induce what we call cognitive dissonance. The brain is unable to reconcile the two opposing (or even just differing) views. This is a conflict at the circuit level of the brain, and the brain needs to reach a conclusion, and conveniently the conclusion is produced by the perpetrators of fud, those who seek to control/exploit others.
I think, that the people that are criticizing Erich von Däniken are doing so from modern viewpoint. People in his time had very limited POV, mostly because there was not much data, compared to how it is now, but modern people also forget that science is not a religion and it can't be based on beliefs only - it requires evidence and without any such evidence all the ideas has to be thrown out. Also, if there are better explanations - old ones are thrown out as well, because that is how it is in science. Unfortunately, no matter how good and exiting his ideas were as a read, but as a science theory they simply did not pass test of time, however IMO he has earned his place as someone as an example to have wider horizons to look around.
"People in his time"?!? He only died the other day. Until last week was "his time"! And new weird religions / cults / sects like the "Ancient Aliens" one he founded are being born all the time. The world hasn't changed fundamentally since last week, so it's still "his time".
The only place he has earned is as a successful nutjob / scam artist (about on a par with L. Ron Hubbard or Eric Dubay?), as opposed to all the less successful ones.
> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
- most people don't like admitting to having been wrong -- they might not be right in their new viewpoints either
- some people like to preen and moralize, so changing their view is an admission that they had (and therefore have) no moral authority (this overlaps the previous point)
- most people don't like the idea that something everyone knows to be true isn't -- that's conspiracy theory territory, and they know not to go there no matter what
- even where it's not any of the above, significant shifts in opinion are simply uncomfortable
- in specialized cases (e.g., science) people may have a sunk cost fallacy going on. For example, suppose you have a new theory to replace Lambda-CDM: but you'll be wrecking a bunch of researchers' life work if you're right! This is why "science advances one funeral at a time", per Max Planck. We've seen many cases of this.
The main thing I credit EVD with is teaching me disappointment from certain fun tantalizing things not turning out to be true. This prepared me to better cope with the X-Files and Lost TV shows, as well as nuclear fusion research and faster than light space travel :grumpycat:
He said, he wanted to "ask questions and entertain". I guess he does, but he does not use the scientific method. Also, he does not claim to use the scientific method.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
As a youngster I (the country?) was so excited, entranced for a bit, I read Chariots and Outer Space, stopped at maybe Gold of the Gods? I matured and grew, though I wanted it all to be real, there was little to no progression of the claims and evidence. Like Batboy or all the National Enquirer articles, it was clear it EVD was a crank.
EvD is a good illustration of how we were more resilient against crackpots back then.
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 94.3 ms ] threadNotable for "Chariots of the Gods" (1968).
There was a time when I read a stream of articles and blog posts titled something like "I'm a liberal, but I agree with ... <obviously far right thing>" After reading enough of them, I realized the common structure was to state a number of relevant facts, then make a leap across an unstated and unsupported premise, hoping the reader won't notice. The final section would assert the conclusion based on this premise.
The problem is summed up by Carl Sagan: “Every time he [von Däniken] sees something he can’t understand, he attributes it to extraterrestrial intelligence, and since he understands almost nothing, he sees evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence all over the planet” (Playboy 1974:151).
Unfortunately its true of so many people, and the information revolution we were all promised seems to have made it worse, not better.
Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.
We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.
> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...
And for you, too.
Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.
Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.
Is it possible that Adam and Eve were aliens?
If so, then that means [blah blah blah as if this is now an accepted fact]
No wonder your fam has no critical thinking
This stupendous gaslighting mirrors what I took away early in this article. It used several Appeal to Authority and Epistemic Invalidation and is quite clearly pathetic. Hard to read the clearly biased claims.
1. Can obviously be made
2. Can be made very fast
There is simply no reason why major advancements in metallurgy couldn't have been made between 4453 and 4382BC, completely unknown to us, and later forgotten.
If fact, it's a mystery why we can't see more of such ancient artifacts, if anything.
The article doesn't even go far enough by blaming the oiling on some accidental dumb ritual, while it used to be common knowledge that iron can be protected from rusting by oiling it, and it was done completely on purpose.
I have also take a page from his books by expostulating outlandish theories to explain facts with a straight face, always ending with a quick "of course there are other explanations".
It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.
The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.
At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!
And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!
But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss
Archeology by itself is always going to have limitations, and there are vast swatches of history we are almost completely ignorant about
EvD is certainly guilty of taking himself much more seriously than the evidence suggests. But there's always going to be that "what if"
Its an unproven hypothesis.
It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.
When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts
"However, the fifties and sixties were more dominated by European works. The Italian Peter Kolosimo wrote several books as early as 1957, but his Timeless Earth (1964) became an international best seller and was translated into several languages. French-language authors included Henri Lhote who proposed that prehistoric Saharan rock art depicted close encounters, Bergier and Pauwels' Morning of the Magicians (1960), Robert Charroux's One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History (1963) and Misraki's Flying Saucers Through The Ages. A few British authors also published before Von Däniken, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, John Michell and W. Raymond Drake who wrote Gods or Spacemen? in 1964.
"Although Von Däniken claims he was formulating his ancient astronaut ideas throughout his school days, it is clear that many others had already published their books on the subject, long before he became notable with Chariots of the Gods? in 1968."
Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.
- If you claim that the assistance of alien visitors is needed to explain the milestone leaps or technological achievements of ancient human civilizations...are you walking into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down logic trap? Because obviously "our" alien visitors would have need even greater leaps and achievements in their own past, to be able to travel to the earth. And their visitors similar, and so on.
- Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?
But a related take - if you just move the "seems inexplicable" stuff further away in space and time, then most people magically see it as being less inexplicable.
The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.
Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.
I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.
Rest in ascension.
At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.
He had a way of describing things with a vigor that is quite rare. It was a fascinating read as a kid, blending science fiction with history and archaeology. Of course, later learning about the scientific method, or even just Occam’s razor, made it clear that the theory of ancient aliens is very unlikely, but the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
A quite unique and interesting person departed this planet yesterday.
I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.
If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.
My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.
Do you really want the answer?
People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.
Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.
You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.
This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.
What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.
> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.
This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.
Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?
I've thought about this and the conclusion was:
What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.
Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.
You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.
I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.
My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.
From what I know, and please correct me if I am wrong; it relates to fear and cognitive dissonance. First, by creating FUD the perpetrator can cause physical narrow-mindedness within the brain, the amygdala — centre of emotions if you will — takes control which reduces reasoning capabilities. Second, by introducing multiple conflicting viewpoints in that state, you induce what we call cognitive dissonance. The brain is unable to reconcile the two opposing (or even just differing) views. This is a conflict at the circuit level of the brain, and the brain needs to reach a conclusion, and conveniently the conclusion is produced by the perpetrators of fud, those who seek to control/exploit others.
The only place he has earned is as a successful nutjob / scam artist (about on a par with L. Ron Hubbard or Eric Dubay?), as opposed to all the less successful ones.
- most people don't like admitting to having been wrong -- they might not be right in their new viewpoints either
- some people like to preen and moralize, so changing their view is an admission that they had (and therefore have) no moral authority (this overlaps the previous point)
- most people don't like the idea that something everyone knows to be true isn't -- that's conspiracy theory territory, and they know not to go there no matter what
- even where it's not any of the above, significant shifts in opinion are simply uncomfortable
- in specialized cases (e.g., science) people may have a sunk cost fallacy going on. For example, suppose you have a new theory to replace Lambda-CDM: but you'll be wrecking a bunch of researchers' life work if you're right! This is why "science advances one funeral at a time", per Max Planck. We've seen many cases of this.
I think it is more surprising that we have not found any alien artifacts by now.
Godspeed Erich.
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I cannot respect him as an author or thinker, only as a human.
His book "Chariots of the Gods" was a best seller. I remember reading it probably in the early '70s, when I would have been somewhere in the 10-12 year old range. I'm pretty sure I believed he was probably right, as did a couple friends who also read it.
We also believed in some other bunk, like various psychic and paranormal stuff, much of which came from reading "Fate" magazine.
But without internet there was really no way to connect with a larger community of people who also believed those things. With just books, magazines, and maybe if we were really into it a couple newsletters it was hard to become obsessed with this stuff.
Furthermore we also read popular science magazines, and Asimov's monthly column in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction". They would publish rebuttals to the more significant crackpot claims going around (although I don't think Asimov ever specifically commented on EvD). The mainstream news magazines, like Time or Newsweek, would often include comments by prominent skeptics such as Carl Sagan when writing about these things.
Because mass communication was expensive (and often also slow) new questionable theories took some time to start getting widespread acceptance. That gave scientists (or other relevant experts for non-science based crackpot theories) time to write refutations. It is more work (often much more work) to refute crackpots than it is to generate crackpot theories.
Now we are awash with widespread belief in crackpot theories. A new one can spread very fast and very wide on social media and be established before refutations can be written. And when the refutations do come out the social media algorithms might not show them to the people that those same algorithms fed the theories to. They get more clicks and engagement if they instead show those people new crackpot theories instead of refutations of the crackpot theories they were showing a week or two earlier.