 Originally Posted by Carôusoul
How do we know you're not a disinfo agent though
Especially now that the mods have pushed my post right to the top, replaced the old 'sloth' with an agent, and deleted all of the original sloth's posts.
I don't think its fair or constructive to heap too much derision on conspiracy theorists though. In life we're all faced with competing sets of ostensible 'facts', and have to make judgment calls about which claims to trust the most. There really is a lot of abuse of power by governments and big corporations, and there really are a lot of things that aren't understood by scientists. If somebody knows this from personal experience, or senses it on a gut level, then ridiculing them just hardens their position. They know their views are not treated fairly, so they trust the views of their critics even less. Also its a barrier towards understanding things that extremists are a little bit right about. I'm not suggesting that's what you were doing earlier, I'm just saying what I see of both sides of this, and trying to clarify my response.
 Originally Posted by sloth
I don't see what the con artists would be gaining from duping the op
They sell books, and skills like 'remote viewing' that a person can use to defend oneself in these troubled times, often at hundreds of dollars a lesson. They're not getting rich doing it, but its a living.
 Originally Posted by sloth
I would still challenge just how much of an impact it would have on the common person. I mean, what type of profile would the person we are talking about have?
I agree that it doesn't have much of an obvious impact on an average person. But the subtle, cumulative effect on a large number of people can be significant. Gravity is a fantastically weak force compared to electromagnetics, but it has huge effects on large scales because it acts in the same direction. Other things like fear are like that too.
And I do care about the impact it has on unusual, extreme people also. If you're a person who doesn't take anything very seriously, or doesn't aspire to a high degree of cognitive consistency, or isn't willing to make a significant personal sacrifice for what you perceive is the greater good, then maybe it doesn't matter so much. But if you're a sincere person who believes a false claim, and you make rational decisions based on the claim, it can really mess up your life. For instance, if somebody claims to know that the world is going to change radically in Y2K, or 2012, or whenever, and you believe them and act accordingly, you can quite easily do irreparable damage to your career. That may not seem to matter much if you're young and don't care too much about possessions. But when you're 30 find you can't even get a fast food job because you don't fit the profile, then you start to care. Or to use another example, if it were really true that people spent an eternity in heaven or perished in hell based on accepting a religious idea, nothing else would matter besides proselytizing. Nothing. Except insofar as it impacted proselytizing. Consider how screwed up the world would get if we all acted rationally on that.
Your approach apparently is to protect yourself from this sort of thing by not forming hard beliefs about anything. But you still have beliefs in the sense of having working hypotheses. You make soft, qualified judgments about what ideas to have more or less confidence in for the time being. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to make decisions or think coherently about anything. Its true that you can't trust the media. Yet somehow you have to guess about which things the media says can or can not be trusted, otherwise you can't make successful choices about how to live. Someone would con you out of all your money, or dupe you into supporting things that you'd be appalled about supporting if you saw the whole picture. So you do need to be able to make grey-scale judgments about beliefs, you can't treat them all equally.
Another reason why I think that alien related disinformation is unhealthy is it steals a lot of oxygen from pursuit of personal development. Its not a coincidence that the UFO book section is right next to the Metaphysical book section. Most of the stuff in the Metaphysical section is nonsense too, but there are things that I care about a lot plowed in with all the nonsense.
And I'm offended by lying just on principle. I've been hurt by lies, I've seen a lot of other people hurt by lies. And there is an awful lot of that going on in the paranormal phenomena arena, particularly everywhere there is money involved. If the people who make shows on the history channel were merely mistaken it wouldn't bother me, but its done cynically. (By the way, you used the word 'lemming' as a metaphor. Did you know that lemmings don't actually plunge en-mass off cliffs, that Disney made that up? Ostriches don't hide by sticking their heads in the sand either.)
I do recognize that lying about paranormal stuff does have a kind of macabre utility in the overall scheme of things. All people, if in possession of a sufficient level occult knowledge, would be unable to resist the temptation to use it to manipulate other people for their own advantage. So everyone learns what they can handle according to whatever their motives are, then they get dragged to a stop by intellectual vanity, obsession with apocalyptic prophecies, or sex addiction, endless posting of fantastically long moralizing posts on Dreamviews (joking about myself here), or whatever. It sucks, but it would be a lot worse if we somehow got past the demon at the gate before we were ready, so to speak.
All that said, I agree with the essence of what you were trying to do, which is to stand up for someone who is trying to express a thought without being crapped all over by skeptics who aren't interested, or who think that other people can be browbeat into wiser behavior. In this case I also agree with the essential point that was made earlier though: If you work out or improve your mind it pays off eventually, and there's something about conspiracy theorizing that is very much not like that.
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