Just responding on this point since a comment of mine was linked to (re ESP):
I see these sort of wildly overconfident claims about being able to breezily outsmart experts on difficult scientific, philosophical, or technical problems as moderately, but not dramatically, more credible than the people talking about UFOs or ESP or whatever.
Are you sure that no-one with any credibility thinks UFOs may be extraterrestrial spacecraft?
And re these two topics and a few others, the experts (in the sense of those who have spent years researching them) are largely those who believe they are real, as they are taboo topics along mainstream scientists. Hence the latter are surprisingly ignorant about them, with little/no knowledge of the research, and a tendency to resort to unscientific hand-wavy dismissals that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
(I’m not claiming to be an expert on either of these topics myself by the way, though I seem to be better read on them than most astronomers and psychologists.)
Just responding on this point since a comment of mine was linked to (re ESP):
Are you sure that no-one with any credibility thinks UFOs may be extraterrestrial spacecraft?
And re these two topics and a few others, the experts (in the sense of those who have spent years researching them) are largely those who believe they are real, as they are taboo topics along mainstream scientists. Hence the latter are surprisingly ignorant about them, with little/no knowledge of the research, and a tendency to resort to unscientific hand-wavy dismissals that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
(I’m not claiming to be an expert on either of these topics myself by the way, though I seem to be better read on them than most astronomers and psychologists.)
Yes.