As I visit www.randi.org… I am pretty aware of that one. Seeing as he has a big “clock” counting off the time since she agreed to his testing on the air.
Everybody knows what their choices are, and everyone is free to make them. No one is tying people down and controlling their access to information. If they choose not to be skeptical, that’s their choice.
If someone chooses not to be skeptical about fraud it is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of luxury. These individuals simply don’t have the stress from which to procure rationality out of a decision to exist ot not exist in regards to the resource being thefted here at others expense in the belief that something is coming from nothing. I would also argue that Fox news in particular and much of television is designed solely to encourage this irrational belief to maintain class division and productivity.
It does not require much effort to teach people about the damage that virtualized consent incurs. Even these geeky sitcoms could be written to convey this message OVERTLY as well as the news, without using a mass of crazy verbage.
These newscasters, their guests and the stories are picked for a very specific reason, to push an idea that corruption is bad by playing out rhetoric scenarios with people who stand for non-corruption; calling them corrupt. That’s basically ALL that television news does.
-Justhink
scotth, I am impressed with your media analysis ability. I used to work as a journalist, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. Your letter was well thought out and well written.
And to all those in this thread poo-pooing the whole affair and claiming the OP is overreacting: “For evil to triumph it is only necessary for good men to do nothing.”
I submit that lying is evil.
A few points:
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Senator John Edwards of North Carolina probably gets tired of being confused with John Edward, the “psychic”.
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Originally posted by Revtim:
I think that’s backwards. If a writer for a news service wants to write credulously about psychic stuff, then an editorial would be the place to do so, because it’s an arena for presenting the writer’s own opinions. (A good editorial, of course, should be based on facts and sound logic, but that’s not always the case.)
A story presented as a news report, on the other hand, should deal with known facts, and not present unproven claims without comment.
- If I understand it, Miss Cleo protects herself from fraud charges (I mean for her basic schtick, rather than overbilling and things like that) by that little “For Entertainment Purposes Only” disclaimer. I’m amazed that’s enough, legally: apparently you can spend as long as you like making specific claims that you obviously want people to believe, and yet be untouchable because of that fine print disclaimer. (On the other hand, of course, I don’t know how you could ever prove legally that somebody isn’t a psychic; just that they’re making claims unsupported by evidence. Now, proving they’re not Jamaican…)
Here is where I completely disagree.
Before you posted this, I had already drawn from your statements that this was where our base premises differed. I am working an a GD thread just to discuss the merits of just this arguement.
I am corresponding with the estate of Carl Sagan now to get permission to quote a pretty significant chunk of Demon Haunted World. I had realized that my attitude was pretty similar to yours, Stoid… until I had spent a little time looking at it from the uncritical person’s point of view.
The short arguement for now is that being critical is a hard lesson to learn. It certainly is not being taught very well during primary education in my neck of the woods. My hypothesis is that it takes a couple things happening together to kick start this process in most people. A soid background on what is possible, the logic training to use that background to extrapolate to a specific case so that it can be mentally flagged as probable, possible, improbable, or impossible, and the intellect to apply that process. Once the level is achieved where the BS detectors start going off pretty often, it is pretty self sustaining as the person tends to start checking stories against other sources of information. Lots of new information is picked up from this, and logic skills are further sharpened.
Many people never make the leap. And it isn’t necessarily because they don’t want to. If the minimum level of skeptical inquiry in never reached, the value of it is never demonstrated to person. If you just graduate high school and don’t continue schooling in Texas, it would be quite possible to enter the world under trained to understand it to any reasonable degree.
Reinforcing and taking advantage of a groups ignorance is hardly trivial in my mind.
This is a completely over the top comparison, but the core of it is applicable I think:
In the South during slavery, slaves were to remain illiterate. Whites that taught slaves to read were severly punished.
Frederick Douglass (link) at the age of ten was learning to read from his master’s daughter. When they were busted, the master (Captain Auld) was quite upset. In Frederick’s presence he explained:
“A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master - to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now, if you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Where the comparison is valid is that so many people finish their public education and have no idea what they are missing in their understanding of the world around them. No one “withheld” this knowledge from them, but only small and poor efforts were made to impart this knowledge. The result, often only the brightest in the class came away with this lesson. In fact, down here, critical thinking is pretty much taught by the osmosis concept. They don’t address directly. I guess they just figure that student will be exposed to enough information that they will figure it out for themselves. Science here is almost exclusively taught from authority… Here ya go kids, these items are the correct facts, with very little coverage on the more import ideas of how we found them. Generally, when the methods of science and critical thinking are taught, the kids are too young to really grasp it, and the education moves on and they never return to that important topic.
scotth, I think you are dead on with your comparison of ignorance and slavery. In fact, can think of no better metaphor.
I have talked to people in the past who believe our educational system is designed to impart ignorance, in order to keep the populace docile. I wouldn’t go that far; at least in our country people who WANT to know what is happening can find out with some effort.
But to bring balance to your view that little effort is spent on teaching critical thinking, compare our educational sytem to others in world history. In many ways we still come out ahead. In Renaissance Europe, “education” meant learning to read and write Greek or Latin, with emphasis on the (usually wholly mistaken) “scientific” ideas of Aristotle or Plato. The Soviet Union taught nothing but lies to its entire populace about events ocurring in their own country. To this day, Japanese children are rarely taught about the massacres their military committed in China during WWII. It is one thing to not emphasize critical thinking in education, it is another to push falsehood or lies by omission about known facts, with or without malicious intent.
The point I would like to make is that even if we DID teach critical thinking, there is no guarantee it would be learned. There are children leaving our schools now who can’t read or write very well, and god knows THAT topic is well covered. How much can we reasonably expect from public education? The American public has come a long way from the days of travelling snake-oil salesmen (one of the key reasons the FDA was founded, I might add). But without much greater involvement from all concerned, there is a practical limit on the amount of “stuff” that can be taught to children with the available resources.
Currently, critical thinking is taught as one day at the beginning of some science classes. Most people don’t even remember that it was discussed, much less the content.
I wonder what would happen if a full semester course was set up (and required for graduation).
Critical thinking is a large key to continued education (especially informal education).
Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World should be required reading in high school.
Scott is right that people are not taught critical thinking skills in school. Everything is passive. Students simply receive information without questioning it. There is no give and take, no skepticism. People should be taught how to think and not simply what to think.
The thrust of the article was not reporting on the validity of the psychic content of the show, but simply reporting that the shows exist. If there was any debate about the whether the shows were really being aired or not, then it should have been on the editorial page.
But it really should have been in the entertainment section, as ** scotth** has mentioned.
If they would have stuck with just the story that these shows are on the rise, I wouldn’t have said a word other than I regretfully have to agree that they are in fact no the rise.
Then, they went on to interview psychics, mediums, etc and spout their claims and views like they were some type of recognized expert.
The only thing that I would recognize these people at being expert at is lying.
Overall, the piece sounded possitively glowing about the fact that these shows are on the rise. My panties get seriously wadded about that point.
And no, I don’t really wear panties, in case any of y’all thought to ask…
But they are experts in the field, the field of complete and utter bullshit! It was perfectly appropriate.
Really, I missed your smiley.
Oh here it is: 
It must of fell down the page!
Just reporting…
So far, everyone’s predictions on the amount of response coming from foxnews has been right on target.
Not a peep.