Real-world science, on the other hand, would like to find out, but has limited funding (as anyone who has written a grant application knows all too well). Do you spend those resources on investigating whether the Face on Mars is something other than a natural rock formation, or do you spend them on looking for evidence of water on Mars or life on Europa, which are more plausible? There’s not an infinite amount of money, manpower, and other resources for science- at some point, it does become an either/or choice, and you pick the project that is most likely to yield significant results.
Sure, I get that, and agree with you. In a practical sense, decisions of priority have to be made.
Now, see, here’s where there’s an issue for debate: if by “right” you’re referring to the people that believe crop circles are of non-human origin, then the opinion that “there’s much better things in the world to pursue” is a matter of opinion, after all. Sure, there might be much better things for a lot of people to pursue, but that doesn’t invalidate pursuing the source of crop circles by definition. Someone should still find the truth here, even if it isn’t most of us who have better things to do. I’m not going to waste time on it, but I’m glad someone is, because it may not turn out to be a waste, and that would be cool.
As I recall, it was only after the original Viking images (was it Viking? I think so) that set of the whole debate. The later, higher resolution images came about after his passing, I think. I’m reasonably certain that it was before any subsequent images, but I would disagree with your motivation (kind of my point in this thread): we should NOT have gone back “if only to shut every one up.” We SHOULD have gone back to see who was right. The latter is science, the former is the closed-minded imposition of dogmatism, without proof one way or the other.
I agree here, as well, but I would submit that “extraordinary” can be a matter of opinion, and thus it is a questionable standard. It seems to me that TRUE science demands the proving of ANY claim, “extraordinary” or not (many people disagree with me on this, but I haven’t found their arguments to be convincing).
Absolutely. If they did wrong, nail them, if possible. I’m not arguing that point.
You are very right, here; and this does become a concern. I tend to think in idealized, conceptual terms when it comes to arguments (which tell me that any potentially yielding avenue of inquiry is worth pursuing), but in a practical sense, money is of course an issue. It’s just that no-one put me on a budget on this thread, so I was indulging my wish list, a bit.
I’d love to own a Ferrari, but just because I can’t afford it doesn’t make it an inoperable vehicle altogether (well, hey, it made sense to me).
Voodoo doll nothing. I’d see if I could get her to strip naked first.
In my opinion the SiL is the sole responsible for putting herself in that situation. It’s natural and understandable for jjimm to blame only the asswipe charlatan but presumably she consented to everything he did. I’m betting he never promised any concrete, palpable results and can always claim it was her “negativity” that caused the treatment to fail anyway. As long as gullible people exist these low-lives will feed off them.
And I disagree that he ever stole anything from SiL #1, except her naivety.
Why do people always have to bring pond scum into things like this. Pond scum is not so bad. Quit picking on pond scum.
Trust me…you might want to re-think that last statement.
Sorry for the hijack, maybe this would be better in another thread …
Of course you’re right, and people do investigate crop circles just to see. Sadly I’ve seen people investigate circles and claim them to be ‘mysterious’ when the people who made them are right there saying “Yup, me and Bill made that after a few ciders last weekend.”
I guess crop circles aren’t that good an example, if you look at homeopathy there have been several studies to check it’s effectiveness. It’s true that many people dismissed it out of hand (and about as many people embraced it because it was ‘ancient’ and ‘mystical’) but most scientists did call for studies and wait for the results. These have pretty much shown it’s worthless but people still try and claim it as effective.
Sorry, my bias was showing there, the problem with the face is that people who make a living out of interpreting these images all said “it’s a pile of rocks, looks a bit like face, nothing else” and it was people not used to these sorts of images that said “Ooo, a face, aliens, etc, etc”. At some point you have to trust the experts, that’s what they’re there for. Many times the people calling for these investigations don’t trust the views of the experts, because they’re the experts and the represent traditional science and are not to be trusted.
But I see your point, people distrust the experts because they often take the same tone that I did in my original post. Many of the outspoken skeptics have a problem with their ‘tone’ in my opinion, and there are certainly people who have gone to far and dismiss things far too broadly.
Absolutely.
I think we mostly agree. There’s no way can test everything we’d like to, skeptics do have a habit of rejecting things that “don’t quite fit”, but that’s because the vast majority of those things turn out to be nonsense. So we have to be careful not to reject the unproven just because it’s unproven, but similarly we can’t endorse it until it is proved. And if 99 examples out of 100 are proved unproven I think skeptics are allowed some leeway to be dubious about the last one.
But any true scientist will tell you that they’ll gladly re-examine their views in the face of new evidence. Randi makes a point of saying this every so often in him commentaries, I think his point about Geller is that he’s always failed to prove himself under lab conditions.
I’ll stop there before I ramble any further.
And that’s a problem.
What would prove to everyone, even the people who distrust experts, that, say, the face on Mars is not of alien origin? Or what would prove that people did make the crop circles, or that Uri Geller isn’t bending spoons with his mind? For just about any piece of evidence that you can come up with, someone will say it’s faked if it disproves a theory that they like. Conspiracy theorists, for example, are very good at this. They might say that the people who said they made the crop circles are lying to get publicity, or are part of some massive cover-up to hide the evidence of the existence of aliens.
Speaking of coverups of aliens, I like what Dave Barry once said about them (paraphrased, because I can’t find it online):
And then there’s the fact that we can’t get really convincing proof of some of these things. Let’s agree that a videotape of people making every crop circle we’ve ever found would prove to the vast majority of rational people that crop circles are made by humans. But most of the people who made crop circles just didn’t videotape themselves doing it, so there’s no way to get such a videotape. Even if we somehow did have that tape, it wouldn’t convince everybody- there are people who believe we didn’t land on the Moon, even though there are movies and photos of the astronauts on the lunar surface. It gets even worse for something like the face on Mars- to prove that it’s natural, you’d need millions or billions of years worth of video of it forming naturally. Where would you store all that video, and how would you show it to someone to prove that aliens did not make the face on Mars? In the case of Uri Geller, I don’t even think you can prove conclusively that he’s not bending spoons with his mind. You’d literally have to read his mind while he was bending a spoon to disprove that, and that might not even work, because he might think he was cheating while he really wasn’t.
Agreed. Some skeptics do take on a tone that is too arrogant. Even the ones who don’t might get quoted out of context. And scientists are human- they don’t always say the best thing to say in the best way, and they get tired of hearing certain theories that they regard as implausible if not impossible over and over.
I agree she bears a certain amount of responsibility, and you’re right he only hinted about “good things” happening in January. But holy fuck, man, she was terrified out of her wits, she thought she was going to fucking die and leave her two kids without a mother. This motherfucker already knew this, and he took advantage of that. To the tune - I have discovered since - of $100 a session, at up to 3 times a week, with an 8-hour round trip each time. If not strictly a thief, how about a fraudulent cunt?
Not that, alas: she thinks there’s “something in” healers, just not this one. 
I think the spiritualist term for that would be “delivering negative energy to his lower chakra.” 
I hate people like that. I’m a tree-hugging hippie pagan myself, but I never NEVER EVER fuck around with my health. I can’t because I have been visited by the autoimmune faeries and have a healthy dose of good sense. I’ve had it out several times with people who claimed anything from “AIDS is an autoimmune disease” ( :rolleyes: ) to “I can cure your lupus with herbs” ( :rolleyes: agayne). (As you can see, I tend to be a crusader on education on autoimmunity in certain forums.) I firmly believe that a lot of healing is mental, but there also has to be a certain amount of medical for the serious stuff.
But there I go again, preaching to the choir.
But yes, Faith Healing Crystal Fucker needs to have a little “negative energy” introduced into his day.
Um…I’ll don the dunce cap here for a minute. I thought AIDS is an auto-immune disease. Are you saying it’s not?
AIDS is an immuno-deficiency disease, while auto-immune diseases (like lupus for example) tend to hyperactive the body’s immune system.
Opposite problems. 
Thanks! It’s what I was thinking with the wrong word. Damn. I hate when that happens!
Yeah, I’ll definitely go with fraudulent cunt. He’s a worthless piece of shit taking advantage of her and knowingly risking her life. If I were you at the very least I would refuse to be in the presence of this person, ever. I feel for you, it’s very difficult to save people from themselves, and when your SiL is delaying proper medical treatment, she needs a book full of clues. But good on you for realising she bears responsibility for her choices.
Sadly that seems typical.
There’s “something in” this healer, too- a whole lot of BULLSHIT.
Yes. It’s <i>acquired</i> immuno-deficiency syndrome. It appears to be becoming a common mistake nowadays. I tend to burst into flames when I see it (not here, because I knew it was probably just a vocabulary failure. I have those a lot, too.)
Apparently the vocabulary failure extends into coding as well. :smack:
Or you could just embarrass the hell out of him on national TV: