There is a large difference between a “doctor” practicing a form of medicine for which there is no basis in fact, and a doctor who poorly practices a medicine which has a basis in fact.
Would you rather be treated by a doctor that could cause problems if he performs a treatment improperly, or a doctor whose treatment has absolutely no chance of working, no matter how he performs it?
I am saddened by your sister’s experience.
This is funny… skeptics debating skeptics.
“I believe in Jesus, and am skeptical of Mohammed”
“I believe in aromatherapy, but not in acupuncture”
“I believe in chiropractics, but not in iridology”
“I believe in ESP, but not in UFOs”
“I believe in science, not in psychics”
“I believe in psychics, not in science”
Aren’t we ALL skeptical somehow?
Regarding the OP, I don’t think there’s much more to say. Some people are jerks, whether they are skeptics or not.
But generalizing is not right. We are not all jerks.
Enjoy your debate. Saludos.
What if they’re a rapist? I mean, we don’t know, do we? :rolleyes:
You don’t think it should be against the law to sell products – like, say, “medical” treatments – which clearly do not do what they are advertised to do? Can I go around selling products and mnake all kinds of claims about their capabilities when they cannot do what I claim? Of course not; the FTC would have my ass in jail in a New York minute. Why, then, should providers of medical services be exempt from the same standards?
yosemitebabe said:
And yet people wonder why skeptics fight against it. Hmm. Imagine that…
Yes, and? Some of us are outraged at it. Does that mean we shouldn’t be outraged even more at this particular type?
While it thankfully hasn’t gotten that far yet, some HMOs do pay for various types of alternative medicine (read: “therapies” with no scientific basis).
hastur: Unlike the claims of psychics, I cannot read minds. So when I see a message replying to one of mine, but only addressing part of it, I tend to wonder why this is so – especially when that person has also posted two more messages after the response. Now you try to make me feel bad because you took your friend – sorry, won’t work. If you had time to write what you did to me and to write another message to somebody else and yet another to somebody else, then you had time to say, “David – I don’t have time right now, but I’d like to more fully explore the other things you said.”
Oh, and I notice you still haven’t addressed them. But you did take the opportunity to try to slam skeptics.
So, yes, maybe this thread has become “pointless.” But it isn’t the skeptics who have made it so. Look in the mirror.
Why, thanks, in that case I hope I have managed to uphold the sceptical position successfully without venom and hostility! I see the discussion has become more personal, so please forgive my approach (below).
That sounds rather like Jehovah’s Witnesses! I suppose the trick lies in the method of education. Sceptics ought to avoid holier-than-thou attitudes. A sceptic, after all, is not holier than the average person, just better informed.
Let’s be fair here: I did not use the term “crackpot”, although I certainly believe it applies to certain people. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a crackpot as an eccentric or impractical person. When used as an adjective, the term means mad or unworkable.
Garlic is good for you, so I would no more consider that crackpot than if you were taking vitamin pills. I do not have information on whether garlic specificaly helps your cold though, perhaps someone else can help out.
Again, I am not sure how you define crackpots. I have been talking mostly about charlatans and frauds, who by definition require interaction with other people. Does your friend enjoy or believe in Astrology? Does she do so by herself, or does she gab about it endlessly like some astrology freaks I know? Since astrology is in no way practical, serves no purpose, and is rooted in fable, if your friend believes in it she matches the OED’s definition of crackpot. If she shares her passion about it with others, she could be helping to multiply ignorance.
Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. Unfortunately this phrase is often shortened by removal of the word “informed”. I don’t think quirks ever hurt anyone (I’m probably wrong), and there is a big difference between having a quirk and, e.g., spreading the message of phrenology or DIY colour therapy. Private trifles, I think I mentioned earlier, do not really concern others. Everyone has peculiarities of behaviour, but I have a problem with phrenologists, astrologers, psychics, people who think men did not walk on the moon, creationists, and the like. For the simple reason that these ridiculous beliefs are A) rooted in the deepest ignorance and based solely on opinion, and B) they multiply themselves unless they are checked.
Let me be absolutely clear on this: everyone needs help, but sceptics are not missionaries. I don’t know of any self-respecting sceptic who fights ignorance in the badgering way you allude to. If, on the other hand, I know you and I know children X and I catch you telling X how good astrology is, I will become somewhat upset. That’s because I know both how easily impressed children can be and how persistent belief in astrology may prove, so I would not want to see a child’s fresh mind become indoctrinated with such ridiculous notions as belief in astrology (which for some reason does not seem to fade away like other childhood fantasies such as Santa Claus or the tooth fairy). On the other hand, if you keep your astrology fetish to yourself, I have absolutely no reason to annoy you about it. If it comes up in conversation I may mention what I think about it and what science has determined about it, but that’s it.
On the other other hand, were you 15 years old and telling me how awesome your horoscope is and you really believe in it, etc., I would probably make some effort to explain the difference between truth and falsehood, science and make-believe, opinion and the scientific method, etc.
I actually mentioned religion in response to Airman Doors, USAF, and your discussion. It’s an earlier post. The situation is complicated and there are strong social pressures on the topic of religion. I think I did provide an answer. Religion is a private affair, and it is never my intention, nor I believe the intention of most sceptics, to invalidate personal religious beliefs. But preach at me, and I will be understandably offended. I don’t go up to religious people and claim anything about their God, but in an earnest discussion about religion I may say something similar to this, although that is probably rather more than most people are willing to listen to in one sitting. That’s not really the topic of this thread though.
I think you may have me confused with some pretty hardcore religious zealots!
Of course. I have never claimed to compromise the privacy of others for trifling reasons. In fact, I generally do not start a debate unless a suspicious claim is broadcast, i.e. it is no longer private but made public and therefore potentially dangerous. Ignorance is like a virus, dangerous and very difficult to fight.
OK, I say enough with these herring-questions, I do not feel they add to this argument (start another thread on them if you wish to discuss so many specifics!). Vegetarianism is certainly crackpot by the definition provided above. Does that make all vegetarians nutcases? No, of course not. What about Vegans? The case there is certainly stronger, but it’s none of my business… Now, if vegetarians or vegans came up to my 10 year old boy (hypothetical, I don’t actually have children) and started explaining how good a Veg diet is for his growing body, I would be seriously concerned about lack of animal protein, calcium, and a host of other important items (including the Veg preacher’s brain).
There’s a very significant difference between fighting ignorance and “saving” people according to religious systems. The fight against ignorance is practical and has its origins in analytical thinking–scepticism and the scientific method are a way to analyze claims after all. Religion is not. I don’t care HOW convinced you are of anything, because personal conviction has absolutely no relevance to any argument. Put up or shut up, as they say. If I don’t see solid evidence/reasoning, I won’t take you too seriously. At the same time, I will always do my best to offer solid evidence and reasoning to all. That’s what sceptics do, although I am becoming wary of using the word so frequently. Remember, scepticism is nothing but a method.
And to repeat: sceptics are certainly not going from house to house trying to save people, or stopping pedestrians in the street to tell them that “scepticism saves!”. Heck, I don’t even like people as a rule. However, when I encounter broadcasts of ignorance I choose to do my best to stamp them out.
Leaving aside, the exaggeration, it all depends on the educator involved. Again, our concepts of what is going on here appear to differ when it comes to pestering. I respect my privacy too much to condone the invasion of others’.
Yosemitebabe, pointing to the few people in the crowd that the conman hasn’t directly harmed and saying, “They haven’t been hurt, so back off!” is disingenuous at the very least.
DavidB, I believe I’ve got dibs on Hastur’s next response. How many times has he(and oh, so many others) thrown out the claim that there are “real” psychics out there? How many times have I asked, “O.K., could you please show me just one?”, without ever recieving an answer?
pldennison wrote:
I wish that were true. But, unfortunately, peddlers of “herbal remedies” have a really sneaky back door they take advantage of.
So long as their products are classified as “dietary supplements,” they can make any outlandish claims they want about them, so long as the bottle has a little disclaimer in teeny tiny type that says:
“These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”
You can put plain tap water in a bottle and claim it will give you more energy, regulate your menstrual cycle, put hair on your head, and extend your lifespan. You can sell it for $5.99 a bottle as a “miracle drink.” And so long as you put the above FDA disclaimer on the bottle, you can get away with it. In any other industry, this would be considered false advertising. It’s shameful how these frauds have the complete legal sanction of the Federal government.
And what’s worse is, a lot of the people who make and sell these herbal remedies actually believe that they do all the things they’re claimed to do. One study mentioned on http://www.quackwatch.org showed that, of the 900 or so herbal remedies that have actually been tested, only about 11% of them did what their proponents claimed that they do, and worse, only about 10% of them have been proven safe. Yet many herb peddlers continue to believe every outlandish claim printed on the bottle. And they have the gall to accuse the mainstream medical establishment of suppressing the “truth” about these herbs because “they’re only being out to get your money,” while the herbal remedy sellers, of course, would never think of going after your money.
I can’t resist adding another example of this, from What could this be?, where Honesty posted a question about experiences that could have been symptoms of a significant neurological disorder and was told by a psychic (who later posted here as WingedWolf):
“It’s a type of energy which hasn’t yet been mechanically detected, but it is related to biomagnetism. … An energy surge–this could be related to your body’s ability to produce the energy described above in greater quantities than most people do. The nerve spasm–which caused your body to jerk–was caused by the stimulation to those nerves causing them to fire all at once, and triggering your muscles to contract. It’s a very common side-effect/symptom. It may also be in reaction to an increase in energy around you, that your nerves respond to. (A spirit entity can cause this as well). … It is normal for your genotype, if not common. It does mean that you psychic … Somewhere around 10% of the population is born-psi, and about 10% of those are “born-on”, having instinctive use of psi-abilities as well as having them innate. I would guess you are in the latter catagory, basedo on the age your abilities awakened, and that energy-manipulation and perception is your primary aspect. In other words, you perceive auras, and you can also manipulate them. There is a great deal more you can do, if you care to learn. I recommend you at least learn some self-defense, for you may be vulnerable to some things others wouldn’t be vulnerable to, simply because of your sensitivity to them.”
Hmmm:
We’re mixing people of faith, people of blind faith, crackpots with delusional understandings of the world, and charlatans preying on one or more categories of the former and/or on the overcredulous. (For some of you, you may equate some of these categories.)
I once suggested a spectrum of credulity from the straw-man hyperskeptic to the hypercredulous, suggesting that most people fell somewhere along the middle of the sequence.
Obvious example: the whole “historical Jesus” argument, found on numerous threads here, past and present. On one previous argument (fall of '99, if I remember), David B., speaking in vox skeptica, raised the question of confabulation to explain the entire 1st Century Christian movement. Well, maybe. But it seems highly unlikely to me, as a skeptic of such explanations, that it all can be attributed to erroneous memories being reinforced. This does not, of course, suggest that the stories told of Jesus are therefore the “Gospel truth” (pun intended) about a Person who was the Incarnate Son of God, as traditional Christian theology would have us accept. But it does to me suggest that there is more to what lies behind the Christian teachings than mere falsification of memory. In this sense, I feel the skeptics are “palming cards” – having set as the proper universe of discourse a worldview that accepts solely sensory evidence and authorities basing their concepts on purely sensory evidence, it often rejects any evidence which would presuppose something more than the world available to the senses (amplified, of course, by suitable detectors for things like infrared, gamma rays, sub- and supersonic vibrations, neutrinos, and so on) as “clearly erroneous.” In short, this is a form of circular reasoning, since in a purely mechanistic universe, any evidence tending to prove that the universe is not purely mechanistic is obviously misinterpreted, since it would disprove a purely mechanistic universe, which is a given.
David, your definition of faith (p1 of the thread) may be the dictionary one, but it does not fit with the attitude toward faith of rational Christians (and, I would assume, other belief systems, but, following Izzy’s caveat, I will speak of the one I have some expertise in). May I ask your source dictionary, and whether other dictionaries suggest other definitions?
One strong point here is that while many of the groups contained in the categories of my first paragraph solicit funds from the believer in one way or another, ranging from “free will donations” to the sale of supposedly efficacious things, there are those believers, of both my faith and others, who are sincerely focused on the search for truth and, in general, do not seek funds for anything, other than perhaps the betterment of humanity in measurable, acceptable ways (e.g., charitable activities for the poor).
I would challenge all the long-time members of this board (i.e., those sufficiently familiar with me and what I think to have grounds to form such a judgment) to identify one way in which my faith (what I believe, not the group to which I belong) has in any way injured or impeded the rights of another.
Well, of course this was that woman’s choice, but I wonder if the options were really presented to her. I don’t think these “alternative healers” said to her, “You have 2 choices. You can either have conventional treatment, which will give you about 70% of survival, or we can treat you using this alternative therapy, which hasn’t been scientifically tested, has never worked in the past, and will, in all likelihood, lead to you dying in agony as cancer takes over your body, but not before you first spend most of your money on this treatment.”
I don’t think the woman was a “crackpot”, as you put it. She just decided that she’d prefer to believe in something unrealistic, because it gave her hope that she’d survive, rather than face the reality that she might die. She was neither a crackpot nor a bad person. She was, however, a victim of people who took her faith in them and abused it for their own personal gain, not caring if she lived or died, and if we as a society, and as individuals, can’t work against those people who, by force or fraud, prey on the weak, and the desperate, then we’ve failed as a society.
BTW, as a side note, I think when you say “deist”, you mean “theist”. The deists as a whole probably would have come down on the side of the skeptics, because deism was an attempt to create a religion and moral philosophy based on the idea of rationality.
Look, I don’t go around ripping astrology columns out of people’s hands. I’m a fan of fantasy novels, but I think that it can be dangerous when we’re not able to distinguish fantasy from reality, and when people believe stuff that’s not true.
It’s always been one of my fantasies to be telekinectic…to be able to move things with my mind. That’s probably because I’m lazy, but I always thought it would be cool to shut doors across the room, or get a book off my shelf without going over there. I’d like somebody to be able to do it, and show me how, but, up to this point, nobody has done it or been able to prove it can be done. That’s all I’m asking, and I think that’s all anybody is asking…if you think the stars control our fates, if you think the world was created 6000 years ago, if you think aliens created the pyramids, if you think “whites” are inherently superior to "blacks, or “Aryans” to “Jews”, then prove it. That’s all skeptics ask.
Czarcasm said:
OK, fine, you can have dibs on that one. But I suspect neither of us will be getting straight answers.
Poly: Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition
To whoever posted about Quackwatch – it’s not quackwatch.org, it’s .com – some other, well, quacks have taken over the .org name because they know a lot of people will go there by accident. The Real Quackwatch is here.
I wouldn’t hold my breath, Czarcasm. When Hastur posts about pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo, the first thing that “falls through the cracks” in his responses is invariably evidence.
Hastur,
Some of us are relentlessly plugging away politely. It’s a discussion board - you get all types here!
It is certainly possible for you to continue to post to me, and here’s my latest reply.
OK, maybe every psychic isn’t a deliberate fraud. But none of them have any powers. So all psychics are mistaken or fraudulent.
Give me a break, pl. This is about leaving someone alone with their own decisions. This isn’t about inviting (or not inviting) a spoon-bender you don’t know to stay overnight at your house.
Too much to digest here, and I see I have successfully hijacked Hastur’s thread. (Sorry, Hastur!)
I can’t remember all that you have written, and I have a limited amount of time. I will try to touch on several issues:
I have said before, when someone makes claims to you about what they believe, and are interesting in sharing with you (and possibly attempting to influence you) they are welcoming your reaction. I am certainly not suggesting that you shouldn’t discuss or argue with them. They have opened the conversation. Discuss, argue, debate away. They are inviting it, they have no reason to bitch because they don’t like the response they are getting to a conversation they started.
The kind of person I am thinking about is someone who seems relatively balanced, yet believes in something you don’t agree with - something “weird” and “crackpot”. They don’t ramble on and on about their particular “crackpot” belief (and I put that in quotes because I am being somewhat facetous with the term). They aren’t trying to persuade you to believe. They just may mention that they believe.
I think Abe has answered most of my questions and concerns on that area well enough - he certainly doesn’t advocate being a huge pain in the ass to these kind of people - people who are minding their own business. And I agree with this. That’s kind of been my main issue all along. I have seen too much of this “I’ll nag you to death for your own good” thinking going around. Too much busy-body intrusive obnoxiousness from people who are trying to “save” everyone, even people who are basically harmless, and minding their own business. (The issue of vegetarianism is the first thing that comes to mind - if you want to see any evidence of people pestering vegetarians, just search this board.) IRL, I have a friend who adheres to a certain religion where she won’t wear pants, or makeup. She has her kid home-schooled. Some people have pestered her about her “crackpot” ways. She’s made it clear, she’s not trying to convince anyone else to dress the way she dresses, or homeschool their kids. But she wants to do this. (And yes, her kid is really smart and doing well.) But yet she gets pestered.
I’ll also ramble and repeat - you can’t nag people to death, even for “their own good”. We all try to inform people of things we fear they don’t know, because we care. We all do this - I do the same thing with issues I feel are dire. But understand - there’s a certain point where you need to let it go. They have made their decision, they know. You can’t “save” every individual person who you feel is going down the wrong path. Any further attempt to “save” them will only be supremely irritating, and possibly make it worse.
As for the harmful effects of religion, we only have to look at the events of 9/11.
David B wrote:
Yikes! I must have gotten confused between quackwatch.com and chirobase.org, and reversed their top-level domains.
I see the so-called quackwatch.org webpage has been taken over by chiropractors – who apparently still believe that chiropractic manipulation can cure deafness.
They’re probably worried about her child. Yeah, the kid is “really smart and doing well,” but how do you know the kid would not be doing even better at a public or private school? It isn’t just the education kids need, it’s the development of their social skills and you don’t get that being around Mom all day, you get by being around your peers. But they’re all in school, aren’t they?
They “know” and yet they don’t believe? You tell someone about the dangers of smoking and yet they continue to smoke? What would you call someone who believes something in spite of contradictory facts? Irrational? Unreasonable? Do people really have the right to be irrational and/or unreasonable?
And what about the effect that decision has on us, the ones giving the warnings? We talked to my father endlessly about his smoking. We kept asking him to stop and telling him about all that had been learned about how dangerous it is, especially if you smoked two to three packs a day like he did.
He still refused to believe smoking was bad for him. He believed he had some sort of immunity to it because he had no symptoms of any illness.
He died of a stroke, and strokes do happen more often to smokers than to non-smokers.
Preview is my friend. Preview is my friend. Preview is my friend.
jab1 wrote:
Well … yes! They do! If I really really want to jump off a cliff tomorrow night, I should have the right to do so. It would be irrational for me to do so. It would be unreasonable for me to do so. My friends and family would probably feel a lot of grief if I did so. And if somebody talked me out of it, I would probably feel very glad a few days later that I didn’t jump off the cliff. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have the right to throw my life away.