Stupidity Breeds Stupidity
"Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by it's ingenuity when trying to destroy itself." ~The Seventh Doctor, Remembrance of the DaleksThe human race never fails to dismay me at times. Like when, following an amusing snippet in this week's New Scientist's Feedback section, I chanced to read the reviews of a very daft book indeed - "Who Built the Moon?" By Christopher Knight and Alan Butler. Here's a sample from the Amazon blurb:
The Moon has confounded scientists for many years. It does not obey the known rules of astrophysics and there is no coherent theory of its origin - in fact, it should not really be there... Higher life only developed on Earth because the Moon is exactly what it is and where it is. Whern all of the facts are dispassionately reviewed, it becomes unreasonable to cling to the idea that the Moon is a natural object. The only question that remains is, "Who built it"?Now, I'm well aware that people like to take leave of their senses every once in a while and believe things that have no basis in fact. I'm also well aware that people like to rebel against what they've been taught all their lives and will, for the sake of said rebellion, argue any old tripe that they happen to come across with spurious logic like "The moon and the sun look exactly the same size from the surface of the Earth. That can't be a coincidence!" (heard that one before, but it's particularly apt here). What dismays me most is that people actually read this stuff and think it to be true and, what's more accept it without any kind of rational argument whatsoever. Moreover - and this really takes the biscuit - they argue that received wisdom about whatever they're reading about has no basis in rational fact (because the book tells them so) and therefore, because someone comes up with a half thought-out argument against it, must be untrue. What happened to thinking for yourself? What happend to questioning what you're told instead of just blindly accepting it like a docile schoolchild? When I was studying, well, anything very much, we were always taught to question, question, question everything. It doesn't matter if it says it in a textbook, it could still be bunk. Review the evidence. We did and, of course, what it said in the textbook usually turned out to be true (for a given value of true, usually watered down for the sensitive brains of people who would be told at the next level of education that the simplification they had been taught at the previous one had been a lie), but sometimes it wasn't so cut and dried, so we debated it. Yet people all over the world will accept this kind of spurious bullshit just because it says it on the printed page. And yes, this infuriates me. Yes, I've lost some friends in the past by expecting people to think about things. But come on. We've managed to take over (and royally fuck up) this planet. We've crossed the oceans, we've developed the means to fly, we've sent men to the moon for fuck's sake. Can't people at least engage the few pounds of porridge between their ears for few seconds and just think every once in a while?
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