I used the term “truther” as an attempt to be honest—admitting that I pretty much agree with them, rather than trying to pretend to be a devil’s advocate or fence-sitter.
I don’t see how that’s a failure of filtering.
The rest of your first paragraph is basically ad-hominem, as far as serious discussion of this issue goes. If I’m upset, I try not to let it dominate the conversation—this is a rationalist community, after all, and I am a card-carrying rationalist—but I also believe it to be justified, for reasons I explained earlier.
“That’s normal”—so are you in the “people aren’t rational so you might as well give up” camp along with komponisto? What’s your point?
If you want to calibrate, you could look at Holocaust and HIV denial. I’m told they are well described by the above quote. or any medical controversy.
Holocaust denial and HIV denial are easily refuted by the available evidence—along with global warming denial, evolution denial, moon landing denial, and most religions. 9/11 anomalies manifestly are not, given that I’ve been trying for years to elicit rational rebuttals and have come up with precious little. Please feel free to send me more.
Often it is best to silence incompetent skeptical inquiry.
Do you really believe this? Why? Who determines that it is incompetent?
Even the Frequentists (remember Bayes? It’s a song about Bayes) agree that the probability of the evidence given the null hypothesis is an important number to consider. That is why I talk about what is normal, and why it is relevant that “Conspiracy theorists will find suspicious evidence, regardless of whether anything suspicious happened.”
Holocaust denial and HIV denial are easily refuted by the available evidence
Yet people don’t bother to refute them. Instead they pretend to respond.
I used the term “truther” as an attempt to be honest—admitting that I pretty much agree with them, rather than trying to pretend to be a devil’s advocate or fence-sitter.
I don’t see how that’s a failure of filtering.
The rest of your first paragraph is basically ad-hominem, as far as serious discussion of this issue goes. If I’m upset, I try not to let it dominate the conversation—this is a rationalist community, after all, and I am a card-carrying rationalist—but I also believe it to be justified, for reasons I explained earlier.
“That’s normal”—so are you in the “people aren’t rational so you might as well give up” camp along with komponisto? What’s your point?
Holocaust denial and HIV denial are easily refuted by the available evidence—along with global warming denial, evolution denial, moon landing denial, and most religions. 9/11 anomalies manifestly are not, given that I’ve been trying for years to elicit rational rebuttals and have come up with precious little. Please feel free to send me more.
Do you really believe this? Why? Who determines that it is incompetent?
Even the Frequentists (remember Bayes? It’s a song about Bayes) agree that the probability of the evidence given the null hypothesis is an important number to consider. That is why I talk about what is normal, and why it is relevant that “Conspiracy theorists will find suspicious evidence, regardless of whether anything suspicious happened.”
Yet people don’t bother to refute them. Instead they pretend to respond.
The presence of conspiracy theorists neither proves nor refutes the likelihood of a conspiracy. Yes.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody was claiming that it did.
sings “You can claim anything you want… with Alice’s Rhetoric” and walks out