I’ve been on a Wikipedia binge, reading about people pushing various New Age silliness. The tragic part is that a lot of these guys actually do sound fairly smart, and they don’t seem to be afflicted with biological forms of mental illness. They just happen to be memetically crazy in a profound and crippling way.
Take Ervin Laszlo, for instance. He has a theory of everything, which involves saying the word “quantum” a lot and talking about a mystical “Akashic Field” which I would describe in more detail except that none of the explanations of it really say much. Here’s a representative snippet from Wikipedia:
László describes how such an informational field can explain why our universe appears to be fine-tuned as to form galaxies and conscious lifeforms; and why evolution is an informed, not random, process. He believes that the hypothesis solves several problems that emerge from quantum physics, especially nonlocality and quantum entanglement.
Then we have pages like this one, talking more about the Akashic Records (because apparently it’s a quantum field thingy and also an infinite library or something). The very first sentence sums it up: “The Akashic Records refer to the frequency gird programs that create our reality.” Okay, actually that didn’t sum up crap; but it sounded cool, didn’t it? That page is full of references to the works of various people, cited very nicely, and the spelling and grammar suggest someone with education. There are a lot of pages like this floating around. The thing they all have in common is that they don’t seem to consider evidence to be important. It’s not even on their radar.
Scholarly writings from New Age people is a pretty breathtaking example of dark side epistemology, if anybody wants a case study in exactly what not to do. It’s pretty intense.
I’ve been on a Wikipedia binge, reading about people pushing various New Age silliness. The tragic part is that a lot of these guys actually do sound fairly smart, and they don’t seem to be afflicted with biological forms of mental illness. They just happen to be memetically crazy in a profound and crippling way.
Take Ervin Laszlo, for instance. He has a theory of everything, which involves saying the word “quantum” a lot and talking about a mystical “Akashic Field” which I would describe in more detail except that none of the explanations of it really say much. Here’s a representative snippet from Wikipedia:
Then we have pages like this one, talking more about the Akashic Records (because apparently it’s a quantum field thingy and also an infinite library or something). The very first sentence sums it up: “The Akashic Records refer to the frequency gird programs that create our reality.” Okay, actually that didn’t sum up crap; but it sounded cool, didn’t it? That page is full of references to the works of various people, cited very nicely, and the spelling and grammar suggest someone with education. There are a lot of pages like this floating around. The thing they all have in common is that they don’t seem to consider evidence to be important. It’s not even on their radar.
Scholarly writings from New Age people is a pretty breathtaking example of dark side epistemology, if anybody wants a case study in exactly what not to do. It’s pretty intense.