The Most Powerful Man in Chess Is Maybe a Lunatic
deadspin.com
deadspin.com
Do people likewise call all God-believers lunatics? If not, then what's the difference? In both cases people believe in an entity where there's no strong consensus on its existence.
The Internet has enabled people that think they have found a true belief that is unacceptable to find each other more easily than ever before. The creation of these micro belief systems is one of the most interesting aspects of the Internet. Lots of these on Reddit as an example.
This I don't agree. I find Greek Mythology more acceptable than Christianity. In some country the belief of Jesus is assimilated to being lunatic indeed. It's hard for me to believe that Creationism is taught in some schools in the US.
We don't call them lunatics. I guess the difference is that there's more of them, and it's just easier for everyone if we get along. Less so for the more fringe beliefs.
It's the fact that he claims to have been abducted and "taken to visit a distant star" that makes him sound unreliable. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
So how can we demand evidence on anything other than a consensus of our social setting?
He has the argument of ignorance as we in this discussion do not have the means to proof he wasn't abducted by aliens. Now I accept that the argument of ignorance is a fallacy but I'm new to philosophy and am still working on understanding why it is a fallacy, other than just accepting it as a rule.
It may be the sleep deprivation and caffeine talking, but I was not expecting today to contain "having my view changed so that self-proclaimed alien abductees are not to be considered lunatics".
I feel you're wrong, but I can't articulate why, and what you are saying has an undeniable logic to it. This is unnerving.
If I lift a rock and drop it, will it fall on the ground or fly away? The reasonable answer is that it will fall down, obviously. If somebody told you that he dropped a rock and it rocketed into the sky, you probably wouldn't believe them. Because it goes against the way we experience reality, and the way everybody around us seems to experiment it as well. When you swerve on the road to avoid a wall it's because you know that otherwise you'll collide with it instead of magically going through it. Can you prove that you will though? What if I told you that I did go through a wall once, would you believe me?
That's where the scientific evidence is the last bastion of reason. If somebody claims that rocks can fall up, they should be able to come up with hard evidence for it, or even better a way to reproduce it so that it can be investigated. Could the people in Roswell in the 70's provide such evidence?
If somebody in the middle ages had claimed that time ran faster at the top of a mountain than at the bottom of a valley, he'd probably be considered a lunatic. General relativity now tells us that he would've been correct. That doesn't change the fact that claiming that times runs faster at the top of a mountain "randomly" is just a lunatic thing to say. Einstein on the other hand had a well constructed theory, built on top of actual observations of our reality, that was eventually proven right through experimentation.
Maybe it'll turn out that alien abductions are actually a real thing, but even if that's the case I don't think we could be accused of being wrong or narrow minded for not accepting such ridiculous claims without a single strand of evidence. Otherwise we basically give up on any shared perception of reality.
We're now living in a civilization where a good chunk of humanity has a video recorder with them 24/7, and yet no pictures of alien abductions to be found on instagram.
Who claims that?
can you probe him?