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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Mass hysteria can make otherwise rational people behave very irrationally. And once claims are made--for many cultures--it's difficult to recant without losing face. There's also the risk of being left out of a group if close companions make a claim.

Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt. People preach, seek out, and legit believe (despite no hard evidence) in supernatural healing, limbs regrowing, divine languages, divine laughter/joy, spontaneous creation of jewels, etc.

IME the claims that become most popular are the ones impossible to falsify. So testimony is usually all that's left.

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> Growing up in a very charismatic flavor of Christianity I thought I 'experienced' a lot of phenomenon that I now look back on with contempt

I firsthand experienced a charismatic Christian telling me a story about how one time his car wouldn't start, and then some stranger appeared to help him get it started again, and then once the car was running the stranger was gone – totally believable, everyday occurrence, except for my interlocutor's insistence that the stranger wasn't a human being, but actually an angel sent by God appearing in human form.

I wonder what that random stranger would think if he knew he's been turned into an angel in the mind of the person he helped.

That was me. I always thought of myself as handy with cars though, not necessarily of heavenly origin. In fact, one person whose car I repaired with a leatherman and a coke can as my complete toolset and materials store thought I was a miracle worker. (I hope that fix held up until he got home...).

More seriously though, people who are that far into religion will see 'the hand of god' in just about every normal phenomenon, my paternal grandmother was one of those and she deeply believed all these things to be true, even when there were perfectly ordinary explanations for them. That never stopped us from getting along just fine, but I wouldn't press her on such items because her world was fragile enough as it was.

Religion is comfort food for the mind, and if someone needs their 'angels in human form' then maybe we should just let them.

Materialist or skeptical views are also comfort food for the mind, though. It's just comfort for a mind that's differently tuned.

These beliefs project a very basic, easily understood view of reality - discount vast amounts of difficult or inconvenient experiential data which has been with mankind since the beginning (ETs, visions, dreams, ghosts, the paranormal, faith healing, synchronicities, etc.) - and papers over a variety of huge and fundamental questions (origins, purpose, life after death, etc) with a very solid, tangible, and pat answer.

People who are deep into materialism will also see materialism everywhere, so the effect also happens that you mentioned with your grandmother.

Materialism has its flaws yet has more physical evidence than any form of mysticism.

Materialism is a theory in the philosophy of the mind. Its main competitors are idealism, dualism, and neutral monism, not "mysticism".

And, materialism has no more physical evidence than its competitors do. Whatever observations materialists claim as "evidence" for materialism, advocates of competing theories will say that those observations are just as compatible with their own theory as with materialism. If competing theories can explain these observations just as well as materialism can, then those observations turn out not to be evidence for materialism at all.

Or if perhaps the event happened at all. I think sometimes you can have a very powerful dream that later feels just like a memory.

> it's difficult to recant without losing face

Not sure if that applies to this highly derided topic.

I do agree the mass hysteria angle has a place in the digestion of all these accounts, but what is the mechanism? Is it reproducible? Is it only applicable to panic situations? What about when you have tangible forms of evidence to follow the account (such as air-to-ground and infrared radar [0])? Incidentally, that's the account that was convincing enough to get me interested enough in this subject to study it with an open mind.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings...

I agree it's worth studying and understanding. I feel like we're seeing quite a bit of it in the area of politics right now.

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