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Comment by zoeysmithe | Hacker News Reader

Classism in higher education, science, etc is sadly all too common. Even those in the 'correct' class have uphill battles as science very much is vulnerable to ego, politics, etc and reform can be difficult, or in some cases impossible, regardless of merit.

It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now due to these politics. I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things. There's just way too many stories and experiences to entirely write it off, but who knows. I feel like hand wavey excuses like third-man, carbon monoxide suddenly everywhere, thought experiments about brains releasing chemicals, calling everything a hallucination, intuition impossible to know conventionally just called luck, etc is the system trying hard to deny this.

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> It makes you wonder what obvious thing is being ignored right now

Not really, 40% of the US believes they were created (or are descendant of) by a divine being (creationism), in spite of all evidence, so pass that hurdle first

> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.

Like 20%-66% of the US believes this today? No one is experiencing the reality you are, ever, something to keep in mind, IMO.

Not to mention flat-earthers, climate change deniers, 5G-causes-vaccines activists burning down 4G towers as they have no idea what 5G even is, etc., etc.

It's all too easy for the less skeptical to be misguided. :/

yeah, but way less people believe in those things though, still a huge problem, unfortunately

not many polls on people understanding a difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation even, who knows what people know

> No one is experiencing the reality you are.

This is a common sentiment, but it is also a declaration of epistemic bankruptcy, thus incompatible with the scientific method.

No, people don't experience the same reality, but it can still be observed and measured, which was pretty much resolved in the 1700s (Hume, others), so you might want to delve into that first.

I think you might be conflating "experience" and "interpret." If we can all measure reality and come up with the same values, we are experiencing the same one. How we interpret that is another question. Keep in mind the philosophers who came before had great contributions to the big thought-experiment we call existence, but many of them argued from emotionally or socioeconomically tainted positions and nobody has gotten it 100% right yet, or we would not be having this discussion.

Back to the original point of this thread, science doubts until certainty, or as close to certainty as our current capabilities will allow, is achieved. That doubt is what allows it to change with the introduction of new information. This is why the religious hold on to what they do, the paranormal believers cling to what seems like misunderstood phenomenon to the rest of us; they don't doubt, and are thus barred from discovery of the truth.

> or we would not be having this discussion.

Or those who aren't students of philosophy, just never read everything they said, seems more likely, no?

> Keep in mind the philosophers who came before had great contributions to the big thought-experiment we call existence, but many of them argued from emotionally or socioeconomically tainted positions and nobody has gotten it 100% right yet, or we would not be having this discussion.

Okay? What does that mean? We have 300 years of society embracing this perspective of Hume and the (at least) tens of thousands of scholars that followed him. I think it is well established that we believe this, even if you have some special knowledge or something enqueued.

Are you going to debunk all philosophy of the 18th century because they were arguing from an "emotionally or socioeconomically" stance (whatever that means)? It seems like an argument from an extremely weak position rhetorically, and I am being generous.

Your replies indicate that you are not able to have this discussion as you are too steeped in your field of study, which I assume you consider to be objectively correct. I respect the time and effort you've put into it, but Philosophy, though useful at times, is conjecture, not science. It does not have a place in a discussion about the inherent truth of measurable natural phenomenon if one is not able to cast doubt on it. I shall move on.

Yeah, I thought you got schooled, too.

Science is philosophy, though what one might describe as applied philosophy. The point being: science (the scientific method) cannot exist outside the context of some epistemic system.

I saw your 'recommendation' to read about Hume further up the comment chain. Respectfully, I know more than you. Take your own suggestion. But don't just read about Hume; get a broader intro to the subject so you can understand how ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics tie into one another.

  I saw your 'recommendation' to read about Hume further up the comment chain. Respectfully, I know more than you.

As an exercise in knowledge and observation, who 'recommended' Hume up thread, and to wHume are you replying?

Nice catch. Those passwords-as-usernames got me :)

No drama, gave me a chuckle & I'm glad you took it well; my primary motivation was to alert you in case you wanted to change up your response, etc.

Hume might have enjoyed this past century's Dialetheism of Graham Priest and Richard Sylvan as a solution to paradox arising from strict rationalism, it's more probable Hume would have lacked any passion for it.

To be exact a little under 40% believe in special creation - the mainstream Christian position (and more common even in the US) is that evolution is part of God's creation.

The US is very odd, not only in having large numbers of members of creationist churches, but also in tat a lot of members of churches that oppose creationism and Biblical literalism are quite often creationist.

The good news is that there is a downward trend in creationism.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...

That's not so odd if you take into account that a lot of US citizens trace their origins back to people that left Europe because their beliefs were conflicting with those of the established churches. And because the established churches did not have a strong presence in the United States (or actually, its predecessor) these suddenly found themselves to be the dominant religion in sometimes much larger regions than they ever could have hoped for back in the home country. And when the population boomed so did their numbers.

It explains how it came about but not entirely why it persisted. It is also interesting that it has influenced the views of members of the established churches in the US.

I am not saying its unexplained, just that I do not understand it personally (I really do not understand the American culture and society at all well).

There are people that believe in flat-earth. Not entirely sure why it persists.

There's a difference of holding firm in one's existing belief/understanding and not just changing the beliefs as the winds change, but only with strong compelling evidence. It's entirely different when that evidence is presented in multiple forms and yet one still chooses to ignore it.

Flat-earthers are very few. You only really see them on social media where rage bait and fake stupidity get engagement.

A close family member does not believe in evolution. No amount of evidence will suffice. People can get closed minded around the weirdest things.

I think that background also helped entrench outspoken religiosity in US culture.

There's also the dynamics of having lots of variants of Christianity competing for attention (perfect for the age of televangelism) versus Europeans losing faith in established churches

Lack of evidence is not the same as contradictory evidence.

Could you point to any literature on evidence that refutes creationism? I'm not saying there isn't any. I'm just admitting my ignorance of it. Please enlighten me.

Falsifiability is pretty important here. What evidence could, in theory, refute creationism?

Reminds me. On a Greyhound cross country trip, I got seated next to this pretty, well dressed, middle aged lady, that poor college student me, hardly ever saw on such trips. We start chatting and she tells me she is a Ghost Hunter. I took her at face value due previous experiences with real freaky characters on Greyhound, and was thinking oh great here we go again, thank you Greyhound, going to be stuck for hours next to another very strange kook. That kind of put me off further conversation. Then she starts taking out her papers to read, and says - want to see something weird? Shows me all sorts of stuff about different haunted houses. And I was just blown away by how well organized and detailed everything was. Later on she told me she was a PI doing investigations for real estate companies. But for a while it felt like I was sitting next to Scully reading X-Files.

You're saying real estate companies actually pay people to investigate "haunted" houses?

That's crazy

I don't think so. In my state you get a few days to do a "neighborhood review." If you, as a prospective buyer, walk around to all your potential neighbors and they start telling you about all the ghost stories and freaky stuff that happens in your house at night, you'll probably pull your offer. In aggregate there's money lost. And where there's money lost, there are people trying to fill those gaps.

> I would not be 100% surprised if people in the future accepted things like 'ghost experiences' as normal things.

Even if the experiences becomes accepted (although i think it unlikely) but not necessarily as really being what people who believe in ghosts think them to be.

it is quite common for things to turn out to be real observations but not to be what the observers thought they were (e.g. flying saucers).

If militaries around the world are not using it, it is probably not real. See also telekinesis or ESP experiments the US Army performed [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...

"Science advances one funeral at a time.”

Max Planck

Which is ironic since Max Planck experienced a staggering amount of change in science that did not require anyone dying, took place over just a few decades here and there, and was extremely fruitful.

Born 1858, died 1947, pretty much everything known about anything changed somewhat in that time period, and he was literally part of a lot of it, and helped convince people and change their minds without them dying.

Almost like the quote is utter bullshit.

Almost like its a colloquial phrase of Plancks writings, that represents how the quantum revolution played out for so many people.

If people in the "correct" class are having trouble, that means it's not entirely classism. Only the additional trouble the people in the "wrong" class have is because of classism.

Dunno if it's classism so much that if you look at reports of odd waves or lights it's going to be really hard to filter the signal from the noise of people saying odd stuff. Photos are much better.

The problem is they never even tried to look before. Just hand waved that it was impossible and they knew better. Like bees can't fly.

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