1/4 of us now think Apollo was Fake News?!?

5 responses to “1/4 of us now think Apollo was Fake News?!?”

1. 

   gsikich1

   Sep 11, 2019 at 6:37 pm

   Wow. Amazing that this is the case. Thanks for the useful information that you provided here in your write-up. Can I cite this in a future article that I am now considering writing?

   Reply
2. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 11, 2019 at 10:57 pm

   Sure!

   If “critical thinking” comes naturally from the scientific method, "magical thinking" flourishes in counterpoint.

   For most of human history, there was little to no progress. Almost no progress in a human lifetime.

   That was before the scientific method.

   Reply
3. 

   gsikich1

   Sep 11, 2019 at 11:34 pm

   [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson] Good points. It will be interesting to develop this article and focus it on how perception based on a media driven society reacts to facts that, while proven, are open to speculation and disbelief.

   Reply
4. 

   jurvetson

   Sep 12, 2019 at 4:22 pm

   Please share when you post it. Thx.
   Also, maybe of interest, I have had a couple of deep dive dialogs on Facebook:

   1) The fifth comment has a huge sub-thread on a "moonfaker" trying to defend the argument that rover photos were faked to make the range of that EV look 3x better than it really is. I try to button him down on a precise claim… and it’s mind-blowing, at least to me.

   2) A philosophical reflection that really got me thinking, and I’ll paste that here (it is public there too):

   Paul Jeffries: These views aren’t just ignorance (in the literal sense of not having knowledge), so they can’t be addressed by simply informing people of the truth.

   The issues run much deeper. It’s a matter of epistemology, and a mindset where the priorities are about personal needs, more than knowledge which is inherently abstracted or depersonalized. The virtues of the scientific enlightenment, materialist mindset that is at issue are seen as unappealing by the people who reject “science”. They aren’t rubes who would believe science if only they heard the right claims; they’ve heard them. They fancy themselves as insightful resistors who seek a deeper truth.

   If people feel disenfranchised, marginalized, hopeless, and feel that authority is suspect because it’s always been an instrument of oppression, they’re going to look for hidden truths (such as astrology) and ways to upset stagnation (such as political contrarianism). At the very least they’ll be disinterested in things that don’t seem to pertain to their own lives or questions or suffering or striving.

   Similarly, they know that Trump “lies”; they think it’s epistemological jazz and his statements are code speak for a deeper truth. They are operational statements, not propositional ones. They won’t stop supporting Trump because you show them some “fact”, and they won’t stop trying to resist authoritarian oppression by ideology (as they see it) because you try to erase the sense that the world has meaning and purpose (as they seek it) by declaring scientific materialism and evolution.

   Ironically (for those who are in the tech community and baffled by the statistics cited in the post), there’s a deep connection between American entrepreneurialism and resistance to received knowledge (of science or historical fact or whatnot). We’re a frontier culture of pragmatists. We reject authority in our church history. We reject theory, just as we reject fancy theology. We rejected a distant king. We rejected book learning and notions of European social class pretenses (except as it suited our attempts at justification of chattel slavery).
   It’s no accident that California in particular is the heart of innovation, where “weird” ideas that are very much not scientific materialism or received Judeo-Christian mainstream theology and metaphysics — weird spirituality —and weird art, weird communal living, weird hippy culture, on the physical frontier edge of a continent, all mix with the practical build it from nothing spirit of people who came looking for gold. No one can replicate Silicon Valley if they can’t capture the same admixture of irrationality, counterculture, anti-authoritarian experimentalism, pragmatism, commerce, autonomy, and sense that the world is to be synthesized at will, spun from whole cloth rather than an existing thing to be fought over and subdivided.

   I’m not saying that ignorance is an essential currency of innovation. But those among us, and here I am speaking for example of myself, who embrace science and education and knowledge and also embrace skepticism about authority and entrepreneurship, should realize that the qualities we leverage and instantiate have similar roots to those we think are obstacles in a very different population. We are closer than it seems.

   People who feel left behind, including by all the things we do in the tech frontier, will retreat to conservatism and skepticism and seek enlightenment in acts of revelation that feel authentic to them and are personally available and not reliant on distant authority.

   If we want to find common ground or even one day common mission, it won’t just be a matter of a slight improvement in public schools or making sure everyone somehow “hears the word” of science.

   Me: Fascinating. And worrisome, as this sounds like a self-amplifying bifurcation, creating a growing chasm of communication… to the point of mutual incoherence.

   Pulled from proscriptive moorings, both sides can fall prey to modern prophets and revealed truth (one a contrarian superhero within, the other a belief in a protocol — a externalized process for accumulating progress).

   Where is Karl Popper when we need him?

   Paul Jeffries: Yeah, I think you might be right. As I suggested, their ultimate roots are common. But there’s a self-feeding wedge of mutual incomprehension, contempt, and identity oriented around not being the other. As with politics in America too.

   I should say I glossed over a complexity. There is a species of fanciful, humanistic, ambitious anti-science among the “costal elites” that is different than what you see among, for example, fundamentalist evangelicals. The former is folks who are denizens of tech (they might even be into crypto today; back in the day they were early BBS types, for instance) but into alternative medicine, vapor trails, vaccine skepticism, 9/11 conspiracies, remembered past lives, quantum mysticism, but also transhumanism and life extension and meditation and environmentalism and veganism and whatnot. They’re an admixture of perspectives and would grant the premise of common ground for debate and aren’t necessarily a part of a bifurcation wedge relative to adherents to received knowledge.
   Those folks don’t think outside of mainstream received knowledge in the same way and for the same reasons as, say, creationist evangelicals. Although there are overlaps on things such as skepticism of the state and big business that play out as common ground on things like anti-vax.
   The blue state / red state divide is self-amplifying.
   The divides inside blue, which can include both mysticism and hyper pseudo-rationality, are perhaps more within a shared dialectic.

   On another day it would be fun to explore whether one way mass communications, and then the web, and the social media, amplified or diminished such differences, or where epiphenomenal and just shed light of differences that were always there.

   Reply
5. 

   jurvetson

   Jan 20, 2020 at 6:28 pm

   P.S. Nixon nailed it, just 2 months after this post: moondisaster.org

   Reply