Readit NewsWhich is great… that's why I don't use chatGPT at all, having a LLM summary + a list of websites to deepen the search if I need, is just a superior user experience IMO.
Been a while since I read it, so I have to ask: Does it? What stood out to me was criticism of skepticism.
> It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.
I agree, yet I will note that he goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and then criticize it. He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic. The Descartes quote is in the book as well.
Put another way: He was a skeptical person, but he did not ascribe to "skepticism".
One thing I was pleasantly surprised to find in the book was an inclination to believe certain things to be true that many skeptics will refuse to entertain due to the lack of evidence. The only example I can recall was that back (and other) pain is often entirely psychosomatic. He didn't invoke John Sarno, but he showed clear openness to believing it. It wasn't a simple "I must have an open mind, so I must consider this as a possibility", but an actual assertion of his belief in it given recent findings. He gives a rationale on why it is a reasonable thing to believe.
(Sidenote: I have a lot of pain, and Sarno's approach did nothing for me)
> He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and criticize it.
Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also maintained that you can't have effective science without skepticism.
> He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.
I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be thought of only as a skeptic," I am not sure if that is a complete departure from your intent.
The details are in the blog post. Basically, every skeptic community I've looked at has espoused the very behavior that Carl Sagan criticizes in the book. Very dismissive and arrogant folks. There's a reason he explicitly calls out the skeptic community.
I did put this disclaimer though - I don't want this discussion to degrade into a no true Scotsman fallacy:
> Or at least, visible and vocal skeptics I run across on the Internet. An argument could be made that these are the minority and not really representative of the majority of people who ascribe to skepticism.
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2. Because you're a fan of Occam's razor, can you take your razor and say "Shucks, this guy Luis Elizondo was confirmed as a legitimate knowledgeable operator by former senate majority leader Harry Reid, a member of gang of eight, privy to the most classified intelligence in the United States, full stop, there isn't a higher position except for the president of the united states. This guy Dave Grusch has as his lawyer the former inspector general of the US intelligence communities. For some reason he's also outlining a scenario where we know about non human intelligences and they pose a serious existential threat to humanity, that's odd. Ah, well, can't be anything!"? The thing is, something deeply, deeply, deeply odd is going on and the shape of the leaks (something you should LOVE if you love Occam and 'debunking', because you've already predicted leaks in your no conspiracies modality) is consistent and absolutely disturbing, concerning, and a clear matter worthy of sustained attention. Why are all of these people at the highest level of our government talking about this? You're not at all concerned or curious, you're merely drifting through life, confident you passively have the answers? I find this incredible.
3. The US government hasn't kept the secret, as explicated. Just like the nuclear program, certain things have leaked.
4. If you continue to see mounting credible operators repeating the same story with absolutely no curiosity, no desire to know more, certainty that the entire thing is impossible or somehow debunked due to your meager cognitive abilities and patterns of thought that you don't even own, I don't know what to tell you. It's literally impossible for you to come across this information because you've immunized yourself to it. The fact that it's here and we're facing an overwhelming, nauseating story from the highest levels of government is worthy of serious consideration and we do not require your assessment to make that basic, obvious determination.
>If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.
Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.
If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.
Nobody denies David Grusch is exactly who he says he is with the access he says he had. His lawyer was the former inspector general of the intelligence community for God's sake.
I find "conspiracies can't be true" a tiresome point. Any secret is a conspiracy and many are kept. Are the technical details of the F-47 or nuclear physics not true because these secrets have been kept? Nuclear physics have been classified and protected for going on 90 years now.
You can transform your claim to accommodate this, but it becomes suspicious.
If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?
I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?
If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.
Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?
I think maybe beef would be more expensive, in a more-just world; Though of course I sympathize with restaurant owners.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef#Environmental_impact