I think it's really super-common for people to engage in really sloppy, and even superstitious thinking. We only tend to call it the later on a content basis but the fundamental principles are there just as much there when the fairies are absent and it can relate to beliefs about science, consciousness, politics, and all kinds of other things - and unfortunately the later tend not to fall under quite as much scrutiny.
Lintar wrote:
Except that's not how they're made. The usual method of "debunking" this phenomenon is to use a wooden plank with string attached, and to press down the grain (or grass or whatever) by going in a circle, but this just doesn't work for even the simplest of designs (i.e. circles) because the process causes breaks in the stems. Examination of the evidence after the appearance of a design within the wheatfield (and do recall that the vast majority are rather more complicated than just simple circles) shows that the grain/wheat/whatever was subjected to heat. That is, they were bent, not snapped at the base.
I think that's a good example of where people are so committed to their viewpoints that one can't even get the air cleared on what the actual facts are. Consequently if something tantamount to an Escher shows up in the middle of a field and there's heat-warping and nanodiamonds or whatever in the stalks you have these idiots suggesting that three guys came out in the wee hours with wooden planks and made perfect artwork of several acres in the matter of a couple hours.
The strange belief seems to be that if it isn't men (or men and women, men women and theys, etc.) with wood planks and rope then it's either green men or God. Even if it were all man-made the people who are pushing that explanation are the worst people to explain anything to anyone, ie. they're generally the kinds of churls who jump to the side of whatever looks like the most popular or salient viewpoint of the time and use that as a place from which to lambaste anyone whose different - that is they're not high quality thinkers at all, they're just borrowing the authority of high-quality thinkers for their own purposes.
I think it's by that sort of mechanism that fake news survives - ie. the maverick and outsider types for as few as they are will often be of rare high quality because they have to be to survive (a great example is to consider what kinds of things Jacques Vallee would have to say on the crop circles, most people would pretend he didn't say it and ask him to talk more about computer science which is his other core competency), reality is messy enough that you can make very compelling arguments from almost anywhere, so their content - even if wrong - will tend to be high quality and, for the slop on the other side, tends not to get anything close to the quality of criticism that would be needed to make it go away. Also this means that if it turns out that their right - no one will know because no one was willing to take a serious shot at their arguments and see if they held up. The orthodoxy will generally be saturated with posers to the point that the whole edifice will start looking as coherent and scientific as VICE or Buzzfeed, Bill Nye might make a few passing jokes, at best someone like Massimo Pigliucci might chime in and say that he's never researched the topic but as far as he can tell they're BS (we appreciate his candor in admitting he hasn't), and from there no coherent dialectic can even be had because orthodoxy can't get together the right people to make their opponent's best case and dismantle it.
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