Academia as gatekeepers

submitted by [deleted] from (self.conspiracy)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Alienhunter 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Problem is conspiracy theorists aren't actually down with academic rigors a lot of the time. I don't get the the academics that are totally scared of dealing with conspiracy theories like they are pathetic children unable criticize an argument, but it definitely gets to the point where people who believe in a conspiracy will believe that any evidence that disproves the conspiracy has been tampered with by those who wish to propagate the conspiracy and therefore at least to them they won't really go along with normal academic discussions and try to dictate everything go along their own terms.

It is similar to arguing with creationists, creationists , and not that everyone doesn't have biases and engage in this sort of thing from time to time, but especially in their case, they are doing science somewhat backwards. Instead of drawing a conclusion from the evidence, they are drawing evidence from a conclusion. They believe the Bible must be true as an absolute statement and that any conclusion that disagrees must be false so their evidence supporting their positions becomes heavily biased towards cherry picking out those arguments that appear to support them while conveniently ignoring evidence that doesn't. Or in some cases inventing convoluted mechanisms by which fairly obvious phenomenon such as the propagation speed of light can somehow be compressed into a week long timespan which doesn't satisfy Occam's razor compared to the simpler explanation that shit just takes a long time.

Similar to the issue with epicycles in the geocentric model. It's a perfectly serviceable model that explains the world well, it's a scientifically developed and testable model. But it's "wrong" in the sense there's a much simpler model if you just shift perspective.

Conspiracy theorists tend to argue in similar ways and you do have the spineless academic cowards that somehow can't be asked with a debate, but the same goes for the conspiracy theorists since they like to play at the "we aren't allowed on colleges" but actually they can't defend a lot of positions without getting destroyed. Conspiracy theories especially may be "true" in a lot of senses but they specifically lack evidence that make them provable in any academic environment. Naturally since once there exists sufficient evidence a conspiracy theory is true it's no longer a theory is it?

[–]cars 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

It's the same thing with people who say "We don't entertain the words of bigots because anything they say is obviously driven by hate". Unfortunately, academia is filled with that kind of people.

[–]Alienhunter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I find that interacting with the crazy sign wavers is rarely of any benefit but I won't begrudge their right to wave a sign around while screaming.

Beyond that it's just a kind of intellectual laziness to refuse to approach difficult topics. I've had productive discussions with self-professed Nazis before because I'm not worried about their ideological position, I think it's flawed, I'll tell them why I think it's flawed, and they can either disagree with me, agree with me, or get angry and storm off. But you'll really get some of these academic types in a tizzy and see them go down an emotional virtue signalling display when you ask them to clarify basic positions. Genocide is wrong. I agree, most everyone agrees. But why is genocide wrong? That's an interesting discussion. But just floating the question will trigger people because it means they have to think about it for more than two seconds. They also don't like economic arguments like "it's expensive to kill people" since they see it as dehumanizing even though everyone in the room is in agreement already that genocide is morally wrong. And if for some reason you get some idiot that actually is legitimately pro genocide as self destructive socially as such an argument is, it's important to actually have these discussions otherwise society will simply be unable to defend against genocidal movements in the future. Logical dispassionate arguments are important because they are one of the few things that can cut through emotional hysteria towards true conclusions.