Senior Skeptic Michael Shermer has a look at the many delusions afflicting too many people, "from alien encounters to Virgin Mary sightings on pizza pies, to hidden messages revealed while playing "Stairway to Heaven" backwards - and explains the evolutionary and cognitive basis for these lapses in reason."TED has the video. Robin gets the hat tip.
LINKS: Skeptic founder Michael Shermer on TEDTalks - TED Blog
RELATED: Science, Nonsense, Philosophy
4 comments:
PC, have you read Shermer's book Why People Believe Weird Things? He devotes a chapter to Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, describing them as a cult, and analysing why such a committed group formed around Rand.
Heh. Ayn Rand and the Objectivists. Sounds like a band. :-)
Oh yeah. I might need to read it again and see how it now stacks up, but reading it at the time it came out I thought the people he was referring to largely deserved what he said.
That said, of course, Rand's epistemology is just what the Sceptics themselves need.
I heard Michael Shermer in a debate recently where he opened with a joke/jibe at the Muslim Muhammed cartoon stupidity. He's got a good sense of humour:
"Did you hear about the nasty incident last week involving 5000 rioting atheists in Denmark?
They stormed the office of a Danish newspaper on reports that 12 pieces of blank paper were found on a cartoonist's desk"...
I take it you've never listened to "Stairway to Heaven" backwards.
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