RE: What's worst: god, horoscope or homeopathy?
June 6, 2015 at 12:16 pm
(This post was last modified: June 6, 2015 at 12:57 pm by Pyrrho.)
(June 6, 2015 at 4:54 am)robvalue Wrote: Yes, no, maybe, 42
Would people class alien conspiracies as "woo"? I don't think I would, because it's not an appeal to the intangible, but rather to the improbable. I don't mean like we're all aliens or something, but just that aliens have landed here and stuff, and we've taken their ships and hid them. All that. And abductions, I suppose.
I don't think "woo" has a precise definition (not for this kind of use, anyway), so I am not interested in the question of whether belief in alien abductions is woo or not. But believing in it is something that only crazy, stupid people do. So in that way, it is, if anything, worse than belief in a god. Belief in a god is indoctrinated into children, whereas, typically, adults adopt crazy beliefs about abductions more or less on their own.
To put this another way, you can be more sure that someone is either crazy or stupid (or both) if they believe in alien abductions, than you can be sure that someone is crazy or stupid for being a Christian.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
