Complex Numbers

Top Bunk

One today from someone at my alma mater

https://aeon.co/essays/is-debunking-more-about-the-truth-teller-than-the-truth

Debunking debunked
Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before

What's not clear is that the goal was ever to make us "any less credulous than before."

Just as you can deworm a puppy, you can debunk a religious practice, a pyramid scheme, a quack cure. Get rid of the nonsense, and the polity – just like the puppy – will fare better. Con men will be deprived of their innocent marks, and the world will take one more step in the direction of modernity.

Read articles like this one, and the world will take one more step in the direction of postmodernity.

What we should imagine instead of an impartial skeptic is a person who gets a charge out of being the rational member of the exchange – someone who is drawn, for reasons that might or might not be clear to him or her, and that are probably difficult to articulate, to the drama of unmasking.

"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for these meddling kids!"

There's really a lot more here, so much that my choice is to either quote it excessively or leave it at that. I'm choosing the latter because I'm lazy. But to summarize my takeaway from it, as I understand it, the author turns debunking into a social exchange, and skewers the idea of "modernity" (as defined by her) throughout. One could even say she debunks it.

My rebuttal? While it's not always easy -- or even possible -- to ascertain the truth of a situation, I think it's important to try. I agree that sometimes people go too far, perhaps by ascribing ill intentions to those they're trying to debunk. Maybe that's not clear; let me give you an example.

I had a friend who's a chiropractor. She spent many, many years at a school learning how to chiropract. It's her job and she makes a decent living at it, last time I checked. Meanwhile, many people consider chiropractic to be nonsense, a thing to be debunked. Someone like that might accuse my friend of lying, turning it on her instead of the practice itself. But she's not lying; she actually believes in what she's doing. Whether it's promoting falsehood or not, in her mind, it's truth. So no, she's not intentionally deceiving anyone, and I'm pretty sure that it would hurt her a great deal to be accused of being a con woman.

As for me, from what I can tell, there's some benefit to chiropractic, but many chiropractors' knee-jerk rejection of "allopathic medicine" is dangerous and a rejection of evidence-based treatments. Obviously, this didn't mean that we couldn't be friends, but it's not like her way would have helped me when I had a heart attack.

Sure did help with my back pain, though. (And yes, I'm aware that's anecdotal and not actual scientific evidence that it works, but that's not the reason I'm relating this.)

Point is, this article has issues, and if you want to debunk it yourself, go for it. Me, I'm going to have another beer.