
Here comes pseudolaw, a weird little cousin of pseudoscience - smacktoward
https://aeon.co/ideas/here-comes-pseudolaw-a-weird-little-cousin-of-pseudoscience
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YeGoblynQueenne
>> Nobody responds well to being told what to believe, so vilifying the gurus
will often only hurt your credibility with their followers.

Which is funny, because ultimately, the people who fall for that kind of idea
are not "thinking for themselves" as they often say- they're still,
ultimately, trusting someone else to tell them what is true. They just choose
to place their trust in crackpots and charlatans, who don't know what they're
talking about or are actively deceitful, rather than listen to recognised
experts.

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netcan
I have friends who I have witnessed converting to flat earth-ism _and_ anti-
vax-ism.

I am perplexed by the whole thing, because any thoughts you are likely to have
(stupid people, trolls..) are wrong. It's just hard to form/adopt any kind of
theory of the phenomenon.

At its core I think Scientism is a good name for it, because it does seem
somewhat similar to Marxism (in particular) and Freudianism, the "theories"
Karl Popper and F. Hayek had in mind when they coined these terms.

I usually have opinions and theories about _everything._ I have nothing here.
No idea what's going on, other than a suspicion paranoia is plays a role.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> I am perplexed by the whole thing, because any thoughts you are likely to
have (stupid people, trolls..) are wrong.

I know. I've struggled with that kind of thing too. Educated, intelligent
people who are competent and successful professionals will suddendly start
spouting madness like anti-vaxxer propaganda and refuse to vaccinate their
kids etc. I've had some heated arguments that made some people upset that I
really didn't want to make upset and now when they start, I just shut up and
stare at my plate awkwardly, like. It's not like I want to win any arguments.
It's just, educated people should not talk bollocks like "vaccines cause
autism". It's just not right. It's like listening to your mother describe her
favourite porn or something, it's ...disturbing.

I don't know how to deal with that. It just ends up making me doubt myself.
Like, if I can't trust education to help me figure out what's true and what's
crackpot nonsense, then what?

~~~
rstuart4133
> if I can't trust education to help me figure out what's true and what's
> crackpot nonsense, then what?

You sound young.

When I was born was no TV, no IVF, no RU-286, no drones hunting down foreign
soldiers, no trolling on social media, no Cambridge Analytica, no Facebook to
take my privacy, no camera on every street corner, no face recognition,
nuclear power was going to be too cheap to metre, no climate change theory and
as a consequence no education telling me how to deal with any of those things.
Yet when I look around most people have a similar ethical compass to me on
those things. Obviously we didn't acquire it by trusting education.

