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I guess this would be unethical as a skeptic, but it's tempting...

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believeitornot:
I just read another article about the growing market for esotericism here in Germany. Of course, what we really want to do is enlighten people and get rid of this BS, but in reality the demand is there and many people in these times of comparable peace and prosperity are just hard-wired for superstition and will buy into some of it no matter what. And constitutions usually (for good reasons) place restrictions on how much governments can regulate and prosecute things that cause no obvious harm.

So I wonder if it might be a good idea to use all the availible resources of psychology and marketing research to create very competitive simliar products yourself and sell them professionally - with all the proceeds going into a science foundation to be used to fund real research. Kind of like the lottery proceeds in some northern European countries going to foreign aid. It could even be advertised to be used for cancer research or similar.

It's a slippery slope of legitimizing this stuff, of course, but it might do more good than harm in the end. I think the skeptic's ultimate goal of getting rid of all the voodoo is unrealistic anyway, given our brain chemistry. What do you think?

ting-bu-dong:

--- Quote from: believeitornot on Jul 24, 2012, 07:51:18 AM ---I think the skeptic's ultimate goal of getting rid of all the voodoo

--- End quote ---

I think that's a bad goal to set. It's like we occasionally convict innocent people, therefore the legal system is a failure. What matters is moving in the right direction, which is to make more people think about their beliefs in factual terms and to be aware of the arguments against things like pseudoscience and alternative medicine. Some people will always be believers, and some will always be skeptics, but there is an enormous middle ground of people who have never even heard the skeptical point of view. So throwing in the towel is way premature in my opinion.

believeitornot:
All right, not a good idea about the goal. But I'm not proposing to throw in the towel, but to channel some of the money going to this nonsense into productive things like research. I see this as a win-win, as it eats away off the charlatan's market share while simultaniously funding research. Wouldn't it be great if some of the money made from selling homeopathic "remedies" went to Alzheimer research or similar?

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