The true believers would simply refuse to watch the videos, self-rationalising them as too negative, or "overly" skeptical. Even if they did see them, they'd tell themselves that whoever failed was simply a fake or self-deluded, whereas it's different for their own power(s). The irony is profound, but so is their own self-delusion.
At the risk of derailing this thread I'll just mention a couple of things here. Firstly I'll reiterate the point that I know the "true believers" are pretty much a lost cause, but I was addressing "Dawkins' third of the population" that is reachable - like myself.
I'd also suggest that a video of such a demonstration is almost by definition not meant for public consumption, without the express permission of the participants. Airing such material without their consent would be unacceptable, as it would be a breach of their privacy (at least in my opinion).
I was under the impression that anyone could go to the JREF and dig up that sort of info anyway. But if Randi doesn't have the legal right to air that material, I personally wish he would add a clause in the application that enables him to - especially in this era of Youtube.
Maybe he could start his own website called the Boobtube. How about the Rubetube? The Self-deludetube?
... uh, okay, I'll stop now.
Personally, I wouldn't enjoy watching these people make fools out of themselves; I'd feel too embarrassed on their behalf. Given our shared human nature, it's only too easy to empathise: could we ourselves have fallen into a similar delusion, if our own life paths hadn't included whatever education or revelation got us into being able to exercise critical thinking?
Actually, I have to do a little backpedal here and admit that Neal Adams and I weren't so different before I became a skeptic. I guess it's like a reformed smoker getting on his high horse with other smokers - sorry.
Also since he's a member of the forum, it may be inappropriate to be overly direct with some of my opinions, (God, I hope Tom Cruise isn't a member here too).
Like Neal, I have a creative streak that tends to lend itself to freely hypothesising and I've been involved in perpetual motion/free energy/anti-gravity, religious study, network marketing, self-help, and various other nonsense.
It seems to be a double edge sword - an academic nature combined with a creative one and you can come up with a counter-intuitive hypothesis like Special Relativity just as easily as The Expanding Earth Theory.
The difference of course is going the next step and actually checking to see if your hypothesis actually measures up against reality - no matter how good it sounds.
This is the keystone I was missing all this time. I mean I knew intellectually that this was how science was actually done - but somehow still didn't fully appreciate the resounding implications of that method, along with the almost unfathomable ability of human beings to delude themselves.
Funny, because even then I had the notion that higher intelligence was a property requiring the following in ascending order:
1. Memory.
2. The ability to notice patterns.
3. The ability to discern real patterns from false patterns.
In other words remembering facts, (no matter the quantity), doesn't make you particularly clever - but it's a start, and ultimately a basic requirement.
Noticing patterns is something I, (and I suspect Neal), have in spades. This resulted in an ability to extrapolate from minimal information further conclusions, (some quite complex), a portion of which actually turn out to be right.
This is the kind of person who goes down to the patent office every week with an idea he just thought up, to discover it is not a new idea at all. Still, you could pat him on the back for deriving it from scratch himself - especially if it has proven to be a perfectly useful invention in the meantime.
As an example of this, I can cite several examples from my own life.
While learning the basics of logic gates in electronics class I reinvented the half bit adder, (I didn't set out to do it, the idea just came to me unbidden - in fact I pretty much can't learn anything new without my brain automatically churning out ideas based on the new information combined with what's already in memory - my blessing and my curse). I showed the teacher before the the class the next day, which just happened to be on the half-bit adder. Naturally he assumed I had been reading ahead.
No, I didn't call my idea the same thing either.
Experiences like this gave me confidence in my abilities, (and might I say an unhealthy intellectual ego to go with it), even though I can now see I was just as often wrong. Simply another case of counting the hits and ignoring the misses.
This ego led me to believe that my "theories", (as I called them at the time - which were of course in reality only hypotheses), possibly superseded conventional science.
As I have described, an artistic person really does "see" a bit further ahead a lot of the time. I mean they actually do "see" things other people don't and they tend to learn very quickly, (just my subjective perception). This became very much apparent to me and other people from a young age. I was at the top of all my classes, a year younger than my peers, and often right about pretty much everything most of the time, (again the intellectual ego).
My IQ as far as I can ascertain is actually only about 138, (a figure I would love to exaggerate if only just slightly, since Genius officially starts at 140), but like I say, coupled with an artistic imagination you seem to get a bit of a, "Da Vinci style", edge when it comes to academic pursuits.
Ah, Da Vinci - my goddamned hero. Pity I didn't notice that he actually used the scientific method as well, and actually tested his ideas.
For myself though - I considered the hypothesising the "fun" part, and would quickly lose interest in practical applications. As far as I was concerned, my work was over. I got the emotional buzz of knowing I'd solved the problems of mankind, and one day I might get around to building that free energy device. Besides, I was onto the next idea anyway.
What I am trying to say is, Neal, and others might actually make good real scientists one of these days if we can just get through to them. They have genuine ability, they are just missing a relatively simple key component.
Sorry for crapping on off topic - but I have come to love talking about the stupid things I've done in the past - and the stupid beliefs I held. I ditched the intellectual ego years ago when it became obvious that working my butt off just so I could beat everyone I knew in chess wasn't any kind of life to lead.
I'm certainly not the smartest guy in the world, and I'm certainly no genius, but I am highly intelligent academically, I am creative, and I can contribute to intellectual discussion. And I wish Neal could too.
Exploration of a Delusion.
It's my intention to talk further about my spectacular non-skeptical career later on in some other dedicated threads, but I thought you might enjoy learning about the mental process involved in this kind of thing. Here's one of my invention ideas, the "Inertia Engine", (naturally I never got around to actually building it).
Oh yeah, one of the cool things about coming up with this kind of stuff is you get to think up really cool names for things. Which you do before you have the actual device naturally. :roll:
I got the idea once watching an out of balance washing machine. I thought: This thing is rocking back and fourth because it's got more wet clothes in one side. Now if I were like that superhero the Flash, and I could grab it after it kicks to the left, and flip it upside down at super-speed, then when it kicked back to the right it would be upside down and kick to the left again. If I kept repeating the process, flipping it over and over each time, it would move to the left continuously.
So I designed this to smooth out the jerky motions and simplify the idea.
The dark blue cylinders are electric motors - one on each side for balance rotating together. The red ball is a lead weight. The rest is just frame work that's pretty self-explanatory.
The idea is that the motors on the gimbal and the motors rotating the weight rotate with exactly the same period. If you look closely you'll notice that instead of rotating back past 180º the second half of the rotation ends up on the same side of the device.
If you look from the front you would see the weight going in a figure 8 - supposedly cancelling out any directional motion, If you look from the side you would see it trace a circle/ellipse, once again cancelling in all directions. But if you looked down from the top you would see the weight trace a bell curve from left to right and back again. This, in the perpetual motion universe where centrifugal force exists, should propel the "engine" forward in that direction.
This is the entirety of the "mathematical calculations" about which I would speak, "proving", that it works.
Well actually to be fair, I exaggerate slightly. I was never a far-gone true believer, so I had hopes more than certainty. But I do feel certain now that the thoroughness of my "calculations" is pretty much on par with anyone else working on a perpetual motion machine.
Personally, I would still love to build this thing just to see what happens and prove to myself that nothing happens - because intuitively it's so damn neat - this is what I still find interesting about perpetual motion/free energy devices, and why I still think they are fertile ground to kick ideas around in, (as long as you are not selling shares or taking it too seriously).
I actually thought such a simple idea must have been thought of before so I worried that black helicopters would be over my house and NSA agents beating down my door if I told anyone, because this is obviously how a UFO works. Besides, I don't want everyone running down the patent office with my gazillion dollar idea either.
Yes I actually thought this. I think this is why perpetual motion/free energy is a area of whack-jobbery that people tend to descend into - they feel they can't openly discuss it, and so just like a religious cult they are cut off from people who could help them face reality.
Ironically, now I wouldn't care if someone did make a gazillion dollars off one of my ideas - at least it might get into consumer production within my lifetime, so at least I could
buy something cool like this.
But in the end, stuff like this isn't that simple is it? It would be great to have the old Star Trek impulse drives that don't need anything to push against. And also only use the amount of energy required to move, (pretty much 100% efficiency).
And this is the kind of thing you spend the rest of your time thinking about in whackville. Thinking of all the great uses for your invention, and how it will save lives and improve the lot of mankind, (when you're not busy writing you Nobel Prize acceptance speech that is).
Also you start refining the design when you don't even have a working model. It's similar to functionality creep in so many ways - something I coincidently, (or not so coincidently), suffer from terribly when I write computer programs.
I should point out that most people doing this probably have the same noble intentions as I, despite the egregious delusion involved.
Like I say, it would be nice to see what an obviously intelligent, imaginative and "science-philic" person like Neal Adams might
really accomplish in his life, but alas.
I just reread that - Jesus Christ I can crap on!
Maybe Steve should add a category for long rambling verbosity in a single post on the SGTTU Forum. I'm a shoe-in.
