April 29, 2009

Open-Mindedness

This video annoys me a lot:



Amusingly, the guy is proving his own theory of closed-mindedness by making blanket generalizations about what open-mindedness to supernatural phenomena signifies. He lumps together all advocates of supernatural phenomena as being like his retarded neighbor who sees evidence of a moving lampshade as evidence of a ghost – thereby discounting the more serious-minded research into supernatural phenomena that does exist. This is the problem with the UFO issue in that it has been overtaken by morons who’ll believe anything, overshadowing those researchers who take the subject very seriously.

I’ll agree with him that people are making retarded claims without evidence and that holding too emphatically to these ideas is a closed-minded sort of fundamentalism. But his examples of people who “believe” seem more than a little condescending and don’t take into account the actual evidence gathered together by scientifically-minded smart people. It conveniently discounts actual evidence. That’s very, I don’t know, closed-minded. Given the guy’s stance in the video, he probably doesn’t want to believe, which is the case with a lot of skeptics.

Thousands upon thousands of people have witnessed UFOs – including pilots, doctors, politicians, etc. Even if half a percent of those are true, it’s something. The video brings up a court of law, where this type of evidence wouldn’t hold water. Actually, witnesses have sent people to jail for less testimony than there is about UFOs. It tragically devalues people’s sense of perception to discount what so many have seen. The government’s explanations for these sightings is so strangely off-base (swamp gas, Venus) that it just adds more confusion. If it doesn’t exist, why have such a stupid explanation?

Open mindedness is basically just believing things are possible, even without mountains of direct evidence. Not believing these things exist, believing they’re possible. To do otherwise sucks some of the magic out of life. A world where UFOs exist is way cooler than a world without them. Denying yourself that possibility is sort of sad and sort of boring. It's a lot more fun to dream.

Well made video though.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would like to comment on your last full paragraph. I think you have a contradictory of terms and should maybe revise the post. As is stated in the video, being openminded is about the willingness to consiter new ideas, not believing in new ideas. To believe requires an amount of faith, of which scientific fact, which has been proven by experimentation, needs none. However, if in the future, that said scientific fact turns out to be untrue, based on other proven experimentation, then being openminded is the ability to consiter that the old idea was wrong based on new data.

In regards to your UFO comparison, Why do I have to believe that UFO's definitly exist until I am given proven fact that they do. By basing your conclusion that they do exist on "a half a percent" of people who have claimed to see a UFO, you are being closeminded in that you are saying someone said they saw it so then in must be true. This is an exact definition of being closeminded. If you watch the video again, you will see that openmindedness is not rejecting idea just because but rather being compitant enough to ask why and how, as well as being given physical evidence, before believing in what one states as fact.

I agree that there are those types of researchers that take this extreamly seriously, however, and again, unless they proven provide evidence that there really are UFO's, and not just someones personal account of them, it will be very hard to get the idea excepted in the scientific community.

Please, if you have a list of people who have actualy evidence that has been proven by an impartial third party to be an actualy UFO, then please include it in your post.

The other side of the coin also has to ask of the probability of other life. This is where theories come into play. A theory is an educated guess at an idea which has not yet been tested to prove that it is correct or incorrect. String Theory. Widely excepted in the scientific community, yet it stays a theory until such time as we can proove that it is either correct or is not correct. Currently, we do not posses the technology to prove nor disprove this theory based on the actual observations of strings. This can be compared to your UFO argument quite easily.

I urge you not to just make conclusions before researching more into your argument before making a claim against something that you believe. Just because you believe it does not make it true, nor does it change any of the facts that UFO's do or do not exist. Again, this is the exact definition of closemindedness and makes you look foolish in the process.

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