Comic Strips

Could've been mid March as well

Time of year athletes were born correlates with hockey performance or something right?

I’ve tried to use a fact like that to bridge the gap between me and those who like astrology.

In absolute terms, Boomers didn't get more conservative as they aged, they got more liberal. Just at a much slower rate than the younger generations.

Hello there, my amphibian friend! You're the first other frog I've seen on here :)

I'm sure Mr. Wilson would indeed. I was not familiar with him until your mention, and upon researching him briefly, I would hedge that Sagan (and certainly myself) would disagree with him as well.

Firstly, I would ask how, or rather who, determines what misinformation is worth advising against and what isn't? The relative harm of astrology is indeed low compared to say, Capitalism, but then again, the effort to write my initial comment was also low. I don't expect it to do much, but on the off chance it steers someone away from magical thinking, it was worth writing.

As to why I would disagree with Wilson: I could never subscribe to his concept of trying to get people to become 'agnostic about everything' because the minute you take a hard stand on a single thing, you discover that to be agnostic about everything is just harmful. I think it's good to be open-minded, and I'm not one of the dogmatic religious-level scientific fanatic he describes who blindly follow the AMA or any other scientific institution that insists they have everything figured out and demands you not question the sacred gospels, but his method seems like the ultimate cop-out: "We can't truly know anything with certainty, so it's all possibly right, just with different probabilities!"

I don't buy into that one bit, because otherwise one could use such a worldview to justify saying "Hmm... I guess maybe eugenics could be right? I'll give it a low probability, but can't be too sure!"

It also could be used to justify belief in Scientology, literally any debunked scientific theory, climate change denial, radical religions, etc.

I think it far healthier to have an open-mind to new concepts that can be proven good, and to have an active and healthy skepticism for anything that makes claims without evidence. But that's just my 2 cents.

I should mention that I don't mean to strawman your argument, as you didn't mention Wilson's 'agnostic' concept, but that seems to be at the heart of this philosophy, and why he prescribed to mysticism and would likely find astrology harmless.

ngl I blame physicists who communicate to the public for this

Notice how you always see a lot of nonsense mysticism around quantum mechanics like "quantum healing" but you never see anything along the lines of like "general relativity healing" or "inflation theory healing."

The difference is that often it is the physicists themselves who choose to communicate to the public who paint quantum mechanics in a mystical light. Indeed, this is not even something unique to the physicists who communicate to the public, you can sometimes even run into it in peer-reviewed publications painting QM as a theory that somehow puts conscious observers front and center and questions the existence of objective reality, or whatever rubbish philosophy people try to imbue onto some linear algebra.

The ones who communicate to the public just are often worse because they don't tell you QM as it really is, they usually tell you some personal theory they have. For example, rather than just describing how QM works, one of these science communicators might tell you their personal theory about how there's a grand multiverse, or that "consciousness" plays some sort of role, and that explains why QM works. They do not just present the theory, but their own personal speculation as an underlying explanation for it.

Because physicists themselves promote all this mysticism around a bunch of linear algebra, you end up with mystics and charlatans who realize that they can take advantage of this by talking about mystical nonsense like "quantum healing." Sure, it might be nonsensical rubbish, but the person who hears about "quantum healing" also heard a real PhD physicist tell them about multiverses and "consciousness," so they think there must be something to it as well. It gives the mysticism an air of legitimacy.

We like to kid ourselves that the mysticism is just promoted by your Deepak Chopra types or laymen who have no idea what they're talking about. But if you actually look at what a real academic philosophy department publishes, there is mysticism all throughout academic philosophy. These philosophers have also had a big impact on physicists, who often adopt these mystical attitudes they learn from the philosophy department into their own discussion, and sometimes even into their own publications.

If you actually talk to the laymen who are deeply enthralled by those quantum mystic pseudoscience charlatans, they usually can point you to multiple real academics who back their beliefs, people with legitimate credentials. This is a problem nobody seems to address and it annoys the hell out of me. Everyone paints either the charlatans or the laymen as the bad guy here, but nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is the rampant mysticism in academia.

I literally argued with a PhD physicist the other day who was going around preaching to people that quantum mechanics proves that there is no physical reality and we all live inside of a "cosmic consciousness." I did not get very far with him because he just insulted me and pointed to academic philosophers who agreed with him and said I'm stupid for even questioning his claims, and then wouldn't address my criticisms.

Boomers are actually an amazing example of how a cohort's shared experiences can shape their collective psychology. The cohort was born into a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and as such are unable to understand the problems of their children.