Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines.
But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk.
Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.
You haven't spent much time arguing with people who refuse to listen to any evidence at all, have you? The "psychological processes" you describe are, in many cases, that people will simply stick their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and say "La la la, I'm not listening!" In other words, a willful, determined refusal to listen.
It's not a matter of psychological processes, at least not for the people I've interacted with in the past. It's plain and simple refusal. They've decided that they're right, they know it, and nobody is going to tell them otherwise, darn it!
As the old quote goes (which is apparently very difficult to pin down to its origin): "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/)
P.S. Edited to add this, because I meant to write it earlier and forgot: It's just stubbornness. You can't cure stubbornness with psychoanalysis. Some people just don't want to believe in what you're trying to tell them. As the even older quote goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can lead a stubborn person to all the evidence in the world, but you can't make him think.
That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this.
In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
I'd prefer to speak about "evidence in support of/against" rather than "facts", which often conceals a presuming-the-consequent kind of fallacy.
> denial of science
Whether "science" is believed or denied by any particular person has no effect on whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence has or is visiting earth.
Demanding that "science" be believed is un-scientific. I am not drawing an equivalence between science and religion here, but pointing out that your argument is a super hand-wavey appeal to an inviolable "gospel". I'm old enough to remember when a theory like intra-galactic panspermia was regarded like canals-on-Mars.
In my view, ETI theories are lacking any credible evidence and this makes me sad.
And the facts are just ... released. It's the interpretation of the observations that are disputed. And unless you think they are all fake, the explanations that do not involve alien tech are non-trivial to say the least.
I'm not sure why you'd think there is any shared causal structure with flat earthers at all.
"UFO-crazy uncles" are known to exist. This is not an extraordinary claim. The existence of such uncles provides no evidence for or against extraterrestrial visitors or other aerial phenomena.
One can be right for bad reasons.
But they're not wrong that the stuff coming out of the back of jet aircraft is changing the climate.
Small, localized weather engineering programs have long been real (cloud seeding), and planetary-scale climate engineering projects are now openly discussed by governments. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering "Types of solar geoengineering techniques include: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) – adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) to reflect incoming sunlight. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the types of chemicals considered for SAI, can chemically react in the stratosphere to form reflective sulfate aerosols."
The people who claim they're monitoring chemtrails aren't even watching aircraft which are deliberately dispensing payloads, because it just isn't that common in the first place (unless you go out and watch crop dusting, but then you can also just see the guy land, get out, and talk about it).
Hand washing prevents illness
COVID came from a lab, not a wet market
Hunter Biden laptop was real
And then a counter example of something broadly accepted but untrue. The humoral theory and blood letting, practiced for thousands of years. This is what killed George Washington.
Copernicus, but "close enough".
Yep. The planets do not, in fact, revolve around the Sun. They revolve around the solar system center of mass (barycenter). This is an error of about 0.25 degree viewed from Earth which was significant at the time.
> Hand washing prevents illness
Did the person who we credit for hand washing advocate for it because he was "crazy", or because he had a well-founded theory?
> COVID came from a lab, not a wet market
The lab-leak theory has not held up to scrutiny. It is considered refuted. Though IMO the initial backlash was excessive.
> Hunter Biden laptop was real
No one outside of politics said the laptop "wasn't real", many emails were cryptographically authenticated very early on. There was a great deal of concern by experts that a coordinated disinfo op was being played into the election. It was, though probably not with the involvement of foreign actors this time. Nothing about that laptop ended up being relevant to the Presidential candidate actually running for election.
> And then a counter example of something broadly accepted but untrue. The humoral theory and blood letting, practiced for thousands of years. This is what killed George Washington.
We're talking about examples of things a "crazy uncle" might believe that turned out to be true. These are just abandoned pre-scientific medical theories and treatments.
Not to anyone who is intellectually honest.