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Drahflow comments on Where's Your Sense of Mystery? - Less Wrong
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That's an very good point, especially because most smart people who really understand science share your opinions
I like your last point - that you feel better than everyone else now, because you do get real science, and so you'd hate to have everything change around. Maybe the people who do like.the idea of a Martian pyramid are those who currently feel worse than everyone else, but who would suddenly become better than everyone else if the pyramid were proven real, because they're the only ones who have studied it.
That would also explain why I find some pseudohistory interesting but most pseudoscience just plain annoying.
Possible experiment to test this: give two randomly assigned groups a test on biology and medicine. Give one group a really easy test and tell them they're within the top 10% regarding medical knowledge; give other people a really hard test and tell them they're within the bottom 10% of medical knowledge. Then give both of them an article on some ancient natural alternative medicine treatment and see which group is more positive towards it. I predict the people convinced they know nothing about medicine will support the alternative treatment more, regardless of how much they actually know.
I disagree strongly with you about who is better, if there are artificial pyramids on Mars.
If you have received sufficient evidence to be pretty certain, you are acting rational on rejecting the notion of pyramids on Mars up to the point (and only up to there) you receive more convincing evidence to the fact that there are pyramids on Mars. In that case you should a) gather more evidence and decide which point is correct b) switch pretty immediately in case there really are pyramids.
In particular I claim you have basically zero evidence against martian pyramids except the general heuristic of occam's razor.
Also, abstaining from making public your (uninformed) opinion on martian pyramids would reduce you credibility loss in case there are any.
Finally, science will not just turn to "wrong" just because there are martian pyramids, most of it still stands as it is.
I was probably reading too much into the example, assuming that "pyramids on mars" was supposed to stand for more anti-scientific things like human faces on mars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on Mars, etc.
Pyramids or canals on Mars would be OK, as long as they're built by Martians. That would even be exciting. My sense is that the Weekly World News wouldn't run a story on anything on Mars unless it connected with ancient Earth civilizations. Or Batboy.
BTW, there are some natural pyramids on Earth. Very small ones, inside caves, as crystals.