Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "A Technology That Would Change The World (If It Exists) | Answers With Joe" video.

  1. Nah man, I'd argue that most people are really lacking a bit of skepticism these days. Here's the thing - when we talk about persecution against people who challenged the scientific understanding of the time... we're constantly bunching the entire known history of mankind together. It tends to be a very surface level analysis that transforms into fallacy. Anywhere from "we chose to go to the moon" to "we thought the Earth was flat, stars circled around us" to "we thought health was a matter of balancing 4 humours" among several other.. erm... "arguments" people use against skepticism. What those "arguments" tend to ignore is that for all things that are often used to ridicule the skepticism of some people, to learn everything we know now, and to get to the point we're currently at, we had generations upon generations of people dedicating their entire lives studying those areas. They didn't come to be out of nowhere, and they didn't come magically fully realized because some historical figure had a catch phrase in their address to the public or whatever. And those didn't contradict scientific method so much as they followed it - and people with secondary intentions, like religious figures, politicians, among others that persecuted them. It wasn't about going against the scientific method. Kennedy's "We chose to go to the moon" is particularly insidious and used almost everywhere to invoke some sort of almost religious cult like belief in all sorts of ridiculous projects. I saw it invoked several times in craptastic stuff like SOLAR FRIGGIN' ROADWAYS among others. Also often employed by the free energy/perpetual motion community. Also to quash down any questioning about Elon Musk's Hyperloop. Pick up a debunking video on crowdfunding projects and you'll likely see at least one comment invoking Kennedy's speech as if it was some sort of valid argumentation for believing in the impossible or for backing up ideas that have no basis in scientific research whatsoever. What it ignores is that by the time Kennedy made that speech, by the time the Apollo program came around, it wasn't some sort of mumbo jumbo magical thinking that could be easily disproved by the most basic scientific knowledge. It was centuries of scientific progress in several areas coming together to an inflection point where, with enough money, resources and dedication, it was absolutely possible to drive a manned rocket to the moon. Hard, as well put on the speech, but far from impossible, far from being against the scientific understanding of the time. And study of history, the way we made it, tends to compress all those centuries of studies in single liners, central figures, or moments in time. It leaves out all that lead to it, which in turn creates these legions of morons misusing history for blind faith purposes. All the modern understandings we have today tend to look like they came out of nowhere, when they really did not. People tend to look at these inflection points in technological advances as magic, as Clarke well put it - any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But, it's not magic. What I'm saying with this is - yes, there are tons upon tons of stuff that our best methodology for understanding didn't get to yet. There are a whole lot of questions to be answered in the very macro scale, in terms of our universe, down to the very micro scale, on the quantum level. There are stuff in physics, mathematics, medicine, biology, psychology and pretty much all areas of knowledge to be solved. But what people have to understand is that there are key areas of knowledge and expertise that we have centuries of accumulated work and research to back those up. And if you are gonna come out of nowhere saying you can disprove those, you will need extraordinary research and proof to be taken seriously. Which is, imho, a good thing. It is the map and compass that skeptics use to operate, to prioritize their attention, to put their bets on, to decide whether to invest in it or not. Because without that, it's just chaos. Oh, I don't think gravity exists, I don't think I have to respect the laws of thermodynamics, I don't think medicine can tell me what to do with my health, so I'll do whatever - waste my entire life on fruitless endeavors. I'll just conclude my comment with this - I still think it's best for people to come out from a point of skepticism, study hard to position themselves in current knowledge, and then start believing in some stuff once they dedicated some time and focus on them, rather than people coming out from a point of blind belief, and start questioning it after the fact. Because the latter carries a whole lot more danger with it. The time of our lives are precious, too precious to waste wading in garbage.
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