The cult of skepticism

Experimentalism

Such imbalance (budgetary mismanagement) in the share of work between setting up experiments and interpreting the data, would "only" be odd if they took on themselves this extra experimental burden. Now of course that is sometimes the case, and we can respect that, but otherwise we are running into trouble: skeptics are becoming unfair when they are not undertaking to pay themselves the price of their mismanagement, that is the inflated experimental burden they believe to be needed, but put it all on the shoulders of their opponents, and satisfy themselves to sit in position of judges, checking the data and just sending it to the flames for the crime of not being as absolutely clear and trivial to interpret as they wanted. And then they blame this on the experimenter who they accuse of not having done proper science. Doing so, skeptics are not themselves behaving scientifically (that is, in a skilled and competent manner), nor expressing respect for science, as they are praising the stupid and their stupidity, that is the lazy judges who they see right to practice intellectual laziness in their interpretation of data, and mocking the actual big work done by experimentalists, who just did not design their work to fit the crazily hard standards which skeptics require.

Ordinary illusions

• He appeared sure that the placebo effect was such a real effect that it could explain my miraculous healing as a real effect (obviously not an illusion of healing as you can see from my testimony, and which he did not try to deny as he wrote it is "surely like 30% or more of healings, and I happen to voluntarily sometimes to take stuff just for the effect in question, avoiding to read the notice precisely to benefit from the context of hope"), in contradiction with both wikipedia and another skeptic's claim "[the claim] “people receive inert substances, yet believing they are authentic, their mind directs their body to repair itself”, is 100% speculation. There’s no mechanism for that, and I don’t even know what “the mind directs the body to repair itself” would mean in specific physiological terms. As best as we can tell, the majority of the measured placebo response in the control groups of clinical trials consists of various biases, statistical effects, and other artifacts from the research process itself."
• This reference of a video showing how pain can come as a mere effect of suggestion.

• Feeling burned by a pan which was actually not hot
• Waking up by the pain from a nightmare which then persisted for several minutes
• Believing that 2 things taste different while they actually don't

When direct sensations are not correctly describing reality, the "care" to correct the understanding by putting things in context, can also be done very naturally by lots of people, with no need to be a skeptic, and quite often with no need to specifically research about it. Namely in the above list of 3 examples, the first 2 are cases where the data of the context, which refutes the validity of the direct sensation, just comes spontaneously by the force of things with no need to care for it at all, so that overall the risk of being fooled is non-existent and the skeptics methods are of no use. Only the third example requires a favorite method of skeptics to elucidate.

These first 2 cases happen to be so simple that the directly stumbling data of the context of a single occurrence of a perception, suffices to show that it is illusory. Now of course we can expect things to not be always so simple. Namely, the immediate context that stumbles with a single occurrence of a perception may not suffice, we may need to include the broader context of its multiple occurrences across long periods of time.
Indeed when an illusory perception occurs multiple times then even if its illusory character does not spontaneously show itself in many of these occurrences, it can still have good chances to show itself in some of these perceptions, therefore still naturally (spontaneously) forcing the person to notice this unreliability of perceptions and to take account of this to question the rest of the cases which are not obvious.

There is still another way in which any possible phenomenon of illusory perception is likely to spontaneously debunk itself by the multiplicity of its occurrences : by the pattern of its occurrences. Indeed an illusory source of perceptions is likely to produce a quite different pattern of occurrences of these perceptions, than a reliable source. Some kind of conspiracy would be needed for an illusory source of perceptions to produce the same pattern of occurrences as the pattern which a reliable perception would produce (according to some hypothesis of real cause which would be so reliably perceived).
Leaving aside the hypothesis of such a conspiracy (with the so tiny possibility for it to take place just by chance), remains the question of the people's skills to manage deciphering the given patterns of their perceptions, to correctly figure out which kind of hypothesis (reality or illusion) best accounts for these patterns. Now this is precisely where the explanations from previous sections apply : skeptics decide that they cannot figure this out from the raw data of the perceptions which occur in natural conditions, so they need to set up experimental frameworks to make it obvious. They need to use their fingers for counting. Among the rest of people, not using their fingers, some can happen to have the skills to correctly do the math anyway, others not. And skeptics give themselves the right to complain loud about how they cannot make the difference between both, as if it was the others fault, not ready to recognize this as their mere personal failure which there is no reason for anybody else to care about.

Crop circles and the study of aliens

"To consider that a skeptic only wants proofs, would be really to restrict his point of view and not to understand the nature of the misunderstanding. What a skeptic most wants is the subjective reason in the method of the individual, which allows one thing to be concluded rather than another. It is richer than a simple proof, less restrictive, and more fundamental."

• Despite his denial of this behavior (obsession for proof, permanent need to conclude before understanding), he appeared to be strongly following it in previous discussions, something he may have failed to take the measure of. Quote of replies (his in italic) :
  There you deviate completely from the subject: you asked me what I think, I illustrate it with an example, and you take excuse of this to judge the justification, which was not the subject. Either you want to know the content of my point of view, or you want to know my justifications, or you want to know how I think I can convince you, but you have to choose. You have a way of trapping me to give yourself the illusion that I think badly, it's ridiculous.
  But we are talking about a specific case, I accept that you base your convictions on other things that is not the problem but then you would have to say something like "it could happen by chance, if I only knew this, I would be agree that it is not worth much, but knowing the other things that I know, I imagine that what he does is real ... in which case it would no longer be an objective study of an example it will be just looking for confirmation of something that you have already concluded elsewhere. What is the point of considering an element if your conclusion is already made? you have to judge the element in itself, and in itself it is not worth much. And it is still not clear if you consider that in itself this element is worth a lot, in any case you behave as if it were the case.
  Damn, it's up to you to remember the subject of the current discussion anyway! You would like me to multiply by 100 the size of my answers with convoluted formulations to compensate for your inability to remember the issue at hand
  Also as I warned that one proof was not an easy one but required some big work and maturation for understanding before being grasped and he could not make that work of required understanding as he was too obsessed and hurried about judging the validity of the proof before giving himself any chance of understanding those required preliminaries.
• There are many other skeptics whose attitude is much less subtle, and I see nothing wrong to denounce them (just like there is no shame to report widespread troubles with Christianity which may not be committed by the precise Christian person one is talking to, as explained by Greta Christina «And I get angry when believers act as if these offenses aren't important, because "Not all believers act like that. I don't act like that." As if that fucking matters. This stuff is a major way that religion plays out in our world, and it makes me furious to hear religious believers try to minimize it because it's not how it happens to play out for them.»).
• (Yet there are still lots of other flaws he could fall into, some of which are commented in other sections here...)

" For example, an individual sees a crop circle and tells you "it is a mark made by a civilization from elsewhere". At this stage it is not really the evidence that matters to the skeptic, it is first to understand why he does not first consider a simpler explanation, such as manufacturing by a human. Some would in fact have no reason (whether it is rigorously evidence or not is not the issue, some will not even have reasons even including potential non-rigorous reasons).
Others will say "because it is too precise to be done by a human" (which IS a reason, we do not judge its strength here). At this point they are shown what a human can do, and they find that it is just as precise. They thus find themselves in the first case, because they no longer have a reason to believe, otherwise they do not even identify it themselves. It is a "problem" that is more fundamental than the question of evidence.
Speaking of crops circle for example, I think you should have seen it in passing but I remind you a bit of the facts:
There was a youtubers commando operation 1 year ago, who secretly made a crop circle themselves, and came to film on the spot the reaction of visitors (and monitoring media reaction etc ...).

Very many believers of the phenomenon have come to measure energies, to feel energies. They are all adamant, and probably all perfectly honest about how they feel. They all have their own methods, either of energy measurement, or of observation of the field and details, to conclude that it could not be human, that it was magnetic living etc ... but it was not.

...This does not tell us that the paranormal does not exist... this tells us that in the real world perfectly honest and convinced people can describe energies, agree, lead reasoning leading to this kind of conclusions. It tells us that honest people CAN be wrong in their feelings.
And therefore, in a second time we can ask: if we have proof of being in a world where people can be wrong about sensations, feeling, intimate convictions, in such a strong way, what reason do we have to believe this same kind of testimony on other subjects?

A crop circle is "a pattern created by flattening a crop, usually a cereal" (Wikipedia). This fascinates special kinds of investigators split in 2 groups.

One group of investigators is made of Earthlings fascinated to know from astronomical studies that their home planet with its quickly evolving civilization (with respect to astronomical time scales) is but one of a large number of planets in the Universe, many of which may be home to other civilizations. They go on with ideas of the style "it would be so fascinating to know what such alter ego of our own Earthly civilization may look like, especially those that are much more advanced than us, which should exist too. The problem is how difficult it is to know anything about them, because of the distance. Yet, hopefully some of them could be just as intrigued to find out about our civilization — as we are to find out about theirs — and at the same time be so much more scientifically advanced than us, that some of them might be going all the long distance to get here. If they did, then traces of their visit might be found in the form of crop circles".
So, when they hear about crop circles that have appeared, some can have the motivation to go all that distance (much shorter than astronomical ones) to the place of this crop circle, to try to investigate there as much as they can the tiny traces which might be left behind by those visitors from elsewhere.

The other group of investigators is made of skeptics puzzled to know from sociological studies that their skeptical approach to life, knowledge and everything (which they developed and confirmed so well to each other in their skeptics community — as seemingly the most advanced thinking framework up to current times), still remains just one of many other ways for people to approach life, which persist across the world. They are intrigued to find out why and how, among all people who developed some conceptions of life and epistemology beyond the primitive work-eat-sleep-leisure, many keep following other thinking frameworks which look so alien and visibly retarded for skeptical observers. But skeptics usually face huge difficulties to investigate such alter ego of their own ideological framework (especially as the kind of intense totalitarian interaction, which they normally need to undertake for studying anything, usually fails to proceed due to how strongly such interactions, usually filled by their inquisitive and condescending attitudes, may repel their targets). Now a solution came to them by observing how some of these strange thinking people were interpreting crop circles as possible traces of alien civilizations. This motivated some of these skeptics, in need of some fresh data to feed their favored research in stupidology, to assign themselves the role of these aliens, going through all the burden of designing and making a crop circle themselves (after getting authorization from the owner of that land for the waste of production it would cause), so as to trap into their crop circle some of those people with alien ideologies, whose reactions they can then trap inside the field of their cameras, regardless that these might only be a special few of such alien thinkers whose ideas progressed to the interstellar degree of intellectual decay needed to drive all the distance from faraway parts of the country into that crop circle to investigate it.

Now what would real aliens think about all that seriously ? What seems to me anyway, is that both groups of investigators are essentially committing the same mistake of over-estimating how alien from themselves, and how representative of the aliens they dreamed to investigate, the objects they could catch by their investigations (namely those presented by the other group) happen to be.

If I had to tell a difference between both groups, and decide which one looks more stupid than the other, I must admit that is not easy, and the main criterion I can see would be anyway controversial. I mean, I could not help being biased about this criterion because destiny already put me on one side of this controversy long ago. In my dreaded school years. So many times I was humiliated by school mates who told me lies and I was tempted to believe them. What is the more stupid behavior : to go tell lies to someone, or to believe the lie that is said ? From their viewpoint, they were clever and I was stupid, because they managed to trick me by telling me lies, and I was the stupid one to believe them. On my side, I just saw no sense in going to tell lies in the first place. I was only interested in the truth and I expected the same wisdom from others. Their completely different attitude seemed so alien to me. If only I had the chance to live in a world full of other serious people like I was, my expectation would have been reasonable, and my credulity would have been safe. Was it my fault that such was not the case ?

I must admit, we cannot really blame those skeptics for having told any lie in this story. Strictly speaking they claimed nothing, they only made a crop circle. And those fooled by this hoax are also likely to get fooled without hoax. On the other hand, they only fooled their targets for the period of about 10 weeks until they disclosed the facts; but since they had also fooled themselves in the same way by the same action, there has not been anybody in a position to easily unfool them since that time.

After I replied in other terms he continued:

"On the other hand there is something that you do not seem to really grasp, in our viewpoint, anyway mine (I am only presenting a viewpoint). When I was chatting with my creationist, and showing him other religions, he said "yes but it's easy if you show me people who believe in shit, well it's shit, while my religion to me it is the truth" (yes yes he answered that exactly). And he didn't seem able to put himself in my place and see that for me there was NO difference.
But therefore, without offense, here what you do not seem to grasp is that you seem (I do not say that it is) to do in my eyes exactly the same thing:
You start from the principle (in advance) that the crop circle stuff is shit.
Knowing in advance this a priori you declare that therefore it only attracts idiots.
If the same thing had been done to film people reacting to a boji stone being in fact a false stone, what would you have said?

In fact this is what is strange: that you do not seem to see that for us (again I do not say that it is the case, I only describe our viewpoint, explain our reaction) whether it is about crop circle, mediumship, boji stones, they are the same illuminated people. So you see a bias because you consider that crop circle is a priori illuminated people.

Hence my question: what distinguishes outside the subject on which they intervene the people that you believe about boji stones or other (mediumship etc ...) and the people that you consider to be basically illuminated people ? because this distinction as you say we [skeptics] can’t make it. And for the moment it would seem that your method to make a difference is to base yourself on what you believe a priori or do not believe a priori (ie people who believe the same thing as you are in good faith, people who believe something that seems absurd to you are illuminated) whereas what we are asking for is a method for making a difference that is independent of your a priori.

So what is this method? how do you differentiate between a guy who talks about the energy of crop circles and a guy who talks about the energy of a boji stone? If for example I found you a testimony of a page where I replace "crop circle" by "boji stone" is there a difference ? What is the basis for this selection bias that you denounce, other than a priori and an answer that you would have in advance on the question?

• Which method can you offer to a creationist Christian to make the difference between one kind of non-Christian viewpoint and another, criteria which he can easily and naturally apply and see as obviously relevant to consider the one as much wiser than the other ?
• Which method can you offer to an amateur of crop circles to distinguish between skeptic-made and alien-made ones, which is the criterion we need so as to objectively demonstrate that the skeptics who made this one are not proper representatives of the true aliens he was trying to investigate ? (it is easy to criticize the methods of others but it may be harder to propose your own — the possible lack of genuine alien-made crop circles is not a good excuse to dismiss the question since the symmetry is still not clearly broken here, as skeptics may similarly lack ways of catching traces of more relevant non-skeptical reactions, than the reactions of amateurs of crop circles, needed for the question of finding comparison methods to be applicable).

Declining an invitation

If I offer you an epistemic interview, promising that it is with the best intentions, would you lend yourself to it? a few emails, a few questions here and there, with no set pace. Or do you think you would waste your time? The epistemic interview is not intended to convince, it is an interview that aims to see the difference in method in the other by which he takes certain things for granted.

I invite you to try the stone on yourself instead of wasting both of our time undertaking great methodological debates which in my opinion are not what is most relevant as a method of investigation precisely. You will be free to debate methodology with yourself to ask yourself to what extent what you will have felt from the stone may be a suggestion effect or not. It's just not my business !!!

His reply:

So in fact I find that this epistemological exchange is very useful because it puts the finger on an enormous incomprehension of viewpoint. I'm not talking about agreeing, I'm just talking about understanding what the other person is saying, how the other person is thinking. And when you say in different ways "come and try for yourself" this incomprehension is revealed, I explain why:

For a skeptic / scientist the contextual effects, ie the suggestion alone, can induce REAL subjective effects. The scientific skeptic thinks so because there are very many experiments, made under very strict protocol conditions which demonstrate it. These experiences demonstrate 2 things:
• the presence of the subjective effect (the subjects describe feeling something),
• and the presence of objective counterparts of its effects: such as the detection of hormones in the blood or any other objectively measurable criterion (always induced in the body's response to suggestion).
Knowing that a skeptic thinks this (maybe he is wrong but at least he thinks it) how would it be coherent in his mindset to be convinced by the fact of feeling himself the effects of which you speak? since the same skeptic never criticized its objective reality? The skeptic does not claim that he will not feel anything, he does not consider himself different from other people. The fact that the real effect is sometimes objectively measurable by a third party (when the response is physiological) is perfectly documented. Thus the skeptic does not deny the reality of the effect, he criticizes the interpretation of causes.

Epistemological question: Knowing therefore that it is demonstrated, that suggestion alone, can generate a physiological response of hormonal type for example, thus similar to injecting a drug with a syringe into the blood (there is nothing more real as possible definition), how do you think to make the difference between this reality, and your reality? (because on hearing you it seems that you oppose your real to our imaginary theory, but we NEVER said that it was imaginary, it is induced by consciousness but it becomes objectively real and measurable. So you must not oppose your real to our imagination, but your real to our real and explain to me how you think to make the difference, how you know that between 2 possible realities your interpretation is the right one).

When I said "try it yourself", it includes very well if you prefer, try to bring a team of experimenters to do all the double blind experiences you want. It's just not my business.

(For the moment I have never seen you criticize too much what science demonstrates, in general you disagree rather on the existence of what science does not see, but I do not see you advocating the nonexistence of this that science finds)
So I would say that, therefore, is a fact that you too accept: suggestion can cause in people a reaction all the most real. So for a skeptic, I would say that "the first thing he would try to refute" in relation to your tiger eye account, is that you are not in this case. That is to say that a self-suggestion did not generate the same type of consequence for you. And this is where I find it difficult to know where you place your personal reasoning here (Without any judgment, already I try to understand the other) So I suggest a few possibilities:
• you actually don't really see these subjective effects as real.
• you consider that YOU can tell the difference between a concrete effect resulting from a suggestion and a concrete effect physically caused (which implies that you consider yourself to be different (once again I don't judge, I'm trying to verify) from people who can't tell the difference)
In this second case, therefore, the most convincing would not be to show you a lack of feeling from your stone when you don't know it is there, but rather show you a feeling from your stone when you think it is there but in fact not. (Do we agree that this would make you relatively reconsider your conclusions?)

You annoy me. I already answered you, namely that each one is solely responsible to himself for the bases of his conclusions and it is absurd to want to try to verify the bases of the conclusions of others, for lack of the practical means of ... putting oneself in the skin of others. The question of how you understand or do not understand the bases of my conclusions which only concern me, seems to me a strange question by you, which ... only concerns you. I already explained to you what I see as the best way to try to answer your questions: that you try the stone yourself, you will be free to make with yourself all the investigations you want on the sensations it does or it does not to you.

He expects that, no matter whether the power of this stone may be real, if he was given the same opportunity I have of having this stone with him and being free to try it in any way he likes, he would remain unable to find any method of experimentation, and any reason from the outcomes of any experiments he would try, that could ever be good enough to convince him of the reality of that stuff. There would be no possible good reason for him to convince himself about it. Even though this burden of how he might try to convince himself about it in this case, which so looks impossible to him, would be made much lighter than the burden he was trying to put on my shoulders of trying to explain to him my reasons for my conclusions, by how much easier it is for someone to "explain" some big complicated experience with its interpretation, only to oneself just inside one's own head, than it is to write it all down and try to convince somebody else about it.

From this, 2 conclusions can be drawn.

First, his offer of "an epistemic interview, promising that it is with the best intentions" turned out to be purely rhetorical and practically insincere, since, according to his own viewpoint and expectations, there was no logical possibility he could conceive for whatever answer I might give to ever look convincing in his eyes anyway. It could only have been one more way for him to make fun of me regardless of anything of what might be going on in reality.

Second, his actual epistemology is a nihilistic one, according to which whatever supernatural phenomenon might be real, there would be no possible valid way to prove it anyway. And he feels so sure of this impossibility that it stops him from even trying. This way, skepticism turns out to work as the real killer of curiosity and attempt of scientific investigation (to be compared to the below remark on how supernaturalism is usually blamed for "pessimistic expectations about the fruitfulness of scientific investigation").
That reminds me a small discussion I had with a young-Earth creationist Christian (who I met, so another one): I asked him "How large do you think a galaxy is ?". His answer was "We cannot know". What a wonderfully skeptical answer this was.

Unless, his attitude might reflect not any logically consistent view but only the expression of some habit of automatically rejecting onto one's opponents any burden of work (other than, of course, the work of analyzing and criticizing their work) when some excuses for this can be found, since these excuses usually seemed defensible, forgetting to always check again that this still logically holds in each case. A quite comfortable habit which, understandably, has its selective advantage in the natural evolution of ideologies.

Paradoxical emergence

But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”

" For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."

(1 John 4: 2-3) "This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world."
(2 Corinthians 11:14) "Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light."
(Romans 10) "... Since [Israelis] did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. (...) how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? (...) faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ."

Usually Christian preachers put so much emphasis on historical argumentation, that even sometimes they refuse to discuss anything else but just repeat how much the only criterion to debate and accept the truth of the Gospel must be a matter of historical evidence (the reported testimony of the Apostles), rejecting from critical discussion any more philosophical criteria of plausibility, as well as any observational checking of how it works in Christians lives (forgetting that... the statement that [the Christians' life is effectively, observably better touched by God due to the metaphysical fact of the Gospel being actually true, than if the metaphysical fact was different] is both a claim of the Christian doctrine and a needed motivation to adopt a Christian life, isn't it ?). The Bible itself presents as one of the main arguments on the basis of which we should recognize Jesus as the Son of God, that His coming was previously announced by prophets. That Jesus himself was not expecting to be accepted as Son of God just based on his own deeds, any direct recognition of his teachings, but also based on the authorities of the prophets who came before him (Luke 24 : 25-27), of the manifestation of miracles in his life, and it also mattered that John the Baptist came first to announce and baptize him. So in all this, there isn't anybody, not even Jesus himself, supposed to have taken on himself the responsibility of deciding where the truth is, everybody must have humbly delegated this responsibility to a large crowd of holy people or large cloud of facts coming before or around him.

Similarly, from a Christian viewpoint, at least in some discussions (while possibly claiming the opposite in different contexts, ignoring the contradiction), the truth of the Gospel is not supposed to be in any way verifiable in the personal lives of Christians, in the sense that no matter how much someone's search for God remains vain and the experience of being abandoned by God in depression, misfortune and senseless waste of life can be huge, no matter how seriously one could research the possible "reasons" for this waste and find none, some Christians will keep dismissing such experience as no possible legitimate grounds for de-conversion, in the sense that faith should thus remain absolutely independent of all experience... i.e. unfalsifiable. In my experience, I remember in particular in some online forum (it seems no more online) a Christian dismissing my testimony in roughly these terms : "What do you have to say, other than that you think God did not give you what you think you needed ?". More in another page. In such terms, all conceivably accessible means of personal discernment are completely dismissed as illusions.

I once asked a Christian apologist for references on the topic, he completed and confirmed the above points : "If one reads through the book of Acts it is quite clear that Paul is not opposed to careful reasoning and argumentation in his putting forth the gospel message" especially according to Acts 17, however only the precise kind of argumentation which the Jews were after, that is focused on criteria of biblical references (where prophets are presented as receiving their spiritual authority from the historical confirmations of their predictions) and historical arguments (interpreting destiny as God's hand) ; Paul tried similar lines of arguments for the Greek but had much less success there (and his message appeared to them as foolishness) because the Greek's truth criteria are very different : "To the Greek philosophers, the meaning of life cannot be understood by looking at historical events. They are temporary and passing. The meaning of life and of reality itself needs to lie in what is eternal and in what can be grasped through philosophical reflection on the nature of the world and of reality. Furthermore, in Greek thought, if there is any life beyond the grave, it is a spiritual existence (not a physical existence)." Also, Sophism (eloquence) was valued by the Greeks, but Paul had not that "quality".

So that all works as a huge rumor, which everybody just has to religiously propagate but which nobody is supposed to dare initiating or correcting (by definition, any attempt to diverge from the given dogmas by exerting one's own discernment would make one a heretic). That rumor out of nowhere is supposed to be the one ultimate authority over any other discernment criterion such as any kind of personal intuition or research.

Now the question is : since this invitation to follow the crowd is the largely main argument (discernment criterion) that the Christian doctrine has to offer in guise of evidence, on the basis of which it invites people to believe it, instead of any verifiable intrinsic value of its content, then which psychological force could be so effectively driving people to accept this in large enough numbers to account for the persistence of Christianity for so many centuries ?

Answers are in fact rather easy to find, and can roughly be summed up as peer pressure, also well illustrated by the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes. Many details of the Christian doctrine can be analyzed as elements which contribute to strengthen this pressure (which gives these details a selective advantage in the competition of doctrines), for believers to both stay "strong" in their faith, and forward that pressure (possibly though giving impressions of being witnesses of the truth of the Gospels having received some divine grace, regardless the lack of any real thing that happened). Examples:

• The value given to faith ("faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" Hebrews 11:1),
• The idea that followers are "saved", thus the worry that non-believers would not be "saved";
• Attitudes of "I will pray for you [to believe]"
• The duty to be thankful to God for life and everything and ignore any troubles one faces, not complaining (regarding all complaints as shameful), creates an illusory testimony of being blessed by God
• The idea that the Son of God died on the cross to save us, while begging us to believe that idea,
• The fact much of this pressure takes place without deliberate or conscious intent by anyone to exert pressure, can actually reinforce this pressure by an immunity from accusations of being there.

• the paradox of accepting as true a counter-intuitive doctrine, or
• the paradox of dismissing as wrong the "testimony" of a whole community of devout, seemingly very wise God seekers.

Now why I developed all the above explanations, is that, in much of what I can observe, the general motivation across the scientific and philosophical communities to support naturalism looks similar to this driving force of religious dogmatism. I guess possible illustrations can be countless. Here is (translated to English) an example of a personal experience of discussion in comment to a YouTube video of science popularization, which I see as symptomatic of the general problem (my own comments in straight style; other peoples claims in italic):

[in the video] "(stuff about the philosophical ideas of Descartes...) if the soul-body interactions are causal interactions...this physical event was not initiated by a physical cause. It would be literally supernatural. Managing to move one's arm by thought would be a kind of miracle. Therefore now most philosophers of mind reject dualism...
[my comment quoting from the video :] "[the dualistic explanation] is not very popular among people who have thought about it a little" : since when has popularity with people who have thought a little, been an argument in science ?? However, it is not enough to think a little to be truly aware of the lessons to be drawn from quantum mechanics. Especially in the absence of good references on the subject... there is someone who seems to have thought a little lot and drew the opposite conclusion.
"On the other hand [dualists] struggle to account for the interactions between mental and physical" One can have a lot of trouble drawing and justifying the exact real lessons of quantum mechanics when one has not studied it at a sufficient level, as in particular most of the philosophers officially specialists in metaphysics did not...
"As Chalmers cannot decently resuscitate Cartesian dualism" FALSE he indeed made the mistake of believing thus at a certain time but has since corrected himself. Quote
- "is not very popular with people who have thought about it a little." I think it is an understatement to say that it is a hypothesis mainly rejected by people who have studied the subject well.
(...)

Here is another youtube comment discussion with someone who claims to speak for science and mistakes me as the dumbest man on Earth just because I disagree with his metaphysical and "sociology of physics" beliefs (all what is in Italic is from "AnticitizenX", all the rest is from me):

What a fallacy is this:
"It’s weird, too, because the Copenhagen interpretation isn’t exactly well-liked among modern physicists. While it may be common practice to teach this interpretation in most schools, there is also an open admission among everyone involved that it's both a logical and philosophical mess. There are plenty of alternative interpretations that arguably do better"
Like so many people you missed the fact that the only (but widespread) way for the Copenhagen interpretation to look messy rests on the materialistic presuppositions of the people who discuss it. All troubles are completely and "miraculously" resolved as soon as the right idealistic metaphysical framework is considered (giving the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation). Therefore this widespread dismissal of the fundamental role of consciousness in quantum physics is purely circular reasoning.
Naturalists can be all the more confident that a satisfactory interpretation fitting their expectations should exist that they did not start studying what such a thing could precisely look like.
I recently wrote a new text on this topic:
http://antispirituality.net/skepticism3
(and a few more relevant points in parts 1 and 2)
Previously I wrote on free will
http://settheory.net/free-will
and the fallacies of naturalistic arguments of academic philosophers
http://settheory.net/dualism


Copenhagen doesn’t just “look messy”. It is logically incoherent and empirically falsified.

Uh, I don't know what you mean by empirically falsified. I did not get that news. As for the logical incoherence, I told you and it is clear (I mean I have good skills in math and physics in case you didn't know): it is only logically incoherent with materialism. Once materialistic expectations are removed we get the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation (so, well indeed not the Copenhagen one which is admittedly not really an interpretation) which has ZERO PROBLEM unlike all naturalistic interpretations (spontaneous collapse, many-worlds, non-local hidden variables, superdeterminism) which are all so plagued with unsolvable problems that none can be satisfactory. If you can't see how the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation is free from all problems (if you know quantum physics well) that probably mainly reflects your inability to get rid of materialistic preconceptions (I know that is not only yours, many people suffer the same inability, hence the foolish rumor of impossibility to make sense of this), or other possible mistakes I explained in my texts...

Uh, I don't know what you mean by empirically falsified. I did not get that news
Practically every professor and science educator who has ever spoken on the subject will admit this. Electrons and photons do not magically squish down into tiny, infinitesimal points upon observation. The very idea of a "measurement" is an open problem in modern physics. So if this is "news" to you, then I don't know what to tell you other than "stop pretending you understand quantum mechanics," because you obviously do not.

Once materialistic expectations are removed we get the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation (so, well indeed not the Copenhagen one which is admittedly not really an interpretation)

Great. You accuse me a being a dummy head for rejecting Copenhagen, only to suddenly show up and admit that you also reject Copenhagen. Please kindly teach yourself how to use words properly before railing against my dummy head philosophies, m'kay?

You just ridiculously play with words by saying "You accuse me a being a dummy head for rejecting Copenhagen, only to suddenly show up and admit that you also reject Copenhagen."
The Von Neumann Wigner interpretation is just Cohpenhagen clarified about what a measurement means, instead of remaining ambiguous. Just trying to replace "Copenhagen interpretation" by "Von Neumann Wigner interpretation" in your article, all your argument falls down.

"Practically every professor and science educator who has ever spoken on the subject will admit this." will admit what ? You claim that Copenhagen is empirically falsified. Do you claim that every science professor agrees that it is empirically falsified ???
"Electrons and photons do not magically squish down into tiny, infinitesimal points upon observation."
Nobody and nothing ever claimed they did. What is your point then ? Well of course we have the X and P operators called "position operator" and "momentum operator" that may be called "observables" but, since their "eigenvectors" are not genuine vectors of the Hilbert space, these are mere mathematical tools which nobody and nothing ever mistook as actually "observables". It would be a ridiculous play with words to find here any matter of argument against imaginary opponents.
"The very idea of a "measurement" is an open problem in modern physics" Indeed it is an open problem how it can be interpreted materialistically, all the materialists who try to interpret quantum physics materialistically report that it is an open problem, because it has no satisfactory solution, of course this is not news to me. There is no consensus that the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation has any problem, because the "specialists" of comparing the interpretations simply forget to include this one in their study list. Or they criticize the ideas of Penrose and Stapp who didn't get it right.
Here is at least a physics professor who disagrees with you http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/eddington.2008.essay.pdf

The Von Neumann Wigner interpretation is just Cohpenhagen clarified about what a measurement means
You're the one who specifically described this as "indeed not the Copenhagen one" (your own verbatim words). It cannot both be Copenhagen and NOT Copenhagen at the same time. For the second time, please learn how to use words properly before engaging in discussions.
Furthermore, the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation is almost universally rejected among modern physicists. It doesn't even warrant a mention in most textbooks. So please don't insult me with this naive pretense that you have any expertise in the subject. Unless you have personally solved the Schrodinger equation for a periodic potential well (or some equally complex configuration), then you're not in a position to dictate what is or is not relevant in quantum mechanics.

will admit what ? You claim that Copenhagen is empirically falsified. Do you claim that every science professor agrees that it is empirically falsified
I do not claim that literally "every" science professor agrees with this. I only ever said that "Practically every professor and science educator who has ever spoken on the subject will admit this." For the third time, please learn to use words correctly. It is not controversial among modern physicists to claim that Copenhagen is almost certainly wrong. I should know. I work with them personally and have published research in the field. Please stop pretending to be an expert in things you quite obviously do not understand.

Nobody and nothing ever claimed they did
The Copenhagen interpretation requires particles to squish down into tiny, infinitesimal points. It's right there on page 5 of Griffiths' classic text. You are absolutely and demonstrably ignorant of the literature to try and make this claim.
I'm sorry, but I'm not going to bother reading the rest of your comment. It is blatantly dishonest of you to engage in this debate when you very obviously have zero understanding of the subject. Either you know that you have no training, in which case it is a lie to invent such assertions about the field, or you do have formal training, in which case you are lying by pretending that the stuff I'm claiming is remotely controversial. Please kindly go away and stop replying until you learn how to use words correctly and honestly.

"Unless you have personally solved the Schrodinger equation for a periodic potential well" I rediscovered the Einstein field equation of General Relativity at age 16, and later I studied Quantum Field Theory and understood its main ideas (Dirac equation, Dirac sea, how the development in Feynman diagrams is mathematically derived from the field functional integral ; also the main ideas of renormalization, though I don't know how to calculate this ; of course the math of quantum decoherence is clear for me), is that not enough for you ? Could you do better ? I care very much to use words properly in my work to clarify the foundations of maths. But words are there to serve a meaning for people able to actually understand them, which is visibly not your case, as you just react by your "syntax error" like the machine you mistake yourself with... I did care to develop the explanation of how I use words but you visibly refuse to understand so I cannot help you any further, sorry. I know very well that "Furthermore, the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation is almost universally rejected among modern physicists. It doesn't even warrant a mention in most textbooks." The problem is that there is no reason at the basis of this mass behavior. Just the crowd following itself just like following the crowd is the only "reason" you could put forward here. Instead of a justification, there is one explanation pointed out by David Chalmers, I already quoted in my texts which you so ridiculously did not care looking at, as it refuted you already :
"There is some irony in the fact that philosophers reject interactionism on largely physical grounds (it is incompatible with physical theory), while physicists reject an interactionist interpretation of quantum mechanics on largely philosophical grounds (it is dualistic). Taken conjointly, these reasons carry little force".
In clear physicists are well known to have no logical or physical reason to reject the Von Neumann Wigner interpretation. Their materialistic prejudices are by far their main "reason". I know there are still a few more "reasons" which I also listed and debunked in my site...
"It is not controversial among modern physicists to claim that Copenhagen is almost certainly wrong." You are the one confusing words to tell ridiculous lies : I asked is Copenhagen known to be empirically falsified and you replied yes it is known to be nonsense, which is totally switching the subject. As far as I know, Copenhagen is known by all professors as the perfect empirical match despite its lack of logical clarity, not at all empirically falsified.

And I'm not responsible if you decide to love Griffiths and his dark humor far from any decent physics, of disserting on a ridiculously inappropriate and nonsensical metaphysical reading for some literally read piece of the math traditionally used to introduce quantum mechanics, when there is no sane reason to see it so.

• that from a network of a huge number of unconscious neurons, a phenomenon of consciousness could emerge;
• that from a network of a huge number of seemingly very serious and intelligent scientists and philosophers, a phenomenon of collective stupidity (dominance of wrong convictions) on this precise metaphysical question could emerge.

• The above observation of the same process happening in religion.
• Apart from the few ridiculous statements from medical authorities quoted in Part 1, other observations of paradoxical emergence of collective dumbness can be observed across academic philosophers, and even scientists in another matter, a bit outside their areas of specializations but still close enough they should be concerned with : how to teach math and physics.
• As for the precise belief in naturalism (and the belief that it would be rationality justified) across scientific and philosophical communities, the fact it happens to be a mere rumor from nowhere without an effective reason, is perfectly clear and openly admitted by serious people who checked, such as D.Chalmers "...philosophers reject interactionism on largely physical grounds (it is incompatible with physical theory), while physicists reject an interactionist interpretation of quantum mechanics on largely philosophical grounds"

Philosophy faculty or PhD
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 54% (target group : 56%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 29% (target group : 27%)
Philosophy of cognitive science:
Accept or lean toward: physicalism 75% (target group : 77%)
Accept or lean toward: non-physicalism 7% (target group : 5%)

Philosophy undergraduate : philosophy of cognitive science
physicalism 13 / 15
non-physicalism 1/15
Philosophy graduate student : Philosophy of cognitive science:
physicalism 58 / 72 (81%)
non-physicalism 10 / 72 (14%)

• The strong one I see is that I consider the idea of possible emergence of consciousness from material processes as a category mistake, since however surprising behaviors (properties) might be expected to emerge from extremely complex systems, this can bring nothing to the explanation of consciousness insofar as consciousness is not a behavior (even if it can have behavioral consequences) but belongs to a different category, precisely a different ontological type radically outside the category of behaviors or "properties" to which any possible fruits of emergence belong (precisely, complexity properties as opposed to elementary qualia). Now a little web search indicates that the very concept of "category mistake" was initially introduced as an argument against dualism (essentially pushing eliminative materialism by dismissing as a "category mistake" the claim that consciousness exists and needs to be accounted for). Now I am not claiming to end the debate on this question here, but I just aim to point out that this question of which ideas are category mistakes and which aren't, is a crucial question on which different people can keep fundamental disagreements, and much of the divergence of views on the ratio of a priori plausibilities of naturalism and supernaturalism can be traced from here. More precisely, this reason of category mistake (to dismiss as a logical impossibility the idea of emergence of consciousness from material processes), is what I obviously meant to be what the mentioned dualistic intuition was saying in the first place. Namely it was the intuition that the concept of emergence of consciousness from material processes is a category mistake and therefore logically impossible. So when skeptics point out that the dualistic intuition might be fooled by emergence, are they clear which intuition we are talking about ? This question of category mistake is a philosophical question which can be investigated, but unfortunately academic philosophers usually cannot do it because of how dumb they are in their own field, and such a question does not fit very well under the most usual investigation skills of scientists in general, and especially not under the famous method of double-blind randomized testing in particular.
  
  
• The weak one is a kind of mirror image or bounce-back from some kinds of objections I sometimes see against supernaturalistic concepts, that consist in not really giving some evidence against them, but in blaming them for undermining some principles of rational investigation. So I need to include this part but call it weak to point out that it is no weaker than that strange kind of naturalistic argument I could see held as if it were an argument, or even a vital necessity in the name of which science supposedly had a vital need to remain naturalistic. Actually, I understand what makes it look so important in the eyes of naturalists: once again it is the confusion between supernaturalism in general, and its specifically Christian version.
  Indeed, the concrete observable effects of creationist doctrines on the behavior of some Christians (who are no more trying to understand the world because "God did it" is effectively ending their curiosity in the sense of quest for coherent, unified understanding of the data, especially the data of fossils, astronomy etc), strongly illustrates that trap, which then naturalists blame as a fatal effect of supernaturalism. But I think it would not be so anymore (or at least to a much lesser extent) outside this specifically Christian way. So just once this specific concrete case of some Christian behaviors would be left aside (if only that separation could be figured out) I don't see anymore what strength of the argument would still remain. Indeed even a hypothesis which might lead to pessimistic expectations about the fruitfulness of scientific investigation should neither be ruled out in the name of such unfortunate consequences it would have, nor should any pessimistic expectation about the fruitfulness of investigation, ever deter any investigation from being undertaken anyway "just in case" it still turns out to be fruitful. Now here is the point: the hypothesis of emergence of consciousness from brain function, is not properly speaking an explanation, but a mere hypothesis, or belief, I'd even call it a prophecy in the abstract existence of an explanation which we do not actually have. Not only is such an explanation not currently available, but it is not expected to be available for a long time (perhaps an eternity), because its very point is that such an emergence can only start happening at such a level of complexity that it is likely to be undecipherable even in principle. All that AI researchers can do is make computing experiments and observe results, yet not actually understand them enough to draw any reliable or meaningful conclusion about whether their experimented systems can be considered conscious or not. In particular, such experiments cannot answer the above question of whether the hypothesis of emergence of consciousness from complex systems is a category mistake or not.

Standards of evidence

Both attitudes of trying to standardize the criteria of judgements (true/false or evidence/non-evidence for the ones, moral right/wrong for the others) are actually very similar, and similarly absurd. Both are kinds of extremism, which is ill-thought perfectionism, by people who can only make sense of questions in terms of "which extremism is the right one", and accept solutions defined by fixed rules that always need to be applied identically without further question. They cannot tolerate any exception to the rule.
To explain the trouble with this : by the same logic one could say "optical illusions exist, therefore we need to cut off our eyes to protect ourselves from the risk of these illusions". One of the problems with this policy of rejecting any source of evidence which has some risk of being imperfect, is how it is continued regardless of the availability of any more reliable alternative solutions.

Right methods vs right conclusions

1. Reaching the true conclusions by following "wrong methods", or
2. Following "the right method" no matter that it can lead to false conclusions

• (Describing things in extreme terms to make them clear :) Picking such strict "standards of evidence" that no evidence can fit into them, results in making one's views unfalsifiable (cut off from real facts) as no evidence can be accepted as good enough to challenge them. Even this would not be so bad if another condition of rationality was met, namely to recognize that who has no evidence has nothing worth saying and therefore should shut up. However Skeptics being Executives by nature, cannot shut up. They still need to decide and force their opinions on others. Their opinions can comfortably stick to their accepted defaults, not affected by the real state of affairs, and still loudly propagated in the names of Science and Reason. In lack of any other accepted reference of truth and evidence, the only remaining reference of truth for them to align their default position, is then defined by the majority opinion of those other people who are assumed to have the most reliable opinions because they are the most "rational", i.e. those who stick to these "most reliable standards of evidence", and at the same time appear to have strong convictions to proclaim, namely the community of the rest of skeptics. Just like with religion : the crowd follows itself.
• Logically, once a word (here "evidence") is given an incorrect definition, any proposition expressed using this word or any other word whose meaning is implicitly defined from it, will be incorrectly interpreted too. The chain of errors originating from there can go very far. The previous point already contains an example. More examples will be developed later.
• More concrete explanations of how the "right" skeptics methods can lead to the wrong conclusions are given in Part 3

The non-existence of evidence

1. Supernaturalism implies the presence of many supernatural phenomena
2. From these, a good number should turn into available evidence
3. There is no such evidence available
4. Thus supernaturalism is false.

The views on 2. and 3. are relative to an interpretation of what "evidence" means. Reading it by their own definitions, skeptics claim 3. but reject 2. as explained above, thus making the argument invalid (which they strangely fail to notice).

Relative to some intermediate standard level of "evidence" I regard 2. as rather weak : many supernatural phenomena are quite elusive, hard to record or check, both by their nature and the lack of organized research about them.

But my biggest disagreement is with 3. I know my rejection of 3. can look crazy in skeptics eyes, first because they feel so sure about 3., second because they will react as "That's simple, if there is available evidence then just give it and that's all".
However I see things as far from being so simple, as I will further explain below ; so given the difficulty I would try to comply to that request only if I had a good reason.
However while I could put as a goal of other expositions to provide evidence for supernaturalism, it is a different game with different goals I undertook to play in the present exposition of what is wrong with skepticism. So inside the bounds of the present exposition, let us say I just report that I reject 3. yet I am not trying nor expecting to convince any unconvinced person to follow me in this option, and for this reason I have no duty to provide evidence for this rejection either. Instead, I want to point out how among (non-religious) supernaturalists, this attitude of not trying to push forward nor prove the invalidity of 3. is both widespread and legitimate.
One reason for this, is that any attempt to point out specific examples of evidence for the supernatural, would be an insult to the thousands (millions?) of other worthy evidence out there which such an attempt would omit. Other reasons are based on things explained in previous sections. First, naturalism is the extraordinary claim in need of evidence; supernaturalism isn't. This is part of the reasons for the lack of motivation for supernaturalists to provide evidence; this itself contributes to reducing the frequency of conversion of occurring miracles into available strong evidence for them. Of course it remains interesting for supernaturalists to distinguish true miracles from fake stories. But unlike the first Christians for whom this mattered as a mark to support the holy doctrine (and yet they could not check anything since all was pure rumor anyway), for most supernaturalists the stakes of this question are usually low, so that weak evidence for specific cases is usually regarded as sufficient. More reasons will be explained later.

Comparatively, skeptics usually appear much more pushy about the truth of 3. expecting people to believe it (I understand they just happened to take it as their personal mission, usually without raising that pushiness itself to any universal value, and that is okay). In such circumstances they are the ones making a claim, and therefore they also should carry the burden of proving it. Now, where is their proof for the absence of available evidence for miracles ? Many skeptics would point to the Randi prize and similar ones in guise of such evidence, but this is rejected by the other side as invalid for diverse reasons (see links).
Now instead of a direct evidence for 3., skeptics can provide an excuse, namely that the structure of 3. is not suitable to provide any direct, concrete evidence for it. Yet supernaturalists can give a similar reply, namely that most miracles usually don't have a suitable structure to easily form any evidence for them either.

Now to approach the issue more seriously, let us try to analyze it at a higher level in the following terms:

In a world with enough miracles that some of them happen to turn into available evidence, how likely is it to lead to the current state of affairs, that is the persistence of a loud and powerful minority of skeptics believing in the non-existence of these available evidences ?
In other words (negated), how falsifiable is the skeptics movement taken with its collective belief in the non-existence of evidence for miracles, as a whole sociological phenomenon (instead of focusing on the behavior of an individual skeptic) ?

• A communication problem: between 2 people debating together, how likely is it for a given evidence known by one to be successfully shared to the other ? There are difficulties of communicating and understanding the details; difficulties of trust whether a whole report was genuine or made up, and the level of work needed to grasp an evidence and verify its validity may not match the patience and discernment of the person to whom it is addressed. For example as this skeptic was having long conversations with a creationist Christian, he could not convince him about the evidence from fossils for the old age of the Earth, because... it is of course much too complicated to explain.
• A percolation problem: once an evidence can be communicated between 2 people, how likely is it (both how easy and how interesting it can be for people) to keep communicating and spreading this information up to fame
• A competition problem : in a world full of stupid people, how likely is it for the best cases of available evidence to make it to the top known cases by percolation in competition with a multitude of other stories and evidences, across a population of supernaturalists usually both unaware of skeptics standards, and usually having completely different criteria of interest (for reasons which may also be very legitimate).
• A skeptics-matching problem : to have any impact on an individual skeptic, an available evidence needs not only to be solid, but also to be specifically adapted to the mindset of this skeptic to whom it is addressed. But skeptics have special requirements on the evidence they can be sensitive to, that is specific combinations of amateurism and professionalism. It needs sufficient professionalism to resist all possible attempts of criticism, and yet sufficient amateurism and simplicity to be readable and understandable by them in the first place, given their usual lack of patience and relative superficiality of approach (because they spend so much time reviewing and debunking 1000 stupidities, they have no time left checking in too much depth anything that might really be much more serious but which they nevertheless expect to be approachable in the same way)
• An excommunication problem (in the same way Christians usually despise deconverts in order to not understand the true reasons for deconversion) : even succeeding to find and provide to an individual skeptic the right kind of evidence which convinces him, will not result in changing the convictions of the skeptics community as a whole, but only in making this individual skeptic a dropout from the skeptics community, which the rest of skeptics will start mocking as a "believer" instead of taking him seriously to question their own positions. Actually the result matches very well this other aspect of the current state of affairs : the presence of a community of professional parapsychologists (as well as many other people not taking this as a profession) who endorse scientific methods and other critical thinking but recognize the presence of valid evidence for the supernatural ; the official skeptics keep dismissing them anyway, not paying them serious attention. Skeptics can still "win the war despite losing all battles", copying a phrase I read somewhere else.
• For those skeptics happening to recognize the presence of scientific evidence for the supernatural, there is still a skeptically correct way to do so, to avoid both excommunication and revision of the skeptical ideology. It will be described in the next section.

Some strange skeptical arguments

Just because we have no evidence of another realm of reality beyond the physical world, how can we conclude it doesn’t exist?
It’s not a matter of certainty, ever. I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it. It just seems weird that this kind of thing would be so crucial and yet so difficult to notice in any controlled scientific way. I would make the case that it is sufficiently unlikely in a fair Bayesian accounting that we don’t need to spend any time thinking about it anymore. Five hundred years ago it would have been a possibility. I think these days we’re ready to move on.

• Consciousness itself which does play a more than noticeable role in our everyday life, may be such a supernatural element (and an indispensably supernatural one according to some understanding of ontology, which is unfortunately still controversial)
• A big fallacy there, is based on the ambiguous use of the word "we" in "we would have noticed it" as explained above.
• His last sentence contradicts the first, and also encourages us to see as legitimate the attitude of no more investigating such phenomena which may actually occur, a kind of legitimacy which is actually self-refuting.
• Some other skeptics have a completely different, incompatible basis for their convictions.

1. The supernatural cannot exist
2. But the scientific method proves that it exists (there is strong scientific evidence for it)
3. Therefore the scientific method is invalid.

Massimo Pigliucci "...I can tell you from first-person experience [in a different field] that there is in fact a lot of garbage out there that gets published in pretty much every field".
Julia Galef: "One of the main reasons I'm interested in parapsychology studies is because of what it tells us about the way we conduct science in general. If you're nearly convinced just based on a priori scientific theories that parapsychology is really unlikely to be true then this is kind of a useful test case for science like if our standard scientific methods give us significant results in these cases then that tells us that there is something wrong with the way we're doing science and that includes the way we do science in lots of other subfields that aren't parapsychology"

"Les recherches en parapsychologie sont à l'heure actuelle d'aussi bonne qualité que celles existant en psychologie. Sur base de ce constat, on peut soit accepter l'existence du psi, soit rejeter ces résultats à cause du manque de plausibilité antérieure, soit encore considérer que ces travaux démontrent en réalité qu'il y a des problèmes importants avec les méthodologies et les outils statistiques utilisés dans d'autres champs des sciences humaines. Certains auteurs avancent ainsi que la parapsychologie est le groupe de contrôle de la science. L'idée est que si les parapsychologues prouvent avec les techniques habituelles de la psychologie que le psi existe, vu qu'il est impossible que ce soit réellement le cas, cela démontre que les méthodes utilisées sont fondamentalement problématiques. Sans entrer dans une longue discussion, il y a effectivement à l'heure actuelle une crise de la psychologie portant d'un côté sur les difficulté de réplication, et de l'autre sur la manière dont les statistiques sont réalisées, particulièrement l'usage de la valeur p."

Translation:

Research in parapsychology is at present of as good quality as that existing in psychology. On the basis of this observation, we can either accept the existence of psi, or reject these results because of the lack of previous plausibility, or consider that these works actually demonstrate that there are significant problems with the methodologies and statistical tools used in other fields of the humanities. Some authors thus argue that parapsychology is the control group of science. The idea is that if parapsychologists prove with the usual techniques of psychology that psi exists, since it is impossible for this to be really the case, this demonstrates that the methods used are fundamentally problematic. Without going into a long discussion, there is actually at present a crisis in psychology bearing on the one hand on the difficulties of replication, and on the other on the way in which statistics are produced, particularly the use of the p-value.

"Je rajoute par ailleurs que de nombreuses critiques des sceptiques à commencer par celles de Massimo Pigliucci dans Rationally Speaking me semblent insister de manière disproportionnée sur des failles mineures. En particulier, il me semble y avoir un énorme raisonnement motivé de nombreux sceptiques à vouloir trouver les failles de l'étude parce qu'ils pensent a priori que l'étude doit être fallacieuse, voire parfois parce qu'ils pensent que l'auteur de ces études est incompétent. Et d'ailleurs ça été totalement mon cas lorsque j'ai commencé à lire ces articles. Plus généralement il semble y avoir un double standard dans la manière de juger différentes disciplines qui met bien en évidence la malléabilité de la méthode des scientifiques en pratique. Quand on veut vraiment être critique, quand on est motivé pour une raison x ou y à être critique, on trouve souvent beaucoup plus de raisons de rejeter telle ou telle expérience scientique. Et ça bien sûr c'est tout aussi valable pour les sceptiques que pour les croyants ou que pour les scientifiques. La malléabilité de la méthode scientifique permet le raisonnement motivé et une interprétation biaisée des résultats scientifiques motivée par des fins idéologiques. Bref, si malgré ces études vous doutez fortement de la parapsychologie, alors vous devriez sérieusement questionner la vérité de la plupart des publications scientifiques, et en particuler la confiance qu'on est justifié d'attribuer à la méthode scientifique surtout si vous pensez que cette méthode scientifique contient des aspects usuellement non formalisés et donc fortement malléables. Et du coup il semble devenu urgent de davantage réfléchir à comment faire de la meilleure science. "

Translation:

"I would also add that many criticisms by the skeptics, starting with those of Massimo Pigliucci in Rationally Speaking, seem to me to disproportionately insist on minor flaws. In particular, there seems to me to be a huge motivated reasoning from many skeptics to want to find the flaws of the study because they think a priori that the study must be fallacious, even sometimes because they think that the author of these studies is incompetent. And besides it was totally my case when I started to read these articles. More generally there seems to be a double standard in the way of judging different disciplines which highlights the malleability of the method of scientists in practice. When you really want to be critical, when you are motivated for an x or y reason to be critical, you often find many more reasons to reject this or that scientific experience. And that of course is just as valid for skeptics as it is for believers or for scientists. The malleability of the scientific method allows motivated reasoning and a biased interpretation of scientific results motivated by ideological ends. In short, if despite these studies you strongly doubt parapsychology, then you should seriously question the truth of most scientific publications, and in particular the confidence that it is justified to attribute to the scientific method especially if you think that this scientific method contains aspects which are usually not formalized and therefore highly malleable. And therefore it has seemingly become urgent to think more about how to make better science."

Avant les travaux de Ben, comme c'est d'ailleurs discuté dans l'article même de Ben, la plupart des psychologues rejetaient la parapsychologie et il y a de bonnes raisons à cela qui ont tout à voir avec des préjugés raisonnables. Comme le dit le proverbe Bayésien : sans préjugé, aucune conclusion ne peut être tirée. L'argument le plus avancé est celui de la plausibilité physique. On a aujourd'hui une énorme crédence en notre compréhension de la physique et celle-ci semble complètement rejeter la possibilité d'une prémonition. Alors ceci dit ce n'est pas tout à fait vrai, en particulier certaines interprétations de la mécanique quantique laissent potentiellement encore entrouverte la possibilité de bizarreries quantiques typiquement à base d'intrication et de non-localité... L'argument quantique augmente ma crédence en la parapsychologie... de ce que je comprends de la mécanique quantique la prémonition demeure extrêmement improbable... Ce dit ce n'est pas la raison principale pour laquelle la prémonition ne me semble vraiment pas crédible aujourd'hui. L'argument que je trouve le plus convainquant est celui qualifié d'argument économique par xkcd. Aujourd'hui dans un monde capitaliste il y a des incentives énormes à exploiter toute faculté prédictive supérieure à celles qui sont déjà exploitées. En particulier la prémonition semble un moyen extrêmement efficace de faire de l'argent par exemple en pariant sur les cours de la Bourse. Vu les incentives économiques, dans un monde où il existe une prémonition juste à 53% au lieu de 50% il me semblerait improbable que les pontes de la finance se fassent remplacer par des algorithmes d'autant que de nombreuses études suggèrent très fortement que les traders de la finance sont en fait très loin de disposer de facultés prédictives au delà du hasard. Si aujourd'hui j'assigne si peu de crédence en la prémonition ça vient en fait essentiellement de cet argument économique et ce malgré les publications scientifiques aussi étrange que cela puisse paraitre, mes crédences sur le paranormal vont à l'encontre de ce qui a été obtenu par la méthode scientifique et en particulier à l'encontre des tests randomisés en double aveugle et des tests statistiques classiques. En particulier là très clairement mes crédences en l'absence de phénomènes parapsychologique n'est absolument pas comparable à la p value obtenue par la méta-analyse à savoir 0.000...1% à cause des préjugés fondés sur la plausibilité physique et l'argument économique, ma crédence en l'absence de phénomènes parapsychologique est bien plus de l'ordre de 99.9999%. Voilà qui devrait donner tout son sens au proverbe bayésien qui dit que la vraisemblance des données n'est pas la crédence de la théorie.

Translation

Before Ben's work, as is discussed in Ben's article itself, most psychologists rejected parapsychology and there are good reasons for this which have everything to do with reasonable prejudices. As the Bayesian proverb says: without prejudice, no conclusions can be drawn. The most advanced argument is that of physical plausibility. Today we have a huge credence in our understanding of physics and it seems to completely reject the possibility of a premonition. So that said it is not entirely true, in particular certain interpretations of quantum mechanics leave potentially still ajar the possibility of quantum quirks, typically based on entanglement and non-locality ... The quantum argument increases my credence in parapsychology ... from what I understand of quantum mechanics the premonition remains extremely improbable ... That said it is not the main reason why the premonition does not seem really credible to me today. The argument that I find most convincing is the one called economic argument by xkcd. Today in a capitalist world there are enormous incentives to exploit any predictive power superior to those which are already exploited. In particular, premonition seems to be an extremely effective way of making money, for example by betting on the stock market prices. Given the economic incentives, in a world where there is a premonition of just 53% instead of 50% it would seem unlikely to me that the pundits of finance will be replaced by algorithms especially since many studies strongly suggest that Finance traders are in fact very far from having predictive powers beyond chance. If today I assign so little credence in premonition it actually comes essentially from this economic argument and this despite scientific publications, as strange as it may seem. My credence on the paranormal goes against what has has been obtained by the scientific method and in particular against double-blind randomized tests and conventional statistical tests. In particular there very clearly my credences in the absence of parapsychological phenomena is absolutely not comparable to the p value obtained by the meta-analysis namely 0.00... 1%. Because of the prejudices based on the physical plausibility and the economic argument, my credence in the absence of parapsychological phenomena is much more than 99.9999%. This should make sense of the Bayesian proverb which says that the likelihood of the data is not the credence of the theory.

Now my skeptic debater, who clearly judged me as an idiot for what seemed to him fuzziness in my thinking, also put forward himself something of the economic argument. First by complaining that, in some discussion, I did not seem as interested as he thought I should be about potential industrial or military applications (the use of remote viewing to uncover military secrets) or for winning the lottery. He asked whether all remote viewers (such as out-of-body experiencers) refuse such uses of their abilities. Like, 2 ants debate on the existence of humans, that the one believes in, and the other challenges her to respond about why humans could not be used as a tool to get food or compete against the next ant colony.

Somehow, these are still good questions. I will not try to develop detailed answers, but ony mention a few things.

Something I happened to stumble on in some facebook groups (long ago, I did not keep references). One story I read is (unless I am mistaken in some detail) an OBEr guy who had undertaken a sort of game with a female friend of his (also OBEr ?) consisting in, from time to time as they are far away from each other, doing an OBE visit to check what the other is doing. One day he did an OBE and wanted to check about her but he couldn't, as he faced a kind of dark veil while trying. Later he called her to talk about this, and she explained that at that time she was having sex with another guy.
Another time I read that a similar phenomenon occurred when trying to unveil military secrets.

Moreover, how can anyone tell that the use of paranormal abilities is not actually widespread ? Somehow it is, somewhere in alternative medicine, just under cover because the world may not be well organized to properly identify and officially recognize what works. On this subject I saw in particular the documentary film in French by Stephane Allix "Guérisseurs, magnétiseurs et barreurs de feu" showing that many well-established hospitals are actually using some alternative medicine in complement to their main standard medical practices, and it appears efficient. I also saw somewhere the info that in the US there are some mediums working with the police to investigate murder cases, and happen to be useful there.
Now as macro-economical issues cannot be well understood without a look on some micro-economical cases, I can comment about economic sides of my experience with magic stones. I suffered many years the trouble which turned out to be cured in this way. If only during all those years I stumbled on someone who saved me in that way I could have thanked such a person with much money ; but there wasn't. Why ? I don't know. First, of course, I was not telling loud around about my trouble, as it was not something so good to claim around. Second, very few are the people aware of the power of stones. Some people may have sensations with these, and yet not know how much it would have helped me. Actually the Tiger eye stone I have is a gift from a friend I knew from some time before, was aware that this stone gave special energy sensations, but had not the idea how useful to me it would be before I discovered the power of Boji stones with the man I met later.
Since then, I only personally know a couple of people who I "converted" to the interest for these stones by direct meeting (= independently of my online activities). I informed them for free, not for any profit. And none of these had any big need of these comparable to the need I had.
All that said, I fail to see what skeptics mean by their economic argument : what more consequences of the supernatural would they see as altogether strongly expected and missing ?

To finish this overview of few oddities of skepticism, here is my transcript of the main content of a video in French of a skeptic (author of a youtube channel on dinosaurs and other evolutionary topics), reacting to previous videos (the skeptical ideology is also called "zététique" in French), namely

• Decay of skepticism by "Mouton Lucide"
• A debate between Mouton Lucide and a skeptic : The failure of skepticism - part 2

...j'aimerais commenter sur le fait qu'il y ait des gens qui trouvent à critiquer à la zététique, des gens qui sont absolument pas convaincus, j'ai eu envie de réfléchir à pourquoi est-ce que la zététique convainc finalement si peu de gens que ça, et aussi ça fait longtemps que je veux faire une vidéo pour expliquer des astuces pour repérer le bullshit (...) quand on se retrouve à table pendant les repas de famille le zététicien c'est celui qui a le plus envie d'ouvrir sa gueule mais qui le regrette le plus à la fin parce qu'il se retrouve seul contre tous et ça c'est quelque chose que tout le monde a vécu au moins une fois quand on est sceptique. J'en viens à me demander, finalement on va en revenir à l'essence même de la zététique qui est quel est l'avantage qu'on tire à être zététicien parce qu'il faut bien se l'avouer c'est quand même la merde d'être zététicien au niveau intégration sociale. On se fait rembarrer par tout le monde, tout le monde nous déteste parce qu'on donne l'impression de mieux savoir que tout le monde. Les gens nous accusent de ne pas avoir d'ouverture d'esprit, et en plus on passe des temps monumentaux à vérifier nos sources, la quantité de temps perdu à chaque fois qu'on croise une info pour arriver à recroiser les sources, remonter à l'origine de l'information et prendre une décision sur est-ce que c'est du bullshit ou non, la zététique c'est quand même loin d'être optimal comme manière de penser, comme philosophie de vie.
(...)
Voilà ce qui, moi, m'a poussé vers la zététique. C'est les réseaux sociaux. J'en avais marre de passer pour un con à relayer des informations qui finalement étaient fausses... et je crois qu'on a tous commis l'erreur un jour de relayer une info de... de relayer une de ces chaines débiles, et on finit par se regarder et se dire merde, j'en ai marre de me faire avoir. Marre de passer pour un con après. La zététique a ce grand avantage de nous protéger des charlatans. Au début vous vous protégez des chaines sur internet et puis vous vous rendez compte que l'homeopathie c'est des gens qui vous tirent de la thune pour vous soigner avec du sucre, et puis vous vous rendez compte que toute votre vie on vous a servi peut-être des merdes qui servaient à rien et que vous avez payé tres cher. ... c'est quelque chose que la zététique permet de s'épargner...
Il y a aussi des charlatans qui ne se savent pas, sont de bonne foi. Par exemple... qui réclament de la thune pour aller à la chasse à l'extraterrestre... et après vous découvrez les sourciers, les magnétiseurs... il y en a qui le font gratuitement mais ils vous fournissent un service qui ne marche pas, qui n'a pas prouvé son effet au-delà du placebo.
Le dernier point c'est que, depuis que je suis sceptique je dors vachement mieux. Toutes ces questions que tu te poses dans ta vie, et tu réalises que ça sert à rien de se les poser parce qu'elles ont une réponse, c'est fou. Et la suspension de jugement, c'est un autre truc de la zététique. Premièrement les questions qui ont des réponses. Est-ce que les fantomes ça existe, est ce que les extraterrestres ça existe. Est-ce que je vais me faire enlever par un extraterrestre. Est-ce que je vais me faire agresser dans la rue par des drogués séropositifs avec des seringues qui veulent me contaminer parce qu'ils ont les boules d'avoir le sida. Non ça n'arrivera pas. Voilà vous dormez vachement mieux. Quand vous savez que vous pouvez faire confiance à votre médecin. Quand on a confiance aux médicaments qu'on prend. Et on suspend son jugement quand on ne sait pas. Y a-t-il une vie après la mort, c'est des questions qui m'ont empêché de dormir à une période, maintenant je m'en fous. On n'a pas la réponse et on l'aura jamais, voilà c'est tout. Vis ta vie. Je ne vais pas aller chercher une secte pour me dire la réponse que j'ai envie d'entendre. Ce dont des choses qui probablement ont échappé à Mouton Lucide dans la video...
Si vous êtes zététicien vous-même et que vous avez du mal à convaincre pendant les repas de famille... expliquer en quoi votre façon de penser est supérieure aux autres. J'insiste sur le mot supérieur parce que je sais qu'il y en a qui vont pas l'aimer. La pensée zététique est clairement supérieure. Elle n'a pas toutes les réponses, et c'est ça qu'il faut retenir, la suspension de jugement quand on a pas la réponse. Parce qu'on dit toujours méfiez vous des gens qui ont toutes les réponses, il faut encore plus se méfier des gens qui n'ont que des questions, comme Mouton Lucide qui pensent qu'on ne sait rien, que la science n'a jamais rien démontré. Non il y a des choses qu'on sait béton. La théorie de l'évolution c'est autant une théorie que celle de la gravité.
La façon de penser d'un zététicien clairement permet d'apporter des réponses là où il y a de vraies questions, de clore les débats là où il n'y a plus débats, et de vivre beaucoup plus sainement. Il n'y a pas qu'une seule vérité, par contre il n'y a qu'une seule version de la vérité à laquelle on a accès. C'est très clair. Les autres versions de la vérité ne sont pas pertinentes pour nos vies. La zététique permet de limiter sa philosophie de vie à ce qui est pertinent.

Translation:

... I would like to comment on the fact that there are people who find to criticize skepticism, people who are absolutely not convinced, I wanted to think about why does skepticism finally convince so few people, and also it's been a long time since I want to make a video to explain tips for spotting the bullshit (...)
when we meet at the table during family meals the skeptic is the one who most wants to open his mouth but who regrets it the most at the end because he finds himself alone against everyone, and that is something that every skeptic has experienced at least once. I come to wonder, finally we will come back to the very essence of skepticism which is, what the advantage is that we get from being a skeptic, because you have to admit it is nonetheless shit to be a skeptic in terms of social integration. We get rebuffed by everyone, everyone hates us because we seem to know better than everyone. People accuse us of not having an open mind, and in addition we spend monumental abounts of time in checking our sources, the amount of time lost, each time we come across some information, to cross-check sources, to go back to the origins of the information and make a decision on whether it is bullshit or not, skepticism is still far from an optimal way of thinking, as a philosophy of life.
(...)
Here is what pushed me towards skepticism. It's social networks. I was fed up with passing for an idiot relaying information which finally was false... and I believe that we all made the error one day to relay an info of... to relay one of these stupid channels, and we end up looking at each other and saying Gosh, I'm tired of being fooled. Tired of looking like an idiot afterwards. Skepticism has this great advantage of protecting us from charlatans. At first you protect yourself from the channels on the internet and then you realize that homeopathy is people who get your money to treat you with sugar, and then you realize that all your life you have perhaps been served crap that was useless and for which you paid very dearly. ... this is something that skepticism helps to save...
There are also those charlatans who do not know it themselves, acting in good faith. For example ... who demand money to go hunting the alien ... and then you discover the dowsers, the magnetizers ... there are some who do it for free but they provide you with a service that does not work, which has not proven to work beyond placebo.
The last point is that since I have been skeptical I sleep a lot better. All these questions that you ask yourself in your life, and you realize that there is no point in asking them because they have an answer, it's crazy. And the suspension of judgment is another thing of skepticism. First, the questions that have answers. Do ghosts exist ? Do aliens exist ? Am I going to get kidnapped by an alien ? Am I going to be assaulted on the street by HIV positive drug addicts with syringes who want to contaminate me because they are upset at having AIDS ? No it won't happen. This way you really sleep better. When you know you can trust your doctor. When you trust the drugs you take. And we suspend judgment when we don't know. Is there life after death, these are questions that kept me from sleeping at one time, now I don't care. We don't have the answer and we never will, that's all. Live your life. I'm not going to go find a sect to tell me the answer I want to hear. These are things that probably escaped Mouton Lucide in the video ...
If you are a skeptic yourself and find it difficult to convince during family meals ... explain how your way of thinking is superior to others. I insist on the word "superior" because I know that there are some who will not like it. Skeptic thinking is clearly superior. It doesn't have all the answers, and that's what we must remember, the suspension of judgment when we don't have the answer. Because we always say beware of people who have all the answers, we must be even more wary of people who have only questions, like Mouton Lucide who think that we know nothing, that science has never demonstrated anything. No, there are things we solidly know. The theory of evolution is as much a theory as that of gravity.
The way of thinking of a skeptic clearly makes it possible to provide answers where there are real questions, to close the debates where there are no longer debates, and to live much healthier. There is not only one truth, but there is only one version of the truth to which one has access. It's very clear. The other versions of the truth are not relevant to our lives. Skepticism allows you to limit your philosophy of life to what is relevant.

In the rest of the video he presents 3 criteria to identify "bullshit":

1. Emotions : appeal to emotions is a trap, so for example when something is in the news he focuses on reading the scientific paper at the origin of it, to assess the content without emotions ;
2. Conspiration : conspiracy theories are usually wrong;
3. Authority : any claim is based on some authority but the one of a single or very few scientists should be dismissed when the overwhelming majority of other scientists are against them.

Taking the tree to hide the forest

Similarly, when skeptics undertake to discuss with someone on either philosophical issues or paranormal phenomena, they usually come along with their big brothers named "Reason" and "Science". They do not hesitate to put these on their side in their picture of the balance of forces against their opponent seen as an isolated individual having to stand against all of these. Indeed, presuming that no evidence for the supernatural could be found until now, anyone's claim of having any good reason to believe in such a thing, would mean being the first such person in the world, against all the best experts of the world who regularly proved all such claims wrong. In such a picture, obviously, the chances for supernaturalists to look serious are very poor.

This is why Near Death Experiences did not seem to exist until 1975 when it was suddenly discovered that there are millions of these. Indeed : when one patient in critical condition comes to be placed under the authority of a doctor who did long studies to get high professional recognition for knowing everything about what goes on in the human body much better than the rest of people... how can this doctor listen to such a story and still not send the patient who told it to a psychiatric hospital ? Such horrors were actually committed. To avoid these, patients needed to shut up. And leave the doctors in ignorance, sincerely believing that no such thing ever happened in their hospitals. Still more recently, such research-blocking denialism persists about other end-of-life phenomena. So there are such times when those who are supposed to best know about something in their field of professionalism with its materialistic dogmas, namely medicine, turn out to be those who know the least about it and block the actual research.

They picture themselves on the side of science, as if they knew what science really says... but what is science ? Science means to know, and to understand what we know. But what is there to know ? There are megatons of scientific articles out there, plus even much more data available beyond these. No matter the effort, nobody has had any chance to study and understand more than a ridiculous fraction of all of that in one's lifetime. Therefore, claiming to speak in Science's name is about as nonsensical as claiming to speak in God's name.

Given this, all that anyone can do in trying to have a scientific viewpoint, is to try to explore things that are there... make one's own selection of what to study, trying not to miss what would be relevant for the topics one is trying to have a scientific view about. How to make the best selection to minimize the worst omissions of crucially relevant information for what one needs ? Only God really knows... but is not on the phone to answer this.

In a sense, there is no possible way to be objective. Anyone can search for the kind of information one believes to be relevant, and blame others for following wrong choices and biases, missing the relevant information.

From that ocean of possible knowledge, skeptics made their selection as follows. Metaphorically speaking, they have specialized themselves in the science of mud, and of all the possible reasons to doubt the possibilities in building any stable construction on top of the most slippery possible mud. From that viewpoint, of course, mud seems to be everywhere and everything looks like mud, so whenever someone is coming to mention any new finding or new kind of evidence, skeptics will dismiss it as mud since that is all that they know about and they analyze everything in such terms. But without reliable ways to prove anything, no way remains to refute wrong views either.

About the experiment of putting envelopes in ceilings in operation rooms

"they put closed envelopes above wardrobes to see if someone in an NDE would go to see what is inside...if we want to prove it like this we are not close to reaching good results. Personally when I lived this NDE I definitely did not feel like going above wardrobes to check what was there. I lived what I felt like living and I lived it that way"

• Putting many cameras that record all events, then ask the people to tell their testimony before any interaction with the people involved, then the videos would be used to check the truth of these perceptions in a rather controlled way
• Making pictures that are not visible for the human eyes, but only visible in infrared or ultraviolet, so that they would not need to be hidden for their observation to be accepted as paranormal.

Another report of NDE study with diverse interesting info, including how patients did not happen to look at the targets.

The politeness argument

"I regret that you have such a bad opinion of the skeptics, who to my knowledge are often full of good intentions and passionate about science. This is the case in any case with the people of our association."

"I have the impression that you are not really trying to argue but to put me at fault, which is very unpleasant for me.(...) "

"...I still find your tone accusatory and obnoxious, so I would really like you to be more courteous and less in value judgments (e.g. you could talk about mistakes rather than lies, which is not connoted with a negative intention). Otherwise, I will be forced to stop this discussion"

• As any act of pointing out the obvious, it is an insult to the intelligence of the other person so assumed to need such an explanation
• Generally speaking, in natural conditions and on any side either right or wrong, the one who makes the least distinction (the biggest confusion) between a conviction (object of criticism by opponents) and the person holding it (who needs respect), is that person himself. And there is nothing wrong with that. I mean, if someone did not take his own conviction seriously, what would still be the point of trying to defend it ? So, to point out the need to separate someone from his convictions, is just another way of saying that these convictions are wrong. And a fucked up way of doing so.
• The last reason, to say in short, is that beyond ridiculous cases (which unfortunately can happen too) the responsibility of everyone to contribute to the rationality of a debate with respect to the risk for it to collapse by the force of insults, is less a matter of not telling insults, than a matter of not feeling them. Here is why :

"I never was to this group, but that is not the type of thing I would follow, sorry. There are probably some interesting things, but I would hardly put up with all the propaganda publications either anti-vaccine, pro-anthroposophical or bordering on racism, which I consider to be real medical and social dangers. If you don't mind, great for you, but I understand that it might be hard for some to take and some may feel discouraged from arguing through it all."

"As for the comparison between science and dogma, it is irrelevant because science requires precisely the ability to be questioned (which seems to be the object of your criticism), and this is precisely the absence of this capacity which one can reproach movements with sectarian tendency like the evangelists."

Skeptics may find very interesting to study the thinking of people who believe that the Earth is flat, however they will run away crying as soon as someone has the madness of going to criticize the skeptical ideology. Poor dears fearing to have a heart attack if they ventured in discussion spaces that are not properly censored by their peer skeptics to fit the way they need discussions to look like. Yet they proclaim themselves champions of self-criticism and accepting criticism. They are even ready to crush the world with their super proclamations of good intentions about it. Yes of course they are open to the criticism from the people who agree with them, like everyone else.

Let us come back to what it was which I was calling a "lie" rather than a "mistake" and why:

"The interference terms converge to 0... the probablity to stay coherent only remains significant for a very short time... even if the state of superposition remains, it can only stay for (this short), then its probability becomes insignificant"

"I presented the standard point of view which is that decoherence is the loss of coherence, of which superposition is a part (among other effects specific to quantum objects, both are not confused). I am aware that decoherence has another role to play in the many worlds interpretation but that was not the topic. I would ask you for avoiding this kind of misunderstanding, and for me to not feel attacked, to try to adopt the philosophical position of indulgence, that is to say that which consists in always interpreting the speech of another assuming he's intelligent. As for ignoring the mathematical content, it is for pedagogical reasons that I made the decision to do so, seeing how many people have a blockage when we talk about mathematics"

On the math content of what is wrong. The reason why coherence and superposition must not be confused, is not that superposition is only a part of coherence, but the other way round (more comments below). Then, there is logically no such concept as the "probability to stay coherent". Quantum "coherence" consists in the presence of nonzero "interference terms" among the components of the state of a system. These terms are numbers which can contribute positively or negatively to the probabilities for the possible results of some kinds of measurements which can be made, in ways which differ from what a classically probabilistic superposition would provide. But these contributions to probabilities cannot consist in giving any non-zero probability for any measurement result which would have zero probability in non-superposed (or classically superposed) cases (indeed more precisely, mathematically changing the sign of an interference term must still give non-negative values of all probabilities).

About this "standard point of view" being "standard". Sorry I have no interest to investigate what the majority of other teachers happened to be saying on the topic, to find out whether it was really here a great parrot's intelligence which I was requested to praise in a world dominated by the same BS, rather than an unfortunate fruit of a personal misunderstanding or distorsion away from some more correct "standard".

About this "standard point of view" being a point of view at all. How could it be ? The fact is, in the whole list of all conceivable and unconceivable interpretations of quantum physics, there does not exist any one in which the end of superposition would coincide with decoherence. And there is a good reason for this : that there is not and cannot be any exact definition for decoherence. Because the concept of decoherence is only defined as emergent from the fundamental evolution laws, without any straightforward definition of its precise amplitude from the given state of a system at a precise time. It all remains relative to the precise abstract way of analyzing the system, whose relevance must be meant as trying to reflect the possibilities of solving the engineering problem of coming up with a measurement device from outside the system (a concept itself dependent of how you defined the limits of the system outside of which a measuring device is allowed to come up), that could acheive this or that much difference of probabilities of results mentioned above. How much hopeless it could be to try designing such a measuring device, and how daunting the complexity of such a device you can still afford to make, which would be needed for a given acheivement. All that matters to the definition of how much "coherence" there is left at any given time (and becomes practically insignificant only due to how fast all of this is wiped out by the exponential decrease with a so extremely short time unit which applies to any given variant of the definition). So whenever a given precise value of an interference term is given, which you may like to call "the probability for coherence to remain", it does not mean that the complementary probability would be the probability for the end of superposition to have really occurred; only that you gave up trying to design a measurement device more sensitive than this to the quantum superposition.

About the many-worlds interpretation being "not the topic". On the contrary the only possibly meaningful sense or relevant explanation to give to decoherence is the one it takes in many-worlds, for the clear reason that :

• Decoherence is purely defined, not directly from the well-established fundamental ingredients of quantum physics (states and evolution laws) alone, but still indirectly so, i.e. as emerging from them alone anyway;
• But these well-established fundamental ingredients of quantum physics alone, form the very definition of many-worlds. Therefore, there is no logical possibility for many-worlds to be out of subject from anything quantum, to such a point that all other reasonable interpretations, having to accepting this content which constitute many-worlds before adding some other ingredient, must still somehow integrate all the many-worlds understanding of every stuff which emerges from the fundamental ingredients anyway.

About the need to omit the math content for the sake of a better pedagogy. It is one thing to make efforts of trying to develop relatively good translations of math into words for this purpose. It is another thing to take this need of avoiding math for the public's sake as an excuse to conform one's own mind to this pedagogical standard of hatred of math, dismissing any care to understand this math for oneself, and then making heavy use of this personal ignorance of the actual content of known science, as a means to keep feeling innocent when proclaiming to the world that this math would prove the opposite of what it really does, while not letting people a chance to discover what might be wrong with the claimed conclusion.

About the need to help someone to "not feel attacked". It is one thing to divert from the topic by insisting on the duty of trying to adapt the expression of stuff for that purpose. But then specifying the expected expression of this requirement, first as "always interpreting the speech of another assuming he's intelligent", and later as "talk about mistakes rather than lies, which is not connoted with a negative intention" without anyhow noticing the contradiction, drives us further into the abyss of nonsense (but it would have been naive to not expect it to end up there anyway ; of course one might try to reject the contradiction, not in terms of lack of knowledge background for this case where competence is claimed, but of the possibility for some people to practice the art of sincerely using their intelligence inappropriately away from truth ; this would drive us too much away from the topic, moreover the methods of skepticism are not supposed to be the art of unintendingly using one's intelligence inappropriately, or are they ?)

About my reason to call this a "lie" rather than a "gross but still unimportant approximation for public understanding anyway" : I actually explained this valid reason before the request to talk of mistake rather than lie came as a reply:

It is on this ridiculous lie that rests the main usual physical argument of skeptics claiming that the von Neumann Wigner interpretation [seeing a fundamental role of consciousness to create physical reality] would be very problematic, when it is definitely not the case.

What should I conclude from this ? Poor dears are these skeptics victims of such a conspiracy of the laws of Nature which once entangled with their holy concerns for pedagogy throughout the math-dumb masses of people, drives them to so honestly and unwillingly fool everybody into the conviction that there would be a solid physical argument for physicalism when there really is none ! They deserve our compassionnate understanding instead of a criticism don't they ?

On the diversity of skeptics

"I do not understand why you send me a text of virulent criticism of skeptics of this kind. What do you think I'm going to tell you? I do not recognize myself in what you denounce, and I do not recognize [skeptics peers] either. It would be silly to start talking in a Manichean way of good and bad skeptics. There might be people who claim to be skeptical and fit what you are describing, but this is not something to complain to us, we are doing everything we can to do a quality job. I don't see what more I can say."

Another aspect of how irrelevant it is to dismiss a criticism under the excuse of not recognizing oneself there, is also well explained by the famous atheist Greta Christina in these words

"And I get angry when believers act as if these offenses aren't important, because "Not all believers act like that. I don't act like that." As if that fucking matters. This stuff is a major way that religion plays out in our world, and it makes me furious to hear religious believers try to minimize it because it's not how it happens to play out for them. It's like a white person responding to an African-American describing their experience of racism by saying, "But I'm not a racist." If you're not a racist, then can you shut the hell up for ten seconds and listen to the black people talk? And if you’re not bigoted against atheists and are sympathetic to us, then can you shut the hell up for ten seconds and let us tell you about what the world is like for us, without getting all defensive about how it's not your fault? When did this international conversation about atheism and religious oppression become all about you and your hurt feelings?"

"— You think of skeptics as a uniform whole, but we are all very different individuals. We share the same goal, which is to promote critical thinking and the scientific method, but we do not have the same means, which creates major differences within the movement. And that's fine, a uniform movement is more likely to close in on itself. I understand you had a bad experience with a skeptic, but don't think they're all the same because of it"

What I reported in this exposition, for many quotes aside some less quoted others, is my experience with the only skeptic who, until now, had the patience and willingness of sustaining a very long and in-depth discussion with me on quite a number of topics. Moreover, if you really, seriously think that this one does not stand your standards of quality skeptical thinking, please say it so loud, denounce the mistakes so committed to stop other skeptics from committing the same mistakes in the future, and report it to him (I'll share contact), that would be a big news to him I am sure. Then if you believe that there is at least a noticable fraction of the skeptics community with more intelligent and respectable behavior than this, it is up to them to prove it. First by understanding that my analysis deserves consideration without needing me to bother running after them, for serious reasons including the quality of my work of clarifying the foundations of mathematics and physics better than most other so-called science popularizers around. Then, by understanding that it needs serious replies publicly and officially in their publications. Because I have no time to waste for more private discussions with idiots speaking in the name of skepticism, in ways which could be more waste of time and nerves as, if I then tried to use these by writing further public reports on these (unless I'd be forbidden to, which would mean it really was an abuse of my time), that could be seen worth dismissing as another ridiculous attempt of extrapolation from a misfortunate experience with the wrong specimens of skeptics.

The idea of a diversity of views among skeptics raises the following issue. There is hopefully this fundamental observable difference between proper science which successfully studies reality, and cults with their dogmas or other failing research methods disconnected from reality : that in any given question altogether meaningful, important enough to get attention and work of serious and skilled investigators, old enough to have got that since quite a time, and easy enough to be accessible to clearly successful investigation in such time, science eventually reaches consensus, while cults fail and stay divided. There is the famous argument from locality, to criticize religions claims of knowing the truth of God for that reason.
Now if it happens for the community of skeptics to keep a heavy and persisting internal discrepancy of different views and different recognized lists of valid arguments on matters with the above mentioned qualities, then it should be seen as a bad sign to the credibility and claims of rationality of this community and its methods as a whole, rather than anything to be proud of.

If the limit to the possibility for skeptics to reach a reliable set of statements on important issues for their concerns is the too small number of active skeptics working on these, which would be ridiculously small compared to the more general scientific community, then they need to admit this: the skeptics community is only a tiny group of people still in their research at a speculative stage, not a proper representative voice of any kind of established science like other sciences can be.

This brings to remember a crucial structure of normal, mainstream science, that is the importance of clear distinctions between 3 different kinds of scientific activities in every field : research (which may be speculative towards new results), teaching of core established knowledge, and popularization. Skeptics do not seem to draw these lines so well in what they are doing. They may point out, as a useful part of rational thinking and debates, the need for people to specify, when making any claim, how sure these claims are seen. However beyond individual discussions done for practice and exploration, there are some topics of wide enough public interest, for which skeptics, in order to be serious and deserve the image of scientific credibility they are expecting, would need to better sort out their activities by not sharing what is sure and what isn't in the same communication spaces, but reserving their more speculative ideas for some more internal discussion spaces, while only spreading to channels for large audiences what was sufficiently checked and found to reach consensus among competent people, for which the risks and rights to commit mistakes can be ruled out.

Here is an example from another part of the conversation:

"(...)
[me:] — I even remember a private message from one (prominent) skeptic recommending me to go see a psychiatrist as an authority to justify that I would be mentally ill, even though in fact I was a victim of poisoning by them. But I can't find it, I seem to have deleted it from my mailbox (...) And so one of my big gripes with the skeptical community is that they generally side with psychiatrists against their critics.

— (...) it is possible that there is this problem because few people are aware of the damage that some psychiatrists can do... "

Now if it happens that official skeptics publications defend psychiatry as a proper science and dismiss its critics then I cannot see how any reasonable person aware of the damage of psychiatry can decently bear being featured as an active member of a skeptics organization without at least dedicating some energy to speak out loud publicly against those skeptics publications and their authors, declaring them a shame for skepticism, in imperative need to be clearly disavowed and contradicted through channels with at least as many readers or viewers as those through which the wrong views were spread in the first place. It should not be the duty of other people who discuss and try to assess the credibility of the skeptics community and its methods as a proper voice of reason, to happily praise the wisdom of true skepticism while excusing and ignoring the big faults committed in the most official skeptics channels, just in the name of the invisible existence of a minority of members of this community who silently think better. The burden to sort out such things should stand on the shoulders of skeptics themselves.

An important reason for this, is that it would be a great matter of practical application and testing of the belief according to which, in average, active skeptics would be no less rational and open to valid criticism and correction of mistakes than the rest of the population.