A lot of people have become lazy and if you can't, with your laptop, go to a free source and get an authoritative article, then it doesn't exist. It's not too easy now, especially given that there is a lot of noise on the Web about controversial topics.
I hear from journalists all the time that they are confused as to what to believe. To which I become a little exasperated, because I ask them how they’re doing their research, and they're using Google. Google is quite good, it will give you a nice pointers here in here. But there's no way in the world you're going to solve a controversial topic by sitting on a laptop using Google.
If you use the way up to find articles, and then go find the articles. Then you start snowballing out to actual data out there. That's available. Most people I know who are doubters, but open-minded come around to - first of all - surprise that is as much good evidence as areas. The second is interest. They don't automatically collapse and say they're a 100% believer, because no scientist, including myself, would ever say that. But certainly level of interest is significantly peaked from “I assumed it was all entertainment and nonsense,” into “there’s something interesting going on.”
So to push the mainstream is extremely difficult. There's a lot of the inertia. And at the level of editors and science writers, I think the principal problem is one of ignorance. Where everyone assumes that it's nonsense. And when that is the overriding assumption, there's no reason to go check the facts. Just recently in the New York Times science section, the deputy science editor, David Overbye, wrote an editorial about What the BLEEP!? And though he seems somewhat sympathetic to the idea, but in a kind of smug way, it's understandable why people want to revert back to the 60s and make physics. Be the way they wish it to be, rather than the way it really is and, as we all know, the parapsychologists were kicked out of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 30 years ago - it's all nonsense. Well, this is an example of what I call junk skepticism. Junk skepticism means that when you're blinded by what everybody knows to be true, I don't take the 10 seconds it would take to verify whether your belief is true or not.
The Parapsychological Association has been a member of the AAAS since 1969, and continues to this day. And I know because I'm the president of the Parapsychological Association. I know it was challenged 30 years ago, but the council voted to keep it. So this is an example of the difficulty of penetrating the mainstream mind, because, the mainstream mind is actually kept by perhaps a couple hundred people whose opinions matter -they're the science writers the editors and so on. They literally don't know what they're talking about, which is demonstrated in this particular case. (See last month's From the filmmakers)
I immediately wrote to the New York Times saying you'd better check this. And they did print a retraction, but of course, nobody ever reads retractions. And unfortunately, it tends to perpetuate a myth. Because people will read the original one and to this day, I write in my bio, in response to letters I get and so on, talking about the Parapsychological Association as a AAAS affiliate, and people challenge me on it. In fact, if you go to Wickipedia, the article which is my bio, which I didn't even post, has a red flag on it. Next > 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
