What becomes of old 'friends'..

[gillianren]

Lots of families have histories of alcoholism and mental illness. Mine, for example. Doesn't mean you'll necessarily be a mentally ill alcoholic all your life.

I'm definitely not an alcoholic; I don't care for alcohol, either.  (I also dread loss of control, so the idea of being drunk has never appealed to me.)  However, having a family history of either alcoholism or mental illness does predispose you toward both.  Especially if you think self-medicating with alcohol is a good idea.  It's certainly a popular one.  In writing, it's known as "the Hemingway defense."

[raven]

Sounds like a chess move*.
*Yes I know who Ernest Hemingway was.

[smartcooky]

Sounds like a chess move.

Well it almost is, since it was the writer Stephen King who first coined the phrase.

"....as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give into their sensitivities.  Only sissy-men do that.  Therefore I drink.  How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work? Besides, come on, I can handle it.  A real man always can"

But King himself rejects this notion. He states that the mixture of creative endeavour with mind-altering substances "is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”

[nomuse]

On the old friends, I think I've got Heiwa over at Godlike arguing that nuclear weapons don't exist.  And IDW has surfaced again but is generally calmer these days.  Unfortunately, he's also left Apollo behind to concentrate on UFO's, ISON, and of course his own unique theory of physics.

There's always an Apollo Hoaxer or two at Godlike but so few of them are worth the time.

[ChrLz]

Nomuse, you have a much stronger stomach (and much more tolerance) than I, to still be hangin' out at Godlike.  I salute you!

For me, I spent a bit of time there some years back when Nancy Lieder was peddling her horrible, dog-killing insanity - but as her influence died away it got to the point where the stupid just burnt too much..  Having said that, I do wonder how much of GLP consists of those honing their 133t trol-skilz..?

Interesting about IDW.. I got the sense he vanished for quite a long while - any hint as to why?

Speaking of old friends, I just did a quick google to see how my old 'friend' highwic was getting on - I see he's still posting at godlike making new predictions of doom, although he's now extended them way out to 2018 or so...  Highwic got very, very angry at me when I chased him around the web like in the comments here to dispute his predictions for apocalypse in 2011/12 and showed that his 'incoming' was Jupiter...

Highwic was one of my 'favorites', because he got unbelievably angry when people disputed his 'info' and invariably got himself banned by his very rude and very silly retaliative outbursts.  Funny, but a little sad, to watch...

[Peter B]

On the old friends, I think I've got Heiwa over at Godlike arguing that nuclear weapons don't exist.

Heh. So all those nukes the Soviets and Americans aimed at each other from the 1940s to the 1980s were just for show? For whose benefit? Aaah, the light dawns - to keep the Swedes in their place. *wink* *taps side of nose*

By the way, he's expanded his spacecraft page, with links to some other site, but with no corresponding increase in good sense (or good manners).

[nomuse]

I was laid up in bed.  Couldn't concentrate enough to do anything meaningful.



Most frustrating part of most conspiracy theorists is their lack of world-building.  I always want them to explain more about how their theory works...and think about its implications.

But you hammer and hammer just trying to get one to narrow down to explaining they disbelieve in the actual lunar landing, but every other part of the space program is peachy with them.  Or, in the case above, that they accept atomic theory and the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, but they don't think bombs can work.

They seem, as a group, surprisingly uninterested in their own theories.  They rarely amplify or expand; they only repeat their original statement (if not their original post, verbatim).

[cjameshuff]

Otherwise, I think his threads on this topic are fantastic examples of typical conspiracist arguments, from begging the question, to goal-post moving, to simply ignoring counter-evidence. I think if I were teaching a course on logic, his threads would be a great (bad) example.

It's curious how he latches on to some technical term while clearly not having any comprehension whatsoever of what it means. "Plane wave" and "transverse wave" have quite specific meanings which clearly escape him entirely: they describe completely independent attributes of waves (the shape of the wavefront versus the direction of oscillation), while he bases his "theory" on them being entirely separate kinds of waves.

His new favorite incantation appears to be "Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor". To the rest of the world, it's a rather straightforward instrument based on lenslet arrays used to test imaging optics and ensure that rays of light traveling different paths through the instrument all end up at the right parts of the sensor. It's based purely on refractive optics, and is little different from an array of very small simple-lens cameras. To Solon, it's some magical technology that somehow makes stars visible in vacuum. (My suspicion is that he confuses the lenslet array with a grating, another favorite word and another case where Solon's beliefs simply have nothing in common with reality.)

When more knowledgeable people correct him, he refuses to even acknowledge it, and continues with his nonsensical usage of the terms. I don't know if he's just using fancy words in an attempt to impress or what...in the latest thread, he seems to be trying more to win the argument by ridiculing his opponents, accusing them of ignorance.

[Glom]

Sounds like Brannon Braga.

[smartcooky]

When more knowledgeable people correct him, he refuses to even acknowledge it, and continues with his nonsensical usage of the terms. I don't know if he's just using fancy words in an attempt to impress or what...in the latest thread, he seems to be trying more to win the argument by ridiculing his opponents, accusing them of ignorance.

And therein lies one of the fundamental differences between the scientist and the pseudo -scientist.

Both the scientist and the pseudo -scientist can come up with what, on the face of things, looks like a really great theory/idea. They can both really fall in love with their theory/idea, but when the experimental/research data don't support it, and show it is wrong, the scientist will let go of it, while the pseudo -scientist wont.

One of the great historical examples of this was Kepler. He had convinced himself that the orbits of the six known planets were circular, and directly geometrically related to the shapes of the five "perfect" (or Platonic) solids. His astrological beliefs told him that he was right, and that this was proof of the Hand of God in the creation of the universe.

But the observational data didn't match, especially when he was able to extract more accurate observations from Tycho Brahe. The scientist/astronomer in him overrode his dearest astrological beliefs and he gave up the idea in favour of the one he eventually arrived at, the one that fit the data; that the orbits were in fact ellipses with the Sun at one focus.

And so, we have Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion.

[twik]

He's so intent on dodging the landslides of evidence against his idea that he contradicts himself pretty regularly.  His insistence that the Moon's barely-there ionosphere permits his "conversion" process, for example, means that his original claim (that the Sun can't be seen near the zenith from the ISS' altitude) can't be right, since there's much more ionosphere above the station than above the Moon.  It's the sort of thing that happens when he's running full-tilt looking back at the evidence rather than forward at a coherent argument.   I wish he'd come over here where the moderation isn't so strict.

The thing that sets my teeth on edge about Solon and similar conspiracists is the sneaky way they feel compelled to introduce their pet theory. It's always a sort of "oh, I have this *little* question/observation I thought I would mention. Anyone think it's just a bit odd, hmm?"

If I really thought I had a new theory of the propagation of light, I'd be going to the ATM thread, and saying, "Hey, guys, I have this really cool alternate notion about light! Here's my reasoning, and my evidence. I think I'm right, and everyone else has been wrong." If I really thought I had something new, I would believe I could defend it - if the idea can't stand up to scrutiny, it's not likely to be valid. This sneaking business of trying to get people to accept one small concern as legitimate (serving as as the camel's nose under the tent) indicates to me that conspiracists really know that there's no way they can defend their ideas in a straightforward discussion.

[cjameshuff]

The thing that sets my teeth on edge about Solon and similar conspiracists is the sneaky way they feel compelled to introduce their pet theory. It's always a sort of "oh, I have this *little* question/observation I thought I would mention. Anyone think it's just a bit odd, hmm?"

Prying out details that you can actually address is like pulling teeth. Then after some goalpost shuffling, demands for wildly impractical experiments, demands for evidence that gets provided and ignored, and more evasion, out comes the same stuff that you'd previously demolished. Compton scattering! Transverse and plane waves! Gratings!

I like how sts60 put it, he's constantly running full-tilt while looking backwards, with no idea where he's going with any of it. That fits with his ability to come up with such absurdities like his notion that the reason the Shuttle's windshields got a close inspection after each flight was the diffraction gratings secretly placed on them to make the outside visible.

[Chew]

The thing that sets my teeth on edge about Solon and similar conspiracists is the sneaky way they feel compelled to introduce their pet theory. It's always a sort of "oh, I have this *little* question/observation I thought I would mention. Anyone think it's just a bit odd, hmm?"

It's called JAQing off.

[raven]

The worst part I think is sometimes there is someone who literally thinks something doesn't look how they think it should and have honest, if misinformed, questions about it. The moon is a weird place, and its lack of atmosphere and its fractal features, for example, make distances difficult to judge.
So they come to the site, and we scare them off by jumping down their throat, because their opening ramble happens to resemble those who lack honest questions and are just trying to push an agenda.

[ka9q]

Yes, I'm concerned about the same thing. Usually by the time I see a newcomer there is already a flurry of replies from the regulars and some of them can be a little nasty.

I think people should be a little more patient. If the guy is just another hoaxer cynically playing the "just asking questions" line, it'll be obvious soon enough. Anyone asking honest questions in good faith, no matter how 'stupid' they might seem to some, deserves straight and respectful answers.