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He was well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind too far and it falls out of the cranium.
by ceejayoz 1y ago
He was well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind too far and it falls out of the cranium.
- zikzak 1y agoUm, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing. But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if. There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?
- ares623 1y agoDidn’t Galileo collect evidence first?
- ceejayoz 1y ago> There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell? Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.
- alganet 1y ago"What if it's an alien artifact?" - We're going to observe it. "What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it. That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.
- exe34 1y agoVery little observing involves just the eyes. much of what we observe relies on millennia of assumptions. if we don't consider alternatives that we would normally reject out of hand, we can miss things.
- all2 1y agoThere's an excellent quote from the WH40k universe: An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and its walls unguarded.
- exe34 1y agothat's not what an open mind is though. an open mind is one that is willing to question what is inside as much as it is willing to question what is outside. a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.
- ares623 1y agoMy favorite piece of media is Contact (book and movie). Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement. Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.
- andrei_says_ 1y agoOne of my other favorite piece of media is the intro of a Rick and Morty episode parodying the plot of contact. Highly recommended.
- philbo 1y agoI think 3I/Atlas is a comet. But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider. I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.
- ceejayoz 1y ago“What if” is just fine. Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.
- philbo 1y agoDoes he though? Honestly I haven't seen it. I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind? I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to. And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument"). [1]: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- ceejayoz 1y agohttps://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/alien-technology-ocean/ https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/alien-technology-oce... as an example.