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How about: "Cryptozoological creatures like [God] are (supposedly) [all powerful entities] living [somewhere outside time], and both have decades of 'evidence'

How about: "Cryptozoological creatures like [God] are (supposedly) [all powerful entities] living [somewhere outside time], and both have decades of 'evidence' to suggest that we might [measure one's effect in some shape or form]—as we did the giant squid." > Maintaining one particular irrational belief does not a religion make. According to the article, cryptozoologists have many irrational beliefs, one for each creature.

jlgreco 13y ago
You're stretching. Both can be irrational beliefs while not being particularly similar to each other.
- woodchuck64 13y ago
  On the contrary, most irrational beliefs are similar to each other because they all stem from the same neurological modules crafted by evolution. Fallacies that are easily exposed by formal logic often seem correct to people not trained in science. For example, anecdotal evidence is given perverse weight because most of the time, anecdotal evidence is pretty solid evidence for a group of hunter gatherers.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Oh, I get that. What I am saying is that just because two concepts are irrational does not mean that the language we have constructed to talk about these concepts plays into the shared root cause. As a concrete example: Tea leave reading and bigfoot sightings are both related to (really, both stemming from) apophenia, but accusing tea leave readers of being basically bigfoot-ologists is a rather... 'clumsy' way of handling the subject matter, for better or worse. Sometimes it is certainly useful to point out that an underlying phenomenon is the basis for another absurd hypothesis, but that is something that you need to go into with some degree of fineness. If you just jump right into that, you'll be accused of being "rude, and therefore wrong" (illogical, I know...).
  - JackFr 13y ago
    Careful, you're falling into a trap there... By the same token, your skepticism and rationality are also only neurological modules crafted evolutionary selection. It is not necessary (or even proveable) that those beliefs actually correspond to the true nature of the universe.
    - woodchuck64 13y ago
      No trap or problem here (except in the minds of confused religious philosophers). "True nature" is impossible to know, agreed, but rationality is aimed at a much more practical goal: accurately communicating the entirety of shared sensory human experience and abstractions built thereon. Rationality at root entails nothing more grand or mysterious than standing in a forest with another person and agreeing that "this is a tree". Language is born of the need to communicate with another being and logic is born of the need for precision and efficiency in communication. Natural selection can shape neurological modules for language in order to propagate genes, but after that there is nothing that stops language-using primates from improving and enhancing language, making it work better, building higher and more strictly defined classes of abstractions that eventually form math, logic and science. As this relates to the original subject, the primary point was that people, cryptozoologists or the religiously devout, were judging correctness by what "seems" correct rather than by rigorous science. What seems correct is the strong influence of certain default neurological modules, absent training. Only with training do people appreciate how misguided one's instincts can be and how much better science is in communicating accurate observations.

jlgreco 13y ago

You're stretching. Both can be irrational beliefs while not being particularly similar to each other.

woodchuck64 13y ago
On the contrary, most irrational beliefs are similar to each other because they all stem from the same neurological modules crafted by evolution. Fallacies that are easily exposed by formal logic often seem correct to people not trained in science. For example, anecdotal evidence is given perverse weight because most of the time, anecdotal evidence is pretty solid evidence for a group of hunter gatherers.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Oh, I get that. What I am saying is that just because two concepts are irrational does not mean that the language we have constructed to talk about these concepts plays into the shared root cause. As a concrete example: Tea leave reading and bigfoot sightings are both related to (really, both stemming from) apophenia, but accusing tea leave readers of being basically bigfoot-ologists is a rather... 'clumsy' way of handling the subject matter, for better or worse. Sometimes it is certainly useful to point out that an underlying phenomenon is the basis for another absurd hypothesis, but that is something that you need to go into with some degree of fineness. If you just jump right into that, you'll be accused of being "rude, and therefore wrong" (illogical, I know...).
- JackFr 13y ago
  Careful, you're falling into a trap there... By the same token, your skepticism and rationality are also only neurological modules crafted evolutionary selection. It is not necessary (or even proveable) that those beliefs actually correspond to the true nature of the universe.
  - woodchuck64 13y ago
    No trap or problem here (except in the minds of confused religious philosophers). "True nature" is impossible to know, agreed, but rationality is aimed at a much more practical goal: accurately communicating the entirety of shared sensory human experience and abstractions built thereon. Rationality at root entails nothing more grand or mysterious than standing in a forest with another person and agreeing that "this is a tree". Language is born of the need to communicate with another being and logic is born of the need for precision and efficiency in communication. Natural selection can shape neurological modules for language in order to propagate genes, but after that there is nothing that stops language-using primates from improving and enhancing language, making it work better, building higher and more strictly defined classes of abstractions that eventually form math, logic and science. As this relates to the original subject, the primary point was that people, cryptozoologists or the religiously devout, were judging correctness by what "seems" correct rather than by rigorous science. What seems correct is the strong influence of certain default neurological modules, absent training. Only with training do people appreciate how misguided one's instincts can be and how much better science is in communicating accurate observations.