EP165: Those Eyes

[bolddeceiver]

I don't quite understand the title ... and it makes me want to continue "...oh, I'm cryin' ..." 

Heh, it had me thinking of Billie Holiday singing "Them There Eyes..."

[Boggled Coriander]

I really liked this story.  Especially the sarcastic attitude of the skeptic. 

Might be an interesting companion story to "Code Brown" (DrabbleCast #29).

[ajames]

Not meaning to get caught up in semantics, but I'm curious - I'm familiar with 'agnostic' and 'atheist' used separately, but I'm not sure what they mean put together. Is an agnostic atheist one who believes that ultimate reality is unknowable, but that God isn't a part of it? As in, "I don't have all the answers, but I know some of what the answers aren't!" ?? Why not just drop the agnostic part and stick with atheist? Or does atheism imply something other than an ultimate reality without god?

Atheist = one whose answer to "do you belive in god" is not "yes". 

"Atheism" is a response to "theism", which means active belief in god/s.  Does not necessarily mean that one actively disbelieves in god/s (that would be "antitheism".)  Most who claim to be "agnostic" are actually atheist.  For this reason I've recently dropped the "agnostic" part of my self-descriptor and just identify myself as an "atheist" though I will elaborate when questioned further about it.

Thanks stePH.

Interestingly (to me at least), I had this conversation about the meaning of the word 'atheism' with my father last week. He argued along the lines that you have put forth, and I argued that atheism was the belief that God does not exist. He had logic (if you look at the roots of the word) on his side, and I had Webster, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and even the OED on my side. As I have looked a bit further, though, I see that my father, and you, have more than logic on your side. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/sn-definitions.html

I hope I'm not being too pedantic here - this is a topic of some interest to me.

[wintermute]

In reference to the outro, I'm a sceptical agnostic atheist, because no other position seems to make sense to me.

Not meaning to get caught up in semantics, but I'm curious - I'm familiar with 'agnostic' and 'atheist' used separately, but I'm not sure what they mean put together. Is an agnostic atheist one who believes that ultimate reality is unknowable, but that God isn't a part of it? As in, "I don't have all the answers, but I know some of what the answers aren't!" ?? Why not just drop the agnostic part and stick with atheist? Or does atheism imply something other than an ultimate reality without god?

I am an atheist because I'm pretty sure no gods exist. When it comes to specific gods (such as Jehovah), that "pretty sure" goes up to something like five nines.

I'm an agnostic because I accept that some god or gods could exist. Show me the evidence, and I'll change my mind.

Almost all the atheists I know (and a fair number of theists, too) are agnostic, though very few of them would think to use that word.

I hope I'm not being too pedantic here - this is a topic of some interest to me.

A pedant is simply someone who demands precision in language. Words have meaning, and using them poorly leads to ambiguity and misunderstanding. Finding out exactly what someone means when they say they're an "atheist" or an "agnostic" is, frankly, central to any discussion on the topic. So, yeah. I insist you be as pedantic as possible

[Dr Frankenshroom]

Cool Story

Love the aliens reply to the talk-show scientist retorts.
The aliens should have abducted him and given him an anal probe
I know I would.  I would do it to remove the crap up his arse 

My retort against the idiotic talk show scientst is by a real top research scientist:

  Stanton Friedman from Moving Into Space"
How do we look to the aliens ?  From an alien point of view  wew a primitive  society  whose major   activity  is tribal warfare. Listen to the  the six o'clock  news for a week and you'll see.
Why don't they want to talk to us ?"  What in the world for?  That raises a bigger question . What are they doing here?  Whats so fascinating about this  unimportant place out in the
boondocks.  Fior the first  time, were  given an indication  the we'll  be able  to move out from
 our own planet  to bother  people  on other planets  in our neighborhood"
....

"For  a million years we may have been  a sort of pastoral  civilisation: a nice place to visit, a good place for a honeymoon. great for hunting and fishing. You don't need a license. Yet since
the Second World War, we loudly proclaimed -not by what we said but by what we did- that we Earthlings (a) are nasty creatures and (b) are going to the stars." pg 215


"The most virulently  anti-UFO  people are uniformly  those took great pride  in their  knowledge  of all that is important, especially  in the scientific relam. They seem  to use this kind of reasoning
" If flying saucers were indeed  intelligently controlled  extra-terrestrial  vehicles, that would  be very  important. If it was important., people like me and the New York Times, who keep up with the important , would know about it. We don't about it ; sop there is no basis  for these things are important, and therefore, anybody who thinks  flying saucers are real must be crazy. We don't need  to at any data, becuastr there's no data to be looked at;  becuase if there was, we'd know about it, and we don't ; so there isn't " I would  find this kind of reasoning  fascinating if I was pychologists which I'm not; but as a physicist I must  stand and proclaim it is nonsence. An ego-kick is not the way to arrive at the truth.  pg 214

Another idiotic comment by the scientist" why didn't they teach us the scientific theory of disease"

This is obvious.  We would never understood all those centuries ago
Even at the time of Madame Cure, people didn't believe her either.
As Aliester Crowley stated, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

[Listener]

I don't quite understand the title ... and it makes me want to continue "...oh, I'm cryin' ..." 

Heh, it had me thinking of Billie Holiday singing "Them There Eyes..."

I'm leaning in this direction. (It's not a Rickroll.)

[Cerebrilith]

The idea of fantasy creatures that depend on our belief and are harmed by skepticism reminded me of the role-playing game Changeling: The Dreaming.

The story was okay until the radio host at the end got too heavy handed explaining the story to us.  I felt like I was being spoon fed at that point.

The back and forth of the radio host and the alien voice worked really well and I'm glad two different narrator's were used for it.  I'm not a big fan of how the effect for the alien voice turned out though.

[wintermute]

Another idiotic comment by the scientist" why didn't they teach us the scientific theory of disease"

This is obvious.  We would never understood all those centuries ago
Even at the time of Madame Cure, people didn't believe her either.

Marie Curie really had nothing to do with the germ theory of medicine; by the time she was born, the basic idea that diseases were caused by micro-organisms was well established. And her work in radioactivity was so uncontroversial that she became the first person to win Nobel prizes in two different disciplines, Chemistry and Physics (Linus Pauling also managed this, for Chemistry and Peace).

And, yes, people laughed at Snow, Semmelweis and Pasteur when they first came up with their hypotheses, but once the data was in, the medical and scientific communities accepted it with barely a murmur.

People understood. They didn't much like the idea at first (mostly because it meant that washing your hands was more effective than praying), but they understood. And they would have been capable of understanding a thousand, or ten thousand years ago - as the guy says, all you'd need would be to give a bunch of cavemen a microscope, and it wouldn't have taken long for them to work out that people with set of symptoms X always have little blobby thing Y all over them. From there, it's pretty simple.

[stePH]

 

As Aliester Crowley states, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

  I was quite interested in Crowley back in my "belief-sponge" days -- I even took "Minerval"-degree initiation in the Ordo Templi Orientis (never went to first degree because I took seriously the statement that one should be ready to forge a lifelong relationship with the Order before taking further initiation).

I still find Crowley quite interesting.  Very few (if any) others combined mysticism with scientific method.

***
"The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular."
E. A. "Aleister" Crowley

[Dr Frankenshroom]

As Aliester Crowley states, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

  I was quite interested in Crowley back in my "belief-sponge" days -- I even took "Minerval"-degree initiation in the Ordo Templi Orientis (never went to first degree because I took seriously the statement that one should be ready to forge a lifelong relationship with the Order before taking further initiation).

I still find Crowley quite interesting.  Very few (if any) others combined mysticism with scientific method.

***
"The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular."
E. A. "Aleister" Crowley

I thought it was Cure. I got the wrong scientist. Thanks for correcting me.

[Dr Frankenshroom]

As Aliester Crowley states, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

  I was quite interested in Crowley back in my "belief-sponge" days -- I even took "Minerval"-degree initiation in the Ordo Templi Orientis (never went to first degree because I took seriously the statement that one should be ready to forge a lifelong relationship with the Order before taking further initiation).

I still find Crowley quite interesting.  Very few (if any) others combined mysticism with scientific method.

***
"The Universe is the Practical Joke of the General at the Expense of the Particular."
E. A. "Aleister" Crowley

I took my 3rd .  I got tired of all the ego games in the OTO.  I then went to Tibetan Buddhism
and found out it wasn't much better their either...



That quote is very topical to this story.

[coyote247]

On the subject of skepticism, I like to think of myself as an empiricist. I think that as a whole universal truth doesn't matter nearly so much as "working truths", like math and physics which are fundamentally flawed in rendering the universe but work incredibly well for the small glimpse we usually deal with. So I think it's a pretty good policy to at least try to give people the benefit of the doubt that their beliefs, be they skeptical or believing, are based on their own live experiences and have been changed with their lives to best suit the universe as it has affected them.

However, as everyone who believes in experience/evidence-based perception may cringe at, I do tend to view anything that can't be physically proven as being interpretive like literature or (in my opinion) conjecture on history, psychology, and sociology and so on. That is the aspects that deal with motive (which can not yet be proven) rather than "what actually happened" and "the statistical rates at which things happen". So when it comes to the unknowable things in life, I say be like your highschool english teacher: anything is right as long as you support with a well constructed logical argument and plenty of supporting details with cited examples.

[Ragtime]

  I was finding this story to be kind of dull at first, but it really grew on me by the end.

I had the exact opposite reaction.   I thought it was a cool idea at first, but the story didn't really GO anywhere with it, so by the end it was the same cool idea, moderately fleshed out, but still without any new direction that wasn't there in the first 5 minutes.

Of course, it picked up again after the story with the dedication! 

[stePH]

I don't quite understand the title ... and it makes me want to continue "...oh, I'm cryin' ..." 

I'm leaning in this direction. (It's not a Rickroll.)

That's the song I had in mind; apparently I've been mishearing the words all this time -- it's "...are crying", not "...oh, I'm crying".

[stePH]

Just finished listening to the story again (there was a story? ), and enjoyed it much more the second time.  Keeping the "aliens as elves" notion in mind helped the earlier alien-narrated passages make more sense.

[Roney]

I liked this story about 70%.  The voices of the phone-in host scientist and the space elf were excellent -- note-perfect I thought, with not a word out of character, and well performed by the Eley tag-team.  I loved the gag that the aliens actually go around stealing homework.  I've seen "elves were just aliens" done before, but "aliens are just elves, with nowhere left to go" is a new one to me.  I liked aliens that were no more at home in the sky than we are.  I was fascinated by the justification of their anti-rationalism -- I can see their point, if the skeptical mind is deadly to them.

And what a fascinating war they were fighting!  I liked their courage in a war that they could never hope to win, not because humans are becoming more rational but because our geographical expansion and round-the-clock activity leaves fewer places to hide.  They seemed to have some quite nifty guerilla tactics for use on modern humans, too: unlike in the old days, where elves could fill in whenever something couldn't be explained, they have to find ways to make people believe in things that actually have simple, rational explanations.  After my initial revulsion, I came to have some sympathy for them.

And I was glad that the space-elf business wasn't saved for a final twist after it had been so heavily hinted at.

So, yeah, an overwhelming display of authorial skill but some of the gears were showing.  The advocate for science is in a situation where soundbites and put-downs are favoured over serious arguments, so he inevitably comes across as glib.  The plaintive, frustrated voice of a dying race understands the scientist and is able to respond to what he has to say -- the radio host has no such advantage, and is made to say things that sound arrogant or foolish in the light of what the listener has just learned from the elf.  At times it seem terribly manipulative, straining to make the scientist into a straw man so the elves could look noble.  It smelled rather badly of propaganda for mysticism.

[qwints]

As Aliester Crowley stated, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

That's just plain wrong. Although hunter-gatherer lifestyles often preclude abstract pursuits, plenty of people who might be classified as pygmies are more than capable of learning calculus. Watch this speech http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/neil_turok_makes_his_ted_prize_wish.html about the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences http://www.aims.ac.za/english/index.php.

I liked the story ok. It reminded me of "Kid Stuff" by Isaac Asimov in which a child smashes an elf with his school books.

The thing that has really pissed me off is Steve's argument of tolerance for idiocy. Yes, we should always treat people with respect. But that doesn't mean that their ideas are worthy of respect. I shouldn't have to respect the governor of Louisiana with respect when he says that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. I don't need to tolerate scam artists who say that can cure diabetes with cane sugar. People like Carl Sagan and James Randi can be abrasive at times, but they know what they're talking about.

Now I understand that some atheists and skeptics can be assholes, but that doesn't mean that most paranormal believers aren't idiots.

[stePH]

The thing that has really pissed me off is Steve's argument of tolerance for idiocy. Yes, we should always treat people with respect. But that doesn't mean that their ideas are worthy of respect. I shouldn't have to respect the governor of Louisiana with respect when he says that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. I don't need to tolerate scam artists who say that can cure diabetes with cane sugar. People like Carl Sagan and James Randi can be abrasive at times, but they know what they're talking about.

Now I understand that some atheists and skeptics can be assholes, but that doesn't mean that most paranormal believers aren't idiots.

Well put.

As Aliester Crowley stated, you can't teach calculus to pygmies.

That's just plain wrong. Although hunter-gatherer lifestyles often preclude abstract pursuits,...

I think that's more what Mad Aleister was getting at, but it could have been put better.

[contra]

I liked this story.  I don't have a lot else to add that hasn't already been said.

I liked the ending a lot.  I like d the idea of aliens gonig around and actually doing all these annoying things to people.  I'm rteally not sure why unless the people were paranoid anyway... becuase I wouldn't attribute a loss of keys to the work of aliens... but then i'm not a believer they have ever been here. 

The idea of a war being done through ideas and thoughts rather than anything else, only one side knowing it is a war though.  I suppose it would be looked at, if someone had such a mind, as how certin countries treat the world .  Some ideas are better than others, and they don't understand that the other side even exists or that alternate ideas were just as valid.  But then its been how all Empires ever have worked...

I don't know.  Its only just came to me.. and it's probably wrong.  I'm tired.  Up early.  i'm gonig to bed.

Night everyone.
Thank you Steve and co.

[Ocicat]

I liked the episode.  From the minute I finished it though, I already feared the comment thread.  Discussions on skepticism vs. belief are never real productive.

For the record, I have heard the "aliens are really elves" concept done before, in a surreal graphic novel called Seekers into the Mystery.  That story is far more sympathetic of the supernatural critters who have become grey "aliens", and they offer spiritual enlightenment.  So "Those Eyes" is sort of the opposite side of the same coin.

[stePH]

The idea of a war being done through ideas and thoughts rather than anything else, only one side knowing it is a war though.  I suppose it would be looked at, if someone had such a mind, as how certin countries treat the world .  Some ideas are better than others, and they don't understand that the other side even exists or that alternate ideas were just as valid.  But then its been how all Empires ever have worked...

I just remembered that the aliens/elves apparently tried to start a war that didn't quite come off.  I'm figuring that this would have been WWIII and would have driven humanity back into the stone age, presumably to reduce us to base superstition within a generation or two (thusly putting us into a mindset more conducive to their survival).

[ajames]

The thing that has really pissed me off is Steve's argument of tolerance for idiocy. Yes, we should always treat people with respect. But that doesn't mean that their ideas are worthy of respect. I shouldn't have to respect the governor of Louisiana with respect when he says that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. I don't need to tolerate scam artists who say that can cure diabetes with cane sugar. People like Carl Sagan and James Randi can be abrasive at times, but they know what they're talking about.

Now I understand that some atheists and skeptics can be assholes, but that doesn't mean that most paranormal believers aren't idiots.

I don't consider James Randi or Carl Sagan to be among those who tell us what to think in an arrogant or insulting way. I've listened to interviews with James Randi, and used to listen to the podcast put out by the people who run Skeptic Magazine, and these skeptics were always very respectful of others even as they completely exposed a specific claim to be rather ordinary rather than paranormal. "I'm here at this famously haunted house, and I'm not saying there isn't a ghost here, but I'm just going to look and see if I can find a logical explanation for what's going on. Oh, well, isn't this interesting. Those weird noises seem to be coming from the adjacent stairway in the building next door where the night janitor works... and so on."
Sure, if you are heavily invested in your beliefs you might get pissed off by such skeptics, but that's only because they are raining on your parade, and as it turns out most of your floats melt in the rain.

With all the psychic charlatans around, we need people like James Randi.

Some skeptics, on the other hand, can be needlessly derisive and offensive, and believe that they have some special insight to "the truth" and it is their job in life to shove this "truth" down others throats, while telling everyone else how stupid they are. These are the people I believe Steve was talking about. To use what the Governor of Louisiana said above as an example, it is one thing to take this statement and show it to be utterly unfounded and incorrect; it is another to do this while telling the governor what an idiot he is (he'll surely listen to what you have to say then), and still another to tell him that he needs to think just like you do, or he is an idiot.

[wintermute]

...and still another to tell him that he needs to think just like you do, or he is an idiot.

Fixed that for you.

[Rain]

I could have done without the bad sound effects but otherwise it was a good story, nothing special though

[qwints]

Someone said earlier that they thought the elves were noble. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of the elves being beaten back by inquiring eyes. I'm convinced the scientist is the hero of the piece (though that may just be my personal bias.) On the other hand, I think the elves are purely evil villains who are content to prey on humanity forever.