It is important to not let wishful feelings influence your judgments. Scientific facts will eventually answer a lot of the these outstanding questions, it just may not be in a human time scale (ie: could take centuries). A lot of what were oddball ideas are now accepted, because of overwhelming evidence (continental drift, warm blooded, feathered dinosaurs, etc).
Literally all of this is dispelling myths. We made up human exceptionalism, it’s our own ego. We decided humans must be different, must be extra special somehow, and that became the default position in Western science
It’s not based on anything, it’s a terrible model to use when interacting with animals, every animal whisperer on the planet has to dance on egg shells to explain “the animal needs to feel understood, just pay attention to these signals to know what they’re thinking”
You want to avoid things like smart Hans and N rays and all the charlatans selling their own brand of snake oil, like RFK Jr. Science is the best tool we have to drive back the darkness. It is self correcting and, if they are myths, then they will get rejected.
This is in the same category as anti-vax. How do you prove a vaccine is safe to an anti-vaxer? You show them the clinical trials. They say it’s too small of a sample size. You do more tests. They say it’s not on a long enough time frame. You wait decades to show them the long term effects. Then someone releases a paper about a link to autism, and no matter how hard you discredit the paper you’ll never convince them
You can’t beat pseudo-science with science. You can’t tell budding science enjoyers that some people think vaccines do more harm than good… There’s no evidence of that, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary
Just like there’s no evidence humans are fundamentally different than other animals. That’s the claim scientists should be attempting to prove, do it the other way around and you just make the next generation start in the dark
It is important to not let wishful feelings influence your judgments. Scientific facts will eventually answer a lot of the these outstanding questions, it just may not be in a human time scale (ie: could take centuries). A lot of what were oddball ideas are now accepted, because of overwhelming evidence (continental drift, warm blooded, feathered dinosaurs, etc).
Okay, but why not?
Literally all of this is dispelling myths. We made up human exceptionalism, it’s our own ego. We decided humans must be different, must be extra special somehow, and that became the default position in Western science
It’s not based on anything, it’s a terrible model to use when interacting with animals, every animal whisperer on the planet has to dance on egg shells to explain “the animal needs to feel understood, just pay attention to these signals to know what they’re thinking”
You want to avoid things like smart Hans and N rays and all the charlatans selling their own brand of snake oil, like RFK Jr. Science is the best tool we have to drive back the darkness. It is self correcting and, if they are myths, then they will get rejected.
Science isn’t self correcting too well…
This is in the same category as anti-vax. How do you prove a vaccine is safe to an anti-vaxer? You show them the clinical trials. They say it’s too small of a sample size. You do more tests. They say it’s not on a long enough time frame. You wait decades to show them the long term effects. Then someone releases a paper about a link to autism, and no matter how hard you discredit the paper you’ll never convince them
You can’t beat pseudo-science with science. You can’t tell budding science enjoyers that some people think vaccines do more harm than good… There’s no evidence of that, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary
Just like there’s no evidence humans are fundamentally different than other animals. That’s the claim scientists should be attempting to prove, do it the other way around and you just make the next generation start in the dark