Belief in NHI

[dubsartur]

Travis S. Taylor is described as a physicist and science-fiction author.  Wiki says he is specifically an optical and areospace engineer.  Cranks and creationists very often have engineering degrees if they have any qualifications in natural science (medical degrees are also not unknown).

I'm sure all these characters would be fun to meet but I can't help someone do story magic on unconsenting third parties or stabilize their childhood faith.  I am a scientist.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

I finished the whole thing the other night, and I quite enjoyed it. At first I thought he was spending rather a lot of time time just talking with Fugal (current owner of Skinwalker Ranch) and his 'team', but in the end I could see his approach worked well for showing what these people are like. The key figures are predominantly fantasists (Bigalow, Fugal), but they also enjoy the grift. They like to think they are doing something extremely special, but on some level know it's all just entertainment. The capacity to hold those two conflicting attitudes in their minds at once is fascinating. One can be both a child and an adult at the same time, in different ways, in different contexts.

The intersection with Mormon theology was fascinating too. Greenstreet's own mormon background certainly turned out to be useful for this insight.

I found a related article on this topic.

[dubsartur]

The Walrus wants you to be scared of TikTok misinformation https://thewalrus.ca/social-media-is-warping-history/ which seems to draw on a trade book from a Big Five publisher: Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)

Basically though, corporate social media are not places for establishing evidence-based consensus.  They never were, any more than bar-room chats, cable TV, or magazines for thinky talky people were.  If you wanted them to be, you would build them differently, and they would be much smaller.  Knowing verifiable true things is an uncommon taste.  There was no time in the 20th century when most people in the North Atlantic world were good scientific materialists, most people have at least one belief or practice which is hard to square with natural science.  But when you are one-on-one or one-on-few with people, you can listen with attention, ask some gentle questions, and offer some extra information and often they can take that and step away from the woo.

If you want a mass-media-sized audience, you have to create mass-media-shaped things like big speculative claims or moralistic gossip about famous people.