ECS you are the one always attacking everyone like you are an Internet Troll that has to have people see everything your way and no other way. If we were all like you nothing in this world would ever get done. We would all sit around and like Gulliver's Travel be saying, "We're doomed Marticia we doomed.
I see ECS attacking theories, not people. A number of us do that here. When we see a piece of evidence that doesn’t make sense or is incorrect, we mention it and point out why we have a problem with it. One can choose to interpret this as a personal attack, but a better way to go would be to consider it a form of scholarly peer review.
When I’ve presented my theory to the world (by putting it on the internet, I’ve essentially done this), I’ve invited the world to review it by default. If people evaluate my theory and the evidence supporting it and point out problems with it, that doesn’t make any of us bad people. All it does is show that my theory may not be correct. I have a few options at this point, depending on how I’m approaching things.
One way forward is to submit to my cognitive bias, ignore all evidence against my theory, and double down in order to satisfy my ego. This is what people naturally are inclined to do, as our brains are wired for cognitive bias. It
feels right because of this, but it almost never results in a correct answer. However, my brain usually doesn’t care whether or not I’m correct - more on that below. Peer review exists specifically to try to prevent this.
Or, I can objectively re-evaluate the evidence -
all of the evidence, not just the evidence that supports my theory. (In fact, I should throw that theory out at this point and start over. The fact that I had a theory before I had all the facts guarantees confirmation bias and means that my theory will be incorrect, except by accident.). Then I can say, "Hmmm. This doesn’t prove what I thought. What
does it prove?" This feels wrong and it’s not easy to do. My instincts are screaming at me that the people that tore up my theory are enemies (there’s that cognitive dissonance at work)...but then I remember that my brain is a sometimes clever but very quirky lump of meat that was engineered to keep a naked caveman alive long enough to reproduce in a prehistoric environment, and that outside of very specific scenarios, those instincts are feeding me unproductive suggestions today. However, this is exactly the course of action that I need to take if I want to arrive at the correct answer, rather than an answer that feels good.
If someone shoots down a piece of your evidence, it doesn’t make them a bad person. It means that you had a bad piece of evidence. If this happens with a significant amount of your evidence, again, that doesn’t mean that they’re a bad person. It means that you had a lot of bad evidence, and probably have a bad theory as a result of it. Having a bad theory or an erroneous belief does not imply anything negative about you at all, other than that you’re stuck with a sometimes clever but very quirky lump of meat in your skull that’s performing all sorts of shenanigans in order to keep you alive in a prehistoric environment, but has absolutely no interest in your beliefs being correct outside of that specific parameter...
...just like the rest of us.
Apologies for the long post, but sometimes we need to be reminded of how our brains work and just how bad our brains are at being logical and objective - me as much as anyone.
