I agree with most of this, the problem is I’m not sure how useful it actually is:
“There’s a big difference between dismissing that whole Lost Continent of Atlantis story, and prematurely dismissing it.”
Well, sure, but we need some way of deciding when our dismissal is premature. I mentioned this in the comments on Talking Snakes as well… there is certainly some room for the absurdity heuristic—my time is valuable, I can’t evaluate the evidence for every crank claim in the world (I know several academics who could easily spend their entire lives checking “proofs” that P=NP if they did this). I have to reject some of them out of hand—the issue is: which ones?
If someone tells me they’ve built a perpetual motion machine in the back garden from tin cans and elastic bands, I’m not going to waste even 10 minutes of my life trying to replicate it. The real issue is where we draw the line between claims which are too absurd to bother looking at the evidence for and those we should take the time out to evaluate, you don’t seem to have said anything yet that will help us to make that decision (perhaps you’re getting there).
I agree with most of this, the problem is I’m not sure how useful it actually is:
“There’s a big difference between dismissing that whole Lost Continent of Atlantis story, and prematurely dismissing it.”
Well, sure, but we need some way of deciding when our dismissal is premature. I mentioned this in the comments on Talking Snakes as well… there is certainly some room for the absurdity heuristic—my time is valuable, I can’t evaluate the evidence for every crank claim in the world (I know several academics who could easily spend their entire lives checking “proofs” that P=NP if they did this). I have to reject some of them out of hand—the issue is: which ones?
If someone tells me they’ve built a perpetual motion machine in the back garden from tin cans and elastic bands, I’m not going to waste even 10 minutes of my life trying to replicate it. The real issue is where we draw the line between claims which are too absurd to bother looking at the evidence for and those we should take the time out to evaluate, you don’t seem to have said anything yet that will help us to make that decision (perhaps you’re getting there).