I was listening to Michael Shermer's book 'the Bordelands of science' and was horrified with everything he was picking a hole in. His the editor of skeptic magazine. He explained how powerful hypnosis was and his experiences with a hypnotist getting people to not see and say numbers and colours from post hypnotic suggestion.

He then said it's a borderland science because science has no explanation from it.

He then picked apart natural therapies, iriology, ostepathy and a number of other fields. I was appalled at the ignorance (yet in his defense I'm going to listen to the rest of the program as I am learning more about history and a wide array of subjects. His knowledgable, even though I don't agree with his conclusions.)

It seems to me that many people now would draw the opposite conclusion, that drugs are a conspiracy and herbs are the most practical, common sense solution. After all many drugs are just based on an isolated ingredient from a herb, the same plant.

Also it's a bit all encompassing to call a whole field bad, as it's made up of many things. He hasn't brought up NLP yet, but instead of saying all NLP is bad, one could say rep systems have their merit, eye accessing cues are fairly accurate yet could be improved with more knowledge of cerebral accessing and so on.

Einstein once said something along the lines of two things are infinite the universe and human stupidity.


I speculate that the problem with human beings is they don't have strategies of evaluation built into them when they're young in school.

The ability to match and mis match a subject. Agree, disagree. Chunk down into smaller parts, examine the validity of each. Use it as a tool to ask how to improve it.

And people who are successful like Tony Robbins often only make 1 or 2 points. I also find increasingly frustrating that people seem to hide behind academic qualifications as a way to satisy their own need for importance.

And I never get surprised with people. I had someone call me yesterday and say "I heard you could help my son his suicidal." I said "look, I've been very sick and out of hospital and haven't worked in several months. I don't know someone who I could refer you to, but as his threatening suicide, that's pretty serious, I could at least start by sending you a DVD free of charge that might empower you with some skills."

He said "errrr....I don't know, a DVD sounds like a lot of effort" and I thought WTF!!

So tell me what's your opinion, are human beings stupid? Are some human beings stupid? Is it, like what I say, people never learn how to learn, so in essence the most 'learned' of us have no strategies to take and build on things.

Is that people need to feel certain (Richard talks about certainty a lot, anyone care to commnt?) so they block anything out that doesn't agree with them.

Does it tie into generalizations? Why do people have the tall poppy syndrome?