Jeffrey Mishlove interviewed by a hardscore skeptic

[Laird]

To be fair, tim, we do have a (serious) thread on fairies on this forum - not that I think such topics deserve mockery, just that their association with parapsychology is not necessarily contrived.

[Ninshub]

No dispute from me there, tim!

If you watched the video from the youtube site itself, which was live streamed, you can see the chat replay on the right. I had to turn it off it was so offputting, though not surprising from subscribers to a channel like this.

[Laird]

Yes. The chat was full of unabashed snideness and mockery - not that I'm incapable of that sort of approach myself, but to those who disagree with you, it just comes across as foolish and unjustified arrogance.

To be fair, tim, we do have a (serious) thread on fairies on this forum - not that I think such topics deserve mockery, just that their association with parapsychology is not necessarily contrived.

True but isn't there an implicit association with nonsense ?

[Laird]

True but isn't there an implicit association with nonsense ?

With that crowd: absolutely.

I haven't watched the video yet and I have other threads I really want to reply to that I've let go too long but I did want to say the skeptic arrogance is both understandable and useful. Understandable because to this day parapsychology hasn't produced anything with the sheer day to day on demand real world usefulness that pretty much every other area of science has. And no, not even remote viewing meets the criteria. It's useful because it should be taken as inspiration to create such a thing if for no other reason than to see the look on their faces. Arrogance can be useful because of how it puts a target in you band makes people want to take you down, prove you wrong, etc. It can get people to put a lot of effort into something they otherwise wouldn't. I don't really mind the arrogance, I see it as evidence that the skeptic has lost their true internal drive for life, as now the only paths that seem sensible are in one day or another submissive to something else outside of them.

So I watched the video, it's pretty hard to be on Jeffery's side on it so much. It's funny that the host focused on the same single issue that I and, quite frankly, anyone else who's actually serious about this focuses on. Which is of course, "What can you do with it? And why should we use it as opposed to something else that does the same thing?" Because no one who matters cares about mysticism or spiritualism or any of that, they care about results and making life easier and more comfortable and all that. Single parents working 3 jobs to barely support one kid don't give a shit about the "interesting things" parapsychology says about consciousness. If you can't produce something that's actually worth their time and effort to train into themselves or the money to pay for to make their life easier, then don't even bother trying until doing so is your goal. Because you're not going to get any funding or interest until you do.

I think the host was pretty reasonable in their approach, I didn't find them insulting or anything like that nor would I think of them as a "hardcore" skeptic. They asked the most important questions that every normal, work a day person would want to know. Jeffery didn't help himself by starting off talking about how he did drugs and was interested in mysticism and that his unique PhD came from a program he developed or that his defining moment where he believed it was real or worth going down came from a dream. Those things all sort of destroyed his chance at being taken seriously, but I commend the host for being as level headed as they were about it all and just sort of going with it.

[Ninshub]

I think the host was pretty reasonable in their approach, I didn't find them insulting or anything like that nor would I think of them as a "hardcore" skeptic.

No definitely not. I was using the term more in the way I think he labels himself as a convinced atheist (and I'm pretty certain you could add materialist), "humanist", etc., and the crowd that seems to be drawn to his channel. But I could be wrong.

Single parents working 3 jobs to barely support one kid don't give a shit about the "interesting things" parapsychology says about consciousness. If you can't produce something that's actually worth their time and effort to train into themselves or the money to pay for to make their life easier, then don't even bother trying until doing so is your goal. Because you're not going to get any funding or interest until you do.

This is what I liked about the Superhuman documentary, though it went a bit farther than necessary IMO in trying to get people to try to develop psychic powers though that will still inspire some people.

What I think is more useful is to get people to develop "Psi-adjacent" practices that will hopefully bring about more Psi experiences - meditation, lucid dreaming, perhaps some kind of intuition training though people often just use "intuition" as a means to rationalization.