Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by mikelyons on Wednesday April 12, 2017 @10:05PM
(#14103535)
People don't understand the mechanics of belief and don't realize that they're being just as dogmatic in their rationalism and scientism as the most fundamentalist religions.
Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by vertex-four on Thursday April 13, 2017 @05:57AM
(#14105517)
Especially some of the actual practices surrounding it - I've had some really bad experiences with e.g. the Less Wrong crowd tending towards assuming there is no value to human emotion, and so failing to even make a basic attempt of integrating into a community rather than dominating it with debate-is-the-only-form-of-conversation, attacks on people's identities under the guise of "you asked a question, that means you want me to tear you apart", and more.
Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by ikeyany on Thursday April 13, 2017 @02:30AM
(#14104620)
Does it really take years and years of education to comprehend that the Earth is spinning around the sun?
Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by averagewall on Thursday April 13, 2017 @05:05AM
(#14105320)
It's not obvious that the sun isn't spinning around the earth instead. You could use coordinate acceleration in an earth-centered frame and the sun would be spinning around the earth. That's equally as correct as the conventional view. So I think a test can be that if someone doesn't understand that the sun is spinning around the earth, then they probably don't actually understand at the earth is spinning around the sun - they just believe it.
I'm a physics teacher, and most teenagers don't have a clue about this at all. They think astronauts float around in space because there's no gravity there. If there's no gravity, then how does the earth stay in orbit around the sun? That shows they really don't understand it at all. It's difficult and you have to actually think hard over a long time to make all the pieces fit together.
Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by PhasmaFelis on Thursday April 13, 2017 @04:05AM
(#14105055)
It might take years to really understand it. It only takes a few minutes to hear something and decide to believe it without truly understanding, but is that really what we want people to do?
Re:The Shamanic View of Mental Illness (2010)
by metaphorm on Thursday April 13, 2017 @03:08PM
(#14110004)
examine this statement in more detail. consider that this discovery is only a few centuries old, was controversial at the time, and that astronomy had been practiced all over the world for thousands of years under the incorrect Geocentric Model because that model is deeply intuitive as well as explanatory up to a point.
the level of precision and rigor, backed by advanced instruments and mathematics, needed to disprove the Geocentric Model is really quite high. you have taken your own education for granted.
"When my son was four or five years old, he asked one of those interminable questions that children ask: 'Why does the sky get dark at night?'
"Eager to increase his understanding, I put a lamp in the middle of the floor to act as the sun, got down the world globe, and used a tennis ball for the moon. Then I walked around the "sun", carrying the globe and turning it, explaining how we are suspended in space, constantly moving. It was the universe in a nutshell - sun, earth, moon, stars, seasons.
"My son watched the production with silent, squint-eyed attention. When I finished, he said to me, 'You don't expect me to believe that, do you?'"
For a lot of people, the supernatural explanation is the simpler explanation. The so-called "scientific" (or more properly Scientistic[1] or maybe Naturalistic[2]) world view rests on explanation after explanation that takes years and years of education to even understand, much less accept.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28philosophy%29