What the Kneejerk Skeptics Miss

I’ve mentioned that I’m both intellectual and intuitive. I’m both rational and creative. This is only remarkable because it seems most people choose one way of approaching things or another, and each side can be wildly out of balance.

I think my approach to my paranormal experiences is a little different because of this. I take my own experiences seriously, yet I am always keen to test them, and their objective reality, as often as opportunity allows. Supernatural stuff have the built-in problem that they commence and decease on their own schedule, and cannot be replicated on command, so one must wait for chances to test out the reality-shifts as they arise. Which means my learning curve is pretty stretched out! It can take decades to understand very simple things.

My background is also quite twisted, and that helped! My parents, despite any psychological issues I had or have with either of them, were both prone to paranormal experiences and were always watching programs (like “In Search Of“) or reading books about unusual things. So I was exposed to a lot of alternative ideas very young. However, my father was also a con man, so he knew how gullible people are and how to exploit that. He actively taught me how to avoid putting my faith into what appears to be true. Appearances can be deceiving! He also LOVED science, hands down, and we always had magazines and books around that fed my young mind. I had a dual-natured home bred education. By the time I got to high school, I was avidly following both scientific breakthroughs and new studies on paranormal subjects.

It was only when I tried to discuss science (or skeptical rational approaches) to fans of Fortean phenomena or the accumulated evidence and ideas behind the paranormal to those who congratulated themselves on the current scientific consensus and rational thinking, that I realized I was always going to be a bit of an outlier. Each ‘side’ tended to collect information that supported their own viewpoint, while ignoring, dismissing, or ridiculing anything from the other side. Because of my own split approach, I could easily see that BOTH sides were missing some crucial things. People tend to feel most comfortable being validated continuously in their chosen area, rather than risk being wrong by vacillating from side to side as I do. I could understand the very human need to keep mental efforts easy by holding to a single stance, yet I could never feel at ease there myself.

So why didn’t I go there? Why did I buck the system from BOTH sides?

Perhaps my saving grace, in the end, is simple wild curiosity. I want to know what’s going on, and then I want to understand how it happens, and then I want to grasp the why of it all. Sometimes, my intuition leaps ahead of the step-by-step process of accumulating facts, but to be completely satisfied, I need to double check what I believe may be true using the scientific method.

It’s rarely easy…

I think most people in today’s society can understand why its important to be skeptical, to make decisions on more than faith. To begin with, there are liars and cheaters and exploiters everywhere! They will sell you what you want to believe in order to get your money, your pussy (if you’re a woman), or to direct your will towards their own ends. Because I am ‘into’ the paranormal, I have gone to see channelers and various teachers and leaders of multiple groups and movements and found a LOT of manipulation going on. I’ve also found a few amazing individuals who I considered very spiritual and/or psychic– but you know what? They didn’t make their living at it. I don’t think any real psychic could easily make a living since the talent is so inconsistent, even for the best. The ones who are the real deal tend to offer their services for free or else find a niche way to address several needs (but only a very lucky few manage that!)

[I'm trying to think of a real psychic I know who makes their living at it, and Michelle Belanger (a prolific author and sometimes psychic guest on various ghost shows) is maybe the only one that comes to mind. Interestingly, she's a lot like me, rational as well as intuitive, and she's wildly curious and loves to teach people. She gets paid for books and by shows, but when she helps people, she never charges them to, say, deal with a ghost or find something that's missing. Still, my point remains, most real psychics have day jobs. Even Michelle lives on a budget. She's written SO many books, and done her guest appearances, but she's barely lower middle class. I happen to know she lives in a house with several roommates in order to afford her life. So-- yeah, beware the rich psychic/bullshit artist!]

Also, because Fortean phenomena are so random (although not as random as we think) and come and go in waves, it’s hard to ‘catch’ it in time to study it well. These rather unpredictable events and encounters, being as hit and miss as they are, create massive confusion. It’s hard to nail down a ghost! Although there has been much more progress with classic hauntings as technology gets more sensitive to finding evidence, and ghosts, at least, tend to stay in one place and are therefore easier to ‘catch’ and study! So it’s actually easier to nail down a ghost than almost anything else under the paranormal umbrella.

Still, kneejerk skepticism is just as troublesome in its own way.

Mainly, their issue is a massive LACK of curiosity. I mean that individually as well as for the ‘rationalist’ community as a whole. There is a smug assumption that one has all the answers when it comes to anything in the paranormal categories. Unfortunately, this has led to blanket assumptions that preclude and obliterate any truly rational digging for more answers.

So I keep coming across these guys (or gals, but the most public personalities tend to be guys) like Pen & Teller, for instance, who understand scams and they apply what they learn from THAT across the board to everything even remotely ‘weird’, declaring there is nothing ‘real’ there. Our brains are easily fooled, they say. We’re misleading ourselves through heuristics (short-cut thinking) and the rest is just illusion, mistakes, cons, or lies. There is no such thing as a __[name your phenomenon of choice here]__!

The problem is that these ‘bullshit experts’ are experts in BULLSHIT, not in the actual various phenomena in question. And because of this, they themselves spout falsehoods all the time, just assuming certain things to be true without even doing the slightest bit of research into the data already collected over many decades or even centuries!

Let me make one example: Astrology!

True: A lot of ‘predictions’ or descriptions of individual personality traits are so broad they apply to everyone and almost anything. A lot of people who swear by it are relying upon filtered memories (recall the hits and forget the misses) to back up their beliefs.

False: There is nothing beyond chance and coincidence when you look deeper into astrology. (This second assumption comes after the first, generally as a “therefore…”)

I could tell the ‘truth’ part right away– it’s pretty easy to understand using logic. However, out of sheer curiosity, I decided to study astrology in depth– actually learn how to make charts and really dig into how the planets, sun, and moon are supposed to affect our personality and events in question. I looked into multiple sources, learned the basics, and THEN I did the thing NO ONE on EITHER SIDE EVER SEEMS TO DO– I compared descriptions and predictions to real people and real life events and kept track.

The Verdict: Astrology, done correctly and in depth (not the shallow surface popular entertainment shortcut versions) is actually accurate an astonishing 50% of the time when describing people, and over a third of the time when illustrating upcoming events.

What true believers often miss, to my annoyance, is that HALF of all “if you’re a Taurus/Capricorn/Leo etc. then you’re this” is totally wrong! They will often say, “I’m just like my sun sign,” and then describe a couple of things that are true, when a full, comprehensive description is actually wildly off base. It’s a little better if you include other factors like moon sign, ascendant, etc.– but not by much.

Still, what skeptics miss, because they don’t bother to even LOOK, is that for a person to match 1 of 12 signs roughly 50% of the time is rather remarkable and odd. Why should that even be? It should be, according to odds, more like slightly above 8% of the time. It’s not just the power of suggestion either, since most people don’t even know the true in-depth description for their astrological sun sign, let alone the rest! Even taking into account coincidental statistics (which are more complicated than just the first raw odds number– just look into the likelihood of 2 people in a room of 30 or more having the same birthday!) it’s still way above chance.

Now why is that? Do the planets and such actually control us? I sincerely doubt it. My own suspicion is that perhaps a very long time ago, ancient scholars noted that certain personalities tended to be born more often at certain times of the year (which may have to do with how seasonal changes effect very young children’s development more than anything else) and used astrology to track this. I don’t have a way to test this, but it seems a logical guess.

When it comes to events playing out as an astrological chart suggests, I surmise that perhaps, again, certain repeating patterns in human endeavors were tracked and then applied to the astrological calendar in use for centuries. Which is why predictions using the system are more accurate than purely guessing– not by a lot, but for centuries, even the slightest edge in guessing would be useful, so the system stuck around, long after other means to make decisions came along that were far more useful.

But, see– I wouldn’t have learned all that (and come to respect ancient people’s problem solving prowess) if I hadn’t bothered to look deeper.

You can’t find what you’re not looking for, is all I’m saying here!