Why are some people so skeptical of science or hesitant to believe

As much as I hate the cliche, reality often is stranger than fiction.

>>7585555
People it more comforting that conscious forces are controlling things because they're easier to relate with.

Nothing is more terrifying than the realization that reality can't be reasoned with.

Also, checked

>>7585571
Relativity and quantum mechanics are strange that's true. In many ways I guess they are more strange than a time demon.

>>7585596
Good point. We do try to humanize everything around us. We even like to think animals have emotions like ours.

>>7585555
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaUhR-tRkHY

>>7585555
Somethign similar happened to me. I was discussing some popsci time travel theory with this guy and he didn't have a problem with understanding it. I then tried to explain Snell's Law to him in an unrelated conversation and he didn't get it at all. I think the aim of popsci or the supernatural is to make sense based on how we perceive the world. Actual science says we can only make sense of some things if we perceive the world differently.

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>>7585555

>>7585555
Face it, Mr. Quads. Your friend is retarded.
I'm not saying this to simply insult her but she seems to be the kind of persion that does not holds and questions believes based on their merit, but instead accepts what feels 'good' to her.

Relativity confuses her, so when she is confronted with it she does not feel good. She can either think that it is true and she is just too stupid to understand or that it is simply not true and that is why she doesn't understand.

While demons and all that shit, she's seen them in movies, she hears people talk about them online and in weird circles, this is a simple idea that resonates with her.

Not to sound harsh or anything but I think that "liberal arts" in college should be a trap. Like, when the students enter the classroom they are all shot in the fucking head.

>>7585555
Just tell her that Einstein discovered that daemons warp spacetime
What's the problem

I think your friend is just kind of a special case. I think the vast majority of people don't think too often on scientific concepts like general relativity and when it's presented to them they often don't understand it at all but they are nonetheless willing to accept it because it's associated with an idealized class of "higher thinkers" who DO understand it, which would essentially be the equivalent of ancient peoples accepting all teachings of the priest class but with the phenomenon displaced into a contemporary culture in which education standards have given a generally higher awareness of how reality works on a basic level than back then. You're friend is one of the few common people that has fallen behind in the evolution of intellectual authority, I guess.

>>7585676
Yea I guess they technically aren't mutually exclusive actually.

>>7585659
Good example and yea people do, do this even with non paranormal beliefs sometimes they just want to substitute pop sci for real sci.

>>7585684
Idk how much of a minority it is. Lots of people seem to distrust scientists and other experts.

Is she just a Christian who believes in God and demons or is she one of those completely insane "spirit science" types who think you can talk to ancient Egyptian gods by lucid dreaming and that hexagrams control the universe?

People have an easier time believing in simple things than believing in complex things.
A god is much simpler than all of physics.
Demons are much more simple than relativity.
Demons literally can't be much more complex than "demons are demons and they x" because there isn't any actual system or mechanics behind that belief.

>>7585739
More the second one, not really religious.

>>7585743
True. Or they wanna believe its "so complex its beyond our understanding".

It's because they don't understand it. They don't know enough about science in general to accept what's scientifically acceptable. There's a lot of unintuitive stuff in advanced science and math that uneducated folk just wouldn't comprehend as even possible until they get a background (even an entry level one beyond high school) in the scientific method). Think the Monty python and the Holy Grail witch scene. People really haven't changed much since then.

niggas fear what they don't understand.

>>7585627
1/2 hour youtube experience
yeah, nah

Idiots struggle with abstraction.

Your friend can understand demons and monsters, because they're closer to being concrete entities. Relativity, however, is pure abstraction.

This usually manifests in a refusal to even take the proposed scenario seriously, rather than an a reasoned- even if flawed- argument against it on logical grounds.

>>7585675
>Not to sound harsh or anything but I think that "liberal arts" in college should be a trap. Like, when the students enter the classroom they are all shot in the fucking head.

The entire purpose of liberal arts is meant to be challenging the exact sort of "safe" thinking you're talking about.

Obviously it's rarely like that in practice.

Fuck, that reminds me of a professor I had once who basically said "College should be treated like a full time job. I realize that's not how it works nowadays, but I'm going to act like it is anyway, and assign you the amount of homework that I would give if it *was* the case."

He saw nothing wrong with this.

>>7585555
Its not about strangeness, Anon. She simply could not accept it because it was relatively new to her.

And, anyone who uses technology is a believer of science because it works! :)

>>7585555
You almost got 5 consecutive fives on an Extralunar Void-dancing sleep club, do you think it could have happened without supernatural intervention ? I don't think it could have.

>>7585675
You sound crazier than her tbh.
Also general relativity relies on pseudo-riemannian manifolds and whatnot to describe space and time, it's infinitely more confusing (and dubious, even) than a demon which is just like a bad intent with a bodiless voice.


Only thing relativity has going for it is predictive power and empirial confirmation, which is a big thing, but assessing that is beyond the grasp of most people, even itt.

TL;DR: Girl is stupid to believe that easily in demons, but jumping on relativity because it sounds cool and sciencey is barely more sensible. Just say "I'll leave it to the scientists because I don't know or care enough.

>>7585853
But university is treated like a full time job..... Hell, coming from working full time in defence uni is way more hours, 7 days a week 10-12 hours of work every day just to keep my head above water.

>>7585555
It's very simple OP. Why are things like gods and demons common across almost all human cultures? Because humans have evolved to live among other humans and think in terms of human intention. So we tend to ascribe intention to natural phenomena that have no intelligence or intent at all. Gods and demons are essentially just human-like entities which control natural phenomena according to a will rather than a mechanistic process and thus allows us to explain these phenomena in a way that makes intuitive sense to us. A fairy tale in which everything has a mind behind it will always be more appealing to a stupid person than a scientific explanation, that's just how our minds work.

>>7585899
>>7585923
>>7585965

All good points. She could come around. Now that I think about it I thought relativity sounded crazy when I first started learning about it too. It is a weird idea and I guess it is human nature to want to believe there are emotional motivations behind things instead of just mindless processes. I posted some stuff about this in a thread on /x/ to and they made some interesting points also although the discussion fell apart after a while.

>>7585911
And you got dubs! Truly this is a sign! You made me a believer anon.

>>7585555
People usually don't accept things they don't understand. "It happened because magic" is a perfectly valid explanation to a lot of people for complicated things because its easier to wrap your head around

>>7585555
At a party once I was drunk and some hipster girl was telling me how she believed in astrology. I reservedly and politely voiced my skepticism. She responded "the moon effects the tides and we are made of water so it is possible that the heavenly bodies control our lives". I didn't even know what to say, so I stopped talking and eventually she went away. I was genuinely speechless for 10 seconds just staring at her.

>>7585555
I like Feynman's explaination. Somethings people refuse to believe becuase it doesn't fit the way they view the world. They forget that nature is under no pressure to make sense.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_sAfUpGmnm4

Understanding the universe becomes much easier when you stop trying to tie it to your own perspective.

>>7585555
Nice quads. What she means by strange is "unintuitive". Demons and shit are strange in that it would be really unusual to encounter a demon, but to imagine that such things exist makes a lot of intuitive sense. In the case of demons/angels/gods etc., because we are conscious beings who often interact with other conscious beings, we are used to seeing conscious intent as a reason for things to happen and a governing force. Mail is controlled by the postal service, 4chan is controlled by Hiroyuki Nishimura, time must be controlled by someone, like maybe a time demon. Makes sense. Whereas the theory of relativity is very unintuitive to layman's understanding of physics.

>>7586126
Wouldn't it be easier to accept natural occurrences as occurring without conscious thought if you're anti-social / don't have much use for social interaction ? As in, someone would say that the mail is controlled by the postal service, and while that's a fact, it might slip out of someone's mind more easily if he avoids human contact all the time, which in turn would make it easier for that guy to grasp natural occurrences if he doesn't automatically tie every event to something conscious causing that event.

I can barely make sense of what I just wrote because I'm half asleep.

>>7586131
While I remember reading something once about a connection between autism and atheism. May be pseudo science bull shit but there reasoning was autistic people struggle to relate to people because they struggle to imagine the feelings of others, struggle to empathize. It is theorized that religious people use this same part of their brain when they visualize God.

So yea maybe there is some connection between being an anti social autist and struggling to understand why people think everything must have emotions and motivations and think and feel like we do. If you struggle to understand what your friends feel its safe to say you'd struggle to imagine what a God or angle or demon might feel or whatever other supernatural thing.