alt Hacker NewsThis kind of furore happens more than you would think amongst nominatively deterministic rationalist groups. Randi broke with people and re-formed, Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.
Maybe some of it is informed by the overlap with academia. Science has the aphorism "physics advances one funeral at a time" and certainly being on the outer has affected careers. Fred Hoyle was too argumentative, many of his ideas like panspermia have turned out to have elements of plausibility in them (like the cometary origins of water)
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nialv7 • today at 12:50 AM
> Dawkins has unbelievably heated arguments over frankly nothing.
and that's without talking about all the problematic views held by him...
I was always amused that the rationalists threw themselves behind a professional trickster with absolutely no scientific credentials.
And Dawkins never had much of a research career.
My problem with the "skeptics" was that the paranormal is an easy target and politically it's punching down.
There are plenty of other irrationalities to consider - like how advertising and propaganda work, how cults and religions actually operate beyond "irrational bad", and how trad econ believes many things that are questionable at best - but the skeptics never dared go anywhere near those.
So skepticism turned into this kind of knockabout point-scoring media circus noise. And in the end the sneering and self-congratulatory condescension actually helped entrench modern conspiranoia instead of deflating it.