Skeptic

Honestly, this is why I really like the hard sciences.

The default human way of thinking is to revert towards ideas that are conventional, intuitive and convenient.

In the hard sciences, it is usually (but not always) celebrated when someone comes with new kick-ass evidence to overturn conventual wisdom.

Often, this celebration lags by a few years or decades and scientists often only get credit after their death.

But still, it's better than regurgitating the same old ideas that some ancient bros thought of when they drank a bit too much mead.

Science doesn’t care about your feelings. Pseudoscience tries to tiptoe around or embrace your feelings.

Got bored reading vaccine pseudoscience (pre-covid by several years). Then got to hear every single damn claim dusted off and brought back to mainstream news.

And then once you start to understand the ways that ideas are corrupted by hacks, you can start to see the same sort of behaviour even when it has an official stamp of approval from an ostensibly legitimate organization. Take the 'cybersecurity' grift, for example, in which technical wizards pretend that they can definitively secure your vital computer systems, even with an always-on Internet connection, if you give them enough money.

The only ones that I buy into are the ones about that giant AT&T building in NYC with no windows that pretty much all communications route through, and the NSA building south of SLC that is storing exabytes of data. Oh and 5 eyes.

Everything we say and do that is somehow connected to a series of tubes is getting tracked y’all. I don’t know why they need to know my family’s breakfast plans or why I asked Alexa the other day for a precise step by step guide on how to manufacture a nuclear fusion bomb after watching Oppenheimer, but they are listening, they are reporting and they are tracking everything.

And honestly, I know some of the types that dig this level of surveillance, and it’s pretty unsettling that they are.