Ahh the old yin-yang dual thread. You never saw it coming.

Pretty self-explanatory:

Here's mine:

I once believed that all science was performed by people that were somehow above the petty greed and selfishness of normal human beings. Scientists must be above normal people, after all they wear really official looking long white coats. Their only goal was truth through verifiable, repeatable experiementation.

Well that's the idea anyways. And those people absolutely exist. But there's also a lot of ugliness in the scientific community. People get entrenched in ideas out of ego and then try and destroy new ideas without any sort of dispassionate observation. Quite the opposite in fact. Read the history of scientific advancement and it's one ugly fight after another. Massive egos with massive amounts of money on the line at times.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no luddite. Science is awesome! But this fact I think hit me harder due to my blind faith in it's completely unbiased motivations growing up.

What is something you once believed in totally and now reject just as fully?

I once believed that a daddy-longlegs spider was super venomous, but their fangs couldn't penetrate human skin.  No idea where I heard it, but it sounded plausible.  I told many people that.  Most of them said 'I know'.  As the Internet became more of a thing I search it once and found out it was complete BS.  I think Mythbusters did an episode on it too.  Turns out they can bite people (if they get big enough), but the reaction for most people is similar to that of a mosquito bite.
Bloody urban legends.

Those little spiders...  Once a scary but thankfully harmless house guest is now just another bug in the house.  Albeit a helpful one if you have other bugs around.

Deeply ashamed to admit, white supremacy -for about 3 weeks - at a very impressionable age.
🤐

Thanks Morphy.

And as to the echo chamber - guess what, I avoid it .
😁👍

Rat Man wrote on Jan 7^th, 2025 at 3:27pm:



Whimper

😬

RhonanTennenbrook wrote on Jan 19^th, 2025 at 3:20pm:


Flares !

Flares so wide they had bar towels sewn in to widen them.
Flares so wide that on a visit to Sheffield, very windy place, the legs would whip in the wind making a cracking sound as you walked.
😁👍

Flares so wide bicycle clips made from belts were the only way to ride a bike safely .....

But,

The only reason you wore flares that wide was because (dick head that you were) you believed you looked cool wearing them and riding  a bike then became uncool so walking to be seen was the order of the day.

😁👍

Morphy wrote on Dec 11^th, 2024 at 12:11pm:


Had similar thoughts until I witnessed it, sort of.  When I was in grad school I had a geology professor I really enjoyed.  I used to joke that his mind was like a hoarders house, full of a bunch of stuff and it might take a few minutes for him to find it.  One semester he led a field trip out west.  His area of expertise/study was the Kaibab Plateau.  He had previously taught at UNLV.  We flew into Vegas and spent the next fives days visiting Zion, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and several other stops in that NV/AZ/UT junction.  Anyway he got to talking about papers he had published and intended to publish.  Something he proposed questioned the current narrative and because of that he was having difficulty getting certain papers reviewed/published, I don't exactly remember.  I do remember thinking, how is this a thing.  Suggesting a layer of sandstone was deposited differently gets you censored?  Seriously? It might have significant meaning to six people in the entire country.

Fast forward a few years and I'm listening to Randal Carlson and Graham Hancock on the JRE podcast.  They start discussing their feuds with academia and I think I have an idea what they are talking about.

Another for me was thinking that people with experience were actually good at their jobs.