Otto Kretschmer

I dunno . I don't even know if anyone would agree to it but if someone did, that would be the only way to bring some new people here.

I renew my proposal - maybe some science-themed Youtubers or subreddits can link people to SFN since classic forums are still #1 for long format discussions (Reddit is moderately suited for that, YT comment sections - unsuited at all).

There's the third thing I forgot about in the OP - they split constantly. So the one truth turns out to be not so one in the end...

This is true for both political and religious totalizing ideologies - the one who disagrees is always either an idiot or a traitor, never just a honest, smart person who looked at the same stuff and just happened to reach a different conclusion. And all of them hate heretics more than infidels - the early Catholic Church spent more time on fighting Arians than on converting Pagans, Stalinist USSR was willing to cooperate with Social Democrats, Liberals and even Nazis (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) - but never with Trotskyists. Modern radical movement also spend a disproportional amount of time on internal purges and policing boundaries, sometimes more than on pursuing their stated goals.

Probably not. Need for Closure is a cognitive trait that makes people more likely to seek definite answers to questions. Such people are more dogmatic and more prone to in-group/out-group bias relatively to more open-minded people who tolerate ambiguity and complexity better. Believing that immigrants do have their problems but their causes are complex and multicausal requires tolerating nuance. For some people a simple binary of white = good, non-white = bad is just easier to hold mentally.

I think it's just simple inability to tolerate change. There's a name about it in psychology, Need for Cognitive Closure, NFC/NFCC.

Not even them - they are themselves immigrants as are all speakers of Indo-European languages in Europe (who started arriving from Ukraine ca. 3000 BC)... and their predecessors too (who started arriving from Anatolia ca. 8000 BC). And H. sapiens itself evolved in Africa. Everyone is an immigrant.

Indeed - as Winston Churchill used to say, you cannot logic someone out of a position if they never logiced themselves into it. I debate such people all the time elsewhere, I quite enjoy it but someone else would have gone crazy.

IIRC since 2018, Google has been prioritizing Reddit and Quora in the search results - when someone asks a basic question like "how does natural selection work?", they get redirected to Reddit as the first place after Wikipedia. People may not even be getting SFN in search results unless they specifically google "science forum" - which many Gen Z/Gen A people likely don't do since they don't use forums (my 13 y.o nephew doesn't even have a computer, 90% of his interactions on the web are Youtube, TikTok and streaming services which he accesses via an Xbox app). Add AI intercepting the basic queries even from Wiki/Reddit and the old forums' survival loop (good thread → Google traffic → new members) is broken for generic questions. It still works for long-tail niche queries, but that's not a lot of traffic and even that is slowly being taken over by AI. Continued - I think it could be possible for SFN to talk to some science Youtubers or subreddits and suggest they drop a link to SFN. Both Reddit and Youtube are poorly suited for long form discussions unlike forums and 2 mods with PhDs is somewhat of a sales pitch.

Forums as a whole lost a lot of membership to Reddit, places like r/Science, r/AskScience, r/Skeptic and subs for individual disciplines like r/math, r/Physics, r/Chemistry and others fulfill the role forums did in the 2000s and early 2010s. I don't think the trend can be reversed.

😂 Right but if enough folks support a formal petition to the administration/moderation, it'll be more likely to fulfill our wish. 🤔

Maybe we should ask just politely?

Thanks for your reply. I forgot the forum is self hosted and the admins do more thdn just manage the content.

TIL that CuriosityStream, an explicitly educational streaming service, was founded by John Hendricks, the guy who founded Discovery Channel. As someone who witnessed the decline of Discovery Channel and Discovery Science (that one was actually shut down elsewhere, my country is one of a handful ones that still have it), this piece of news just... feels good.

I think it should - I sent a request for nickname change to @Cap'n Refsmmat on October 24th 2025 and the message wasn't even read. It seems the admins show up less frequently here than RIchard Dawkins does in Vatican. My suggestion is for either @swansont, @CharonY or @Phi for All to be appointed as an admin - they're online on a regular basis and are well versed in the affairs and ongoings of the forum.

Nothing in particular, just sharing loose thoughts on the topic.

Sorry for doing that. I had thought it's just a generic thread for "motivated reasoning in politics".

- What's the favorite work of philosophy of porn stars? - The Analects of Confucius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analects Though I guess The Rectification of Names comes close.

A more currently relevant example is supply-side economics - after Reagan, Bush Jr and the 2017 tax cuts, the predicted revenue surge never materialized, yet its proponents kept generating ad-hoc hypotheses why it didn't happen - the cuts weren't large enough, Fed tightened too much, baseline spending was too high etc. No novel predictions, just endlessly folding the failed ones back into the narrative.

Well, I meant "reaching a conclusion" in a more metaphorical sense since actual logical reasoning is rarely involved.

I debate political fanatics a lot and there's a recurring structure in all of them, a two-part one: Reach conclusions fast via a snap judgement Refuse to update based on new evidence The second part is more imortant. It's not just that they draw conclusions fast - literally nothing can convince them that their positions are false. Peer-reviewed studies show that LGBT people aren't dangerous to children? Theose studies are fabricated by leftists. Talmud doesn't tell Jews to hate non-Jews? That's a fake Talmud they fabricated to woo non-Jews, the real one is different. Gorbachev recognized the Katyń massacre as done by the USSR? He was a western agent/bourgeois traitor etc. literally got permabanned from a sub yesterday for correcting Katyń misinformation, the reason given was "spreading liberal content" (since obviously, Bush Sr., Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl didn't have other things to worry about in 1990 than healing Polish historical trauma).

TIL that German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel argued in 1801 that there cannot be a planet between Mars and Jupiter. He argued this in his doctoral dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum by saying such a planet is not needed because of well, Plato's numerology. The entire work was heavily anti-Newton. By the 1790s astronomers were excited by what we now call the Titius-Bode law: take the sequence 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52… and you get a pretty good fit for the spacing of planets in the solar system from Mercury through Saturn, except there is nothing at 28, right between Mars (16) and Jupiter (52). A group of German scientists was organizing a hunt for that "missing" planet in 1800. Hegel, fresh in Jena and trying to get a teaching license, thought the whole hunt rested on bad philosophy of number. In Section III of the dissertation he wrote: He then turned to Plato's Timaeus, where the Demiurge builds the world-soul from two geometric progressions - powers of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8) and powers of 3 (1, 3, 9, 27). Hegel tweaks the list to 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 16, 27 (he swapped 16 for 8, probably to get a smoother spacing) and said: Hegel was showing that an empirical pattern (Bode's law) is not necessary, because you can find another badass pattern that fits the known planets just as well and leaves the Mars-Jupiter gap empty. The bottom line? Ceres was discovered on January 1st, 1801 - just as Hegel was finishing his dissertation.

The 1970-84 one is the best:

@swansont or any other mod can feel free to move the thread.

This is a cognitive phenomenon, not solely a political one. Humans use this hearistic when reasoning about many different things.