What’s particularly annoying about the “Mars” article I keep denigrating is to actually refute it, you’d need to spend ten times as many words and time writing that rebuttal than the author did spewing his hogwash. That sort of Gish Gallop is how debates are often won. It’s too much bullshit to deal with so people just…don’t.

It’s disappointing that so many people just buy the contentions therein unquestioningly because the piece contains a lot of big words and suspect numbers. You know, I can use big words too. But I use the right words exactly where they fit. If only everyone bothered to do this.

Fauci’s warning to America: ‘We’re living in a progressively anti-science era and that’s a very dangerous thing.’

Fauci is often wrong, but he’s right about that. The “Mars is Scawy, Scawy and Bad” article is basically just anti-science dressed up in obfuscatory language. Anti-humanist too, for that matter.

Hacker News actually has a fairly decent discussion of that relentlessly and overpoweringly stupid “Why Not Mars” article. A screenshot of a few of the best comments below:

The reason I accurately called the article “smart people stupid” is that sort of piece is specifically calibrated to sound smart to other people who like to think they are intelligent while containing little that is accurate or justified by any sort of sober look at the reasoning or the numbers (and often, as in the case of that article, the numbers are just made up).

In the end, most humans believe mostly myths and lies most of the time. Smart humans, because they both believe more and know more period, have minds that contain even more myths and lies than people not as cognitively capable (as well as more true thoughts and ideas). The “Mars” article is a good example of how that works and why such claptrap appeals to them.

Everyone is wrong sometimes and most people are wrong most of the time, but I believe people should to maintain dignity at least make an effort to avoid being clown-level wrong. That is my goal and philosophy anyway.