What if what you think you know are mostly untrue? Are you ready to accept a paradigm shift of knowledge?
Heard of nutritional supplements, detoxification, energy levels, modern day healing, and the phrase “boost your immune system”? Well, I’m not surprised. All these methods of improving health are as common as computers, but do you know the real deal about these kinds of methods?
Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting video in clearbits.net, which is an open licensed digital media for file sharing.
Check this website out at www.clearbits.net.
I was scrolling through the weekly contents when a short movie entitled “Here Be Dragons” caught my eyes. In short, it is a movie about critical thinking, pseudoscience, and skepticism all meshed into one big logical video.
Believe me, you’ll find many surprises in this video that would make you go “Hey, I’m using that” or “Oh my God, I didn’t know that, and its definitely good to know”. For those naturally skeptical, you may think that this is one of the bull’s product (if you don’t get this, read my second post
).
). If you have 40 minutes to spare, watch this interesting movie below, or else, take some time off to watch it.
Here Be Dragons – a critical thinking video by Brian Dunning
What are your thoughts about the movie?
Personally, I think that “Here Be Dragons” is a very informative and powerful movie as a whole. The host, Brian Dunning gets straight to the point about how pop phenomena is actually making us believe things that have no solid scientific foundation – things which are labeled as pseudoscience. All of his arguments are based on logic and critical analysis. So, according to this video, if something doesn’t have any scientific proof to it, then it’s a busted pseudoscience and a product of the bull.
However true all of these critical thinking stuff might be, it is wise to disregard the hidden knowledge of the ancients. Yes, it’s undoubtedly true that the ancient knowledge is archaic, arcane, and not fully understood by modern era scientists as yet, but is it not a tat ignorant to disregard fully the knowledge of the past and think of them as useless, baseless human imaginations?
Most of the issues he touched upon are genuinely reasonable, but he’s putting everything that is not fully understood by science in the “nonsense” category. And he is certainly careful to avoid hinting about anything that is religion related. If you noticed, the only blow he landed is on Buddhism, and that’s because he mentioned that knowledge is to be sought after and not pre-possessed by humans.
Using critical thinking to counter the arguments in the movie, it doesn’t make any sense to deny something that is not fully understood because of our limitation in total comprehension of the world or universe. Those areas of knowledge could have a scientific basis in the future, even if it may sound totally non-intuitive now. If it is not proven to work under the scientific method, that doesn’t mean it does not work in reality, for there are some aspects of these phenomena that are difficult to manipulate and control in the lab. In most cases, there are no specific apparatus to measure what is needed to be measured too. An example of factors that can lead to possible inaccurate lab results is the effect of emotion.
As science cannot answer all the questions in our minds, it is a process of learning more about what we do not know, like what Brian said. Science is a tool to discover and rediscover the veiled knowledge of the world, but only up to a certain extend. There is always gonna be that certain something that we still could not grasp, even if the next kingdom comes. To know everything means that we have nothing left to learn, and that lucky day will never come.
Who knows, in the future, that certain “extend” might be extended, resulting in the unlocking of different branches of science that specifically deals with the supernatural or inexplicable phenomena of today’s world, very much like how science had broken up into niche fields like nanotechnology and quantum physics, in which some laws of physics actually break down and cry.
The ancients had passed down significant ancient relics to us, the modern generation. And without those knowledge, especially those of math, science, and biology, we wouldn’t get to enjoy the prosperity we have today or breathe the polluted air today for that matter. Just take the Pythagoras Theorem for example, note the impact and development this past knowledge have brought us. It could be the same for other past discoveries or assumed knowledge like “energy” and the like, albeit requiring extra time.
I find that what this video should really portray is to make us think critically about whatever that is presented before us before accepting those facts besides doing some unbiased researches, which is a good thing. Nowadays, cases of fraud are all too common, to state the obvious. Not forgetting that people nowadays, no matter which profession there are in or how smart they are, fall for advertisements or information that are too influential.
Also, I find that this video is also trying to influence the public to support his idea of all things scientific, which is another good thing to disseminate. Since that is the main purpose of the video, I feel that there is no need to go beyond that and saying how absurd Feng Shui and “energy” really are, for who knows what scientific potential the future might hold for them?
In a nutshell, I find this video enlightening despite my having some minor skepticism in some parts of the movie. It is an eye-opener, I kid you not. However, like anything that comes from the web, we should also take the movie and its subtle and obvious messages with a pinch of a salt.
For your information, the man behind the video is Brian Dunning, a computer scientist by profession. Skeptoid.com is the brainchild of the same man. He also hosted in the Skeptoid podcast and has a blog related to the same topic.
For further understanding about critical analysis of modern pop phenomena, please do visit his website.
You can find tons of cool and useful stuff there plus a whole lot of facts and truths about the world as we know it.
Also, you can check out Brian Dunning’s blog.
Are you Skeptic enough?
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