Reply #13: Scam artists infest every sphere of human activity

[GliderGuider]

Because people are easily herded by manipulating their limbic responses. I'm a big fan of Paul Maclean's triune brain hypothesis, which implies that some behavioral and belief tendencies are indeed hard-wired in the older levels of the brain. Those tendencies can be overridden to some degree by cortical reasoning, but the tendencies themselves remain. The reptilian and limbic systems are probably also the seat of much of the human love of unreason. There may not be a "minimum daily requirement of irrationality", but there seems to be an irreducible tendency towards it that is hard to overcome even using harsh methods because it operates at an unconscious level. Take Republicans... please...

I would also suggest that forgoing modern medical care in favour of gentler approaches is not always a bad idea. Google "statin rhabdomyolysis" for an example.

My main objection to many of the threads like this is that the contempt that is all too often on display tends to promote closed-mindedness and shuts down dialogue. I firmly believe that there are useful things to learn from people with irrational beliefs -- not necessarily about the beliefs themselves, but about such things as why they hold them, what value they feel they get from them, and why they feel there might be something "real" about them.

As a final note, I don't think that reification (which is the sort of unreason we're talking about with lay interpretations of QM) is always a bad thing. After all, without that tendency, our belief in an enduring, monolithic self (which is IMO the fundamental human reification) would not be possible.