Michael Shermer: Why people believe strange things

smoke a blunt

Nun bun!
Damn, that's really funny. xD

That sandwich probably brought in a profit in less then 6 months.
That backwards thing was funny too! I heard nothing the first time.

"...its more likely that all of them are fake like the crop circles."

SERIOUSLY?

So, you will have no problem whatsoever supporting LAWS that make ILLEGAL, the withholding any radar returns which are believed to be extraterrestrial.

Would you support this? Passing a laws which make it a CRIME to withhold from the public ANY information relating to extraterrestrial visitation.

FYI, google the John Callahan incident.

"he presents the things as false before even starting to investigate"

All scientific analysis does this, by the way. It's called the "null hypothesis". It's necessary to eliminate false results caused by noise, randomness or sampling error.

Actually, let me re-state that. You can't eliminate false results, only quantify how likely they are. You want to quantify them below an agreed-upon threshold.

No nhe doesn´t. All the things you mentioned have been proved over and over to have natural explanations. Why would he allow hismelf to think that they might be another explanation when it´s clear it isn´t?

No, actually he is one that helps science by thinking critically and not with a made up mind.

Shermer is just a road block in the world of "science" and it's a shame people like him have been given this kind of prestige and first say is so many things. How can you "advance" science while ridiculing things people believe? After all he's the one saying we're all the product of science and psychology, therefore wouldn't it be natural for people to end up believing these things? He's overlooking so much of his own hypocrisy.

Wether ghosts, crop circles, etc. are true is not the point. The point it Shermer is automatically denying anything he first concieves to be "supernatural". He says his job is to "find natural explanations" for things, yet fails to mention he may be dealing with natural phenomena all along just not understood or accepted yet by mainstream science.

Clearly he's looking at things with a prejudice, and that pretty much negates anything he will say.

This is how science works. Don't like it? Try religion.

Well it's clear Michael Shermer is going by a method of presupposing skepticism prehand. If you listen to him you can understand this. In other videos, for instance where he "investigated" out of body experiences, ghosts, acupuncture, among other things, he presents the things as false before even starting to investigate. Therefore he's creating a bias that is firewalling off any potential evidence towards lots of these things.