Minor Annoyances

Hi there. Remember me? It's been a while, I know, but I'm back now. You can stop holding your breath.

Lame jokes aside, I always like to give the Skeptics Circle about a week to hang out at the top of the page before I displace it with something new. Today that something new is simple. I'm going to look at two groups of BS artists and explain why they are annoying.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, then go on below the fold...

Cryptozoologists

From a practical perspective, cryptozoologists are generally quite benign. They don't defraud people out of money, they don't taint the memories of the dead, they don't keep people from using real, science-based medicine...Really, they just talk a lot about cryptids, and occasionally go look for them.

But, like I said, they're annoying. They're not evil or dangerous. From a strictly scientific perspective, they're just irritating as hell. Allow me to explain.

First off, cryptozoologists tend to conduct cargo cult science. They don't do actual science because they aren't actual zoologists. They're cryptozoologists. They think putting on funny hats and wandering through the woods is doing science, but really they're just adopting the external trappings of science as they understand it.

Real zoologists actually go out there and catalogue what they find. They look for undiscovered species and when they find one, any one, it gets recorded. They don't assume the existence of a specific undiscovered animal and then look for evidence to prove it exists. That is the province of the cryptozoologist.

Somewhat less important, but still significant, is that zoologists are trained scientists. Cryptozoologists are generally amateurs wandering the woods in silly hats.

Secondly (and this is what really chaps my ass about cryptozoologists), they claim discoveries made by real scientists in an effort to give their "field" legitimacy. One can hardly speak to a cryptozoologist without hearing about the coelacanth or the giant squid. Sometimes they're just using them as an appeal to "science was wrong before," but I'll give even odds that the reason they're bringing them up is to say "Cryptozoologists found them!"

Sorry, guys. The coelacanth was found by scientists, divers, and lucky boaters. Not a cryptozoologist among them. Moreover, its existence was known to science since the 50s (and perhaps as early as the 30s) thanks to a number of fortuitous finds, so further searching was looking for more, not for one.

The giant squid, on the other hand, was rumored to exist for centuries. For a long time it was thought to exist thanks to indirect evidence (giant sucker marks on whales, for example, which, incidentally, are not like sasquatch footprints because they cannot be trivially faked), but there have been lots of dead specimens down the decades. The folks out there looking for (and finding) good photo and video of the giant squid? Scientists. Not cryptozoologists.

And don't even ask them about population dynamics. Bornean orangutans are facing extinction in the next decade (two at most) unless dire measures are taken, and it may already be too late. We're looking at somewhat less than 50,000 animals spread out over about 165,000 square miles of rainforest, though that is continuously shrinking due to logging and forest fires.

The Pacific Northwest covers almost 700,000 square miles, a great deal of it thick with forest, reputed home of Bigfoot. Unless they're promoting a single, immortal Bigfoot (I'm sure some lone wacko is), there would need to be an enormous population in order to sustain the species.

Just think: we know of about 50,000 orangutans in the thick, nigh-impenetrable rainforests of Borneo, but not even a single well-recorded sasquatch in woods that are much less dense? With a population that is necessarily much higher because of the larger habitat and supposed long history of the beast?

And that doesn't even bring the Loch Ness monster into it.

So, in summary, cryptozoologists are annoying because they are ignorant, wannabe scientists with a poor grasp of method and a tendency to fabricate or steal achievements in their "field."

"Intellectual" Religious Believers

By "intellectual," I mean the kinds of "thoughtful" believers referred to in the Courtier's Reply, the people who aren't so crude as to make circular arguments for the truth of the Bible, or who have sophisticated arguments in support of their faith. Those types.

These people are annoying because, when you strip away all the external trappings of thoughtfulness, you find the exact same nonsense spewed by the "crude" believers from whom they love to distance themselves. "Intellectual" believers just use more and bigger words.

They still assume God to exist before they even fabricate their "arguments." Their circularity and fallaciousness are often not as easy to pin down as those of a backwoods Bible thumper, but that's only because they're couched in more sophisticated language and rhetoric. At the end of the day, they're still making claims in the absence of all evidence.

Somehow, though, these folks like to place themselves above the hoi polloi of average believers. They have the gold-plated balls to talk down about other believers when they're engaging in the same bullshit as their "crude" brethren. The dumbasses are just more honest about it.

"Intellectual" believers, on some level, annoy me far more than the Bible-beating, trailer-living, Jack-Chick-reading morons ever could because of the sheer arrogance of their position.