User:Rursus

My purpose here at RationalWiki includes:


 * 1) Analyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement,
 * 2) Documenting the full range of crank ideas,
 * 3) Explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism,
 * 4) Analysis and criticism of how these subjects are handled in the media, I don't give a sh*t about the hysterical easy-desinformed media!
 * 5) I'm going to prove, from a Christian ethical foundation, that the so called Christians promoting pseudoscience are heretics that misuses the Christian faith for their own sinister, satanic purposes; God I will not take such misconduct lightly,
 * 6) I'm going to praise the rationality of atheism, not, I generally don't care whether they believe in God or not, as long as they respect non-Occamist ways of reasoning.

I welcome contributors, and encourage those who disagree with me to register and engage in constructive, non-derrogating philosophical dialogue.

Yeah! I'm the same guy as the one at Wikipedia. I'm kind of a religious (incredibly skeptical) Lutheran Protestant (and a pain in the ass, because of my notorious skepticism). We Christians have a rule to not drink blood – it's something about vampirism, or too much ureic acid or something – but for pseudoscience, creationism, intelligent design and their kin, I'm willing to make an exception. Also, I'm pretty sick and tired of the pseudoscience quality of the religious articles on Wikipedia (and also some articles kidnapped by radical atheists), leaving room for POVvy cotteries to block the edits of neutralizers.

I take a real delight in reading about the cranks and pseudoscientists, but claiming it to be something else than fantasy stories is not to my liking.

Creationism
/Creationism

Conservapedia
I refer to WP:RationalWiki. It seems Conservapedia is essentially an antidemocratic anarchy where dictatorial bullies rule.

Otherwise, since being less rightie than leftie, Skeptical Evolutionist Christian of the Big Bang, Heliocentrism and Round Earth, I've never considered Conservapedia as anything else than a fools waste of time.

A Swedish Conservapedia
A Swedish Conservapedia RILpedia "Ett trovärdigt alternativ" (A Trustworthy Alternative). Seems to be promoting pseudoscience like creationism. My general opinion is that there is no need of religion labeled wikis, and that religion labeled wikis are usually desinformative, and so not trustworthy. I'm going to identify responsible cult, Word of Faith in Sweden is most likely.

Why Wikipedia nor Citizendium won't suffice
The utterly failed Conservapedia aside, Wikipedia and Citizendium have some diverse inherent problems that makes them ineffective for various informational tasks.

Citizendium, immature, too social
About Citizendium I just want to say that I tried it, but there was too much social interaction, and too little rules to read and follow, so that I soon got too irritated to continue that pursuit: I'm not willing to discuss erecting an article from stub status up to something informational: I'm a doer, not a socializer, except as a means for doing better. Also: the anti-Wikipedian attitude of doing everything backwards, produces some infinitely awkward technical solutions.

Wikipedia a little too anarchic
Wikipedia is generally admired – wellfoundedly so – while Citizendium have yet to make the big hit (and yes, there's actually a fair chance in my estimation). As a foundation for self-education, Wikipedia will currently work up to and including the advanced college level, and not more. It will actually reach citability status for A-class articles (and better), and those will become more reliable than any real encyclopedia whatsoever. The problem is the infinitely numerous articles that aren't A-class or better: they're sometimes usable, sometimes full of trash, most often slightly POV-ly biased (POV = 'Point of View', i.e. subjective), and in quite a few cases extremely POV-ly biased. The problem is that the anarchic thinking about no authority goes much too far, and leaves too much room for editors that systematically breaks the intent of POV while not breaking one policy rule, and that the administrators often enough are young stupid bullies that have no interest nor understanding of NPOV and balance while aggressively upholding an overbearing accusational antivandalist stance towards established wellbehaved editors as well as newbies trying to correct obvious flaws. The individual editors and the system of consensus are good, and makes the inner workings acceptable, as long as the articles are not about religion, cults (so called new religions), destructive cults, philosophy nor pseudoscience, but the later simply cannot converge to reliability under the current Wikipedian philosophy.

Truth and consensus
A well behaved net-encyclopedia (NE) needs to work chaotically very much like Wikipedia and RationalWiki, but so called NE:OR (original research) and some little NE:SYNTH (due synthesis) is necessary to make an additional foundation for improving a free open encyclopedia, and respected fact authorities ("academics") are needed to mentor editors to make good articles. A well behaved net-encyclopedia needs to take some informal science-like stance what is NE:TRUTH (NE needs to orient itself what is coherent truth) before deciding about NE:WHAT_THE_HECK_ODD_THINGS_THE_WORLD_CLAIMS_ABOUT_IT. (That's why I feel warmly towards RationalWiki).

Text cleanup
Articles in NE also needs to have editors that clean up the texts, one of the deep troubles with Wikipedia is that the articles are rarely easy reading, instead the texts are generally crappily obfuscated messes of blatantly true lists of facts. (Except regarding philosophy and religion, where they are generally bad quality POVvy essays). That's because the editors add facts here and there directly in the articles, instead of making claims on the talk pages, letting some responsible add the facts. Wikipedia have some democratic tendencies, personally I think the infinitely successful net-encyclopedia NE needs to be some kind of laissez-fair democracy, rather than a anarchic consensus-of-the-talkatives' dictature.

Skeptical investigations
Trying to determine what constitutes a constructive moderate skepticism applicable to all sides of life – just being indiscriminately skeptic to everything will in the long run make yourself doubt your own shadow, which is a useless waste of effort.

The structure of cult thinking
/The structure of cult thinking

Astrology

 * /Astrology, the WP:Astrology is unreasonably apologetic towards astrology, so I believe it is kidnapped by astrologers – a not too uncommon phenomenon on Wikipedia.
 * When inventing Astrology sources, I found the following hyperskeptic toolkit Astrology and Science: Artifacts in reasoning - Hidden persuaders make astrology work. It's prob generalizable to many brands of pseudoscience.

Velikovsky

 * WP:Immanuel Velikovsky was a charismatic "independent scholar" (here approximately equal to "persuasive crackpot"), that built an elaborate psychological defence system around his preposterous pseudoscience system claiming f.ex. that Venus emerged by electromagnetism as a comet out from Jupiter in some 15th century BCE, a defence system that managed to perpetuate his wild idiocy in some 30-40 years by some vitriolic adherents, one of which was WP:C. Leroy Ellenberger, that later defected and became a knowledgeable Velikovsky critic,
 * Leroy Ellenberger's lesson telling us why the early oppressions against Velikovsky was contraproductive and only served to inflate the Velikovskian pseudoscience, (cf. User:Rursus/Bad antiastrology),
 * Stephen Jay Gould description of Velikovsky's inverted methodology.

Pseudohistory of religion

 * A Refutation of Acharya S's book, The Christ Conspiracy, by Mike Licona, we here paradoxically have an Intelligent Design proponent (pseudoscience) that bit for bit tears apart a Christ Conspiracy (cultic-styled pseudoscience) proponents academically ignored book by logical and valid arguments, except as regards astrology, where Mike by lack of understanding misinterprets a valid argument from astronomers into an invalid generalization.