When is a gotcha not a gotcha...

The hot topic of the moment seems to be weather modification and I was watching an online dialogue between two people, one who was convinced that weather modification was real and being used by nefarious governments as a weapon against humanity and the other who thought that this was the biggest piece of bullshit they had ever heard.?So the first person speaking with some conviction stated their understanding of what was going on in the world from an awakened perspective and the second person demanded the first person cite their sources.?Person number one provided a list of links to which person two scoffed and instantly dismissed claiming they were not credible.

I smiled, I’ve seen this before, many times in fact. Now it can come from a few perspectives. It’s possible someone is just exceptionally analytical and has a limited criteria of what they will accept as data, but more often than not, its just because they are not yet able to comprehend how unimaginably fucked-up everything in the world is and are not ready to accept that they have been lied to.?And I don’t blame them, it really is pretty awful and of course a comfortable lie can be more palatable than an uncomfortable truth.

I saw it again recently on a friend’s FB page.?She was trying to convey her understanding of some information that had recently come to light.?Essentially that your government hates you, and it’s run by monsters who actually want to kill you at every opportunity and will apply all kinds of methods in which to do so. One of her friends argued back that everything was perfectly normal and he cited information from a government website to prove her wrong. I laughed so hard with that one.?Just to recap, you are being told that your government lies like a Mickey Mouse watch and you attempt to counter the argument with information from that same government.

The other tactic, often used as the coup de grace, is the 'show me the peer reviewed journal to back up your claim' cliché.?It is based on this this unwavering notion that peer reviewed means infallible...oh dear.

It's problematic for a number of reasons.?First off, if you are of the mindset that everyone is a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist,?there is no study ever that will convince you otherwise. The second is, what study would ever be released that would corroborate such topics???Look how quickly whistle-blowers are deemed noncredible, reputations tarnished by any means possible.

Richard Smith, former Editor in Chief of the British Medical Journal, claims that there are many issues with the notion of ‘peer review’ stating that it’s defects are easier to identify than its attributes. He said “My point is that peer review is impossible to define in operational terms (an operational definition is one whereby if 50 of us looked at the same process we could all agree most of the time whether or not it was peer review). Peer review is thus like poetry, love, or justice. But it is something to do with a grant application or a paper being scrutinized by a third party—who is neither the author nor the person making a judgement on whether a grant should be given or a paper published. But who is a peer? Somebody doing exactly the same kind of research (in which case he or she is probably a direct competitor)? Somebody in the same discipline? Somebody who is an expert on methodology? And what is review? Somebody saying `The paper looks all right to me', which is sadly what peer review sometimes seems to be. Or somebody pouring all over the paper, asking for raw data, repeating analyses, checking all the references, and making detailed suggestions for improvement? Such a review is vanishingly rare.”

If you are interested you can read his article in the JRSM??here - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

So if you are someone who states 'show me the peer reviewed study' as a way of a gotcha I suspect that while you think it gives you some superior upper-hand in the discussion, to me it appears as the exact opposite, it doesn't show me that you want to know more, but rather you want to shut down the discussion. I see it more as a form of intellectual snobbery. There are many resources available at our fingertips and discernment is always our fall back position, but its up to you to investigate and join the dots, draw conclusions and follow your gut, not what your ego is telling you.

Now, I am not suggesting that you should believe everything and anything, far from it, but it would be wise to remember this little quote ?from Carl Sagan “One of the saddest lessons of history is this:?If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.”