Richard Dawkins

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Testimonies are testimonies and prone to a lot of errors even by people you deem to be expert at testimonies (if there's even such a thing). Especially when it comes to very extraordinary claims, one should not just trust what people say they saw.

I've heard many people use this description about Dawkins, and it still works:

"This is what happens when a biologist is allowed to leave the laboratory."

I'll take common sense over the word of a self-important anti-theist any day of the week.

Specifically what racist things has Dawkins said or published.

ruveyn

Atheism is NOT a religion. It is a principled refusal to accept the beliefs of the religious in the total absence of substantial empirical data supporting their religious beliefs. Do you believe the earth is flat? Do you believe the Sun goes around the earth? Does your refusal to accept these propositions constitute a religion?

ruveyn

What common sense?

Atheism may not be a religion but it is certainly a meme. I would love to debate Dawkins on that were he to claim otherwise.

It may be a meme but the fact that it is culturally memetic does not make it any less true because of that. In fact, as an idea, it is probably so memetic because people are starting to realize that perhaps religion is irrelevant to the twenty first century.

But the fact that he has left the laboratory and begun criticizing the role of religion is due to the fact that the biology and religion have become entwined when they should not have. Religion states that it has a right to propose theories about our biological evolution(creationism) even though such theories do not have any basis in objective reality or have been empirically proven and so I guess Dawkins then thought it would be his responsibility to utilize his biological knowledge to show that such theories are false, especially when so many creationists in America are trying to pollute the education system with theories about the origin of the universe have not been tested and can never be tested. You could say Richard Dawkins should stay in the laboratory but he is only trying to do so because creationists are trying to get into the laboratory

This is a fantastic video demonstrating a psychological experiment that was done in 1999 demonstrating the invalidity of eye witness testimonies and how fallicious the brain can be when perceiving reality. Thought you might find it interesting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Yeah, it's very interesting. I always show this to people who haven't seen it whenever I get the chance.

Heard about a study that demonstrated that people actually recalled false testimonies simply due to word tricks by the interrogators?

http://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html

Haha, that is absolutely fascinating. I shall have to research that further when I get the time. It is amazing to see how easy the mind can be be manipulated when given the appropriate information and the relativity of memories. It's interesting when you hear someone tell an anecdote when they tell it to two people. It always changes depending on the person they tell it too. They may exaggerate certain areas of the story or choose certain words that give it a more hyperbolic nature. Here is another website that actually mentions the one you just referenced interestingly enough showing how certain types of language alter our perception of reality -

http://beta-lab.nl/content/falsifiable- ... estimonies

It's compelling to think that even stories one finds in the bible and miracles apparently performed by Christ could have been down to people misinterpreting what they were seeing. Walking on water, turning water into wine- all of these things could be down to things that actually happened but that were eventually distorted by eye witness testimonies.

I hate to break it to you dude, but this study in no way invalidates eyewitness testimony. My education is in forensic psychology and this was trotted out many a time with the same claim. This is why nobody should ever trust psychology studies. You cannot create a false environment with specific instructions that has nothing to do with witnessing crimes and then say, hey this proves that is wrong. The reason people don't see the gorilla is because they are told to focus on the players. It's so false and so facile.

Fortunately we do know because of DNA that eyewitness testimony is often horribly mistaken. The reasons are many and complex and have nothing to do with being told to watch a sports team in action. Usually it's much more tied up to people's emotions such as terror, honest confusion, bad lighting, intentional lying. Not just a matter of looking in the other direction (that could be one reason, but it's just one scenario among hundreds and it can't explain for instance how people mistakenly identify what they actually saw, which is what happens in bad eyewitness testimony). Something entirely different. This study and the claims people make around it really piss me off!

All this talk and you didn't point out what is so false and facile about it. The point is that people only see what they are led to see. This applies for all settings, whether crime settings or something else. So what exactly is the problem again?



So eyewitness testimony is unreliable for a number of factors. Ok, and?

Ok, here I'll be more specific:

1. Conditions of the study are no where near the same conditions of witnessing a crime. There is no fear, much less terror involved, no need to get a criminal off a street, no sense of personal violation, etc. etc.

2 To show a video with the instructions to count how many times somebody does something is to intentionally take the viewer's attention away from the gorilla. In a crime, there are no such artificial constraints. (It's possible an eyewitness could be told to look away, but that's a whole other thing which again is going to be highly emotional and involve their safety, it doesn't take away the need or desire to see what's going on so somebody may still peek - compare that to just count how many times a player does something where they have no need or desire to watch the rest of the screen and will just be focused on the players).

3. MOST IMPORTANTLY - the only thing that happens when someone watches this video is that their attention is diverted from one part of the screen to another. Thus, they don't see the gorilla. They admit later, I did not see the gorilla.

If this were to happen after a crime, say someone said, I saw the guy that was holding the gun, but not the guy on the other side of the room -- that's not an eyewitness error. That's simple and correct (it's what happens when people watch the video).

Eyewitness error is when somebody believes they saw something they did not see. Or they saw something and did not remember correctly so that the wrong person was identified.

See the difference - nope, didn't see that (correct). Vs. That's they guy who crawled into my bed and raped me (false).

The study doesn't even ask the correct question (which is do people misidentify what they have seen or believe they have seen?) - much less does it provide any answers to that question.

Why the focus on crime? They were actually discussing aliens. And besides, so what if there is no fear involved in that video Fib posted? What is the significance of fear again in this context if selective attention occurs either way.



It's not about being told to look away or anything like that. It's about the fact that no witness, whether in a crime scene or elsewhere, gets to pay attention to every single detail. So we end up practicing what is called "selective attention".

Sure, during a crime, witnesses may be more alert but change blindness and selective attention are always a possibility.

No one is arguing that there aren't multiple other factors to consider anyway.

But if your main argument is that selective attention shouldn't be considered unreliable testimony, maybe you're right. But they're all linked together in the long run, and testimonies are all about being selective in what they spotted.

1. Conditions of the study are no where near the same conditions of witnessing a crime. There is no fear, much less terror involved, no need to get a criminal off a street, no sense of personal violation, etc. etc.


We were not saying that it was in relation to a crime. Although I can empathize with your point as people are probably more likely to have their senses distorted when in a state of hysteria, we were discussing UFOs not a criminal scene. Furthermore, one does not need to be in a state of fear to have their perception distorted. As many studies have shown, which i referenced in the website above in one of my other posts, people's perception of events change, not only due to fear, but also because of the status of the person they are recollecting the event to, the need to weave a common cultural narrative into what they saw so that the meaningless takes on a meaning and the so forth. Fear is not the only thing responsible for a distortion in the perception of reality.


2 To show a video with the instructions to count how many times somebody does something is to intentionally take the viewer's attention away from the gorilla. In a crime, there are no such artificial constraints. (It's possible an eyewitness could be told to look away, but that's a whole other thing which again is going to be highly emotional and involve their safety, it doesn't take away the need or desire to see what's going on so somebody may still peek - compare that to just count how many times a player does something where they have no need or desire to watch the rest of the screen and will just be focused on the players).

Again, I can concur with your point that in a criminal scenario, such constraints are not present however, again as I said, we were not discussing a crime, we were discussing ufos and what the experiment suggests is that as human beings we tend to focus on what we think is most important to the point that we do not perceive other things that may be of equal importance. We tend to filter out sensory information we consider less prominent to the point that our testimonies cannot be valid. Someone who has their car followed by a ufo may only focus on the ufo since they consider it the most important piece of sensory information and this will lead them to block out the other relevant sensory information that may be causing them to see the ufo in the first place. A hierarchy of importance is placed upon what we see and hear.

3. MOST IMPORTANTLY - the only thing that happens when someone watches this video is that their attention is diverted from one part of the screen to another. Thus, they don't see the gorilla. They admit later, I did not see the gorilla.

If this were to happen after a crime, say someone said, I saw the guy that was holding the gun, but not the guy on the other side of the room -- that's not an eyewitness error. That's simple and correct (it's what happens when people watch the video).

Eyewitness error is when somebody believes they saw something they did not see. Or they saw something and did not remember correctly so that the wrong person was identified.

See the difference - nope, didn't see that (correct). Vs. That's they guy who crawled into my bed and raped me (false).

The study doesn't even ask the correct question (which is do people misidentify what they have seen or believe they have seen?) - much less does it provide any answers to that question.[/quote]



I do not think me or Mcalavera were saying that the people who say they have seen ufos did not see anything at all. I am certain that people have seen objects in the sky that they could not identify, however I would say their perception of such objects could be distorted as the experiment suggest. Considering the rarity of such a spectacle, they would have focused solely on the lights and failed to pick up on other details in their environment that may have helped explain the objects that they were seeing. Thus, if an individual says 'I saw the UFO and there was NOTHING strange about the sky', we might be skeptical. The sky may have been rather odd and strange temperature changes may have caused some orb like object to appear, however they may not have taken into account such weather conditions because they selected the ufo and nothing more.