> At that age, I didn’t yet understand why some people are incapable of changing their point of view. To be honest, I still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

Are you describing Erich von Däniken's inability to change his mind when evidence clearly contradicted his theories?

Incapable: that happens when the acceptance of an idea implies that their perception of their identity is flawed and has, logically to change in order to adapt for the new reality where the idea has its place. Denial is a protection mechanism, and it is very effective when the reality is too difficult to support as it is. Identity is so essential in our beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that most of us won't accept anything that requires it to change. Unless we accept that failure is part of our identity and that this means that our identity sometimes has to evolve. But that has to be done willingly, explicitly (in our minds).

I share your confusion about how ideology clouds judgement but I have a little anecdote.

I sometimes give people the Monty Hall problem. When they get it wrong, it often falls into the category of staying with the initial pick increases chances or switching has equal odds. I then proceed to give them the example of N=100 doors, opening 98 others, leaving their pick and another closed and then asking them whether that makes a difference.

If they insist that it makes no difference, I then start to play the actual game with them, writing down the prize door before the game starts and then proceeding with the game as normal. Only after a few rounds of them losing do they accept the proofs of what the optimal strategy is.

My interpretation is that, before playing the actual game, they refuse to believe me. They don't trust me or the logic and so dismiss it. Once actual stakes are involved, even if it's their pride, only then do they start to be open to arguments as to why their intuition was wrong.

> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view

I've thought about this and the conclusion was:

What you believe you know makes you what you currently are. You can't just believe in a contradictory position. You could believe that you have been proven wrong, which would then change your belief.

Changing your point of view, looking at things from the vantage of someone else with different life experiences and the resulting belief systems would be dishonest at best, and claiming that you are capable of changing your beliefs on a whim is like being able to rip your arm off.

You can, at best, adapt your own belief to encompass theirs with caveats or simply not care about your truths.

Yeah, whatever...

One way or the other he still was a bullshitter, blowhard, huckster,...

That means that in the end, the "single way of thinking" was the right way of thinking.

But don't despair, there is still a lot of pseudoscience around: creationism, global warming denialism, anti-vax, astrology, etc. Some of these are even oficial policy for governments around the world.

> why some people are incapable of changing their point of view

Do you really want the answer?

People don't always say what they think and aren't consistent because they may hold multiple conflicting beliefs. This isn't lying or a lack of curiosity. It's the opposite, and perfectly rational.

Actually, if you don't think you have any conflicting beliefs you should think about it harder or seriously question how open-minded you really are.

You can give someone all the evidence that convinced you about something, but it will only convince them if they share enough of your foundational assumptions. At the core of all beliefs lie some assumptions, not facts.

This quickly becomes philosophy, but I encourage you to seek more if you really want this answer. You are pulling on a thread that I promise will bring enlightenment. I wish more people asked this more often and really meant it. It would resolve a lot of pointless conflict.

What I see instead, especially on places like HN or Reddit, is people trying to reassure themselves because they want to settle a question "once and for all" instead of seeking better answers. They want praise for what they "know" and to take a break, but there is no perfect truth, just better answers, and this process never ends.

> the what if, the “wouldn’t it be cool if this premise were true,” still lingers in my mind from time to time.

This stops being as relevant when you're put under pressure to make real decisions based on what you believe is true. You are forced to weigh the consequences of the decision, not just what you think might be true. This is a compromise, but I struggle to call this dishonesty.

Good point. I was introduced to the idea that aliens came to earth long ago and invented humans and built lots of weird monuments through The Mountains of Maddness by H P Lovecraft, written in 1930.

Your precedence note is fair but it seems likely the whole "ancient aliens" subject was in the air around that time; pseudohistory has existed as long as history and this particular strand just emerges with the sci-fi boom and particularly the post-war fascination with UFOs.

Von Daniken was obviously just particularly good at pushing his brand of the nonsense; all of those authors though are interesting examples of the sort of anti-academic and conspiracy theorists that have reached their apogee in recent years via social media.

This was the first book that I picked out to buy for myself as a child (I remember pestering my parents for it at the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park back in the 70s). I read it over and over and thanks to that, when I later came to stories like the Hebrews wandering the desert in Exodus, it was hard to put the von Däniken nonsense out of my mind.

Psychologists have there own version of this (which managed to achieve a sort of respectability) in Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which has the same sort of furtive/animistic fallacies are put forth to justify a questionable conclusion.

Exactly - a fun storyteller!

And I watched The Flintstones as a very young kid and loved it. And it deeply influenced how I thought cavemen lived. Well done, Hanna-Barbera!

The problem is that Erich von Däniken's "science fiction" was pseudo-scientific claptrap, which he sold as the truth, that perpetuated harmful cultural stereotypes, was patronizingly racist, also plagiarized French author Robert Charroux's "The Morning of the Magicians", and he never admitted he was wrong despite mountains of indisputable evidence.

At least Hanna-Barbera framed The Flintstones as fiction. Yabba Dabba Doo!

His books are entertaining, I'll give him that. Some of his archaeological interpretations are laughable but now and then he has a head scratcher.

The reason better toolboxes have felt inside the drawers is you put a drop of oil on the felt, and it will keep the tools rust-free.

I’ve known a few people like that, and it had a darker undercurrent: they didn’t disbelieve that, say, the Greek or Roman monuments were built by those civilizations because they viewed those as predecessors of their own, but they considered the pacific or Central/South American cultures inferior and didn’t want to believe they were capable of great engineering.

Beyond the strong whiff of racism, I think there was also this idea that civilization went on a single path (grain, the wheel and domesticated horses/oxen/mules, bronze, iron, guns, steam, etc.) and so anyone which didn’t follow that path was basically developmentally challenged. This definitely did not consider the possibility that not every region had the prerequisites to follow the same path.

The ancient aliens line of thinking is:

Is it possible that Adam and Eve were aliens?

If so, then that means [blah blah blah as if this is now an accepted fact]

No wonder your fam has no critical thinking

> The main thing I realized from arguing about it with them was that <my beliefs> did not really matter and would not convince them of anything

> It's an emotional and spiritual belief for them - a way for them to rationalize...

And for you, too.

Science the method is pretty damn great. Science the institution is closer to any other agenda-driven information source. If you’re doing first-hand, first-principles science, great. But if you’re doing the “here’s a study...” game, you’re relying on external authority you aren’t equipped to interpret, which, in practice, isn’t so much different from the people who think CNN or Fox News or Ancient Aliens is gospel.

Put another way, a real practitioner of science would seek to understand the phenomenon of why your family member believes what they believe. I guarantee you, it makes sense, once you know enough information (it always does, even if they’re actually insane, that helps it make sense). But to say, ”this person won’t even accept science” and hand wave it off as a “them” problem, emotional religion etc, are the words of a politician, not a scientist.

Yesterday, my daughter asked me if it was “a round earth day or a flat earth day” thanks to my habit of providing outlandish explanations for things, often contradicting myself in the course of a single conversation in the process (they’ve come to enjoy trying to poke holes in some absurd explanation I’ve come up with).

I have always enjoyed bringing in the "you know, the bible could be read very differently if you consider God to be an alien" to certain philosophical conversations I've had with people over the years, ever since reading von Daniken's work.

As you allude to, there are always other explanations.

I've created table-top RPG campaigns by cobbling together these kinds of wack theories and building a world where they are true.

>It's a hobby. Mostly harmless.

A whole bunch of current disinformation comes from people having fun with misinformation and dumb people believing it until the idea makes a life of its own.

It's not harmless at all. A lot of explicitly nefarious people use this technique to engineer the population so they can be controlled.

Claimed UFOs sightings seem to have become less common since everyone is expected to carry a digital camera with them all the time (in their phones). Similar for Loch Ness etc.

But it's not like people don't like their outlandish theories anymore. Alas, they've become very politicised, too.

To give an example that's hopefully not too polarising: many people like to blame inflation on greed.

Not really. Von Daniken talks about ancient aliens. Hancock talks about ancient human civilisations.

I think it was a manufactured bestseller. Selling books is a for-profit exercise. I don't think crazy theories are anything new, "new age" beliefs are really a continuous thing since the second great awakening at least. But in the 70s, bookstore chains realized that a certain demographic bought a lot of books, and you no longer could leave all that profit to ill-run independent crystal-selling bookstores just because of some high-minded concern for truth. Give the voracious book buyers the books they want, let the marketplace sort out what's true or not. That was the ethos of the time.

This demographic was called "new age" by the marketers, but almost no one who bought such books called themselves new age.

But people who wrote such books became very aware of the demographic profile too. And while there had certainly been grifter cult leaders before who didn't sincerely believe what they preached, now they realized that they could go straight to profit, just by writing a book. No need for the messy high-intensity "make a cult" step. The bookstores were on their side now.

Maybe. On the other hand, it was also harder to find refutations of crackpot theories that the mainstream happened to believe in.

Ancient Aliens ought to be required viewing in schools, because they are very careful to employ enthymeme and reported speech to make a series of statements each one of which is technically true, yet have implications which are false. Gaining the skill to recognise when these kinds of claims are being made is, I feel, essential for the electorate in a democracy.

What really drives me nuts about von Däniken (and Tsoukalos, Childress, et al. …) is that he contradicts himself. (Sorry, I don’t care about this stuff enough to have a recent example.) His position isn’t consistent.

Zecharia Sitchin’s arguments are also frequently not good but he at least seemed to be trying to construct a consistent whole whereas these other guys will just say anything.

VD wasn't the original, not even close. Peter Kolosimo had best sellers on the same subject years earlier, as did others.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts

I heard Däniken speak about 30 years ago, and exchanged a few words with him afterwards. He was a brilliant orator and came across as highly sophisticated. His arguments were contrived and I recognized that even as a child, but he was nothing like the natives of the YouTube era who do it for the likes and memes. He was completely sincere in his own belief of what he said.

I think a lot of it is based on how little of time most people knew existed in a tangible way. Until the last few centuries you were born into a world where most technologies you use had already been around so long they just might as well have existed forever. And the stories of how any talked about technologies were generally myth, folklore, or completely false. The idea the earth was around for billions of years wasn't really a thing for most cultures. Maybe you believed it was around forever, or that a mythological creation even happened in the 'more recent' past and the earth popped up like it was. The idea their was a beginning a long time ago, but it only started out with the most basic shit (ionized hydrogen mostly) and everything after that is because of an ever increasing entropy gradient is just not an idea that seems to pop into our heads.

I don't see why it would require a "turtles all the way" down logic trap. There would be a few ET civilisations which would develop the long and hard way, but then they could accelerate or seed civilisation elsewhere. A sort of reverse Prime Directive.

Still easily a seven on the grifting scale from used carpet spruiker to current POTUS.

Weird critique from Sagan, who wrote a bestselling novel based on the idea of contact with extraterrestrials.

Around a decade back, I and a bunch of colleagues explored these theories and despite knowing they were all bunkum, the sheer entertainment value they served was gold.

Think of it like Marvel universe stuff.

We'd go on long walks and let our 'what if' imagination run wild.

This also applies to certain "conspiracies."

In both cases, it's their God of the Gaps.

(Not to be confused with the Boss of the Ross. Or Hermes. Or Nike.)

>But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss

Its an unproven hypothesis.

It doesnt need to be "dismissed" it needs to be proven. You could make up any number of hypotheses. You wouldnt "dismiss" any of them. If you were interested in one you might design a test to prove it. But failing that its not worth worrying about.

When you write like 49 books trying to convince people of your untested claim, it seems like grifting instead of working towards evidence.

> But I think the basic idea, by itself is harder to dismiss

Speak for yourself. I find it very easy to dismiss.

Just as I find easy to dismiss horoscopes, creationism, anti-vaxers, global warming denialism, etc.