> 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?

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.

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 still don’t fully understand how ideology can cloud the mind so thoroughly that only a single way of thinking remains possible.

I'm envious of those true believer kind of people.

My father is one of them and he's held absurd ideas as 100% facts and we've had many nasty quarrels about it, BUT it also means he 100% believes in whatever his current goal is and he's achieved a lot more than I ever will because he's unwavering in his beliefs and goals, whereas I'm always doubting and second guessing.

> 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.

I think, that the people that are criticizing Erich von Däniken are doing so from modern viewpoint. People in his time had very limited POV, mostly because there was not much data, compared to how it is now, but modern people also forget that science is not a religion and it can't be based on beliefs only - it requires evidence and without any such evidence all the ideas has to be thrown out. Also, if there are better explanations - old ones are thrown out as well, because that is how it is in science. Unfortunately, no matter how good and exiting his ideas were as a read, but as a science theory they simply did not pass test of time, however IMO he has earned his place as someone as an example to have wider horizons to look around.

> 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.

- most people don't like admitting to having been wrong -- they might not be right in their new viewpoints either

- some people like to preen and moralize, so changing their view is an admission that they had (and therefore have) no moral authority (this overlaps the previous point)

- most people don't like the idea that something everyone knows to be true isn't -- that's conspiracy theory territory, and they know not to go there no matter what

- even where it's not any of the above, significant shifts in opinion are simply uncomfortable

- in specialized cases (e.g., science) people may have a sunk cost fallacy going on. For example, suppose you have a new theory to replace Lambda-CDM: but you'll be wrecking a bunch of researchers' life work if you're right! This is why "science advances one funeral at a time", per Max Planck. We've seen many cases of this.

The main thing I credit EVD with is teaching me disappointment from certain fun tantalizing things not turning out to be true. This prepared me to better cope with the X-Files and Lost TV shows, as well as nuclear fusion research and faster than light space travel :grumpycat:

> 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.

> 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.

From what I know, and please correct me if I am wrong; it relates to fear and cognitive dissonance. First, by creating FUD the perpetrator can cause physical narrow-mindedness within the brain, the amygdala — centre of emotions if you will — takes control which reduces reasoning capabilities. Second, by introducing multiple conflicting viewpoints in that state, you induce what we call cognitive dissonance. The brain is unable to reconcile the two opposing (or even just differing) views. This is a conflict at the circuit level of the brain, and the brain needs to reach a conclusion, and conveniently the conclusion is produced by the perpetrators of fud, those who seek to control/exploit others.

Perhaps most of us can assess something like this and decide for ourselves on the available evidence as to its truth and relevance. What the author claims seems, to me at least, a minor issue. I get it that you do not agree. More generally aside from outright lies and pure stories, there are always analogical levels of interpretation. Presumably, if an unbeliever, you're irate at many of the world religions.

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.

I was very naive when I discovered his books as a child in my fathers bookshelf. Luckily my father told me that I should be careful not to take anything as "the truth" from any of Däniken's books. It helped me a lot with keeping the necessary scepticism while still enjoying the books and I was really grateful for this advice.

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.

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!

And at least Scooby Doo's whole schtick was that supernaturalism is just creeps wearing rubber masks. Scooby Doobie Doo!

Exactly - a fun storyteller!

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.

> Based on the folk & religious beliefs of a great many cultures, it's easy to argue that human societies have a very strong bias toward believing in anthropomorphic supernatural beings - be they angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, or whatever. Are von Däniken's ancient aliens anything more than "random" meme, which turned out to be an excellent fit for the social environment it found itself in?

The supernatural beings are a way of explaining a world that is not completely understood. Even today we don't completely understand it but we have dismissed the idea that something intelligent is behind the inner workings of the world around us.

Now if you have supernatural beings it is not quite a big leap from going from supernatural to just technical advanced. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. For us modern readers this removes the supernatural part while it keeps them for our ancestors.

I wouldn't call it a random meme. But it was an excellent fit at a time where we started to explore space and could even imagine becoming ancient aliens to other civilizations in the future.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Obligatory Calvin & Hobbs mention: https://preview.redd.it/quintessential-dad-explanation-v0-p5...

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.

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

I remember him from 90s TV shows among other similar people. It seemed more like an obscurity but it was interesting to watch. Obviously he highlighted things which just hadn't been fully understood yet. To me it seems that was a time when society still had a healthy relationship to conspiracies, para sciences etc. (Maybe it's true but very much probably not...)

Most likely his ancient astronaut theory was the inspiration for the entire Stargate franchise. Of course to make the movie believable they had to give Jackson a more academic background than von Däniken had.

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

It’s a general societal expectation to be saddened and shocked by death.

Given how much he knew about the alien tech, youd thik he would use it to be immortal, or at least very long lived.

Yeah, honestly, if anything, congratulations are in order: if you die in your 90s, you did quite well in the longevity contest. Most people die before their 90th birthday, many long before. Not too many people make it to their 100th birthday.

[flagged]

Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter who or what it's about. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>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.

[flagged]

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.)

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