DaveC:
They're supporting the underdog.
That might be part of it, but I think that MR's supporters here also support him because, at some level, they think there is a reasonable chance that the aliens are here. Or, to put it more neutrally, they think there's a reasonable chance that a supernatural or similar "extraordinary" explanation is required to explain at least some of the UFOs.
My signature line has a quote from David Hume: "A wise [person] proportions [their] belief to the evidence."
I would suggest that an "extraordinary" explanation only becomes a reasonable expectation when there is sufficient evidence for it. Or, to put it another way, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
The problem for these people who are on the fence, but leaning into the aliens and the woo, is that every time we actually dig into the available evidence for the woo, it inevitably turns out to be underwhelming.
In that circumstance, it seems to me that the sensible thing would be to put the extraordinary and the woo back on the high shelf where it belongs, for now. Don't toss it in the garbage bin, but don't go reaching for it until the preponderance of evidence demands that you do that.
It is appears to me that there can be a great resistance to letting go of magical thinking. Unexplained doesn't imply magical. It's just an unsolved problem that can be attacked with the best methods we have developed for finding reliable solutions to unsolved problems: critical thinking, the scientific method, all that good stuff. Magical thinking has never really made any useful contribution towards solving any problem.
There needs to be a pro-believer voice in the discussion, otherwise it would just become an echo chamber (as well as very short).
MR is the only pro-believer here. He would be stamped out by the rest of us - albeit not because we are too skeptical - but because he is too much of a troll. True, he's more of a liability than an asset to his cause, but he's all we've got. (One must wonder just how tightly-coupled UFO-belief and trollish behavior is in the broader picture.)
It would be very easy to ban MR, on account of his continual trolling. It seems to me that it's easy to mount a solid argument for his permanent banning from this place, based on years of posting history. I am confident that he would have been - perhaps has been, for all I know - permanently banned from many other science forums in relatively short order.
But, at least for now, I choose not to ban him. Leaving aside my personal opinions of him, that can only be because I think he brings something valuable to this forum.
Where is the value? In my opinion, it is this: as the only remaining regular "hard-core" UFO believer here, MR repesents his believer community, to a greater or lesser degree. I think it's good to be aware that out there in the world there is a relatively large group of people who are probably a lot like MR, in terms of how they think about this stuff. MR gives us some useful insight into what these people believe, how they think (or, more often, fail to think), and how they comport themselves in discussions about their beliefs. Instead of a bunch of skeptics sitting in a (virtual) room, trying to imagine what a hypothetical believer might say about something, we get to interact directly with a live specimen. It's both fascinating and informative, if you look at it the right way.
Do I think that MR is a
good representative of the UFO believer community? It seems to me, from observing other believers in that community, that he is not atypical in his beliefs or attitudes. Is he good at persuading people who are on the fence that they ought to join him in his beliefs? I guess those of you who consider yourself on the fence are in the best position to tell us that, not me. What I can say with certainty is that MR's arguments aren't
reasonable. Since my personal worldview aims for rationality and consistency, I think that MR does an appalling poor job of saying anything that would be likely to shift my view in the direction of believing in his aquatic aliens, or anything similar. The arguments he makes for his position are first and foremost entirely
internal ones, appealing to his own perceptions and biases, as if those should convince anybody
else of anything. When he considers
external evidence, his main focus is almost always on anecdotes and "testimony". He barely glances at objective data and actively turns away from any detailed examination of such data. Moreover, he is intellectually dishonest and is caught in a similar state of cognitive dissonance to the one I talked about in my previous post.
MR might not think of himself as a representative of his tribe. He might not want to be that. But that is
de facto what he is, here. I wonder whether his fellow believers would be proud of his work as their representative? If their aim is simply to evangelise, then I think they would not complain; MR keeps the topic live on this forum and promotes all the believer-produced content from youtube. If, on the other hand, if their aim is to persuade those who do not yet believe, perhaps they would be disappointed in just how poorly MR is performing in that regard.
On the other hand, as a rationalist, I'm probably not the best person to judge MR's persuasiveness. Maybe his presentation has some sort of emotional appeal for fence-sitters. Maybe they'll believe him because they feel sorry for him and will side with him merely because he seems to a persecuted minority here. That would be a mistake, of course, because even if he is persecuted that doesn't make him right, but we're talking emotion here, not reason.
Let's assume that MR adds value in some kind of weird way to this forum. The complementary question to that is whether the
responses from skeptics to MR on this forum add value, to the forum and/or to the wider discourse between skeptics and believers. On
that, I am firmly of the opinion that they do, at least for anybody willing to sort through the dross to get to the meaty stuff about critical thinking, the scientific method and epistemology. On a less high-falutin level, I also think that the skeptics here have made useful contributions to the wider debate about the specifics of a number of UFO sightings. So often, the specifics are glossed over or faulty assumptions are made without thought by people in the UFO believer community. Here, some of those things get picked through with the fine tooth comb - often to the annoyance of those who just want to believe.
I do not expect MR will change. He will, in all likelihood, continue to skate the fine line between being banned for this trolling and dishonesty (along with the occasional angry outburst in which he takes out his frustrations with
ad hominem attacks) and managing his warning-point count so that he can keep the youtube cutting-and-pasting up to the level he desires. He will continue to proselytise. He will continue to make the same faulty, poor arguments. But he'll also probably conveniently keep bringing bad ideas from his community here, where they can be dismantled and shown for what they are. That is good news for the promotion of critical thinking and science.
