Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines.
But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk.
Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.
You haven't spent much time arguing with people who refuse to listen to any evidence at all, have you? The "psychological processes" you describe are, in many cases, that people will simply stick their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and say "La la la, I'm not listening!" In other words, a willful, determined refusal to listen.
It's not a matter of psychological processes, at least not for the people I've interacted with in the past. It's plain and simple refusal. They've decided that they're right, they know it, and nobody is going to tell them otherwise, darn it!
As the old quote goes (which is apparently very difficult to pin down to its origin): "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/)
P.S. Edited to add this, because I meant to write it earlier and forgot: It's just stubbornness. You can't cure stubbornness with psychoanalysis. Some people just don't want to believe in what you're trying to tell them. As the even older quote goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can lead a stubborn person to all the evidence in the world, but you can't make him think.
Indeed. As an example, there was a one-line response far down-thread from my GP which basically said only "Mick West is not credible" (which the poster has since deleted). I found this remarkable because Mick West, more than any skeptic I've seen, meticulously cites all his sources and doggedly sticks to only well-evidenced, fully supported facts. No broad claims, blanket dismissals, appeals to authority or consensus. He just does the work of collating relevant evidence and practical experiments which anyone can confirm and replicate for themselves. Because he's not asking us to trust anything we can't verify ourselves, his credibility is irrelevant.
Which made me want to reply, "If Mick West isn't credible, name one source of evidence which counters UFO true belief who IS credible in your opinion?" The obvious point being, there are none, because their belief is unfalsifiable. But then I remembered why engaging with those holding unfalsifiable beliefs is futile... the main point of your post. :-)
That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this.
In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Ev...
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
