Scientific Experiments? Who needs that?

I understand why people believe in crap. Television programs whose intention is to properly inform us…don’t properly inform us.

I made a comment on Facebook about the History Channel and how they don’t objectively look at an issue (the Mayan calendar and 2012) and just perpetuate stupid beliefs.

OMG! 9/11 occurred on the day for “change”! The war in Iraq started on the day for “retribution” or “justice” or “some crap”! What kind of stupid conclusion is that to make, big events happened on randomly ascribed days?

Also the program stated that each 5,125 year cycle ended in catastrophe. We are nearing the last of five cycles (December 21, 2012…if you didn’t already know that). Were the Mayans even around for each of those cycles? How do they know that the cycles WILL end in mass destruction? They were thought to have been established between 2000 BCE to 200 CE, which means they were not around when any of the previous cycles ended. Why doesn’t the History Channel just explain to us that these are just MYTHS and that the calendar just predicts the alignment of the planets?

The worst offender was a show on Discovery Science (I think that was the name of the channel). It was about ninjas and their abilities. I caught the last part of the show discussing clairvoyance. For a channel with ‘science’ in the title, they were really bad at it. To ‘test’ this and to see if ninjas could possess such ability, they had ten people in a room. A mock raid was being conducted (used for an earlier part of the show) and they wanted to see if the participants could find the person hiding in the building. The only information they were given was a basic outline of the building with no details of the inner layout. They put them under optimal conditions for remote viewing (really quiet and really dark) and had them draw details about the hiding man, where he was, and what the building looked like.

It goes downhill from there.

The show mentioned how the Military spent millions on researching clairvoyance and remote viewing. They failed to mention that they WASTED millions of dollars and that the “psychics” had a horrible time locating things that could have easily been found using satellite imagery. Leaving out that part is a little deceptive to the audience.

They made a big deal out of the fact that half of the people knew the correct location of the guy in hiding. And by that, half the people knew the correct half section of the building he was located in.

The “+” was where people thought he was. The red “+” was where a person correctly located the man in hiding.

It’s really easy to say you had a 50% success rate when you start dividing up the building. 50% were right between two areas of possibility? Sounds like chance.

One person was spot on, but seeing how nine other people gave nine other locations, that sounds like chance again. They COULD run the experiment again multiple times, like a REAL scientific experiment, but one time is good enough for them.

 

Look! They were 90% correct!

Then they also made a big deal when some of the people knew he had “some sort of facial hair”.

The man had facial hair like this:

One person drew facial hair like this:

That is not similar at all. If the man had a handle-bar mustache and a person said he had only a soul patch, this show would probably make a big deal out of how correct they were. And is it really that far-fetched that a middle aged man would have facial hair? Of course not all people knew that he had facial hair. In fact, I think only about a third of the people guessed (yes I am using the word ‘guessed’ to describe this) that he had facial hair.

Oh, and at the end of that segment, a historian said that ninjas made up those abilities to make them appear more bad-ass. Gee, funny how that was crammed into the last five seconds of the segment.

This is why people believe in super-natural stuff like this. These programs deceive the audience so much by omitting certain facts and making conclusions based on chance and probability. They don’t do any real scientific experiment. They already came to a conclusion before their little experiment and brushed off that historian who actually knows what he was talking about. People, stop watching this crap. TV, stop producing this crap.