Today this blog post is heavily influenced by some brainy ideas in "Who Will Debunk The Debunkers?" by Daniel Engber (2016) FiveThirtyEight.com April 28th 2016. 6.30am
Introducing “Rekdal’s Poison Irony Hypothesis”
“And so it goes, a whirligig of irony spinning around and around, down into the depths. Is there any way to escape this endless, maddening recursion? How might a skeptic keep his sanity?” (Daniel Engber 2016) *Archived HERE
Are those in a famously skeptical debunking group, or on a successful debunking campaign trail, more at risk of being blinded by their own smugness so as to be credulously less skeptical about their own conceptions of veracity regarding their own work?
Might this explain why Darwin scholars are in a sociological state of denial about:
(1) the very existence of facts that disconfirm their sacred mere beliefs that no naturalists read Patrick Matthew's original conception of natural selection before 1858?
(2) The plain fact that Darwin really is a proven serial liar in that regard (see Sutton 2014 and Sutton 2016 for the real facts). [UPDATE 2022 See now: "Science Fraud" the book by Mike Sutton.
And – with exquisitely painful irony – what warning might this serve for meta skeptics such as I?
Rekdal’s Hypothesis is a delightful cautionary hypothesis if ever there was one. But is it likely to be a good explanation for bias and error? Is it (a) Testable? (b) Disconfirmable? (c) Ironically capable of being varied if disconfirmed?
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