Teachers: do you believe the moon landings were a hoax?

[noblegiraffe]

I was just on Teacher Tapp and found the results from this poll pretty horrifying: 15% of teachers polled don’t disagree with the statement “I believe the moon landings from 1969 to 1972 were actually a hoax”.

What now? Nearly 1 in 6 of us??

Gosh well who were you talking about when you were mentioning these people who believe what they were told by experts?

noblegiraffe

This sounds awfully like discounting the negligible ones.

Of course. That's what it is. That doesn't mean I dismiss them as impossible, because I am not an idiot.

Wriggly, wriggly.

All you’re doing is repeating a view that first-hand knowledge is the only reliable sort. Which is bollocks. Because you know you have a heart pumping blood around your body despite the fact you have (virtually certainly) never seen it directly with your own eyes when awake and compos mentis.

noblegiraffe

Everyone who accepts whatever they are told because the person who tells them claims to be an expert?

This isn't complicated. I don't believe everything I am told. I believe some of what I am told. I don't automatically believe something just because someone who claims to be an expert says it is true.

Ruffina

There is reliable and there is absolutely factual, isn't there? I believe I have a heart that looks like the hearts I have seen in diagrams, but I do not know.

Sorry I haven't read the full thread but can you explain to me the bit about believing Henry VIII had six wives but not being sure about the moon landings? What is the difference in the evidence for each of these things?

I believe the landing was faked. The desire for the US to prove superiority over the USSR at the time was so great that they would have gone to great lengths to create the hoax. They had the means, they had the motive.... Sure they would have preferred the real thing but I think they were terrified Russia would beat them and created the hoax that is... Its not like anyone in politics has gone to great lengths to prove their own agenda before right? Uh huh

StripyDeckchair

Not a lot. It's just that I have seen more evidence for one than for the other.

Noble giraffe I love you. As a lapsed mathematician I really enjoy the rigour of your arguments.

I would like to believe teachers understood enough about critical thinking to be able to detect ridiculous conspiracy theories. It frightened me that they obviously don't.

I still don't get it. So if you went now and watched some interviews with the astronauts and people who worked for NASA at the time and lunar scientists since talking about what they've learnt from it and read some books about the development of rocket science, etc. you would believe it?

StripyDeckchair

Me?

@Thisreally Yes. I'm trying to understand what counts as evidence.

StripyDeckchair

It's not easy to say. It depends on the evidence presented to the contrary, doesn't it? Again, not being a natural conspiracy theorist, I don't know what the people who say it was faked say.

I do know that people lie. And I know that footage can be faked.

Okay, so what does make you believe in Henry VIII's six wives?

StripyDeckchair

Believe, or know? I don't know.

I have read widely in the secondary literature that refers to letters to and from the English/Spanish courts, of the transcripts relating to the trials, of the death of Jane Seymour, of the political and religious changes that surrounded the accessions and deaths of the women, of the diplomatic palaver surrounding Anne of Cleves, of the trial of Catherine Howard etc.

I don't believe any of that to be fake, nor has it ever been suggested by any academic that these women are inventions or distortions.

But, as I pointed out above, I believe they existed, I don't know. And I believe the ML happened. I just don't know. And I have seen less evidence for it.

Using those terms:
Do you believe the Holocaust happened?
And do you know the Holocaust happened?

StripyDeckchair

I believe it. I don't know it.

That's where you're approach causes some really serious problems I think. Saying you don't know the moon landings happen doesn't have any immediate moral consequences. Saying you don't know the holocaust happened opens up an avenue to anyone who wants to deny it. It causes deep offence and pain to survivors and the families of those who died. It paves the way for further actions like it by making it deniable.

*your

StripyDeckchair

I don't think it is reasonable to use that sort of emotive language when we are talking about facts. I am not going to make judgments about what is possible or impossible based on the feelings of anyone.

So all facts exist in a neutral zone separate from any feelings about them and you can make judgements about those facts independently of any feelings you or other sl may have?

*others

They absolutely happened. Noble Giraffes arguments hold enough away for me (plus I've met enough astronomers to have formed my own view from the evidence presented.

But just FYI Henry VIII had five wives. Not six.

Had had six weddings, but his marriage to Ann of Cleve's was annulled so therefore never actually existed....sorry. Pendant.

This you're tying yourself in knots!

You know the holocaust happened. There is so much evidence that it is impossible to deny.

How do you know that blue skies are blue? Or do you just believe.

I agree with Stripy. I think we need people to stand up and say ‘Of course the bloody moon landings happened, don’t be daft’
Or ‘Of course the holocaust happened you anti-Semitic twat’
Or ‘Of course the MMR doesn’t cause autism, you money-grabbing fraud of a doctor’

Without qualification, or ‘I think’. Because the conspiracy theorists won’t be couching their arguments in caveats and weak pleading, and kids (and adults) need to see people who aren’t afraid to call them out on it.