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??

Have you been to NASA? I have.
Have you worked with an astronaut? I have.
Have you worked in Space Technology? I have.
I really think we need to bring more people from real science and technology into teaching as it is bloomin dangerous to have teachers teach kids and they don't confirm the moon landings happen because they haven't first hand seen it with their own eyes (bullocks reasoning if there ever was one).

"Do you accept that to say it is not a certainty is to be morally culpable (even if only in some small way) in making room for Holocaust denial and its consequences?"

Yep. Even the suggestion that it might not have happened gives ammunition to the Holocaust deniers. It's utterly despicable. And just plain ridiculous.

I believe I talk with confidence.

“I talk with confidence.” No weasel words or caveats.

"Do you accept that to say it is not a certainty is to be morally culpable (even if only in some small way) in making room for Holocaust denial and its consequences?"

Yep. Even the suggestion that it might not have happened gives ammunition to the Holocaust deniers. It's utterly despicable. And just plain ridiculous.

That reasoning applies to anti-vaxxers and general woo advocates too.

I only mention this because I see you on many threads taking a refreshing and much needed, evidence-based, rationalist line, but you seem willing to grant the possibility of the highly improbable quite often. And therefore the potential acceptability of crank viewpoints.

Don’t go so easy on ‘em!

really think we need to bring more people from real science and technology into teaching as it is bloomin dangerous to have teachers teach kids and they don't confirm the moon landings happen because they haven't first hand seen it with their own eyes (bullocks reasoning if there ever was one).

If you know any NASA scientists qualified and willing to teach, send them my way. We have a recruitment crisis on our hands.

I'm getting bored of this.

Is it impossible that the ML were faked? No.

Is it likely? No.

Nothing anybody has said here negates these points. I am not going to derive my understanding of logic from anybody else's moral compass. That would be ludicrous.

Enjoy the rest of your debate!

But just to be clear, this isn't a conversation with children, it is a conversation with adults who should be able to handle facts. The "you have to pretend X is impossible because otherwise people use that to Y" argument is utterly ridiculous in that context.

This is pretty depressing.

"Open to alternate theories " my arse!

Noble have you seen something called 'alternative maths ' ?
Facts are no longer facts . All opinions are equally valid no matter the knowledge or experience of the person. There is a wonderful moment where parents complain to school that their childs creativity was being crushed by being told 2+2 =4 is a fact. And can't be 22.
I feel we are well on the way to this utopia sometimes.

Oh and a final word I feel I need to say about "experts". It was "experts" who fed expectant mothers Thalidomide. It was "experts" who gave people with depression frontal lobotomies. It was "experts" who treated women for "hysteria" using clitoral stimulation. It was "experts" who told Galileo that his theories were evil and heretical.

The Enlightenment moved rational enquiry out of the moral sphere. Let's not move it back, eh?

Thisreallyisafarce
But they are medical and scientific advances that were done to the best of the knowledge at the time. As things developed then the problems with that knowledge emerged and things moved on.

That is different to saying well documented historical events may not have happened because you didn't see it with your own eyes.

The problem with saying things like 'the holocaust might not have happened' despite evidence is that it leaves the door open for white supremacists to say "see even they think it could have been a hoax..." and then go on to use that as backing for their own racist views.
Or it makes it acceptable for anti vaxxers to scare people away from vaccinating their children because some MLM aloe Vera gel and healing crystals is all that's needed.

There is a moral element to the views we express.

Exactly!

*@ Farce

MaisyPops

I really, really want to leave any perceived moral element out of this. I am not walking around questioning the Holocaust, either in front of adults or children. Please do not misunderstand me. But to place any question of fact beyond the scope of rational enquiry for moral reasons is plain dangerous. It leads to things being considered unquestionable (such as medical advice, matters of historical fact, matters of science) when, actually, they are incorrect.

I am not prepared to do that in my own mind.

It was "experts" who told Galileo that his theories were evil and heretical.

I think Galileo was the expert here. But of course you’ll be reviewing the evidence for a heliocentric solar system yourself.

noblegiraffe

But at the time Galileo wasn't the expert. He was out under house arrest for daring to doubt the "experts" who told him his theory was evil, and that he possessed no right to a priori reasoning.

You are being horrible again, by the way. I really see no need for it. Are you always this touchy about other people insisting they have the right to think for themselves?

You don’t have to believe it. That’s the good thing about science - you can experiment for yourself. Bounce a laser off the mirror the astronauts left on the moon. Then ask yourself how the mirror got there.

SputnikBear

Perhaps I will. That is the point. Until I satisfy myself of a fact, it remains a reported fact. It isn't unassailable in my mind. Nor would doing that convince me of the absolute veracity of the reported facts surrounding the ML (and subsequent landings). It would merely tell me there is something reflective on the moon.

@Thisreallyisafarce of course people have a right 'to think for themselves!' But this is where we run into danger - when people have opinions about cold hard, incontrovertible facts - like whether or not something happened.

Something either happened or it didn't and it makes no sense to have an 'opinion' about whether or not it happened. That's not what critical thinking is for. You open up all sorts of absurdities if you say people are allowed to debate facts. This gives power to people like Donald trump and his followers. And then issues that are really not up for debate (like whether or not an event happened) become socially acceptable to debate as if it's an 'opinion.'

Opinions aren't the same as facts and must be regarded differently. Facts should back up opinions, not the other way around because that's not how rationality works...

physicskate

That is exactly what critical thinking is for: debating what one person or many people claim as "facts", with reference to the available evidence you have access to. That is what critical thinking means.

Nobody is saying that anything is outside the scope of rational enquiry. What I am saying is that there is no such thing as rational enquiry detached from moral obligations. It doesn't have to be an either/or. Historians keep enquiring (rationally) into the Holocaust but they do so knowing the moral stakes and knowing that they are not simply neutral observers of events.

It's pretty widely accepted in the humanities and arts now that it's a good idea to acknowledge that we don't have a 'view from nowhere', that we are all afffected in our views by our biases and experiences. That doesn't mean the end of rationality, it means a more complex account of rationality.

In terms of the Enlightenment, again it's pretty widely accepted by scholars now that some of the Enlightenment ideas that implied that all rational thinkers would share their conclusions ignored the fact that their conclusions were shaped by being white, Western males. The next step is not to say that reasoning is wrong but to say that we need a more complex account of reasoning than the Enlightenment offered us.

StripyDeckchair

Nobody is saying that anything is outside the scope of rational enquiry. What I am saying is that there is no such thing as rational enquiry detached from moral obligations

Yes they are, and yes there is. Reason is not a function of morality. I do not have any issue with taking ethics into account when I reason. But that isn't what reason is, and I will not be told what I am and am not permitted to reason about for myself.

@Thisreallyisafarce it really must be exhausting for you!! Factchecking everything you've ever read or been told by trusted sources. Going round the uk looking for evidence of vikings to going to cern and doing the Higgs boson experiments yourself...

You'll never build on collective knowledge if you go around wasting your time on well-covered ground, like inventing calculus from scratch like newton (or was it that European fellow??). Point is, it doesn't actually matter to calculus who discovered it, what matter is it's use as a tool.

Life is hard if you're literally going around and reinventing the wheel.

Factchecking everything you've ever read or been told by trusted sources. Going round the uk looking for evidence of vikings to going to cern and doing the Higgs boson experiments yourself...

But I don't do that.

Where does your concept of reason (your ideas about what reason is) come from? I'm genuinely asking.