What grinds my gears

"Rational thinking is not natural" may seem like quite an odd and stupid title, but let me explain. (No, it's not an attack on rational thinking. Again, please let me explain.) Irrationality, superstition and anti-scientific sentiments seem to be on the raise (again) in later years. The irrational has always fascinated people for the entire history of humanity. There has always been (and unfortunately there probably will always be) a very significant portion of humanity that wants to believe in all kinds of superstition, bypassing all rational thinking. However, irrational thinking has experienced a huge boost recently. Not only is young-earth creationism and anti-evolutionism on the raise, but a general anti-science mentality among other groups as well (such as many nature activists). To these people, somehow, the very idea of requiring actual observation, measurements and testing before believing something seems silly and limited. Not only is rational thinking disca...

One of the key techniques that cults, and even many more open religions, use to keep their followers is to discourage, if not even outright forbid, communication with the "opposition". If your intention is to keep a flock of followers who agree with your views, this technique makes sense and is pretty effective. If your followers never communicate with people with differing views and never hear and have to think about criticism of their own views, and are never exposed to alternatives, that's an effective way to keep people believing in your views. Sometimes some of the people, even when isolated from alternative views and criticism, will start thinking about it on their own and doubting the veracity of the views they have been believing. However, this is relatively rare (and usually other techniques are used to discourage, mitigate and outright destroy such doubts.) But this post is not about religion. It just served as an introduction. What I find curious is that ...

Have you ever noticed how the concepts of "good movie" and "entertaining movie" seem to be completely independent of each other? It's not even unusual to see movie reviewers on the internet post or say things like "it was quite entertaining; don't get me wrong, it was a bad movie, but I still liked it." (For example, the latest instance of almost exactly this that I have seen was a review of the movie Battleship .) This kind of statement feels completely contradictory to me. Now, don't get me wrong. There are two kinds of "enjoying a bad movie": Enjoying a movie because it's so bad, and enjoying a movie regardless of it being (allegedly) bad. I'm not talking about the first type of movie here. Movies like Plan 9 or The Room can be enjoyed because they are so hilariously bad. It's just outright amusing to see, for example, toy flying saucers being dangled from clearly visible fishing lines, an actor who's ve...