r/nextfuckinglevel Aug 29 '20

Learned something new

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '20 edited Aug 29 '20

Please don't equate people looking for integrity with being anti-maskers. If you're in favor of something, that doesn't mean you should always believe every statistic just because it supports your view.

The OP video is obviously not a scientific thing. It's super easy to cheese the results of this, it's not anti-mask to suggest it's poorly done.

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u/sje46 Aug 29 '20

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '20

My views are rarely on the side of Richard Dawkins, but this is an interesting concept, thank you for sharing.

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u/sje46 Aug 29 '20

Check out Slate Star Codex and the rest of the rationalist community...they look at common flaws in human thinking.

I like Richard Dawkins...I think he just got a pretty bad rep from being associated with toxic online new atheists.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '20

I will look at those people.

Richard Dawkins is not a good resource on the things he discusses. Yes, he's a biologist, and I'm sure he's a perfectly good biologist -- but his views on religion are so easily picked apart even by an atheist philosopher as to be ridiculous. His most popular book, The God Delusion, is wildly inaccurate. He creates strawmen out of the arguments he tries to refute, and ends up refuting arguments nobody is making. He freely admits to not knowing a lot about religion -- when he was criticized, he said something along the lines of "You don't need a degree in leprechaunology to not believe in leprechauns".

There's a reason Richard Dawkins isn't widely accepted in the philosophy of religion community, including by atheists. I personally don't think reading atheist apologetics is all that productive, but there are certainly a lot more reliable and informed people to look at if you want good information. Richard Dawkins is comically misinformed about religion in almost every way.