This reminds me of a neat video I saw with Michael Shermer talking about pseudo-science.

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He has the exact same little rod thingy we're talking about (I think).

If you're the extremely impatient type, you can skip to the 1 minute mark.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman

Quote: Also, considering the crazy things they believe and the lack of good science and information...

Wow, intolerance much? Any of it any more crazy than believing in resurrection, avoiding vaccinations, divine intervention, magic prayers, eternal torture, etc, etc.
Also, are you aware we can thank Islam for much of the scientific method and other important scientific concepts such as peer review?

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
It's not nice to generalise whole populations like that :P

Yes, it's not very nice. But whenever we talk about 'culture' we are doing exactly that. In fact, 'culture' itself is something like a collection of sweeping generalisations about the way people behave, believe and live their lives.
As it stands, superstition is still important in Arab culture. At the same time, education is very low. It's not even possible to make direct comparisons based on statistics, because for those that are fortunate enough to attend higher education, the quality of University education in the Middle East is unfortunately so far below that of their counterpart institutions in developed countries that a comparison would be meaningless. It encourages blind regurgitation of information and discourages analytical skills and independent thinking, which is the reverse of Western education systems. And I'm not even talking about Iraq, which is probably the among the worst of cases. This state of affairs can be attributed to many economic and political reasons, of which a discussion would be quite off-topic, other than to say that it's not because Arabs are inherently less intelligent or anything like that. Unfortunately, referring to past scientific developments from the region that are hundreds or more than a thousand years old has little bearing on the current situation.

So while I might have phrased it a bit more carefully, Andre has a very valid point, which doesn't really have anything to do with intolerance. In fact, he's being realistic in relation to the state of affairs in this other part of the world.

Quote: Original post by Talroth
It is called fear fighting, and humans are stupid. (I should trade mark "Humans are stupid" or something, I've been using it a lot to explain things.)

People are stupid and scared, and they want to see that someone is doing something to help protect them and keep things safe. Similar to the placebo effect. People will feel safer if they see armed guards at check points 'searching' for the things that might kill them, and feel even better when some cool new magical technology 'makes searching even better'.

It works so well that airport security is based on this technique.