The appeal of reality

I used to get excited by pseudosciences, but they don't do it for me anymore. I've thought about why that changed.

I've always been a voracious reader. My parents and four older siblings would always have books around. In junior high and high school I would pick up any book lying around the house and read it, whatever it was. Sometimes these were texts on logical fallacies or classic literature like The Stranger by Camus, but sometimes they were books on pseudosciences like ESP Party Games or The Chariots of the Gods. I never knew whose books they were, I'd just read anything. I still don't know who in my family gave me my diet of pseudoscience.

I loved The Chariots of the Gods and any book on ESP. I was into UFOs and especially thought Bigfoot was cool. The Chariots of the Gods gave me a fascination with the Incas and Mayas that stayed with me for a long time. But it seemed whenever I learned about them in school and other places, they weren't quite as cool as I had read and I wanted more of the juicy stuff. I had similar disappointments whenever I would try to look at other things more carefully.

Eventually I faded away from the pseudoscience and when I thought about it again, it seemed foolish. So what changed? I can see the appeal of those books. What could be more cool than discovering a new primate like Bigfoot or a dinosaur in Loch Ness? Wouldn't it be fun to read minds? Contact with aliens, now or in the past, would be the coolest thing I can imagine. None of that has changed. If any of those things turned out to be true, I would be thrilled. I still think they would be the coolest thing I ever, and I would be finding out everything I could about them.

I think two things have changed. First, I simply can't believe them any more. Santa Claus would be cool too, but wanting something cool can't make me believe it. But more importantly, I've discovered how many true things are just as cool. What could be more fun than the story of evolution, a supernova explosion, or understanding how our genes work? Science is just as cool as pseudoscience, but has the added benefit of being real, which makes it much more exciting. Some people still find the fictions of pseudoscience more exciting than what real science shows us. That just tells me they don't really know science and we must not be teaching science right. Sometimes it just takes a little more work to understand the science to see the excitement. It is often hard to convince people to do that today.