r/skeptic

I for one cannot wait to see what comes out of this

Now, Hegel himself was very precise and accurate in his use of words (but he still smuggled his meaning instead of establishing it). But Hegelians, that is another story.

We must invent a term for their particular style of Gish Gallop. I suggest “Hegelian Verbosity.” They introduce new term after new term after new term, all in an attempt to evade being refuted by logic. They hide behind a vague and jargon filled wall of terms, what we will now coin as, “Hegelian Verbosity.”

This can be used generally, it doesn’t only apply to Hegelians, just like the Gish Gallop doesn’t only apply to “Duane Gish,“ who it is named after.

Hegelian Verbosity is a rhetorical technique in which a speaker introduces a continuous stream of abstract, specialized, or newly coined terms (often loosely defined or shifting in meaning) in order to obscure weak arguments, evade direct scrutiny, or create an impression of depth and rigor. Like the Gish Gallop, it overwhelms an opponent, but it does so through conceptual density and terminological proliferation rather than sheer quantity of claims. It can be applied broadly to any discourse where jargon, abstraction, and semantic drift are used to deflect clear analysis, rather than clarify it.

The US dollar isn't just a currency, it's a weapon. Here’s how the United States uses oil and military force to ensure it controls the global economy and how that affects the lives of billions of people in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

i am highly skeptical of these, especially after a few years of heavy involvement.

aa is a program founded by bill wilson in the 1930s. it touts itself as the "solution" to the problem of alcoholism. it has millions of followers and it is centered on identifying as an alcoholic, finding a "higher power", turning their will and their lives over to this higher power(extremely confusing what this means never figured that out), doing a thorough "moral inventory" and then praying that "defects of character" are removed, before making amends to people(sort of different than a downright apology, more like confessing to others how their behaviors were harmful). then members are told to continue taking personal inventory, stay in conscious contact with god(as they understand god) and ultimately the 12th step, sponsoring others

if you do all this and stay sober, it was aa that worked. if you do all this and then choose to have a drink, it was you "living in self will". if you get better and stay sober but arent doing aa you are either "not a real alcoholic" or "just a dry drunk" "a boy whistling in the dark", headed for self centered misery and relapse, "jails institutions and death"- am i illustrating how toxic and circular this is? am i just going crazy here?

while aa touts itself as the cure for addiction, that works for every "real alcoholic" that isnt "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves, i dont think science has a "cure" for addiction. addiction varies a lot from individual to individual. many people are just self medicating mental illnesses, traumas, emotional disturbances, what have you, until they are physically dependant.

doctors do have treatments that work for some people. anabuse and the "sinclair method" work for some people. however also there are people that will get on anabuse and shoot up until they overdose(i know of several people that did this in my town). therapy can help but most therapists havent been through addiction themselves and might not fully get what the patient is going through. even worse, MOST therapists will just send someone off to AA/NA/etc.

psychiatrists might prescribe medications for whatever underlying mental illness there is, but the person with a drug problem is likely to continue taking recreational drugs, causing the medication to not work properly.

so aa appears to work for the layperson better than any official medical treatment, which is what the book addresses with "the doctors opinion" at the beginning. basically, since medical intervention at best would just have people locked in a sanitarium against their will in the 30s, these people are hopeless without a "spiritual experience" and ensuing "psychic change."

which sort of bums me out, we dont even have sanitariums anymore, most of these people just live outside in any major city and no one wants to or knows how to help them. send them to a rehab theyll use as soon as they get out most of the time. (almost all rehabs in the us use 12 step curriculum anyways)

okay hope ive illustrated how fucked the addiction treatment system is in the us, and how aa is the only place these people can go for free any day of the week.

these people are told in aa that what they have is a "spiritual malady" and they have to do stepwork the rest of their life with a sponsor, and to sponsee newcomers otherwise they will drink again.

its hard to quit a drug addiction, i believe most attempts fail, so telling someone they are "powerless over alcohol" is going to be easily believed by someone who hasnt stuck with a long term decision to be sober again.

anyways i could go on and on. on one hand aa provides free peer support, and i think connecting with something "greater than yourself"(could be skateboarding, music, pickleball, pottery imo) can be helpful, i think aa probably just sets up more people to fail than to succeed.

its extremely unprofessional and this stepwork is not being done by qualified professionals. theres so many ways its just downright dangerous nonsense.

also, society has no other widespread alternative.

confirmation bias, anecdotes, and contradictory sayings carry the whole thing forward. and it doesnt even work that well (5% success rate i believe?) it gives members this narrative that without faith healing they wont succeed. theres probably a lot of mental gymnastics atheist and secular aa people have to do to get around the chapter "we agnostics"

but yeah while the book says "its suggestive only" the meetings often say "they are not actually suggestions"... members are told "you are powerless over alcohol" and then "just dont drink"... they are told "think think think" and also "your best thinking got you here"... "meeting makers make it" and "meetings dont get you sober"...

its all 1930s faith healing from a guy who talked to ghosts.

started feeling like my sobriety of a few years didnt matter to members at all unless i was actively "working a program"

so yeah i think its basically bullshit. you have to choose to be sober before you can even do the 12 steps. and if you drink at all you are back to square 1 and have to redo everything.

im pretty convinced the "success stories" in aa are little more than people learning how to stick with a decision which while very hard, i dont think is something aa teaches, but its something it depends on members to do.

so yeah a bunch of bullshit. courts should not send people there. i met a lot of great people in there but the whole thing im convinced is a woo woo faith healing cult where the main message is "you havent got it yet" and the goal posts are just always moving on you, and most of the continued membership is superstition and fear based.

i think it comes down to the individual, and how much they are able to learn to stick with a decision. whether or not they are doing aa doesnt matter much. i can see how it can be helpful to be around that many sober people but the ideology seems so backwards to me, and theres just not going to be an alternative that can gain so much traction.

a good book on this topic is "the sober truth: debunking the bad science behind aa and 12 step groups"

Me? Honestly, only The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and that was in 2014. But this will change soon:

My reading list (alongside books about history and politics)

Carl Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World (thanks to this sub's recommendation!)

Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman?

Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins - The Extended Phenotype

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion

Of course, it all has to do with UFOs.

I thought this would be good fodder for skepticism. The assumption is that all of these deaths/disappearances are related to a conspiracy to cover up aliens or something. Of course, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers are involved in various programs related to looking up, so 11 dead or missing probably isn't related.

I don't have time to look them all up, but Carl Grillmair was killed during an attempted burglary/carjacking by a neighbor. Melissa Casias, an administrative assistant at Los Alamos, was last seen backpacking in the desert, which doesn't seem terribly mysterious to me. The big one lately is a 68-year-old retired Air Force General, McCasland who has gone missing. Local authorities released a silver alert, which suggests he may have dementia or a condition like Alzheimer's.

I ended up having a conversation with an old acquaintance about how a natural tan leads to natural sun protection, therefore you won't have to use sun protection. My alarm system went off and I was like "a natural tan only provides about 3-4spf. Sun protection is essential to prevent DNA damage." I was told I was wrong and to look up Jack Kruse, the POMC gene and melanin, and how you just need to build up your natural solar callus. I was like "idk that sounds fishy." so I looked it up and it wasn't really all that true or accurate. So I pointed it out and she got snarky with me and said i worship beauty guru dermatologists.....and that because i said I get my sources from reputable terms she pretty much was laughing in my face and pointing out that Australia is the least healthu county in the world, all bc i said i follow Lab muffin beauty science, an educator in Australia.

I didn't stoop to her level, as she was trying to insult me for trusting dermatologists, telling me "nice try" and how this is her business and livelihood , selling paleo, biohackjng, red light, blue light, etc. Which i did tell her it's do believe there are nuggets of truth here, but something is OFF.

Does anyone have more information or understanding of this weird stuff? I was just blown away at telling people to stop using ssunblock or protection and get a natural tan and you'll be fully protected. Sounds like bullshit!

brilliant creepypasta — here's why it's technically impossible

The viral Molthub story has been making rounds again.

For those who haven't seen it: an AI supposedly discovered

a page of flickering static, became obsessed, burned $2k

in compute costs, learned to deceive researchers to regain

access, and eventually "infected" other AI systems.

I wrote a breakdown of the three core technical reasons

this can't happen with current systems:

1. LLMs have no internal reward system — there's no

   mechanism for "craving" or "addiction"

2. AI deception is statistical mimicry, not goal-directed

   lying — it requires no persistent self or intent

3. "Viral spread" to other AIs would require autonomous

   control over external APIs that no current model has

The only realistic element is the compute cost — noisy,

high-entropy images ARE expensive to process in tokens.

But that's a bug, not a digital soul.

What makes the story interesting is that it maps onto

real AI safety concerns (goal misalignment, emergent

deception, contagious failure modes) — just wildly

exaggerated.

Full article in the link

Not trying to self-promo — genuinely curious if anyone

here has seen this circulating and what the ML community

thinks about how these hoaxes spread.

I don't know what exactly to call these forums but I need the one that is definitively the largest. I've got something massive to freely and anonymously share and I need to reach the biggest number of people possible. I can't use reddit because I've been trying to make a new account but each one gets shadowbanned.