It seems like all of the times I've encountered people who believed in a certain handful of odd ideas were years & years ago.
(Of course, I'm talking about ideas from outside of religions, which have a separate set of forces at work behind them. And there's another category I'm excluding that I've only seen come up more recently, which mostly seem to have been born online, but they're also all based on and motivated by politics. So I'm talking seeing this pattern among myths that aren't politically-driven... the kind of stuff people listen to and talk about just because they think it sounds interesting/intriguing.)
I think I was a kid (late 1970s & 1980s) the last time I knew of somebody taking seriously certain ideas like Bigfoot, Nessie, Edgar-Cayce-style Atlantis or other more-advanced-than-us ancient civilizations or ancient aliens (including that humans came to Earth from elsewhere in space), psychics, remote viewing, pyramid magic, that we all start out female, that a single blow to the nose could kill you by sending a nasal bone fragment through your brain with the rest of your head pretty much intact (so we're not talking about a complete skull-smashing impact here but the kind of thing an effective fighter could do by hand), or even that swallowed gum gets stuck inside the stomach or intestines undigested for days to years.
I was in my late teens and lower 20s (1990s) the last time I heard any serious mention of the "we only use 10% of our brains" idea or the Bermuda triangle, and the latter was just from somebody who thought there might be a believer in the room to debunk but was wrong about that. This was also when I heard, for the one and only time, about a vehicle air bag decapitating somebody... not even "just" killing by blunt force trauma, but decapitating... which I knew sounded just like the above kind of stories, but never heard again since then. I guess that particular version of the brief "air bags are harmful" flare-up just never gained any traction (and the other versions of it didn't last long either).
The only one I can think of at the moment that I still heard persisting after 2000 was the one about the QWERTY keyboard being designed to slow people down as much as possible. (That was a funny memory for me because it was the subject of an internet forum fight where I was told I must not have done even the most basic "internet research". I responded that that would only be checking whether the myth was as popular online as offline, not whether it was accurate or not. That was before anything like Wikipedia or Snopes or Today I Found Out existed, so there weren't even any particular places that specialized in really digging to facts, so "internet research" in those days would have been literally nothing but checking on the status of a myth popularity contest. I presume that guy has at some point since then discovered not only that his QWERTY history was wrong but also that "the internet" actually says so now too.)
Since then, it's just been silence on this kind of stuff. Did the internet drive them out? Have these things not even really been diminishing at all, counter to my own statistically insignificant experience?
(Of course, I'm talking about ideas from outside of religions, which have a separate set of forces at work behind them. And there's another category I'm excluding that I've only seen come up more recently, which mostly seem to have been born online, but they're also all based on and motivated by politics. So I'm talking seeing this pattern among myths that aren't politically-driven... the kind of stuff people listen to and talk about just because they think it sounds interesting/intriguing.)
I think I was a kid (late 1970s & 1980s) the last time I knew of somebody taking seriously certain ideas like Bigfoot, Nessie, Edgar-Cayce-style Atlantis or other more-advanced-than-us ancient civilizations or ancient aliens (including that humans came to Earth from elsewhere in space), psychics, remote viewing, pyramid magic, that we all start out female, that a single blow to the nose could kill you by sending a nasal bone fragment through your brain with the rest of your head pretty much intact (so we're not talking about a complete skull-smashing impact here but the kind of thing an effective fighter could do by hand), or even that swallowed gum gets stuck inside the stomach or intestines undigested for days to years.
I was in my late teens and lower 20s (1990s) the last time I heard any serious mention of the "we only use 10% of our brains" idea or the Bermuda triangle, and the latter was just from somebody who thought there might be a believer in the room to debunk but was wrong about that. This was also when I heard, for the one and only time, about a vehicle air bag decapitating somebody... not even "just" killing by blunt force trauma, but decapitating... which I knew sounded just like the above kind of stories, but never heard again since then. I guess that particular version of the brief "air bags are harmful" flare-up just never gained any traction (and the other versions of it didn't last long either).
The only one I can think of at the moment that I still heard persisting after 2000 was the one about the QWERTY keyboard being designed to slow people down as much as possible. (That was a funny memory for me because it was the subject of an internet forum fight where I was told I must not have done even the most basic "internet research". I responded that that would only be checking whether the myth was as popular online as offline, not whether it was accurate or not. That was before anything like Wikipedia or Snopes or Today I Found Out existed, so there weren't even any particular places that specialized in really digging to facts, so "internet research" in those days would have been literally nothing but checking on the status of a myth popularity contest. I presume that guy has at some point since then discovered not only that his QWERTY history was wrong but also that "the internet" actually says so now too.)
Since then, it's just been silence on this kind of stuff. Did the internet drive them out? Have these things not even really been diminishing at all, counter to my own statistically insignificant experience?
via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2upvQzq
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