Open minded skeptic?

[Adrienne]

hey Joy,
thank you.....apparently there is something to the names we were given, having to do with our personalities....that is about all i know about that though....

yes that quote really struck me when i first seen it....cuz we (as humans) so often want others to see our point of view, when we are all entitled to our own space, journey, and time.....it sure has made me see how i have/do act and how that violates another persons personal rights.....makes me think of the movie the celestine prophecy where the guy is trying to convince the girl to have a drink with him, cuz thats what he wants...yikes and ouch as i write this....takes practice i guess to not act in old, conditioned ways...paths makes a million times more easy, and way faster. life is so much more meaningful, when i am notalways thinking of ME.
thanks for you nice words...and lots of peace and joy to you...Adrienne
and it just came out that way, not on purpose...well i do wish you and all to be joyouse, happy, and free

[RBM]

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If you understand that an "open minded" skeptic is not really open minded, but just a skeptic dressed up to be open minded, then it will not bother you so much (or at all) because you see them for what they really are.

This is not to say that you hold anything against a skeptic, it is saying that as a conscientious human being you will not feel near the burden to try and help a skeptic understand something that they really don't want to understand. Whereas you will not feel the same frustration in expending the effort on a truly open minded person.

While you are free to define 'open minded skepticism' they way you have done , I think it could use some improvement. This, being an old thread might find benefit. After all language changes.

What you describe is what in some circles, goes by a different name - pseudoskepticism. I think it is a more rigorous application.

It also clarifies and distinguishes 'open minded skepticism' as used by my favorite consciousness researcher.

Have a great day !

[Curt7331]

Open Minded Skeptic

I don't agree that this is an oxymoron. If I have seen the weather forecast that says chances of rain are slight and I have looked at the sky and someone says it's going to rain I may say that I doubt it. If someone tells me that bigfoot lives in the woods behind his house I will probably be skeptical but I don't absolutely deny that it's possible. If I go to the woods with him and see one I may change my mind. But when he first said this I was skeptical but I didn't know or say that it was impossible. I was skeptical that it was true but I agreed to see his evidence (I was open minded) and when I saw the evidence I changed my mind.
A bigfoot lives in the woods behind my friend's house.

[Aaron]

most skeptics are NOT open minded

but I agreed to see his evidence (I was open minded) and when I saw the evidence I changed my mind.

But the main point is an overwhelming majority of people that consider themselves to be open minded skeptics DO NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND even when the evidence is presented. That means, they really are not open minded and already have their mind made up no matter what.

If you personally are willing to see the evidence even if you have doubts and then change your mind, then you are open minded but that has absolutely nothing to do with - again - the mass majority of those that believe they are open minded skeptics are NOT.

You are then very rare IF you change your mind based on the evidence.

[exnihiloest]

In matter of free energy, which is the domain where I'm making researches, not one evidence has been presented. An evidence is something that is presented in order that others can duplicate and confirm what is claimed. It's factual and objective.
When JL Naudin presented his "lifter", hundreds of duplications have been made very quickly all over the world. So we can affirm that the lifter works. But in matter of free energy, we don't find a single duplicable and working FE device neither on Lindeman's web site, nor by Tom Bearden, Steorn, Lutec, Thane Heinz, Pantone, De Palma, Adams and so on, they are hundreds, perhaps thousands.

An open mind is open to facts and observations, not to fantaisies or falsifications. When there is nothing else to observe than conventional events, and when only the belief in miracles can make someone to see something, an open mind will see nothing because there is nothing objective to see, the miraculous thing being only a psychological process in the brain of the believer.

Moreover there is a considerable ostracism against skeptic open minds on many forum dedicated to free energy. The banishment of critical minds from free energy forums is a more current practice than on academic sites. On arXiv, the archive base of physics, you can propose papers about the possibility to exceed the speed of light, against the general relativity, about corrections of the Maxwell equations or of Newtonian mechanics..., and nevertheless the papers are published. This is great when we compare to the sites and forums in the free energy field, where people are accused to participate to conspiracies, to not have an open mind, to not be able to think outside the box, to be negative and so on, as soon as they try to show by a rational reasoning that a FE claim contains mistakes, looks like a scam, is inconsistant, irrefutable or doesn't present the least evidence. The ad hominem attacks against skeptics then replace any rational argumentation.

The blind believers in free energy should ponder this simple thing: for at least 20 years, not one inventor of a so-called free energy device has renounced to his connection to the mains grid! Now we can conclude that most of them are either pure swindlers making money with gullible people, or incompetent tinkers who see things that don't exist because they are not skilled in doing measurements or have a so biased mind that they believe to see when there is nothing real to see.

The doubt is the method of scientists, known since Descartes as the cartesian method. Today we have conventional energy thanks to the scientists and engineers (nuclear plants, thermal engines...). It is not free but we have it. So doubt and skepticism, as method for producing real things or working theories, works because this method is the only one which is efficient enough for removing all possible errors and whishful thinking.
On the other side there are hundreds of people believing in free energy and speaking about it as if it was a reality and as if they were genius, when they have nothing real to present. They even denegrate scientists much more intelligent than them. This is a simple consequence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, provided that they are not swindlers.

So it's the duty of skeptics to criticize any claim of free energy until the inventor gives the evidence by answering the objections. The truth comes from the doubts and is also the cause for the mind to open: by searching possible flaws. Skepticism and open mind is really an oxymoron. They are in fact the same and only thing. If you believe, you don't need to have an open mind, you know the "truth" in advance! Even an inventor must doubt of his own invention in order to find the possible flaws instead of making one of these hundreds of stupid claims of perpetual machines that never work when someone else try to build it. If we want that great ideas of free energy emerge, we must remove the noise.

[5150]

But the main point is an overwhelming majority of people that consider themselves to be open minded skeptics DO NOT CHANGE THEIR MIND even when the evidence is presented.

well then at that point they are no longer open-minded skeptics, they are then simply dumb-as*es

ignorance can be cured, whereas stupidity cannot