129. Wikipedia Is a Materialist Bastion – Craig Weiler

Mind the Shift

Everybody who has looked into parapsychology knows that it is a long-standing scientific discipline and that new fascinating findings are published in scientific journals regularly. Yet there are tenacious materialists out there who still believe that this whole field is woo-woo and pseudoscience. And they are influential. Craig Weiler is a journalist specializing in parapsychology and psi phenomena. He discovered the stubborn and angry skeptics when he was blogging about psi sixteen years ago. And he was taken aback by their arrogant stance. “They were stubborn and irrational. They weren’t looking into science. They weren’t even close. Which was weird, because they said they were defending science”, Craig says. He started studying the skeptics and their behavior and discovered that they always approach things in the same manner. He concluded that they basically represent one personality type. “Key elements are stubbornness, a lack of ambiguity, and great difficulty saying ‘I don’t know’. They have this materialistic background, and everything has to be shoved into that”, Craig says. “It becomes obvious that we are dealing with people with an authoritarian personality type. Lack of ambiguity, hostile tone, arrogance. If you look at what authoritarian personality types are, these people tick an awful lot of those boxes.” How have you been able to assess this? “I ve been arguing with them on social media since 2008. Over time I have had hundreds of conversations with skeptics. I was getting kinda hooked into it. I’ve freed myself of that now, but it allowed me to eventually see them more clearly, not just lock horns with them. It was a bit of a personal journey.” It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if these materialist skeptics weren’t so active and didn’t have so much influence in the public debate. They are organized in outfits like Center for Inquiry and its program Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and they run the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. They control the narrative on psi and other topics at the intersection of science and spirituality in various ways. One of the most salient ways is their iron grip over Wikipedia. An activist group advocating for materialist atheism called Guerilla Skepticism on Wikipedia has virtually gained full control of a couple of thousand articles about psi phenomena and persons studying them The group, run by former photographer Susan Gerbic, is intent on ridding Wikipedia of anything that in their worldview resembles pseudoscience. They kick out others from the platform. “They make sure there’s nobody there to disagree with them.” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself encouraged GSoW from the beginning to “protect science”. Wikipedia has become the go-to source of information for millions, if not billions of people. Craig Weiler and I agree that idea as such is wonderful. It is only sad that it in some areas has been turned into a propaganda tool. “I want to educate the public: you have to be very careful when you look at these topics on Wikipedia, because you’re literally getting somebody’s quasi religion.” So, what can be done? Craig is part of a group that aims to expose the physicalist “police” on Wikipedia. They are now documenting GSoW’s biased editing, their omissions and their blocking of other editors. There are many other contentious topics that certain skeptics are “policing“ on Wikipedia, such as alternative medicine, the UAP phenomenon and alternative archaeology (lost civilizations), but Craig focuses on his area of expertise.

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