Question: do you think we landed on the moon?

Laura Fisk answered on 10 Jun 2019: last edited 10 Jun 2019 10:30 pm

You know, my first thought to this was “Why not believe it?”. And then I thought, “I wonder why other people might not believe it?” and *then* I thought, “Why *do* I believe it?”
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I think this means I must admit I am probably less interested in whether we landed on the moon as to how we as humans interpret information we are exposed to! (That’s why I’m a psychologist!)
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The moon landings and whether the Earth is flat or not are particular examples of how different groups of people can have very big differences of opinion on the same topic. The particular issue with these two topics (and some others) is about ‘evidence’ – what we count as evidence, whether we think it is important, and whether that’s actually what we’re talking about.
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For the moon landings, people will point at a lot of different bits of evidence they occurred – bits of rock that were collected, video footage, eyewitness accounts. Personally, I am usually happy accepting things like bits of rock from the moon as evidence the moon landings happened – I haven’t found enough reason to think otherwise.
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I do know, though, that other people look at this evidence and think, “No, that’s been faked”, or “how do I know if it’s faked or not?”.
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There’s often not much overlap in the positions of these groups of people – and so it basically ends up with one group telling the other it’s plain wrong. I’m not sure that’s very helpful – it generally means people get more stubborn about their initial view (whatever it was). What I am interested in is why people take the perspectives they do – why are rocks sufficient evidence of the moon landings for some people and not for others?
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I sometimes think of it as differences in how sensitive a person’s ‘cynicism gland’ is (Just to note, people don’t really have a gland in their body for cynicism, it’s just a metaphor!). Different people’s ‘cynicism glands’ will be ‘tickled’ by some things more than others. Some people have a more sensitive gland than others, and they question things in certain ways.
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As a scientist, I think I generally have quite a sensitive cynicism gland. I spend my life questioning things and asking “why?”, “does this make sense?” and “so what?”. But I do have to draw some conclusions and I use general rules to do this – like ‘Occam’s Razor’ (“the simplest explanation is usually the right one”). These kinds of rules help me make some decisions.
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So, the question I ask about the moon landings is “which is simplest: believing the moon landings happened, or believing they were faked?”. To believe they were faked I’d have to have an idea of why that would have been worth the time and effort and money – I’m not sure I know what the point of that would be. There *is* loads of other stuff I’m cynical about – big statements made by politicians about statistics is usually one of them – but the moon landings don’t reach the threshold for tickling my ‘cynicism gland’, so I am content in believing it.
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As a psychologist, I’m interested in things like why the moon landings do (and don’t) tickle some people’s cynicism gland. People’s cynicism glands are affected by all kinds of things: for example,
● life experience about how believable or trustworthy things are (e.g. people who have a lot of experiences of authorities being unreliable and problematic, will have a lower threshold for the activation of their cynicism gland , particlarly with some facts accepted loudly as ‘obivous truths’ by lots of people – it’s as if the reasoning goes, “Lots of people say this happened; people are generally not to be trusted; therefore I cannot trust this happened”.
● how much we practice asking questions (skill level – that’s what subjects like science and English are always trying to get you to do e.g. “Why did the author describe xyz in this way?”, “what happens when you put this chemical with this one?” etc).
● how connected we feel with other people generally (if I’m connected with a group of people that think one thing, I’m more likely to think it too, because all of us as humans want to have a group we belong to)
● investment in a particular position (e.g. sometimes we can proud of ‘going against the majority’, feeling like they have discovered a secret loads of other people haven’t worked out, feeling ‘righteous’ like in a protest)
● respect for a particular person (some people make a really good case and are really charismatic – when we like or respect someone, we’re more likely to believe them. Sometimes this is regardless of what they’re actually saying!!)
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These things, and rules like Occams Razor, are like shortcuts for making sense of the huge amount of information we have available to us. It’s ok to use them – in fact, it’s essential and inevitable that we will use them. The trick is to notice what it is we’re thinking and to work out why. I think it’s good to ask questions. I also think it’s useful to ‘pick your battles’ – there’s a lot of information out there to make sense of, and some of it is worth your time and some of it isn’t. Whether humans landed on the moon or not is not a battle I think I need to fight – I have other battles (like, how we encourage people to have innoculations [jabs] against diseases etc.