Quote:
Originally Posted by Duppin  Their approach is the same as all credible people who do that sort of thing.
They go in expecting it all to be bullshit and disprove whatever they can.
Now, they are still making a TV show so they may play up some things for that purpose, but the majority of the places they check out they end up deciding aren't haunted after all. |
Quote:
Originally Posted by SalaciousTunare Nope.
Ghost Hunters is a great show, they go in 100% skeptical of claims, they investigate, collect "evidence" then go about debunking.
Most episodes they don't find shit or they nothing but personal experiences like something touching one of them, but every once in a while they find some interesting stuff. The evidence from the Stanley Hotel and the St. Augustine Lighthouse episodes were two that stuck out as beyond normal. |
My girlfriend watches that show constantly. She first got me to sit down and watch it with her under the old "you'd like them they try and debunk it instead of trying to prove that a place is haunted."
God, was I in for an unpleasant though not unexpected evening.
What I want to know is in what way are these people skeptics?
How can a skeptic use an EMF meter to try and find a ghost?
Why would a skeptic use an instrument designed to detect AC current in common household frequencies? Why would a skeptic use them oblivious to their proper use? Why would a skeptic carrying around an EMF meter that has a fluctuation consider that a sign of the ghost considering the vast, vast amount of electronic devices they are toting around and that surround them. Most importantly why would a skeptic assume that an EMF fluctuation is the result of a hitherto unknown entity acting through a hitherto unknown force producing a hitherto undetected source of electricity instead of one of the dozens of electronic devices around them? I guess you can't get any more parsimonious than that....
The exact same argument goes for thermal cameras, ion detectors, and whatever crazy implausible shit they happen to be peddling.
Then there's the electronic voice phenomena. In which I'm to believe that through completely magical means ghosts can speak into recording devices
in frequencies undetectable to the human ear but playback perfectly well on the chosen medium despite that device having been designed to explicitly pick up a certain range of frequencies and play back those frequencies at a similar frequency. Basically they made a glorified wah petal. Awesome.
Then there's the video where we see a shady figure stroll by or a chair move or whatever the fuck. Let's ignore the fact that there is zero transparency between the TAPS guys and what I see on TV. These guys immediately jump to supernatural conclusions for things that have perfectly valid natural explanations.
Hey, that chair moved all by itself! Yeah, I could believe that an entity for which no empirical evidence exists operating through unknown phenomena moved a chair. Or I could believe that someone tied a string to it and pulled on it. Furthermore everyone involved has incentive to pull of such a hoax. The ghost hunters to guys for ratings, interest, and the general health of the show, and the owners of the haunted place for increased interest in a bustling paranormal tourism business. It's not hard to pick the more likely scenario.
Of course a real skeptic would be bothered by the whole lack of parsimony.
Fuck Ghost Hunter's for selling skepticism instead of what they're really doing: the same old shady paranormal dance people have been doing since time immemorial---shilling contrived mystery for money.