Dr Strangestrength:Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Silly Bullshit.
Many people on this board are survivors of the realm of silly bullshit and sometimes looking back it is therapeutic to understand why.
It has always been troubling to me, and I am not alone, that so many apparently very smart people believe in so much unproven quackery. Judges, Doctors and Physicists who read horoscopes, believe in UFO abductions, holocaust denial and invest time and money in psychic phenomena.
The reason seems to be that smart people believe in weird things is because they are very good at defending dumb ideas they arrive at for non-smart reasons. For social, cultural and emotional reasons they surrender to one pseudoscience after another and go on to defend it.
When someone finds out that the S & C coach of his favorite team is having them all do one leg balancing tricks, blind folded with a chop stick in between their toes and a spinning porcelain plates on the chopstick, it does help, I find, to think that; yes, he is a pretty smart guy, smarter than me probably, but he got caught up with this ridiculous BS because of a self perpetuating con job by marketeers and pseudoscience and instead of critical analysis he's using his intelligence to defend and spruik it.
Rip, do you think that this goes part of the way to explain why those who are objectively very intelligent, end up surrendering to fanciful concepts like "core fitness training", Nautilus, Rubber-band-everything (fill the rest in for yourself)? I think its very important that everyone understand how very smart people can be so utterly and breathtakingly wrong on strength.