Brand New Sentence

I think about this all the time. We lose so much intelligence to stuff like this and* sports stats. And poverty.

Look at the flat earthers who successfully replicated experiments to measure the rotation of the earth through the very very very minor local effect on optics. If they could drop the obsession they could do real science, rather than just be stuck trying to figure out new ways to deny what they see

I met a guy who just loved spelunking.

He went to Laos and found a weird spider in a cave and he sent the picture to an acquaintance who was a biologist, and apparently it was an unknown species so he got to name it!

Pretty cool to have a species named after you.

I mean, it could come from archaeologists and biologists just embracing it. Bigfoot hunters may be jamokes but to your point a lot of them are the type of crazy that goes deep into unexplored woods for weeks at a time.

If we just had an institution that was like "haha, yeah, wild, I hope you find Bigfoot. By the way, while you're out there, if you could just keep an eye out for these anomalies and send us their location if you find them that would be swell. We won't report it if it's trespassing or whatever." They could do a lot of good.

Big foot is one thing, it's more of a cultural phenomenon. Flat earthers fundamentally believe that all authorities are lying to them so it would be a lot harder to get them to play along.

Tycho Brahe spent his life documenting planetary motions in an effort to prove everything moves in perfect circles.

His assistant Johannes Kepler waited until after Brahe's death to take those records and draw a dang oval.

Dude I don't think they spend their entire careers on bigfoot lol

More like some eccentric hikers that probably contribute to society in a number of other ways.

Maybe they'll find the Insulindian Phasmid.

Same reason they don't call you astronuts.

Second this. Les Stroud is a Canadian treasure.

Shouldn’t have to suspend disbelief. Disbelief in something is just as blind of a conviction as belief in it. What is unbelievable is that before the internet existed, we have separate accounts of hairy forest hominids on every single continent, and the oral tradition on these non-human beings is surprisingly consistent. That seems like a statistical improbability to me. But I don’t have first hand experience with the forest cryptids so I remain open to either possibility. Either humans have a collective mass global hallucination, spanning millennia of experiences (which is on its own intriguing), or there really is a magical forest cryptid. Holding either position doesn’t improve or detract from my life. So there’s no reason to believe, or disbelieve in Sasquatch or Yeti or Yowie or Mapinguari or any of their other names.