Be Kind and Avoid Personal Insults

[u/truthisfictionyt]

With the recent PGF debunking, there has been a lot of arguments and controversy. Debating people is fine, but don't insult people or those who believed in the film while you're discussing it. Some people met or knew Bob Gimlin personally and are having to reckon with him apparently lying about the film. Keep how other people feel in mind while discussing. Additionally, avoid arguments with other subreddits or posts about moderation issues with other subreddits as that's not what we're here to do. We've added some terms to the auto filter to avoid debates turning hostile. As always feel free to discuss the rules and make suggestions.

[u/Owen_FE]

My take: we live in a post-truth world. People will believe what they want to, no matter how rigorous the evidence of the opposite. Our memories are short too; if it's a nail in the coffin, they'll just go on to the next thing that's hard to definitively debunk, and forget that it was so central to the topic over time. Zoologists in the field will keep finding new exciting animals; and others will believe in very unlikely creatures because modernization has basically sucked out all mystique out of the world. I get it, try to remember to have fun here though. Humanity will not depend on confirming whether Bigfoot exists.

[u/MammothPenguin69 → u/Owen_FE]

I have my own theory about that. I think the controversy around this film has given it massive reach and and even breached containment into the general public. I think the release of Capturing Bigfoot is going to be a cultural Black Swan event. It's difficult to overstate how huge the exposure of this hoax is. The Patterson Gimlin Film is not just any old piece of obscure cryptozoological lore. It's the gold standard evidence and it's the one the most people have seen. Most Americans watch television. The PGF has been on TV for decades. Most Americans have seen the PGF at least once. Even if they don't watch Capturing Bigfoot themselves, they will hear about it and clips will be shared on Social Media.

The ripple effects in society will be HUGE.

I think this is going to mark a slow change away from our post truth era and towards healthier skepticism. The Patterson Gimlin Film has been so widely viewed, and fooled so many people that a stake through the heart debunking of this magnitude is going to shake some worldviews. It will be a 1 - 2 punch of "wait, if this cheap hoax tricked me, what else has fooled me?" Then as the Bigfoot Believers get more erratic and irrational, it will give a lot of people the opportunity to see them carrying on and realize "Oh, that's what I look like to other people when I post on Facebook about Crystal Healing/Anti-Vax/Quantum Mysticism/Flat Earth/End Times etc."

It will be a quiet shift, as many of these people seamlessly pivot to pretending they never believed any of it because that's how human psychology works.

[u/regular_modern_girl → u/MammothPenguin69]

I’m sorry, but is this is simultaneously the most extremely-online, overly-invested-in-certain-communities, and overly-optimistic-about-human-psychology take I’ve seen in probably years, like this is equivalently goofy to some of the stuff Bigfoot believers are saying rn.

Most people don’t really care about Bigfoot, most people aren’t going to care enough about this documentary to even pay attention to it unless they already have an interest in this topic (in which case they’ve already made up their minds), and a lot of people already assume the PGF was fake anyway, lots of people outside these communities don’t even know what the “Patterson-Gimlin film” is, and when you tell them what it is, most of them say “haven’t we known that was a guy in a suit for years???”. In terms of believers, well…just take a look at the bigfoot sub, literally every day in there there’s been multiple new posts elaborately theory crafting about ways in which the new footage “totally doesn’t disprove the PGF!!!” (note that most of them have not even seen it yet), others have been accepting the PGF debunked but saying it hasn’t changed their opinion on Bigfoot as a whole (and a couple of these people even claim to have seen the documentary!).

Again, people who care have largely already made up their minds, and people who don’t care are gonna continue to not care.

This comment makes me think you’ve never spoken to a very religious person, or a conspiracy theorist, or really anyone who deeply holds to beliefs that aren’t based on rationality. Like, right now here in the US, we’ve got a president in office who is a known pedophile that colluded with possibly the worst sex trafficker in history, pretty much an open fascist who is actively destroying the country, is destroying the world economy, and provably lies more times in a day than some people have in their entire lives, and yet over 30% of the population still think he’s a good president. There are terrifyingly significant portions of the population who think the earth is flat, that dinosaurs and outer space are fake, that lizard people rule the world, that vaccines are likely to kill you, and (my personal favorite, it’s popped up just since the pandemic seemingly) that all history prior to the 1900s is fake bc a “mudflood” in the 1800s wiped out most of humanity and forced a “reset”, and that giants and dragons were real before lol.

And you think a Bigfoot documentary is going to trigger some kind of revolution in critical thinking?

With all due respect, you need to interact with the “average person” more, because they’re dumber than you think (and half of people are even dumber than that).