The Galileo Gambit: An exercise in stupidity
This popular fallacious argument is used by wooists every day, apparently unaware that by now it's a very old joke.
I was following a UFO thread on Xitter last night, and almost unbelieveably came upon the Galileo Gambit used in all seriousness, free of any irony. Forgive the almost unreadable grammar (or not):
your point of view is extremely unscientific because it’s something new and doesn’t fit into your little world view suddenly we’re all high on something that is the attitude of the people who laughed at Galileo when he said the Earth wasn’t the center
This guy was defending Harvard laughingstock Avi Loeb’s position that comet 3I/ATLAS is an alien spaceship against some piece of criticism. (Loeb, if you recall, literally named his alien-hunting donation basket The Galileo Project.) Apparently neither guy had even googled the term; if they had, they’d have learned that people got tired of laughing at the Galileo Gambit 20 years ago; we’ve just heard it So. Many. Times.
Here is what you already know about the Galileo Gambit:
Wooists are often surprised to find that people laugh at their silly unscientific claim, and sometimes respond with “They laughed at Galileo, and he turned out to be right.” The implication is that because we’re now laughing at him, he too will turn out to be right. But as Carl Sagan wrote, “They also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” Nearly every time, the reason an idea gets laughed at is because it’s wrong. It’s also a factually wrong account of Galileo’s story:
Nobody “laughed” at Galileo’s heliocentrism. The Church (not other astronomers) accused him of heresy, because doctrine favored geocentrism, and sentenced him to house arrest for the rest of his life.
Heliocentrism was not a crazy idea that nobody accepted. In fact it was fast becoming the prevailing view; many had already been satisfied by the evidence that Galileo was right.
So we’re pretty jaded when we see people like Avi Loeb using the term unironically, and of course when people like our esteemed Xitter user above do the same.
Here’s why the Galileo Gambit is much, much worse than you knew:
With some thought and some digging, I came up with ten (!!) reasons why the logic is more fallacious than even I had realized:
