For anyone else who has a UFO-crazy uncle, I've found Mick West's YouTube channel to be invaluable https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest. Mick is a retired video game programmer (Spider Man, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), who does extremely well-researched videos analyzing UFO claims.
He's not flashy or trying to be entertaining, just thorough, evidence-based and scientifically rigorous. He'll even do controlled experiments, recreations and 3D models to validate what's going on. And he's unfailingly respectful no matter how unhinged the claim. His work explaining the "Gimbal Video" is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus
Sounds like you've already decided and are trying to work backwards - as in the supposition "UFO-crazy" seems more like you're trying to wrangle some analysis to prove your inter-family ad-hominem than following the evidence to illuminate a mystery, and Mr West's work is abused for that lol
As used here "UFO-crazy" wasn't a supposition, it was a constraint.
"UFO-crazy uncles" are known to exist. This is not an extraordinary claim. The existence of such uncles provides no evidence for or against extraterrestrial visitors or other aerial phenomena.
The existence of UFO crazy uncle's does from a probability sense have some bearing on whether we have any true extraterrestrial evidence.
In context seemed more like a smear for any who don't dismiss as unremarkable. But I'm glad you took it as the narrow case, tho - do they really "exist", or might they have just been right all along? Lol
Being "crazy" and later turning ought to be "right" are not exclusive.
One can be right for bad reasons.
OK - this needs some good examples :)
Justified, true beliefs: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ...
People who believe in "chemtrails" are (in my un-scientific survey) pretty likely to be conspiracy enthusiasts ("cranks", "crazy", etc.).
But they're not wrong that the stuff coming out of the back of jet aircraft is changing the climate.
Small, localized weather engineering programs have long been real (cloud seeding), and planetary-scale climate engineering projects are now openly discussed by governments. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering "Types of solar geoengineering techniques include: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) – adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) to reflect incoming sunlight. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the types of chemicals considered for SAI, can chemically react in the stratosphere to form reflective sulfate aerosols."
Except "stuff" isn't coming out of the back of aircraft: they're talking about aircraft contrails which is just condensed water vapor from wingtip turbulence.
The people who claim they're monitoring chemtrails aren't even watching aircraft which are deliberately dispensing payloads, because it just isn't that common in the first place (unless you go out and watch crop dusting, but then you can also just see the guy land, get out, and talk about it).
Galileo's heliocentric model
Hand washing prevents illness
COVID came from a lab, not a wet market
Hunter Biden laptop was real
And then a counter example of something broadly accepted but untrue. The humoral theory and blood letting, practiced for thousands of years. This is what killed George Washington.
> Galileo's heliocentric model
Copernicus, but "close enough".
Yep. The planets do not, in fact, revolve around the Sun. They revolve around the solar system center of mass (barycenter). This is an error of about 0.25 degree viewed from Earth which was significant at the time.
> Hand washing prevents illness
Did the person who we credit for hand washing advocate for it because he was "crazy", or because he had a well-founded theory?
> COVID came from a lab, not a wet market
The lab-leak theory has not held up to scrutiny. It is considered refuted. Though IMO the initial backlash was excessive.
> Hunter Biden laptop was real
No one outside of politics said the laptop "wasn't real", many emails were cryptographically authenticated very early on. There was a great deal of concern by experts that a coordinated disinfo op was being played into the election. It was, though probably not with the involvement of foreign actors this time. Nothing about that laptop ended up being relevant to the Presidential candidate actually running for election.
> And then a counter example of something broadly accepted but untrue. The humoral theory and blood letting, practiced for thousands of years. This is what killed George Washington.
We're talking about examples of things a "crazy uncle" might believe that turned out to be true. These are just abandoned pre-scientific medical theories and treatments.
> In context seemed more like a smear
Not to anyone who is intellectually honest.
What remarkable projection.
He doesn't seem to explain the recently popular "transients" though.
I think it takes time. I can only imagine the hours required to research, develop and shoot such well-evidenced explanations, given that part of his audience is true believers searching for any gap through which they can sustain their beliefs. But look at his website: https://www.metabunk.org. A quick search there for "Transients" returned several pages of posts, some from Mick himself.
Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
>Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to.
Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines.
But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk.
Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.
> But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk.
You haven't spent much time arguing with people who refuse to listen to any evidence at all, have you? The "psychological processes" you describe are, in many cases, that people will simply stick their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and say "La la la, I'm not listening!" In other words, a willful, determined refusal to listen.
It's not a matter of psychological processes, at least not for the people I've interacted with in the past. It's plain and simple refusal. They've decided that they're right, they know it, and nobody is going to tell them otherwise, darn it!
As the old quote goes (which is apparently very difficult to pin down to its origin): "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/)
P.S. Edited to add this, because I meant to write it earlier and forgot: It's just stubbornness. You can't cure stubbornness with psychoanalysis. Some people just don't want to believe in what you're trying to tell them. As the even older quote goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can lead a stubborn person to all the evidence in the world, but you can't make him think.
> Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this.
In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
If a “category of claims” has shared causal structure, then the category’s track record absolutely does tell you something about the next claim in it.
It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
Every person on Earth could agree that Earth is flat and it wouldn't affect the reality of whether or not extraterrestrials visit earth even a little bit.
The shared causal structure is the absence of facts and denial of science. Nearly every religion on earth also suffers from that in their gospel, where many fictitious and supernatural phenomena are bundled together and sold for truth.
> the absence of facts
I'd prefer to speak about "evidence in support of/against" rather than "facts", which often conceals a presuming-the-consequent kind of fallacy.
> denial of science
Whether "science" is believed or denied by any particular person has no effect on whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence has or is visiting earth.
Demanding that "science" be believed is un-scientific. I am not drawing an equivalence between science and religion here, but pointing out that your argument is a super hand-wavey appeal to an inviolable "gospel". I'm old enough to remember when a theory like intra-galactic panspermia was regarded like canals-on-Mars.
In my view, ETI theories are lacking any credible evidence and this makes me sad.
There is nothing anti-science about the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. In fact its apparent absence is has a name -- it's called the Fermi Paradox.
And the facts are just ... released. It's the interpretation of the observations that are disputed. And unless you think they are all fake, the explanations that do not involve alien tech are non-trivial to say the least.
I'm not sure why you'd think there is any shared causal structure with flat earthers at all.
Extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the universe, and extraterrestrial life visiting Earth are two distinct things, and the former is vastly more probable than the latter.
True, but if you don't have sufficient knowledge of IR to assess the claim that a particular photo cannot be a bird, the tendency of the people making and believing that claim are usually equally confident that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams and that vaccines contain microchips is a compelling argument against it.
Similarly the absence of a conspiracy of freemasons running something does not inhibit the existence of a conspiracy of Taylor Swift fans running it in any possible way. But I think any objective assessment of whether the Swiftie conspiracy is likely to be real or not should probably take into account the possibility people positing Swiftie conspiracies have been influenced more by well established tropes about freemasons and Jews, and if the alternate hypothesis that a common human failure mode involves positing the idea groups they distrust secretly conspire to achieve unrelated outcome they dislike is well supported and the claim of an actual Swiftie conspiracy isn't...
The only thing that cuts against this is that if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.
What about Avi Loeb's theory that 'Oumuamua is an UFO with a solar sail, which would explain its apparently unusually flat pancake-like shape?
That's an example of ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by a professor who decided that there's more money in UFO BS than in his previous career (or sincerely lost his grip on reality, who knows).
I don't know, he seems to be really smart. Maybe it's a good UFO theory for a change.
It was an interesting thoery, but IMO his habit of making similar claims every time an interstellar object is discovered cast doubt on that original theory.
Three of my favourite game series as a kid, what a legend.
unc's thrashing out
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[citation needed]
Sez you, but you aren't credible.