Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Because the eyewitness (es) tell me what they saw. And seeing something in such cases is more probable than seeing nothing at all.
UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?
- Thread starter Magical Realist
- Start date
Because the eyewitness (es) tell me what they saw. And seeing something in such cases is more probable than seeing nothing at all.
Yeah, sure whatever.
I don't even have a link to who you quoted and, you want people to have access to information?
I don't even have a link to who you quoted and, you want people to have access to information?
Oh wait!
This would mean I could be on your side. But I can't, cause all you say is bullshit!
And you know it.
This would mean I could be on your side. But I can't, cause all you say is bullshit!
And you know it.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
No, they tell someone, who told someone else, who wrote it down, that you then read or watched. That's a lot of broken telephone potential.
Another straw man. MR attempts to refute a scenario that no one else has proposed.
The probable alternate is not "seeing nothing at all"; the probable alternate is "seeing something that has a rational (i.e. non-paranormal) explanation."
Is this your excuse to everything you've done?
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
The number of things that are metallic and that appear metallic far outnumber the number of things that aren't metallic and that appear metallic. Besides, ufos are not a one time event. There have been literally thousands of reports of them over the decades, greatly increasing the odds that what the eyewitness saw was a valid instance of the same. There have been photographs as well. See below:
https://www.pocket-lint.com/cameras/news/157512-best-ufo-photos-and-sightings-captured-on-film
Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
A car isn't infallible either, but it is reliable. Same with an eyewitness account, particularly one corroborated by other eyewitnesses, camera footage and radar video.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
This is not how analysis of unknown things is done.
All you are doing here is confirming what you expect to see.
No. UFOs are an umbrella category of things unexplained.
To assume they all have the same explanation is to form the conclusion as part of your premise.
All you are doing here is confirming what you expect to see.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
A car is reliable when it is on a road - i.e. in its usual circumstances.
A car is extremely not reliable at the bottom of a lake.
Human perception is reliable when looking at a friend or a tree- i.e. in its usual circumstances.
Human perception is 99% reliable when looking at spurious unusual events - but it's not 100% reliable.
No. You don't get to double-dip.
The reliability of an eyewitness account must be determined on its own merits before being applied to support other evidence, not after. If you do it after, then you're trying to double-dip.
Posts 5486 and 5487 are excellent examples of faulty logic typical of armchair UFO buffs. They should be required reading as cautionary tales in any UFOlogy 101 primer class. Kudos to the poster for providing such a succinct, dense example in poor critical thinking.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I think that a distinction needs to be made between 'reliability' and 'infallibility'.
Reliability doesn't need to imply the impossibility of error. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough for human beings to conduct their lives. Reasonably accurate and veridicial (within some poorly defined limits) most of the time. Put another way, judgements of fact become more likely when they are based upon or backed up by human perception. But not immune from error, just more likely.
If animal perception really was unreliable, in the sense that animals couldn't rely on it to find food (most of the time) or to escape predators (most of the time) or to find mates, why did it evolve in the first place? We do rely on it, which seems to prove its reliability right there. (Try driving down the street with your eyes shut.)
Science seems to rely on human perception as well. That's what scientific empiricism is all about: the theory that knowledge of matters of fact (as opposed to relations of ideas as in mathematics) comes exclusively from sensory experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Again I think that MR is right.
What you are calling "double dipping" is technically called "consilience". Or oftentimes "convergence of evidence".
As Wikipedia puts it: "when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will not likely be a strong scientific consensus... For example, it should not matter whether one measures the distance between the Giza pyramid complex by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a meter stick --- in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience
So in the case of the "tic-tacs", it isn't necessary to exclude every possible source of individual perceptual error (is that even possible?), if multiple observers are reporting seeing the same thing. If we add radar and video, then arguments about video glitches or radar anomalies become less persuasive if the visual observers, cameras and radars are all basically converging on the same object.
That's the 'consilience argument' from earlier in the thread and I get the impression that similar ideas influenced the UAP Assessment as well.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
There no contention that multiple moderately reliable pieces of evidence might conflate to a more compelling big picture. Indeed, that's how this UFOlogy is typically done.
But it does not work reciprocally. That they conflate to a more reliable picture does not reciprocally make the individual bits of evidence themselves more reliable. (Which is what MR appeared to imply.)
See the bolded text in your quote where it pointedly does not say that the originally-contributing evidence somehow becomes more reliable.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Empiricism is the opposite of interpretation.
"I saw a round shape in the sky." is empirical.
"I saw a sphere hovering without propulsion." is interpretation.
That is the crux of the argument here, when it comes to human perception.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I think that it works both ways. Measuring the distances between the Great Pyramids with a meter stick is an exceedingly crude method, probably subject to many errors. But that's how they did it back in the late 18th century, I guess.
I think that I want to argue that if laser rangefinding and satellite imagery produce approximately the same distance that those early investigators got, then these later very different measurements corroborate the earlier number arrived at by a cruder method. That's so even if that earlier method considered alone was prey to many possible sources of error which might have rendered its results less than trustworthy. The later methods certainly seem to suggest that the earlier measurement wasn't really all that bad.
So multiple measurements can be mutually reinforcing, in that the agreement between them corroborate the accuracy of individual measurements in the group, even if there might be reasons to question each one in isolation.
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
Yes they do. That the eyewitnesses' account of the UAP is confirmed on radar rules out observer error on the part of the eyewitness or any thing else that radar can't pick up. And that the eyewitnesses saw the object rules out a glitch or a bogey on the radar. The confirmation of the two information sources together by each other strengthens their individual plausibility taken separately.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
That this measurement was close to the laser measurement does not mean that "measuring by metre stick" is now more reliable. Until we have more data, it could be just luck.
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
This is literally self-contradictory.
If they are taken separately that means they are not taken together. You can't have it both ways.
This is another great example of what happens when you have no mental filter for junk.
Do you honestly believe these are the best ufo photos and sightings ever captured on film?
If that's what they are, then UFO belief must be in a very sorry state, indeed.
Most of these photos are blurry, low quality images, or just show unidentified points of light. This is typical of the most commonly touted "best UFO photos".
Some of the photos presented here look like camera artifacts. A couple of them could show just about anything. The one from 1942 doesn't show a UFO at all - just some spotlights and possibly some tracer rounds being fired into the sky. The "flying triangle" one isn't a legitimate photo at all, but rather an artist's impression of what it might have looked like, maybe.
The NASA one is moderately interesting. I don't know if anybody has officially explained it yet. However, I did find the original image in NASA's archive, so maybe I'll be the first to suggest a simple explanation. That image forms part of a series of images that look like test images for the rover's camera. It is in a set that includes photos of parts of the rover itself. Photographs of the object itself are taken with various different camera filters. This is all so routine that it seems obvious that the people at NASA were well aware of what they were looking at, and were simply using that object - among others - to test the rover's camera.
So, what's the object? Well, the accompanying images appear to show crashed debris from the lander than deposited the rover on the surface of Mars in the first place. So, the object is almost certainly artificial - indeed man made. Given the mangled state of the other parts of the lander that are shown, it seems highly likely that the "mysterious" object is just one more piece of the lander, flung away when it crashed (as it was designed to do).
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5843/opportunitys-empty-nest/
One must ask: who is less discerning here?
The web site publisher, who calls it "best ufo photos and sightings captured on film"?
Or the poster, who thinks "Oh yeah! Linking to this will definitely will prove I know UFOs from a hole in the ground !"