41–50 of 223 posts
He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.
The difficult thing with this sort of article is that while it generally sounds plausible, the layperson reader doesn't know about the specifics. I don't know anything about BFO spoofing or handshake rings. This means that all I can really judge this article on is its presentation and logical reasoning, and while both seem okay, there's no way for me to evaluate the premises and finer points that the piece critically…
You can also ponder it from the perspective of a rational hijacker. Why fake BFO when you could have just had no pings at all?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like how positive americans are. They wouldn't say people are dumb for coming up with crazy "Lost" and "Twilight Zone" theories. But instead, it's wonderful that everybody is trying to help :)
There are plenty of Americans who cannot believe that some adult gets on TV and publicly puts forward these sorts of theories. It's like watching a Fox News anchor have a melt-down on TV regarding the ethnicity of Santa Claus...[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYlJqf4dLI
This articles first paragraph says: "There had been no bad weather, no distress call, no wreckage, no eyewitness accounts of a fireball in the sky" Someone did claim to see a fireball. http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/03/oil-rig-worker-says-he...
Also the british woman on a yacht ... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mh370-search-br... Incidentally, the kiwi oil rig worker who claimed he saw MH370 come down in a fireball was sacked for saying that, and hasn't worked since. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...
The best explanation I could find of why he was fired was that his email caused computer problems related to the resulting traffic, which was in no way his fault.
I don't understand why an entity with "state level resources" would need to go through this elaborate procedure to acquire a jet (which they presumably want to use for nefarious purposes). 1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're…
The theory has a lot of holes, but in the absence of the plane and much other hard evidence, it becomes really attractive to believe in it. What were the Russians doing in Malaysia? In fact Russians make up an increasing number of tourists in south east asia. I ran into many when I was in Phuket a couple of years back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how I feel about climate change.
I've struggled with this as well when it comes to issues that are under heavier debate [1]. I like to think that I am capable of reading most technical things and evaluating them with a healthy skepticism, but at a certain point, I know that I just have to trust people who are smarter than me. One thing I try to pay attention to is consensus. It's probably very easy to get duped by a single voice that's smarter than…
No one really knows the specifics of what's going to happen, but the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has started focusing on 'adaptation' as some degree of climate change is inevitable (and, indeed, has already happened). The IPCC would be my choice as the closest guess as to what the next century will look like [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report
The difficult thing with this sort of article is that while it generally sounds plausible, the layperson reader doesn't know about the specifics. I don't know anything about BFO spoofing or handshake rings. This means that all I can really judge this article on is its presentation and logical reasoning, and while both seem okay, there's no way for me to evaluate the premises and finer points that the piece critically…
I started reading this and then I thought of Occam's Razor. This theory is appears way too complex to be true, something much simpler likely happened.
It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth. Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them. However, there are data to show that Newton's laws don't hold in other situations. Newton's laws are not "truth" -- they are useful.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a scientific theory must make predictions which are falsifiable. In other words, it must not only fit data in the past, it must continue to fit data into the future. If your idea has no predictions, then it isn't a scientific theory to begin with and Occam's Razor doesn't apply.
In this case, the author has a theory which (presumably -- I haven't checked) fits the data in the past. Even if we had a simpler theory that also fits the data, we couldn't invoke Occam's Razor, because neither theory makes predictions about the future. The event is already finished and will not happen again. With Occam's Razor, I'm saying, "Well, we could imagine it to be like X or like Y and no matter how you slice it, it's going to work the same. I will pick X because it is simpler". But with this event, it makes a huge difference which "theory" I pick, so I can't use Occam's Razor.
Even if I could pick two equivalent theories -- let's say I had a theory that the plane crashed into a mountain and I had another theory that said the plane did a loop-de-loop and then crashed into the mountain. Maybe both ideas fit the data in the past and I could go and verify that the plane ended up crashing into the mountain. Both theories fit the data in the past and fit data in the future. I'll pick the simplest one because, hey, it really doesn't matter if the plane did a loop-de-loop before it crashed.
Now, maybe some people really care about the loop-de-loop. If they can't find any data that supports the loop-de-loop but doesn't support the straight-on-crash, then we are still going to reject the loop-de-loop theory. Why needlessly complicate things when there is no data to differentiate the two theories? But this does not mean that the plane did not do a loop-de-loop. There is no justification for saying that at all. We don't have any data to support one position or the other. We are just accepting the simple answer because it makes our lives easy.
Where most people get this wrong is: - They try to apply it to non-scientific theories. - They try to apply it to a single theory rather than a set of equivalent theories. - They try to apply it to a set of non-equivalent theories. - They believe that the result is "true".
That last one is pernicious because if you believe that something is true just because it is the simplest explanation that fits your data, you have stepped from science to religion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also ponder it from the perspective of a rational hijacker. Why fake BFO when you could have just had no pings at all?
Better to have people looking in the wrong place, in a way that they will look indefinitely
The scenario described in the article could only have gone down with the support of a state level actor. In foreign affairs, states are mostly rational and risk-averse. The risk involved in such an operation would have been astronomical: - It stretches the imagination that in the Post-9/11 world, hijackers could access a panel in the cabin without raising passenger and crew suspicion. So the hijackers would have requ…
One of CNN's most embarrassing moments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A Can anyone fix American news?
24-hour cable news? Probably not. The fact that they have to be saying something for 24 hours a day, without repeating themselves too frequently, is virtually impossible. There's simply not that much news. Not to mention the fact that young people don't watch the news (the State of the Media report in 2014 said that the average age of the evening news watcher was 53) [1]. Honestly it's painful to watch when I'm at th…
If they were trying to put things in context as expected from journalists, they would have a lot more to say.