51–60 of 223 posts
If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear.
I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back. Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he h…
It shows how much a good story-telling can go with convincing others that you know the truth.
Lack of debris and communication aside, the sheer frequency of Asian airliner disasters and disappearances this past year has been especially provocative and unusual. The Ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia has resisted implications that the plane had crashed, insisting that MH370 was a CIA operation. The loss of the plane over the Ukraine, too, stirred up rumors of a hacked plane being used as a missile and also rumors th…
> the sheer frequency of Asian airliner disasters and disappearances this past year has been especially provocative and unusual No, not really. 2014 actually had less crashes of large planes (6) than any previous year on record, it's just that three of them were particularly large -- and the death toll was still less than 2005 (or 2002 or 2001 or 2000). http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm
I've recieved some other numbers (12; aviation-safety.com for 2014) but the consensus is that 2014 is the safest year on record.
I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back. Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he h…
"Ohm's initial publication was met with ridicule and dismissal; called "a tissue of naked fantasy." Approx. twenty years passed before scientists began to recognize its great importance."
The site here has a whole list of these "maverick scientists": http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html#j9
I think the other lesson we need to consider is, just because an idea appears to be crazy, doesn't mean it is...
The Author, by presenting his theory in a way that also illustrates his awareness of the possibility that he himself is also crazy, was able to get it published by the New Yorker as a symbolic piece on the dangers of getting sucked into a conspiracy theory. If this was his plan, I think it's a good one as there's too many technical summaries, pictures and diagrams for this not be an article that is in part promoting a conspiracy theory.
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…
Of course there is, this is a planet of six billion people.
I'm sure from your endeavours you are familiar with BBC Monitoring which summarises news from thousands of global media sources. 50%+ of those stories never reach the western mainstream news.
And that's just one possible source.
I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back. Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he h…
Over the past several months, I've been putting an increasing level of thought into how people reach conclusions and investigate technical problems, and looking at things like confirmation bias, and I see it happen in myself and others.
The best example I have, is a vendor I work with had an outage in their platform, and we spent weeks going through the data, where the vendor jumped to a conclusion about the cause of the outage, even though it poorly or in no way explained the data we had compiled. No matter how hard I tried, I was not able to convince this vendor that the conclusion they reached was incorrect, every piece of evidence, was manipulated in a way to explain their theory. That is until they developed the fix, applied it, and had another outage occur after they thought they fixed it.
It troubles me, to know that we wasted so much effort, due to these biases.
While not 100% related, one story I like to remind myself of to try and disrupt my own biases, goes something along the lines of: - A little girl was helping her mom make banana bread one day, and asks her mom, why do you cut the ends off before you serve it. - The mom replies, I don't know, that's the way my mom always made it. - Next they ask the girls grand mother, why did you cut the ends off the bread - She replies, I don't know that's the way I always made it. - They manage to ask the great grand mother, why did you cut the ends off... - The response was, my serving plate was too small, so I used to cut the ends off so it would fit on the plate.
If anyone knows the attribution for that story, it would be great, I'm unable to find it so my recollection is probably wrong. However, I still really like this story, as I use it as a way to remind myself and others, that we need to be ready to question everything, when it comes to understanding a problem. It doesn't mean that we can afford to question every bias, but it does mean that we need to gain enough evidence to corroborate any theory that may come up, or if necessary, invalidate it.
Where I work, I believe it's something we need to spend greater effort on, is questioning our biases and make sure we're reaching the right conclusions.
On top of everything others said, what kind of nation hijacks a plane with 152 Chinese nationals, unless they want a war with China? (And if they do want a war with China, why bother with such a complicated plot?) If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear…
reminds me of sting's "russian" song, specifically, "i hope the russians love their children too..."
I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back. Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he h…
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…
--- Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.
In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature." Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.
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Should we do nothing about climate change? Probably not. Panicking is not likely to help either. Given that the Cold War didn't end in a scorched earth I do believe we are capable of pulling together and dealing with what's in front of us.
(Edit: formatting)