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How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

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Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#61

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

kevin_nisbet wrote: post #56
rdtsc wrote: post #32

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…

This was also the part I found most interesting. 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…

The first time I read that story it was about roast beef, so I'm guessing there's a number of variations and adaptations.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#62

Post by crimsonalucard »

mikekchar wrote: post #47
bhouston wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a common misinterpretation of Occam's Razor, IMHO. Simple explanations are not more likely to be true. What Occam's Razor says is that if you have 2 theories that fit the same data, you should pick the simplest one. Why? Because it is simpler, not because it is more likely to be true. It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth…

In reference to your paragraph on scientific theory:

In actuality nothing in science or in reality can be proven to be true. In science it is only possible to disprove or falsify theories. You can actually extract this concept from a famous statement in science and statistics:

"Correlation does not imply causation"

This basically means nothing can be proven, we can only correlate things. If you negate that statement it turns into:

"No Correlation does imply non-causation"

Which means by establishing that two things do not correlate we've disproved or falsified causation.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#63

Post by iopq »

dingaling wrote: post #55
austenallred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's simply not that much news. 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.

And your viewership doesn't care about most of them. There's only so much news that the general public cares about.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#64

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

mikekchar wrote: post #47
bhouston wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a common misinterpretation of Occam's Razor, IMHO. Simple explanations are not more likely to be true. What Occam's Razor says is that if you have 2 theories that fit the same data, you should pick the simplest one. Why? Because it is simpler, not because it is more likely to be true. It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth…

The theory goes: the simpler answer is more likely to be true because it is impossible for a series of events to be more likely.

The probability of A + B cannot be higher than A or B alone.

Of course that doesn't mean that A + B didn't occur, just that it is less likely.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#65

Post by kevin_nisbet »

owlmonkey wrote: post #42
greendestiny wrote: post #29

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

I don't think I agree.

I think this is something that can often backfire. If someone creates evidence that say's the plane crashed at location x, when location X is searched and there is no plane, I still have more information than I started. I know the evidence that led me to location x is incorrect. This could be because the data is bad, or due to tampering. If I'm now focused on tampering and able to corroborate that it is tampered with, I now have a new area to narrow my investigation, based on who has the skills, ability, and motives to tamper with that data.

Now, I would agree, if the goal was to create a short term disruption to the investigation, which didn't require holding up to scrutiny in the long run.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#66

Post by tjradcliffe »

The answer to the headline question is: "very".

Speculation on the location of MH370 is evidence of innumeracy, at best. Insanity, at worst: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364

tl;dr: because air disasters are incredibly improbable, the range for speculation is almost completely unbounded, and therefore the probability that any particular speculation is correct is vanishingly small.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#67

Post by nandemo »

Steko wrote: post #41

rdtsc's point above is taken but this guy's idea in particular is really bonkers. 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.

Agreed.

Also, am I the only one disturbed by OP's implicating the 3 Russian passengers? It's not backed by any investigation, just speculation. And more likely than not those 3 Russians were simply victims.

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#68

Post by Throwaway90283 »

jonah wrote: post #45
damian2000 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe it was some passengers/cargo they were interested in.

Surely it would be easier to kidnap a passenger at their hotel, or to hijack their taxi, then to steal an entire airplane, take control of hundreds of passengers, make it disappear from radar, spoof the location, fly it across national borders, land it in Kazakhstan, and hide it underground.

It's completely absurd. If the president of the United States was on that flight, I'd give it more credibility. However, which passenger on that flight was so valuable, and surrounded by so much security, that hijacking the flight made sense?

The same goes for cargo, it must be easier to make friends in the right places, or pay people off to have that cargo "misplaced".

Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

#70

Post by gfdgh54yhgf »

rdtsc wrote: post #32

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…

Well said.
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