101–110 of 223 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but then there would never be conspiracies because they are almost always more complicated than non-conspiracies.
And indeed there almost never are.
No convoluted conspiracy theories necessary.
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 problems they face are:
1. underfunded startup airlines (Indonesia, India) 2. energetic and not well-understood equatorial Pacific storms 3. uneven quality of candidates and training 4. Asian cultural issues in the cockpit, esp. S. Korea 5. demanding weather (monsoons) and terrain (low-viz)
The NTSB did a lot (well, everything) for the current safety of American airlines, but there's no comparable safety body in Asia.
So Asian airline safety should really be compared with Africa, not the West.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the average reader is going to interpret this as subtle irony, and I have doubts that it was intended to be taken that way. I think an average reader going to see that an airplane expert smells something fishy and has a bunch of technical "knowledge" to back it up. This is how conspiracy theories get started, and if this guy really understands how unlikely all this is, it is arguably irresponsible of hi…
I think a large portion of the conspiracy theorist population probably has a mental illness that makes them susceptible to delusional thinking. Delusional people can lead very normal fully functioning lives, but mix a certain topic that offers patterns which make their brain go down a certain path, and they suddenly become very adamant about believing something that is illogical and irrational. There is probably litt…
So if any of this was true it would all just be an amazing coincidence that the pilot was in a courtroom seeing a political figure he strongly supported for years getting a hefty sentence on trumped up charges for challenging the national leader. And then after being observed to be highly upset and emotional have a night to consider it all and then go fly the plane the next day.
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.
Occam's Razor is only useful when one hypothesis stands out above all the rest in prior plausibility. In the case of major air disasters no such single hypothesis is favoured. Almost any prior, up to but not including "zapped by aliens", is sufficiently likely to be in the running.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the average reader is going to interpret this as subtle irony, and I have doubts that it was intended to be taken that way. I think an average reader going to see that an airplane expert smells something fishy and has a bunch of technical "knowledge" to back it up. This is how conspiracy theories get started, and if this guy really understands how unlikely all this is, it is arguably irresponsible of hi…
I think a large portion of the conspiracy theorist population probably has a mental illness that makes them susceptible to delusional thinking. Delusional people can lead very normal fully functioning lives, but mix a certain topic that offers patterns which make their brain go down a certain path, and they suddenly become very adamant about believing something that is illogical and irrational. There is probably litt…
“‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me.
It’s a kind of subconscious laziness.
Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa,
it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty.
At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path;
at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty.Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Oh that's really interesting. Am I alone in the impression there were an unusual number of Asian (specifically) airliners that disappeared or crashed under unusual circumstances? I've recieved some other numbers (12; aviation-safety.com for 2014) but the consensus is that 2014 is the safest year on record.
Considering that airline crashes are exceedingly rare on a per flight or per distance basis, what, exactly, are the usual circumstances of airline crashes?
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…
There is another side to this lesson. I cannot count the amount of times I've read about scientists in the past getting ridiculed for some "crackpot" theory only to be vindicated later. A perfect example is Ohm's law: "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…
I can, and it is a much, much smaller number than either:
1) a theory was widely accepted because "it just made sense" and turned out to be false (bloodletting, Aristotle's physics, caloric, aether, bad air causing disease...)
or
2) a theory being ridiculed and it turning out to be nonsense (n-rays, Cartesian vortices, cold fusion...)
Take-home: the initial plausibility of any theory will vary widely between people (plausibility is subjective, probability is objective). But as evidence accumulates the beliefs of all good Bayesians will converge.
Ergo: initial plausibility isn't the least bit interesting. Validation by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and/or Bayesian inference is. So bringing up initial plausibility--in either direction--is not so interesting, except in the case (as in this one) where a nearly infinite number of theories have almost identical initial plausibility, because we know with as much certainty as we know anything that air travel is incredibly safe, so failures are necessarily due to bizarre low-probability anomalies.
Under those circumstances, anyone who promotes their particular theory as vastly more plausible than any of the equally implausible alternatives is necessarily nuts: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If P is true, its negation is false. >In actuality nothing in science or in reality can be proven to be true. If this were the case, the word "true" would have no meaning. We prove things in science all the time. We proved that you can cross a river without getting wet, for instance. We proved that humans can travel to the moon. The examples are endless, really.
Not exactly sure what you're referring to here. Still let me give you some detail on how I negated that statement:
I'm essentially negating phrases within the sentence using the distributive property from algebra:
~( ) = ( )
If the positive statement is valid the negated statement is also valid. Negating +2 into -2 doesn't make the -2 any less true then the +2, in fact it's not even applicable.
You should note that the negated statement (No Correlation does imply no causation) is a fundamental pillar in science experiments. It's part of the reason why researchers always convert their hypothesis to null hypothesis and then try to disprove it.
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>If this were the case, the word "true" would have no meaning. We prove things in science all the time. We proved that you can cross a river without getting wet, for instance. We proved that humans can travel to the moon. The examples are endless, really.
I want to emphasize that what I'm talking about isn't some theory I made up. This is established scientific philosophy within academia. It's actually one of the harder things to understand because it flies in the face of our natural intuition.
None of your examples have been "proven." What is happening is that you have formed a very reliable conclusion based on intuition, you haven't gathered proof. Lets take a look at your river example...
One way in attempt to gather proof that crossing a river makes you wet is to observe 500 people crossing the river. If you observe that 500 people cross a river and all 500 got wet, what you have established is not a proof but a correlation that crossing the river is correlated to getting wet. Intuitively we assume that this is a proof, but from a rigorous and more philosophical standpoint not only have we not proven anything, it is actually fundamentally impossible to establish a "proof." Try to wrap your head around that.
Let me give you an example that's easier to understand and more inline with our intuitive understanding of the world. The following link is a research study on the correlation between birthrate and the population of storks: http://web.stanford.edu/class/hrp259/2007/regression/storke....
They arrive at the conclusion that baby's are delivered by storks because of the positive correlation. Our intuition tells us that this conclusion is improbable despite the correlation. Note that correlation, intuition and proof are completely separate things.
It is however possible to disprove things. If I establish that there is no correlation between cancer rates and heights then it is by logic impossible for height to cause higher cancer rates. What I have done is disproven height as a causative factor for cancer.
It is fundamentally impossible to prove anything. It is only possible to establish correlations. Correlations can only be used to falsify things or demonstrate the possibility of causation. This is not some weird thing I made up, this is established knowledge. I don't blame people for voting my OP down; Many researchers don't consider or even learn about the implications that the scientific method has on reality as we know it.