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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?

#121

Post by Padding »

Retra wrote: post #79
crimsonalucard wrote: post #62

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.

> If P is true, its negation is false.

Where's your proof?

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

#122

Post by DavidPlumpton »

n1c wrote: post #104
DavidPlumpton wrote: post #88

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.

Could you elaborate on this? Did that really happen?

It's widely reported. For example http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

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

#123

Post by prawn »

iopq wrote: post #63
dingaling wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd suggest that the viewership will generally care about whatever the media companies want them to care about. They don't care about far away lands because it's easier and cheaper to rile people up over local non-issues.

Typical 24 hour news has its market. Younger markets will always have some equivalent format.

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

#124

Post by cturner »

pipermerriam wrote: post #37
javert wrote: post #30

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…

    > it's less probable that a bunch of those people are
    > all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the
    > easier it is to trust.
No. It's in consensus that big lies get their best cover. History is awash with big lies hiding in consensus. Slavery is ok. Aristotlean theory of elements. Female inferiority. Divine right of kings. White man's burden. Inevitability of the technocrats. House prices always go up. Object oriented programming will solve all our problems. Anything to do with eating habits - salt, cholesterol, etc.

My favourite is bloodletting. Everyone thought it was true, for thousands of years. If you'd argued against it people would have thought you were crazy. And we now know that it's rubbish. All those well-educated men of all those centuries were todies who didn't have a clue what they were doing. (Or - who knew exactly what they were doing - getting the good patronage and the good women)

Climage change is fun. It's easy to follow the money on - it's just the latest mysticism of 'educated people'. The rebranding thing from "global warming" is pure weasel.

There's a lot of sense in looking at the consensus opinion as a starting point. And you should be wary of going against consensus - it's easy to get burnt by its momentum, people will treat you as a crank, your counter theories may be wrong also. And - it's easy to excuse your actions if you go with consensus and it turns out to be wrong later. But its status as consensus should give it no actual credibility in your mind.

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

#125

Post by palmer_eldritch »

fluxtemp wrote: post #103
Klinky wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd say it's the opposite. The large portion of the population who believes everything the authorities tell them has a mental illness that prevents them from thinking critically and for themselves.

I don't see how that's opposite. Not believing in conspiracy theories doesn't imply not thinking critically. In fact, critical thinking is pretty harmful to most conspiracy theories.

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

#127

Post by prawn »

yongjik wrote: post #51

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…

Russia took down another Malaysian Airlines plane and virtually nothing has come of that.

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

#128

Post by Padding »

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…

> It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth.

Isn't truth the only thing science cares about?

Of course truth alone doesn't mean much and we usually conduct science not just for the sake of it, but those are downstream concerns.

> 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.

Science doesn't necessitate any "reliability" on the theories/premises it uses. You set up your premise apply your theory to it and reach a conclusion.

It's up to others (i.e. engineers) to worry about how valid the premises are.

Deciding to use or not use some other theory as a premise isn't about being or not being "stupid" but rather about being able to prove something that others (be it scientists or engineers) will be interested in reading.

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

#129

Post by DanBC »

Klinky wrote: post #97
tbabb wrote: post #87

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…

What's the prevelance of conspiracy theories? About half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man; only about 20% say humans evolved without God.

50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choice: i) these people have odd beliefs ii) these people have a mental illness and odd beliefs. Even though i is more probable you have to explain the irrationality of the beliefs so yu pick ii, even though we know it's less likely.

Mental illness is very common (1 in 4 at any point in our lifetime; 1 in 6 right now) but these numbers talk about the widest interpretation of mental illhealth. Delusional thinking is thought to be less common. Mood disorders are thought to affect about 5% of the US population; schizophrenia about 1%. So you've suddenly diagnosed very many more people with a mental illness.

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

#130

Post by koolkat »

Klinky wrote: post #97
tbabb wrote: post #87

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…

I don't think being a "conspiracy theorist" is delusonal at all if there are overwhelming facts supportig the theory. When did it become crazy to "...have an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation." Watergate, Iran-contra, prism, the cia drug trafficking during Vietnam, Cia torture programs. All of them can be defined as conspiracies yet they are true. Something is not false just for being a conspiracy. Almost everything secret agencies do can be defined as a conspiracy.
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