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Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

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Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#131
post #107
post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

It's not terrifying. It's how people are, and it's destressing to me that so few people seem to be aware of it. No amount of explaining what confirmation bias is will convince people that drones in the sky aren't aliens. The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.

The fundamental issue with skeptical truth and science is that it is boring in terms of mass market marketing.

Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.

Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.

So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Right back at you.

Especially in the first couple of nursing home outbreaks where the entire patient populace died within a few weeks.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#133
People just don’t want to accept simple, no drama and explanations, even more so if it means they have to accept they are wrong. This is a trait we as a species had all along apparently but manifested much more during covid. I am just amazed we made this much progress cumulatively in which a short time. May be because we let it happen because the growth itself is so fantastic!

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a more neutral term than "collective delusion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias

What's the term for when people's attention and outrage is directed by an unreliable third party (let's say a partisan news channel) towards certain issues/threats, and away from other equally (or more) significant issues/threats? I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a…

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Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#135
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank i…

> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now. There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the d…

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Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#136

This was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on f…

The Governor of Maryland posted a video of drones he saw hovering for 45 minutes, and he decried the lack of action and info from the feds. Something must be done!

It was the constellation Orion and some other stars. He literally saw some stars and thought they were drones hovering near his house.

Why shouldn’t I believe that they’re really this dumb?

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to keep making pennies to replace the ones you're throwing away! Don't destroy currency! I put mine in baggies and use them as weights

dealing with them in any other way is literally not economical to me if it takes more than like a quarter of a second of time.

A quarter of a second or a bit of a second ain't worth a dime.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#138
post #97
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ignoring the mass of solid video 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c. > (seemed a few hundred feet up at most) At night you have absolutely no way to tell > And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an…

> 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones. > At night you have absolutely no way to tell I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of…

You absolutely cannot determine the size, distance, altitude, or speed of an unknown object in the sky at any significant distance. It’s not even rough, it’s completely impossible. You can determine the ratios of those quantities, but the best you can do is come up with a wide minimum and maximum of, let’s say, 500ft to 50 miles of distance (more if it’s just one light).

If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#139
post #27
post #9

The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".

> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name. I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE l…

I found it funny that your phrase: Low Information High Satisfaction > L.I.H.S. is a homonym with "lies".

Great phrase btw

Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)

#140
post #56

The TLDR cause was: The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.

It might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment. A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.

Don't be splitting hairs. The delusion is that the pitting happened recently and wasn't there before.
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