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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)

#201

Post by dboreham »

Vegenoid wrote: post #100
kryogen1c wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.

I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs. This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree…

The counter delusion is a built in emergent property of the system.

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

#202

Post by WalterBright »

p1necone wrote: post #189
WalterBright wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you one of those people who think that regular modern capitalist societies with any kind of social safety net or publicly funded healthcare are communism?

There's a continuum between free markets and communism. It's not either-or.

But the more to the left the economy goes, the less prosperous it is, and there is a point when it comes unglued.

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

#203

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #173
WalterBright wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today. I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind. It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.

But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks? If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.

Interesting that you mention textbooks. Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.

BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.

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

#204

Post by taneq »

metabagel wrote: post #104
mrandish wrote: post #38

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…

Moral panic?

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

#205

Post by lazide »

oceanplexian wrote: post #176
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sensatio…

Intellectuals have the same blind spots. During COVID (At least the ones I worked with) made fun of the disease when it started spreading and refused to take it seriously, then did a complete 180 when their social circles took it seriously. And then did insane stuff like wipe down their groceries with bleach and obsessively washed their hands long after the science was clear that it spreading through the air. No amou…

COVID is easily spread via air, but like most diseases that are spread that way, is also easily spread via surface contamination. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10531613/#:~:text=V....]

Speaking of blind spots.

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

#206

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #171
WalterBright wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so? I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds. For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory -…

More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode). The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored…

> More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.

That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.

You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.

The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!

You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.

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

#207

Post by orbisvicis »

As the story reads this isn't really a mass delusion - people read about pits in windshields, people examined their windshields, people saw pits in their windshields. If it was about the "Jersey Devil" and people started claiming to have spotted the "Jersey Devil", now that would be a delusion.

The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

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

#208

Post by mikepurvis »

WalterBright wrote: post #202
p1necone wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you one of those people who think that regular modern capitalist societies with any kind of social safety net or publicly funded healthcare are communism?

There's a continuum between free markets and communism. It's not either-or. But the more to the left the economy goes, the less prosperous it is, and there is a point when it comes unglued.

Just be careful that “prosperous” is actually the metric you care about and that you have some sane way of measuring said prosperity as it applies to everyone.

For myself as a Canadian, I can see that America is more “prosperous” in the sense that the averages on wealth and income look good, but I’ll take my socialized medicine and higher education thank you very much, not to mention median standard of living numbers.

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

#209

Post by IAmGraydon »

orbisvicis wrote: post #207

As the story reads this isn't really a mass delusion - people read about pits in windshields, people examined their windshields, people saw pits in their windshields. If it was about the "Jersey Devil" and people started claiming to have spotted the "Jersey Devil", now that would be a delusion. The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "I…

It is a delusion - the delusion is that the pits are new and suddenly appeared.

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

#210

Post by IAmGraydon »

stevenhuang wrote: post #198
carabiner wrote: post #57

The subreddit /r/njdrones is sooo off the rails right now. It started out as "I think this is a drone, maybe military?" to classifying different drones as energy "orbs" and "mimics" that only look like airplanes when photographed.

Consider that you are uninformed about the UAP phenomenon.

[flagged]
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