Good post. It's important to understand that there's really not that much new under the sun and we've never been that great at understanding large social phenomena.
Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
31–40 of 325 posts
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#32Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
To me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse.
It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.
But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.
Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#33The 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 prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories
If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#34What if we are living in a simulation and the new pitted glass texture was rolled out, but our collective memories weren't updated?
Patch V1954.1: New normal map support for car windshields. Requires DirectX9 or later.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
They were primed by social media and other sources to believe it.
Not to mention, videos of "drones" are hot right now and get a lot of traffic, so if you can convince yourself that the lights you see in the sky above the airport are drones, you too can get some of those eyeballs
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#36Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft.
Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#37Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting? I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary.
I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night. Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#38The 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".
I dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out". This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?" There are tons of things that we deci…
We already have a more neutral term than "collective delusion"
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#39must be the drones
Re: Windshield pitting incidents in Washington reach fever pitch on April 15, 1954 (2003)
#40The 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".
This happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.
Another good one is the "Mad Gasser Of Mattoon" incident.