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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?

#81

Post by tbabb »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #54
rdtsc wrote: post #32

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 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.

People love to point to underdog scientists who were later "vindicated" and then compare their own pet theories to them. 1) That's incredibly arrogant. 2) That disregards the 10^n other theories that are discredited correctly every day. 3) The scientists who "nobody believed" were right because they did an incredible amount of very careful, thorough research which bolstered their case well past the point where it could be ignored. They weren't wild hunches.

> published by the New Yorker

New York Magazine. Big difference there.

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

#82

Post by [deleted] »

johnloeber wrote: post #17

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…

[deleted]

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

#84

Post by jonah »

Throwaway90283 wrote: post #68
jonah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was some passengers/cargo they were interested in.

Surely it would be easier to kidnap a passenger at their hotel, or to hijack their taxi, then to steal an entire airplane, take control of hundreds of passengers, make it disappear from radar, spoof the location, fly it across national borders, land it in Kazakhstan, and hide it underground. It's completely absurd. If the president of the United States was on that flight, I'd give it more credibility. However, which…

Oh, I'm with you, it's completely absurd.

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

#85

Post by baddox »

> The MH370 obsessives continued attacking the problem. Since I was the proprietor of the major web forum, it fell on me to protect the fragile cocoon of civility that nurtured the conversation. A single troll could easily derail everything. The worst offenders were the ones who seemed intelligent but soon revealed themselves as Believers. They’d seized on a few pieces of faulty data and convinced themselves that they’d discovered the truth. One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.”

I have no experience moderating a large online community, but this feels like a particularly bad way to do so.

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

#86

Post by pimlottc »

geon wrote: post #75
kevin_nisbet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was also the part I found most interesting. Over the past several months, I've been putting an increasing level of thought into how people reach conclusions and investigate technical problems, and looking at things like confirmation bias, and I see it happen in myself and others. The best example I have, is a vendor I work with had an outage in their platform, and we spent weeks going through the data, where the…

I have read the same story about a piece of ham in a pot. There's also The Onion In The Varnish: http://www.joeydevilla.com/2001/12/03/4419/

Nice post from Joey, but I don't get what he's referring to at the end when he mentions his own "onion". Maybe the links used to explain it, but they look pretty generic.

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

#87

Post by tbabb »

rdtsc wrote: post #32

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…

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 him to put it forward. What kind of journalism gets published with such little substantiation?

Nobody, not even the tinfoil hat-wearers in his own forum take him seriously, but because he's a cable news expert, his credibility means a million people hear his shitty pet idea. And plenty of people are going to take it at face value.

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

#88

Post by DavidPlumpton »

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.

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

#89

Post by ars »

Steko wrote: post #41

rdtsc's point above is taken but this guy's idea in particular is really bonkers. He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.

If anything the border would be the worst place to fly - if I were a country I'd put the majority of my radar right at the border.

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

#90

Post by lovemenot »

Whatever the merits of the argument about the actual location of MH370, it was entirely inappropriate to dox those two Ukrainians with such circumstantial evidence as to their involvement. At one point he is saying just look at their physique and imagine these guys taking over your aircraft. Right.

Theorising on the internet is one thing, but real people don't deserve terrorism accusations, except through due process of law. Boston bomb media lynching is a case in point.

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