If UFO witnesses are uneducated, then why do a bunch of them get hired as astronauts?

Ok, we are in agreement: the sneer club is more interested in respectability/dignity than investigation. That’s my main point.

Which kind and ætiology of Delusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delusion

What is your preferred explanation of the anomalous data? Try even once.

Right, that’s my point, thanks for agreeing.

You’re claiming that we do have data, but not enough. So let’s investigate. And you’re happy to trust my eyewitness account in one case but not the other.

It’s obvious that some phenomena will have a lot of data, some (dark matter, Planet X, sterile neutrinos, Sasquatch), are only suspected to exist. We have varying amounts of data for varying phenomena, naturally.

Have you read Kuhn? He says that when anomalous data build up that contradicts the incumbent theory, they’re dismissed/resisted for a long time, don’t get research-funding, until enough substantiating data build up that the paradigm has to be replaced.

There are two ways of dealing with data that don’t match your theory –

• Investigate, research, adjust
• Dismiss, ignore, deride. You’ve used scare-quotes twice here and here to sneer at the data that doesn’t fit the understanding that temporarily holds sway now.

One of these two ways is rational, the other is dogmatic.

At least three claims have been made in this thread that were quickly debunked –

• All sasquatch sightings are from single witnesses and them in delirious states. This is a falsification of the data.
• There have been no sasquatch or UFO sightings since the smartphone era. This is a falsification of the data.
• People who do normal jobs have no credibility. Your opinion is invalid if you are not bourgeois.

Which is more likely:

• There are no anomalies
• Some people have a psychological abreaction against anomalies, and try to shout them down.

I’ll admit to having poor understanding of the paradigmatic theory of these data. Supposing there is a vast conspiracy to fake UFO videos, to have fake congressional and military inquiries… why? Why do these alleged conspirators make these claims? They get a lot of negative backlash from the dogmatists – why expose themselves to scorn for no reason?

Or the ‘mass hallucination’ theory… what is the psychology theory behind that? I’ve never heard of a credible psychiatric report of people hallucinating the same thing at the same time. And why would people with no existing mental conditions suddenly start hallucinating?

It’s a big question, maybe start a thread and tag me?

Section 2.3 of ‘The Scientific Investigation of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) using multimodal ground-based observatories’ lays out some of the evidence. There’s the model of categorising reports as [low credibility, low strangeness], [low credibility, high strangeness], [high credibility, low strangeness], and [high credibility, high strangeness], and obviously the high credibility high strangeness reports are the most interesting ones.

eyewitness testimony without substantiating physical evidence is worthless

In all cases? e.g. in a legal trial? Or in ethlogy? Or only if the claims are anomalous? Like if I said I saw a flock of geese in the sky, and I had no video, you’d think I was lying?

Is your question about UFOs or Sasquatch?

Come to think of it, the meme itself is also mad classist: “Maybe some people have had forbidden experiences, but fuck em they’re poor”

somebody who studied ley-lines was working-class, therefore there’s no North American primate

Good point

Kinda a dated view, IMO.

Deriding data doesn’t make the data go away. That’s what people used to do decades ago; now we have governments, militaries, researchers taking the UFO phenomenon seriously.

Sightings have gone up, not down: https://www.statista.com/chart/8452/ufo-sightings-are-at-record-heights/

They used tp say this about UFOs too: “Nobody ever saw one, or if they did, it was the town drunk on his own with no corroboration”

Sneering and derision isn’t a good way to respond to information just because it doesn’t fit your preconceptions.

About 45, why not?

I wonder could it be done as a plug-in for Popcorn Time

Yes.

That’s not even remotely comparable to someone creating a publically accessible, friendly UI for reading all those books.

I like this idea too!

that’s my point: no bandwidth or centralised-takedown issues

It’s another thing entirely to offer up a nice frontend for everyone to play files from that torrent… we’re talking about streaming directly from AAs servers

???

You’ve raised –

• Anna’s Archive bearing the server-load (“slurp up their bandwidth”, “the traffic costs will inflate dramatically”)

• Lawyers demanding a centralised takedown

Both of these are based on the idea of a client-server model. Torrents don’t have that model at all. It’s a peer-to-peer model as opposed to a client-server model

Can you link me to the part of that article that says that somehow once you put a torrent file on your server, you can never remove it from your server?

“the lack of a central server that could limit bandwidth”… “The BitTorrent protocol can be used to reduce the server and network impact of distributing large files. Rather than downloading a file from a single source server, the BitTorrent protocol allows users to join a “swarm” of hosts to upload and download from each other simultaneously”… “there is no single point of failure as in one way server-client transfers”… “publishers that value BitTorrent as a cheap alternative to a client-server approach”… “to increase availability and to reduce load on their own servers, especially when dealing with larger files”

Happy to explain this more if you’re still confused.

Once you put a torrent out, you don’t have control of it. The uploader does not have a kill-switch. Torrents are peer-to-peer without a central server.