3 ms·
> Ask a group of people who observed an event and invariably there will be a substantial portion who remembered basic facts about the event wrong. This phenomen
by lend000 5y ago
> Ask a group of people who observed an event and invariably there will be a substantial portion who remembered basic facts about the event wrong. This phenomenon is well understood.
This phenomenon is not well understood at all, only observed. But if not one, but a half dozen unrelated people with no conflicts of interest testify that they saw a specific person shoot another person, despite slightly different details from each perspective and individual perception of time, that is as good as fact in a court of law (what type of criminal charge the shooting constituted becomes the rest of the case) [0]. It often takes only one if the person is "credible" (e.g. a police officer).
So why is it that a half dozen highly trained (much more so than a police officer) and credible people aboard the USS Nimitz or Princeton do not get the same treatment? Even the official press release going laterally and vertically through the chain of command corroborates key aspects of these incidents.
> Accepting hard evidence doesn't involve trust at all. You don't trust a medical lab not to fabricate evidence
You really walked into this one. Read this example completely contradicting your claim [1]. The world is built on trust amigo.
> Nonsense. It is up to the person claiming a radically new phenomena to show evidence and proactively demonstrate that there is no possible alternative explanation.
I'm not going to reiterate my whole comment above, but no. Determining the existence of some intelligence greater than our own that is keeping a low profile is less of a scientific method endeavor than an intelligence gathering one. Intelligence is gathered, and then it's up to people to evaluate. It is ridiculous to expect people to prove the infinite set of everything that it is not. People invested in not changing their worldview (of whom there are many) will attempt to assign explanations, and that enters the pool of material to consider. Not that anything changes if everybody all of a sudden agrees on the general nature of the phenomenon, if the phenomenon isn't trying to make contact. Maybe more interest in research into spacecraft that don't spew gas out the back, or more people majoring in physics to try to improve our current primitive models.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/127/508/1193/4555414 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/127/508/1193/4555414
[1] https://reason.com/2019/02/09/the-chemists-and-the-cover-up/ https://reason.com/2019/02/09/the-chemists-and-the-cover-up/