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The hate and humiliation campaigns are so interesting. I've seen and read hours and hours of Loeb's commentary and he's never once made any hard claims. He prop

The hate and humiliation campaigns are so interesting. I've seen and read hours and hours of Loeb's commentary and he's never once made any hard claims. He proposes interesting hypotheses that could explain data, and then goes out and collects data to figure out what's actually going on. That's science. That's the scientific process. You propose the set of hypotheses that fit the available data, both the mundane and unlikely, collect more data, and rule out hypotheses that don't fit the new data, and whiddle it down. Anybody that thinks he's made hard claims are mostly just suckered in by trash pop sci articles that spins what he says into ridiculous headlines/articles like "Loeb says there's UFOs on the ocean floor!" to get clicks. Ironically, the very article that was linked here makes unscientific hard claims: "The seismology data used to locate this meteorite wasn’t due to an impact, but merely a truck passing near the seismic station". That's a hard claim. There's no "we think the most likely explanation is X" or "the data is better explained by X theory". The paper the article links to as "proof" also makes no hard claims but merely says that they think the data "suggests" a traffic based origin better explains the data. The article itself is the definition of unscientific and everything they're trying to pin on Loeb. [Edit] The paper which claims the traffic-based origin also has a grammar mistake in the very first paragraph, so I'm not very enthused about reading further and seeing how methodical their methods were, when they couldn't even manage to write a one paragraph summary without error.

matthewdgreen 3y ago
I don’t know if Loeb is right or wrong about any of this (and I would find it much more exciting if he was right) but the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” saying really applies to Loeb on this one. To track an interstellar asteroid to a precise location on the ocean floor and recover pieces of it requires an extraordinarily precise chain of evidence, and if even a fraction of this article is accurate, that doesn’t feel justified here.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.
  - bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
    I'm not disagreeing hard, and we're just discussing words at this stage. But I wouldnt object to calling less commonly ocurring data points extraordinary.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    The phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certainty) that one measurement will be inaccurate. You can live with this minimal error rate because there’s so much data that a small amount of error doesn’t invalidate the results. If you’re conducting an experiment involving a single asteroid, then every link along the chain of evidence had better be airtight, and validated to a level that wouldn’t be cost-effective or practical in other circumstances. There can’t be a 0.1% or a 1% or a 10% or (god forbid) a 50+% chance that the substance you’re presenting is something other than what you claim it is.
- rhelz 3y ago
  We probably are all familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but Issac Arther noticed it has a very interesting implication: Claiming that an alien probe has visited the earth is NOT an extraordinary claim. Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous. What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to. Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.
  - matthewdgreen 3y ago
    The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand. It’s actually a little bit surprising we don’t see intelligent machines in our neighborhood! But believing in this as a possibility is very different from renting a ship, sailing to a specific location, and saying “this is the residue of an alien probe.” Especially when the evidence you used to find the site is itself very shifty.
    - krapp 3y ago
      >The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand Bracewell-Von Neumann probes don't exist, as far as any can tell. You seem to be basing your credulity towards one unproven phenomenon on another unproven phenomenon. If anything, the fact that VN probes would in theory be easier than the sort of exotic physics breaking technology supposedly demonstrated by UFOs and yet the entire galaxy hasn't been consumed and assimilated as the math suggests should happen should cast even more doubt on UFOs.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  The isotope evidence strongly implies he's wrong.
rhelz 3y ago
Yeah, even if the hypothesis is refuted, why is this humiliating? This isn't kindergarten, its not like having your hypothesis refuted gives you cooties. No moral culpability accrues to you. What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.
- angiosperm 3y ago
  What is humiliating is to be seen failing to learn from elementary criticisms by longtime professionals. In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred. Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    > failing to learn from elementary criticisms Well, the ability to conform to the conventional wisdom of the field isn't necessarily a skill which promotes scientific progress. You know what skill does? The ability to ask the right question. And Dr. Loeb asked himself, "hmm....could I collect material from an interstellar meteorite if I trawl the seabed with a magnetic sled?" Now I think that is a pretty good question. The answer may be "Yes" or the answer may be "No". But either way, it's a great question, which apparently nobody else asked, let alone put in the effort to raise money and try to answer. And it would be a shame if such questions weren't asked for fear of being bullied. Alas, really, the only way we know of asking the right question is to ask a lot of questions, most of which will be the wrong question :-( We tend not to emphasize this fact, but everyone who ever made a breakthrough has asked an endless amount of stupid questions. But if you don't have the courage to look dumb, you'll never get anywhere.
- ecronant 3y ago
angiosperm 3y ago
That Loeb failed to collect material outside the area he designated, as controls, demonstrates he was not even attempting actual science.
- baja_blast 3y ago
  But he did
cozzyd 3y ago
Speaking of hate campaigns, I'm at the same institute as one of the people referenced in the article and have received unsolicited unhinged email from some crazed Avi Loeb disciple urgently imploring me to "address" my colleague's "slander" and "character assassination" of Avi Loeb. How bizarre...

matthewdgreen 3y ago

I don’t know if Loeb is right or wrong about any of this (and I would find it much more exciting if he was right) but the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” saying really applies to Loeb on this one. To track an interstellar asteroid to a precise location on the ocean floor and recover pieces of it requires an extraordinarily precise chain of evidence, and if even a fraction of this article is accurate, that doesn’t feel justified here.

angiosperm 3y ago
Extraordinary claims require legitimate evidence. "Extraordinary" cannot describe evidence; all evidence is ordinary. What happened here is that the evidence was so bad as to be incapable of supporting any claim.
- bdjsiqoocwk 3y ago
  I'm not disagreeing hard, and we're just discussing words at this stage. But I wouldnt object to calling less commonly ocurring data points extraordinary.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  The phrase I used is “extraordinarily precise.” When you’re conducting a medical trial of 10,000 patients there’s always a high probability (virtually a certainty) that one measurement will be inaccurate. You can live with this minimal error rate because there’s so much data that a small amount of error doesn’t invalidate the results. If you’re conducting an experiment involving a single asteroid, then every link along the chain of evidence had better be airtight, and validated to a level that wouldn’t be cost-effective or practical in other circumstances. There can’t be a 0.1% or a 1% or a 10% or (god forbid) a 50+% chance that the substance you’re presenting is something other than what you claim it is.
rhelz 3y ago
We probably are all familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but Issac Arther noticed it has a very interesting implication: Claiming that an alien probe has visited the earth is NOT an extraordinary claim. Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous. What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to. Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand. It’s actually a little bit surprising we don’t see intelligent machines in our neighborhood! But believing in this as a possibility is very different from renting a ship, sailing to a specific location, and saying “this is the residue of an alien probe.” Especially when the evidence you used to find the site is itself very shifty.
  - krapp 3y ago
    >The existence of Bracewell-Von Neumann probes is the one reason I don’t absolutely dismiss UFO believers out of hand Bracewell-Von Neumann probes don't exist, as far as any can tell. You seem to be basing your credulity towards one unproven phenomenon on another unproven phenomenon. If anything, the fact that VN probes would in theory be easier than the sort of exotic physics breaking technology supposedly demonstrated by UFOs and yet the entire galaxy hasn't been consumed and assimilated as the math suggests should happen should cast even more doubt on UFOs.
pfdietz 3y ago
The isotope evidence strongly implies he's wrong.

rhelz 3y ago

Yeah, even if the hypothesis is refuted, why is this humiliating? This isn't kindergarten, its not like having your hypothesis refuted gives you cooties. No moral culpability accrues to you. What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.

angiosperm 3y ago
What is humiliating is to be seen failing to learn from elementary criticisms by longtime professionals. In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred. Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.
- rhelz 3y ago
  > failing to learn from elementary criticisms Well, the ability to conform to the conventional wisdom of the field isn't necessarily a skill which promotes scientific progress. You know what skill does? The ability to ask the right question. And Dr. Loeb asked himself, "hmm....could I collect material from an interstellar meteorite if I trawl the seabed with a magnetic sled?" Now I think that is a pretty good question. The answer may be "Yes" or the answer may be "No". But either way, it's a great question, which apparently nobody else asked, let alone put in the effort to raise money and try to answer. And it would be a shame if such questions weren't asked for fear of being bullied. Alas, really, the only way we know of asking the right question is to ask a lot of questions, most of which will be the wrong question :-( We tend not to emphasize this fact, but everyone who ever made a breakthrough has asked an endless amount of stupid questions. But if you don't have the courage to look dumb, you'll never get anywhere.
ecronant 3y ago

angiosperm 3y ago

That Loeb failed to collect material outside the area he designated, as controls, demonstrates he was not even attempting actual science.

baja_blast 3y ago
But he did

cozzyd 3y ago

Speaking of hate campaigns, I'm at the same institute as one of the people referenced in the article and have received unsolicited unhinged email from some crazed Avi Loeb disciple urgently imploring me to "address" my colleague's "slander" and "character assassination" of Avi Loeb. How bizarre...