6 ms·

For anyone else who has a UFO-crazy uncle, I've found Mick West's YouTube channel to be invaluable https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest https://www.youtube.com/c/

For anyone else who has a UFO-crazy uncle, I've found Mick West's YouTube channel to be invaluable https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest https://www.youtube.com/c/mickwest. Mick is a retired video game programmer (Spider Man, Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), who does extremely well-researched videos analyzing UFO claims. He's not flashy or trying to be entertaining, just thorough, evidence-based and scientifically rigorous. He'll even do controlled experiments, recreations and 3D models to validate what's going on. And he's unfailingly respectful no matter how unhinged the claim. His work explaining the "Gimbal Video" is a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus

cubefox 6mo ago
He doesn't seem to explain the recently popular "transients" though.
- mrandish 6mo ago
  I think it takes time. I can only imagine the hours required to research, develop and shoot such well-evidenced explanations, given that part of his audience is true believers searching for any gap through which they can sustain their beliefs. But look at his website: https://www.metabunk.org https://www.metabunk.org. A quick search there for "Transients" returned several pages of posts, some from Mick himself. Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
  - hnfong 6mo ago
    > Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative. That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this. In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
    - foltik 6mo ago
      If a “category of claims” has shared causal structure, then the category’s track record absolutely does tell you something about the next claim in it. It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
      - cubefox 6mo ago
        What about Avi Loeb's theory that 'Oumuamua is an UFO with a solar sail, which would explain its apparently unusually flat pancake-like shape?
        tsimionescu 6mo ago
        That's an example of ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by a professor who decided that there's more money in UFO BS than in his previous career (or sincerely lost his grip on reality, who knows).
        cubefox 6mo ago
        I don't know, he seems to be really smart. Maybe it's a good UFO theory for a change.
  - glenstein 6mo ago
    >Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines. But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk. Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.
    - rmunn 6mo ago
      > But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk. You haven't spent much time arguing with people who refuse to listen to any evidence at all, have you? The "psychological processes" you describe are, in many cases, that people will simply stick their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and say "La la la, I'm not listening!" In other words, a willful, determined refusal to listen. It's not a matter of psychological processes, at least not for the people I've interacted with in the past. It's plain and simple refusal. They've decided that they're right, they know it, and nobody is going to tell them otherwise, darn it! As the old quote goes (which is apparently very difficult to pin down to its origin): "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/) P.S. Edited to add this, because I meant to write it earlier and forgot: It's just stubbornness. You can't cure stubbornness with psychoanalysis. Some people just don't want to believe in what you're trying to tell them. As the even older quote goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can lead a stubborn person to all the evidence in the world, but you can't make him think.
- brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
  what are transients?
  - mrandish 6mo ago
    Transients are tiny spots which occasionally occurred in the film emulsion of photographic sky surveys taken prior to 1957 when satellites were first launched. They are called transient because they're only seen in one ~hour-long photographic exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Events_in_the_First_Palomar_Sky_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Ev... https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-observatory-sky-survey.14362/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...
civvv 6mo ago
Three of my favourite game series as a kid, what a legend.
- wrqvrwvq 6mo ago
  unc's thrashing out
newZWhoDis 6mo ago
[flagged]
- jibal 6mo ago
  Sez you, but you aren't credible.
- junon 6mo ago
  [citation needed]
keepamovin 6mo ago
[flagged]
- marshray 6mo ago
  As used here "UFO-crazy" wasn't a supposition, it was a constraint. "UFO-crazy uncles" are known to exist. This is not an extraordinary claim. The existence of such uncles provides no evidence for or against extraterrestrial visitors or other aerial phenomena.
  - keepamovin 6mo ago
    In context seemed more like a smear for any who don't dismiss as unremarkable. But I'm glad you took it as the narrow case, tho - do they really "exist", or might they have just been right all along? Lol
    - marshray 6mo ago
      Being "crazy" and later turning ought to be "right" are not exclusive. One can be right for bad reasons.
      - keepamovin 6mo ago
        OK - this needs some good examples :)
        mrandish 6mo ago
        Justified, true beliefs: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ...
        marshray 6mo ago
        People who believe in "chemtrails" are (in my un-scientific survey) pretty likely to be conspiracy enthusiasts ("cranks", "crazy", etc.). But they're not wrong that the stuff coming out of the back of jet aircraft is changing the climate. Small, localized weather engineering programs have long been real (cloud seeding), and planetary-scale climate engineering projects are now openly discussed by governments. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering "Types of solar geoengineering techniques include: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) – adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) to reflect incoming sunlight. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the types of chemicals considered for SAI, can chemically react in the stratosphere to form reflective sulfate aerosols."
potsandpans 6mo ago
The reality is that your uncle is just making fun of you behind your back to his believer friends. Why bother trying to reeducate someone youre already disparaging online? Does it make you feel better?

cubefox 6mo ago

He doesn't seem to explain the recently popular "transients" though.

mrandish 6mo ago
I think it takes time. I can only imagine the hours required to research, develop and shoot such well-evidenced explanations, given that part of his audience is true believers searching for any gap through which they can sustain their beliefs. But look at his website: https://www.metabunk.org https://www.metabunk.org. A quick search there for "Transients" returned several pages of posts, some from Mick himself. Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
- hnfong 6mo ago
  > Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative. That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this. In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
  - foltik 6mo ago
    If a “category of claims” has shared causal structure, then the category’s track record absolutely does tell you something about the next claim in it. It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.
    - cubefox 6mo ago
      What about Avi Loeb's theory that 'Oumuamua is an UFO with a solar sail, which would explain its apparently unusually flat pancake-like shape?
      - tsimionescu 6mo ago
        That's an example of ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by a professor who decided that there's more money in UFO BS than in his previous career (or sincerely lost his grip on reality, who knows).
        cubefox 6mo ago
        I don't know, he seems to be really smart. Maybe it's a good UFO theory for a change.
- glenstein 6mo ago
  >Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines. But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk. Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.
  - rmunn 6mo ago
    > But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk. You haven't spent much time arguing with people who refuse to listen to any evidence at all, have you? The "psychological processes" you describe are, in many cases, that people will simply stick their (metaphorical) fingers in their ears and say "La la la, I'm not listening!" In other words, a willful, determined refusal to listen. It's not a matter of psychological processes, at least not for the people I've interacted with in the past. It's plain and simple refusal. They've decided that they're right, they know it, and nobody is going to tell them otherwise, darn it! As the old quote goes (which is apparently very difficult to pin down to its origin): "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts!" (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/13/confuse-me/) P.S. Edited to add this, because I meant to write it earlier and forgot: It's just stubbornness. You can't cure stubbornness with psychoanalysis. Some people just don't want to believe in what you're trying to tell them. As the even older quote goes, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can lead a stubborn person to all the evidence in the world, but you can't make him think.
brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
what are transients?
- mrandish 6mo ago
  Transients are tiny spots which occasionally occurred in the film emulsion of photographic sky surveys taken prior to 1957 when satellites were first launched. They are called transient because they're only seen in one ~hour-long photographic exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Events_in_the_First_Palomar_Sky_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aligned,_Multiple-transient_Ev... https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-observatory-sky-survey.14362/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/transients-in-the-palomar-o...

civvv 6mo ago

Three of my favourite game series as a kid, what a legend.

wrqvrwvq 6mo ago
unc's thrashing out

newZWhoDis 6mo ago

[flagged]

jibal 6mo ago
Sez you, but you aren't credible.
junon 6mo ago
[citation needed]

keepamovin 6mo ago

[flagged]

marshray 6mo ago
As used here "UFO-crazy" wasn't a supposition, it was a constraint. "UFO-crazy uncles" are known to exist. This is not an extraordinary claim. The existence of such uncles provides no evidence for or against extraterrestrial visitors or other aerial phenomena.
- keepamovin 6mo ago
  In context seemed more like a smear for any who don't dismiss as unremarkable. But I'm glad you took it as the narrow case, tho - do they really "exist", or might they have just been right all along? Lol
  - marshray 6mo ago
    Being "crazy" and later turning ought to be "right" are not exclusive. One can be right for bad reasons.
    - keepamovin 6mo ago
      OK - this needs some good examples :)
      - mrandish 6mo ago
        Justified, true beliefs: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJustTrueBeli https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/#KnowJ...
      - marshray 6mo ago
        People who believe in "chemtrails" are (in my un-scientific survey) pretty likely to be conspiracy enthusiasts ("cranks", "crazy", etc.). But they're not wrong that the stuff coming out of the back of jet aircraft is changing the climate. Small, localized weather engineering programs have long been real (cloud seeding), and planetary-scale climate engineering projects are now openly discussed by governments. E.g. https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering https://www.epa.gov/geoengineering/about-geoengineering "Types of solar geoengineering techniques include: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI) – adding small reflective particles to the upper atmosphere (stratosphere) to reflect incoming sunlight. Sulfur dioxide (SO2), one of the types of chemicals considered for SAI, can chemically react in the stratosphere to form reflective sulfate aerosols."

potsandpans 6mo ago

The reality is that your uncle is just making fun of you behind your back to his believer friends. Why bother trying to reeducate someone youre already disparaging online? Does it make you feel better?