Monthly Archives: December 2010
Inquiring into Claims of Unusual Experiences
It would be absurd for me to suppose when someone relates to me an extraordinary experience, barring reasons to suspect deception, that nothing at all really happened.
Clearly, in many cases, whether within one’s mind or in the external world, something has happened.
But it would be equally absurd for me to leap to the conclusion that what was related to me was literally an external experience in principle or in truth beyond the ability of science to explain.
Let’s try to avoid confusing the currently unexplained with the inexplicable, peeps.
In earlier posts, I’ve often discussed the ways in which we can be misled by faulty thinking, especially the use of anecdotes of personal experience and other forms of undocumented observation, into believing what we want to believe. My point is this: ‘Anecdote’ does not mean ‘evidence’ in the plural.
The reason for this is simple. When people try to use anecdotes to support supernatural, paranormal, or other questionable claims, they are not actually providing supporting evidence, merely supporting a claim by making yet more claims, which themselves require evidence, without which they are useless. I’ll say it once more: anecdotes ≠ evidence.
Even in the sanest and most sober of us, the claim of an encounter with the unexplained is often based upon a very personally compelling subjective experience, a form of evidence that while often powerful and deeply moving, can be highly fallacious and misleading, despite the general reliability of it in our everyday lives.
Anecdotes of weird experiences do not strengthen the case for any paranormal claims, for they are themselves only claims. This is why in a court of law, it is often essential for eyewitness testimony to be supported by corroborating evidence, not just more eyewitness testimony. Anecdotes have even lower status in the court of science.
Our senses can deceive us, our memories are fallible, even the most normal of us can hallucinate much more often than we would like to think, and our intuitive faculties are often inadequate for figuring out things beyond our everyday experience or complex correlation and causation…
…It’s why we invented statistics, to compensate for our natural tendency to misjudge probability.
With regard to some…fringe topics, no matter how many anecdotes are made for a claim, all by themselves they are scientifically worthless as evidence: if a hundred guys all say they saw a UFO, even if they said the same thing, but there is no supporting objective evidence for their claim, then all that testimony is useless and of no value to science.
This could be summed up by the following principle…
Anecdotes are not scientifically useful to test hypotheses, only as a means of formulating them, as rather than being evidence for a claim of fact, they are themselves merely claims of fact.
If, on the other hand, all one hundred of them started showing something that could be objectively verified, such as medically diagnosable radiation sickness, then that might lead to an investigation into what they might have really seen, which, spacecraft from another galaxy or not, is likely to be interesting.
One of the things I have to look out for as one o’ them Evil Debunkers™ is to avoid committing a common fallacy: to make a misplaced leap in reasoning, the skeptical version of an argument from ignorance, though rather than come up with a pseudoscientific or supernatural explanation for a strange event without having reason to suppose it true, attempt to propose one or more ‘naturalistic’ explanations for the alleged phenomena that while remotely possible, sound weak and contrived, and are also just as unsupported by the facts as those proposed by believers.
It’s the fallacy of giving explanations for strange events without first doing the legwork to find out if there’s really anything to explain.
This has a lot to do with anecdotes, which, no matter how honest, sincere, or otherwise virtuous the speaker, are often secondhand, third-hand and even further removed from the original source, the one the mysterious event allegedly happened to.
This has the obvious difficulty that as the one on the receiving end of this testimony, I have no independent access to any of the events described, and if it was a one-time only event, I have no way of repeating it and finding out the answer. I would have no idea what information in the account described has been omitted, embellished, or confabulated before the anecdote was transmitted from the source several persons removed, before reaching me.
Some anecdotes are simply not amenable to real explanation, and in this case a skeptic would be best served by saying to both himself and to the one relating the account, ‘I’ll have to suspend judgment on that statement for now. I have no plausible explanation for what you just told me, no magic easy answer. But let’s say we look into this a bit further and maybe get to the truth of the matter.’
I simply decide that given the data, no definitive answer to the question can be made, that the alleged event is unproven, and file it away until at some point in the future, evidence will be uncovered that allows the case to be reopened, evidence which may point to a definite conclusion and the case’s final closure.
Related Articles
- Each Cell-Phone Tower Creates 18 Babies?! The Difference Between Causation & Correlation | Discoblog (blogs.discovermagazine.com)
- Of SBM and EBM Redux. Part II: Is it a Good Idea to test Highly Implausible Health Claims? (sciencebasedmedicine.org)
- Short-Term Hallucinations? (everydayhealth.com)
[Fiction] A Day in the Life [Part 2]
Drahd2 adjusted the thrusters on its combat suit as the cadre neared the fray in orbit above the enemy world, confident that the doomed planet, like the other now-ravaged cinders in this system, would soon be dismantled after local resistance, useless of course, was destroyed.
This battle had gone on for half a dark-light cycle now, and this enemy was different, since unlike the last one, they were puny in size but putting up a real fight. It was impressive that they lasted even this long…
…though they, like all the others, would simply be annihilated. Such was life.
This would be an amusing diversion, a genuine test of Drahd2’s mettle…
…but there was something unsettling about this, something vaguely disquieting about this particular battle, which it found difficult to pin down.
Then it realized what was wrong.
This enemy wasn’t dying fast enough.
Certainly, they were tiny things, with their largest spacecraft scarcely the size of an automated reconnaissance probe, but they fought like Baleful, managing to do serious damage to the cadre before being destroyed.
These people, whatever they called themselves, were serious business. This would be rousing sport.
Drahd2 gave a warrior’s aria of triumph as its particle cannon scored a direct strike on the engines of one of the small enemy vessels.
The communications channels were filled by the high-pitched cries of dying enemies, and disturbingly, for the first time that could be recalled, the baritone bellowing of fellow troops as their suits imploded from the surprisingly advanced enemy munitions.
Drahd2’s suit sensors picked up a heavy radiation signature from the enemy armaments…
Antimatter weaponry.
No matter though, his suit would probably protect him from anything but a direct hit.
This enemy wasn’t fooling around, and the thought had dawned on Drahd2 that it might not survive this combat, as it heard the roar over the combat channels of its old battlemate ordering a regrouping of the now frantically fighting battle force, just as a surge of Gamma-ray brilliance coming from its coordinates in the silent dark told the story of its death.
Drahd2 offered a quick prayer for its longtime companion’s rebirth, and in a cold rage turned its attention to ripping apart the cockpit of a combat craft hardly its own size, and as it held the unlucky pilot in its hand, a tiny creature no bigger than its forearm, a being with only four limbs, an elfin biped with an oddly similar facial structure, with a pair of eyes over what was probably a breathing orifice, itself over a horizontal slit parted to show what looked like tiny teeth.
The elf was signaling Drahd2 through its suit communicator, saying something in that irritating high-pitched register its captor was unaccustomed to, barely within the shortest wavelengths perceivable without augmentation, an annoying chatter from the being’s tiny larynx.
Drahd2 shifted its glance to a portion of its helmet faceplate, signaling the eye-motion trackers to load the translation software for this species’ language. It wanted to know what the creature was saying before crushing the life out of it.
After all, this remarkable being had the distinction of killing several of the cadre before its own now rather inevitable death.
A good soldier, even though an alien. A foe it could respect.
Drahd2 would honor such a formidable foe by relaying and recording its last words for posterity…
..and as Drahd2 closed its hand on the diminutive being, squeezing the remarkably fragile form, just before a flash of radiance from the corner of its eye painfully filled its field of vision with a void of blinding white, and its universe went forever dark, it heard this:
“…ahead and kill me you s-n of a b—h! …millions more where I came from! …but we’re both soldiers… I’ll make it quick and easy for both of us… Say goodbye Gr—-,” the small being said as their eyes met.
And for an instant, for the first, last, and only time in its life, Drahd2 truly knew the enemy as itself.
Related Articles
- [Fiction] A Day in the Life… (kestalusrealm.wordpress.com)
So Long to Ya, 2010 | The Jibjab Year in Review
Here’s a little something to mark the completion of the Call’s second year, and the hopeful beginning of many more to come. Thank you all, for your readership has made this site what it is today, and much, much more than I could have reasonably thought in only two short years. I’ve met many awesome people through it, learned much, and wish to do more of both in the coming years. You peeps have been absolutely fantastic!
Hey There Cthulhu: The Photomontage Video
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Having made a better audio recording of “Hey There Cthulhu” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut82TDjc
iSg) using a karaoke track of “Hey There Delilah” (from the album Karaoke Bash Vol. 3 (p) 2007 by Starlight Karaoke), I decided to do a photomontage-style video for it using artwork and photographs I’ve come across in my travels through these Intarwebs. So here it is!
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Now Go Away, or We Shall Taunt You a Second Time!
Image via Wikipedia
Okay, this makes Troythulu feel a cold, eldritch snark coming, and cosmic amusement at this latest example of the searing, blazing surge of neocortex-numbing idiocy that sometimes calls itself humanity, with mindlessness on a scale dwarfing even that of Mighty Azathoth itself. Ia!
This is a matter of which Troythulu does not wish to lend any sense of credibility to the culprits.
Nope, this is going to be one long, ridiculing, ad hominem ramble…
It seems a tiny village in southwestern France is being beset by unwelcome visitors, in the form of UFO believers descending upon this quaint little place in droves, more than it can reasonably support, and who believe not only the completely imaginary claptrap about 2012 being the end of the world, an idea even the Maya laugh at as the claims of stupid Westerners imposing their apocalyptic religious myths onto their Long Count calendar, but also that the local mountain is a UFO parking garage, the occupying craft in which will leave our doomed (DOOMED, I SAY!!!) planet and take some fortunate believers with it when it leaves.
I told you this was stupid, though not burning enough to require the showing of “That Image…”
Sometimes I’m amazed at the extremes people go to in acting on their beliefs, even to the point of forcing the locals to call in the military to keep them out.
Why the need?
It’s so they can’t overcrowd and ruin this rather scenic place during their wait, until and when both fictional UFO and apocalypse fail to appear as they no doubt shall.
Superstition is endemic to the human species, no matter what you call it.
It’s no surprise that end of the world scenarios have that annoying (to believers) tendency to fail, save perhaps the real end of the world about, oh, I don’t know, five f*cking BILLION years from now, when the sun gets ready to die and we’ll all be long gone, or evolved into something else.
About the Maya calendar predictions…Did anyone ever inform these peeps that calendars aren’t used for prophecy, and the Long Count calendar is cyclical, not linear…
All that reaching the end of the current cycle means is a reset of the calendar date to zero. But you’ll never hear that from mystery-mongers, since that might cut into their bestseller hardback royalties…
Oh why do I bother?..
But for the residents to be forced to request that the French army step in to keep out unwelcome guests so they won’t destroying the locals’ quality of life?
I feel for them, and know their pain as property values plummet, and the area’s scenic beauty is ruined by minor acts of spiritually-motivated vandalism, so I say, “Go for it people. Do what you need to keep the whack-jobs out of your living space.”
*Sigh*
To think it all started when one local guy, now deceased, posted a claim about seeing a UFO in the area, among other silly assertions…
…and it only takes one to spoil it for all…
It’s at least a good thing the locals are, well, skeptical of the whole thing, since it’s their home that’s being invaded, (but not by ET) and its ambience ruined by the decidedly unwelcome guests.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I plan on being around long after 2012, and smirking evilly at the disappointed folks who will be forced to reschedule their timetable for Armageddon yet again, and maybe this next wait, to stay out of places they aren’t wanted.
Related Articles
- French Village Wants Army to Keep Apocalyptic UFO Weirdos Away [Visitors] (gawker.com)
- Don’t come to my village for the end of the world, says mayor (theprovince.com)
- Mayor of French village threatens to call in army to deal with influx of UFO hunters who believe nearby mountain is ‘alien garage’ (dailymail.co.uk)
- Apocalypse, Eventually (randi.org)
- UFO tourism irks French villagers (msnbc.msn.com)
George Carlin — Religion is B.S.
Warning: Not for viewing by those with easily offended theological sensibilities & no appreciation for humor. There’s a little rough language too, but Carlin calls a spade a spade in this skit.
