Discussion about this post

User's avatar
RobinHanson's avatar

Nimitz tic-tac example is an acceptable one to focus on. But a great many stat analyses draw conclusions from dataSETs, conclusions they could not draw from single datums in those sets. Consider also that people tend to believe in ball lightning even though there is no single compelling example.

Expand full comment
Paul Christiano's avatar

I watched the first video. It makes no effort to say which incidents are convincing (indeed it includes a bunch that it acknowledges are explained, and a bunch that it doesn't acknowledge as explained but where the explanation is quite obvious). If there is in fact compelling evidence, I expect someone to be able to point to *some particular* example that they consider hard-to-explain, and ideally to a significant set of examples *all* of which seem hard-to-explain (or else all of which are individually *somewhat* hard to explain and share some common features rather than looking like obviously different stuff), so that an observer could update after looking into it and evaluating whether it was in fact hard to explain.

I think this is particularly important because the examples all appear to have different "mundane" explanations (so that no mundane explanation is plausibly consistent with all of them), and some of them aren't totally mundane (e.g. some are very likely to be observations of US government aircraft, and some seem very likely to be foreign aircraft poking at US sensors or surveilling military facilities).

If looking into this more, my next step would be looking at the Nimitz tic-tac example (and maybe other sightings of sufficiently similar-looking objects). You say that our beliefs don't live-or-die on one example, but my current understanding is that there aren't *any* compelling examples. No one is providing a list of purportedly compelling examples, and so if I look into one apparently-most-compelling example and it's actually uncompelling then the conclusion feels pretty clear to me.

Expand full comment
43 more comments...

No posts