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I'm going out on a limb here to try to make a contrary point. (I'm not defending the story about how they found the "real" D.B. Cooper, which sounds feeble.)

You can reject the accepted theory (the standard explanation) if you can falsify some part of it -- this is literally part of the scientific method. Alternate theories arise because the accepted theory has serious holes in it. Some of these alternate theories turn out to be circumstantial, some turn out flimsy and silly, and lots turn out to be ludicrous conspiracy theories. Reasonable people who hear the wild conspiracy theories often wrongly conclude that the standard explanation must be right because the alternate theories are so wacky.

To use you own example: The standard Shakespeare, the one from Stratford-upon-Avon, allowed his children to grow up illiterate (this is an agreed fact among Shakespeare scholars). For someone who valued the English language so much, who was one of the greatest writers of the English language, it seems unimaginable that he would not have made any effort to see that his children learn to read and write. For me, that alone is enough to reject the standard explanation (though I can cite other holes). It doesn't mean I can prove who the real Shakespeare was. It certainly doesn't mean that I accept the crackpot theories.

My point is that if the accepted theory has serious flaws, and you reject it, that doesn't mean that you have to choose one of the crazy theories, or circumstantial theories, or any theory. It's enough to say that the standard explanation is wrong or deficient.

I dunno, someone not giving a shit about their kids is relatively plausible to me.

Especially someone busy writing a large collection of the greatest English works of all time.

Alternately, if they couldn't read they'd have to go see his plays performed. That Shakespeare really was a shrewd businessman.

Or, Shakespeare was completely consumed by it, to his detriment, and did not wish the same for his children.

This line of reasoning does indeed embrace an alternate theory, the theory that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays. And it does so based on an isolated morsel of circumstantial evidence, just as the OP described.

When an argument hinges on the sentiment “it seems unimaginable…” it often means that circumstantial evidence is being recast as something more definitive than it is.

A strong rebuttal that fits the model the original commenter set forth.

> The standard Shakespeare, the one from Stratford-upon-Avon, allowed his children to grow up illiterate (this is an agreed fact among Shakespeare scholars). For someone who valued the English language so much, who was one of the greatest writers of the English language, it seems unimaginable that he would not have made any effort to see that his children learn to read and write.

His children were all female, no? You didn't educate women in those days.

You are applying 21st century first world standards to 16th century denizens.

> His children were all female, no?

No, actually. He had one son, Hamnet, who died aged 11.

The literacy issue is not as big an obstacle as we might think today. Shakespeare worked in a majority non-literate culture and created work (plays and sonnets) intended to be heard, not read. Moreover, he was largely an absentee father. If Melville or Tolstoy's kids were illiterate, I'd agree that something doesn't look right, but in this case we're projecting modern assumptions backwards into a deeply foreign early modern culture.

This. Holes in the conventional theory do not act as evidence for alternative theories because you end up inadvertently filling up those holes with presuppositions to support those theories. Case in point: a very plausible explanation for the Shakespeare example is that he was an absent father. You’re making the assumption that since he was a popular playwright and a master of the English language, he would want his children to at least be proficient in the language he loved. That presupposes the notion that all people who have a passion want to pass down that passion to their children. That’s not the case.

Hole h in conventional theory c exists, therefore c is invalid and alternative theory a is correct is the kind of illogical reasoning that is the underpinning of so many conspiracy theories. Alternative theories need to have their own support for them, not simply rely on missing gaps of knowledge in the conventional theories.

People make an inference to the best explanation. How does it work?

There are thousands of factors at play but the credibility of the authors of the theory plays a huge role. Most conspiracy theorists are self-learned "experts" not from the field of inquiry but often coming from other scientific disciplines that provide them with the air of some scientific credibility even if they are laymen in the area of inquiry. In fact, that's such a hallmark of conspiracy theories that I would call those without that property "alternative theories" instead.

In case of Shakespeare, many other theories are just alternative theories, I suppose. Anyway, unless you're an expert yourself the credibility of the authors is key.

And in this case a bunch of former feds/FBI agents have a huge confirmation bias: in their minds the only person who could escape their almighty grasp for this long MUST be another super-smart government agent (just like themselves). Someone who was trained in counter-intelligence and spycraft.

It does make sense on the surface... but once you factor in the source and the (very likely) alternative that he simply died in a massive forest into which he parachuted, I don't know, I'm just less convinced.

Plus as we saw with the Silk Road DEA/Secret Service bitcoin theft stuff, federal agents don't necessarily make good criminals simply because they were well-trained feds/LEO.

Why do you say it's very likely that he died in the forest?

Parachuting into a remote, mountainous, forested region at night in November isn't the safest of endeavors.

Especially given that it was the 1970's and parachutes had absolutely no steering back then.

At night, in the dark, I'm not sure if it would be worse getting stuck 50 or 100 feet off the ground, in a tree that can't be safely climbed, or dropped right in the middle of an unfamiliar frigid lake, and having to swim to shore before hypothermia sets in.

I think, getting stuck in some widow-maker of a tree leaves you with a fighting chance to wait until daylight, to negotiate how to overcome the hazard, but a lake forces you to struggle, possibly into a bad decision, because you have to act before the cold overwhelms you.

That seems like the least likely explanation to me. A parachuter does not plan to jump into a massive forest without having any reasonable plans of what to do after landing. Bear in mind that every detail of the robbery was planned in advance.

It's the dying during landing that's the issue.

There was an exercise by The Skeptics where they interpreted a document to provide predictions about the past and future a la Nostradamus.

It was pretty convincing for some.

The document was a manual for a clothes washing machine.

I've tried to find the link but can't at the moment. I think it was in one of the skeptics.com.au publications.

There's a similar point made in Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco: http://www.mishkan.com/car.html The interpretation of mundane documents as some kind of esoteric mystery.

Our brains are really, really good at taking some sparse information and pattern-matching it up to a complex interpretation. And then convincing ourselves that the interpretation is the only one possible.

I find this sort of thing very suggestive of some relationship to clinical/psychotic paranoia, and another recent HN thread made me think there might be fundamental challenges of deep learning systems that lead to similar problems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17438733

When I looked at the example at the top of the paper, where Steve Carell is misidentified as Zooey Deschanel, I thought - I can envision the AI saying (anthropomorphically) yes, I know that looks like Steve overall, but just look at those eyes - that has to mean something. Kind of like a conspiracy theorist/paranoiac.

Love that book. That passage quite possibly inspired the washing machine manual anecdote.

>a bit of a rant

On the contrary, you’ve described an intuitive way of teaching the dangers of overrelying on circumstantial evidence.

Well done.

Thanks! I'm glad to have contributed to a conversation worth having.

> If there's one thing I've learned from reading about a lot of conspiracy theories for fun, it's that circumstantial evidence can seem right when presented in the right way, even if it's completely wrong.

I do the same. I find it useful practice for spotting the logical leaps/fallacies, and it's good to be reminded that circumstantial evidence is not proof.

>I went on a bit of a rant here, but hopefully my point comes across, that circumstantial evidence is really quite far from real hard evidence.

You are absolutely right. Unfortunately for all of us this simple bit of wisdom is considered heresy in modern society.

> someone finds a body, it's going to remain an unsolved mystery.

This is the case in Japan. No body, no declaration of death. It means people who died in disasters can be declared "missing" indefinitely.

This does solve the case of people being declared dead, and then turning up alive -- but that's a pretty rare case, I'd hope.

It does make me wonder -- can someone wrongly declared dead travel to Europe, invoke the GDPR's right of rectification, and force credit agencies and the like to make them undead? This seems like it might be faster than getting appropriate court rulings.

I'd expect the first major stumbling block would be entering the Schengen area on a passport which, when scanned, tells immigration that it is revoked as the holder is deceased. From there on, it would likely go downhill pretty fast.

Would be interesting if someone gave it a try, though - doubly so on a biometric passport - if all the biometrics check out but you're officially dead - what will the result be?

Chances are you'll find yourself in an interrogation room with lots of law enforcement wondering how on earth you managed to substitute a dead person's biometrics for your own...

Additionally, I suspect no institution would interact with YOU in any capacity - seeing as you're dead - but rather interact with your estate.

Lawyers and bureaucrats would have a field day for years if someone gave this a try. :)

> if all the biometrics check out but you're officially dead - what will the result be?

The implementation will be corrected to match the documentation.

There's no way Dick or Asimov or whoever didn't write this story already.

It is a plot point in "Idiocracy": https://youtu.be/sVyRkl5qNb8