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Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

There are thousands of years worth of people claiming personal experiences with various gods, aliens, animal spirits and so on. None of these have ever led to any kind of verifiable results, so I think it's about time we entirely stop listening to such stories, whatever the reason they are being told.

Your position on the other hand could be used as well to believe in God (YHWH), Lord Vishnu, kami, aliens or anything else that someone has ever claimed to see.

You are also treating pretty well understood physical limits (the speed of light, E=(mv^2)/2 etc.) as mere technological problems that someone could "figure out". And all this to justify listening to a few disparate people who can offer no more proof than their own story telling.

As a side note, please refrain from calling people you are directly talking to "lazy and deluded crackpot nutcases", especially for relatively simple logical inferences.

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Hahahaaha. This so hilarious. I just saw your comment now. You are so blind to what you're doing. You really think you're going to get away with your abusive language and expect silence in return? Who's been enabling you? I used that language because it's the commensurate response to you using that language to describe people you disagree with or don't believe, and the right response to your claim that believers are wrong and you know better. So you can't take it, simiones? Don't dish it out. Please refrain from having a double standard.

Define "verifiable results"? There's plenty of stories of corroboration between people saying they had some experience that can't be explained and that you want to pretend to yourself has to be untrue, and something more verifiable happening. Like they got cured, or they went missing, or they got an implant, or a mark was left on their body, or the ground was irradiated, and so on.

Many of these have led to such "verifiable" results, it's only that you're too resistant to see that. Have you proved all these stories to be false? Have you debunked everyone's experiences, stories and beliefs in things you can't explain? No. you. have. not. So I think it's time you entirely stop pretending that because you don't want to see it, it isn't happening. It's very very disrespectful to witnesses of this.

Do we have any "verifiable" data on drug abuse? Sexual assault? Parental abuse of children? Much of that data is self-reported. But it's "hard data" from the point of view of public health / legal system. It's only because you're unwilling to concede that there's anything outside your understanding, so you'd rather pretend these people are lying, crackpot, deluded, than having experienced something that you, in your arrogance, don't understand and therefore refuse to accept is real.

You're trapped by your own biases and priors, ignoring evidence and seeking confirmation bias. Ok, fine, you do that. But please don't ever - EVER - call people crackpot nutcases deluded liars and think you can get away with having people be silent in the face of that, and not calling you the same.

Pretty well understood physical limits - who says they're limits? You? What are you, God? You don't know for sure. Stop pretending if humans can't understand it it can't be done. How arrogant and stupid that is! But you think you can persist in this, call people you disagree with "crackpot deluded liars" and then you want everyone to silently accept your abusive language and not push back, as you complain when the very same language is used against you. Hahahaha! This totally shows not only your intellectual bias, but your personal bias and arrogance. Please reform yourself.

There is so much to unpack here.

First of all, you are the one claiming knowledge that more or less contradicts some of our most fundamental physical understanding based on hearsay. If you don't understand how fundamental the speed of causality limit (c) or the mass/energy equivalence are to all of the rest of modern physics (and technology), how well proven they are, to what extraordinary precisions, how many other observations would make no sense without them, then there really is no point in continuing our discussion. Until you can account for the hundreds of thousands of reproducible experiments showing how speeds compose and time dilates without a fundamental limit to speed, saying that someone thinks they saw some bizarre phenomenon is very weak evidence.

Comparing "evidence" of aliens (which, I keep stressing, could as likely be angels or demons or devas) to evidence of drug abuse, parental abuse, rape etc is disgusting. Those in the later case are known, well understood phenomena, where we have clear, obvious reasons why reporting is going to be necessarily one-sided. By contrast, there is no clear reason why or how aliens (or angels, gods, kami) would interact sporadically with a few individuals, leaving little if any clear trace of their passing, despite the inordinate amounts of energy that would actually be required to achieve their stipulated movements (try to hide a space rocket launch for comparison).

Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return. I didn't even initially insult the people making these claims (I "insulted" the claims themselves), though I did do that in my follow-up comment, for which I apologize. Still, some of the people making these claims have been proven to have simply lied for various reasons. I firmly believe all of the others have had various hallucinations such as sleep paralysis or symptoms of various mental illnesses. This is not an insult, anymore than claiming that all people who have heard Lord Vishnu's voice and seen his chariot are either mistaken, lying, or have experienced some kind of altered mental state.

Claims of implanted devices have never been medically confirmed.

Wow, you're trying to get out of what you did. You didn't insult the people, you insulted the claims? No you did not.

"as they are all either delusions, lying, false memories etc."...

"the various crackpots and deluded people who claim"...

You don't think it's an insult to a person to call their experience, sincerely recounted, a delusion, a lie, a false memory? Of course it is. Then as you admit, honorably, you do call them crackpots and deluded. Fair enough, but just because some people have been proven liars (or in the rape case, fake accusers), does not mean we should doubt other people coming forward, does it? and certainly does mean we should blanket call those people crackpots, or deluded or pretend they're lying, does it? "Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return." You don't expect to be insulted in return for accusing others in this abusive way of being without credibility? Exactly what I said, You expect silence in response to your abuse. Reform yourself. I saw you pushing down on people, and I pushed back. You can't take it? Don't dish it out. That's the way it is, focker.

You may firmly believe it, but then you're blind (or empathically missing the point) that accusing someone of having a mental illness, or hallucinating something you haven't experienced and have no frame for, is an insult, and more than that. You're saying you know their mind better than they do. You're saying their experience, of their life, is trumped by your opinion. And is less valuable than your "in the stands" commentary on it. You are not involved at all in what they experienced, yet you denigrate it, and claim you're not insulting them. Abusive insulting practice hiding behind veneer of being legitimate.

All I'm saying about physics is we don't know it all yet, and can't assume we do. Science admits as much, but few on the inside are courageous enough to take that to its logical conclusion.

Comparing evidence for rape, abuse, etc, to evidence for aliens is not disgusting, and you're certainly okay with doing that because you're okay to claim that all these millions of people with their stories and experiences must have simply imagined it, implanted a false memory, lied, etc. It's not about reporting being one-sided, it's about reporting consisting solely of witness testimony, often just of one person. That's true both for the alien case, and the rape and abuse case. You don't quite seem to see what you're doing when you want to doubt so many people for telling their story. It wasn't a long time in the past when people were laughed at or dismissed for telling their stories of rape and abuse, just like you'd have people do with those with stories of aliens today.

It seems you have not been acquainted with enough stories, I suggest you do some research and read up on people discussing abduction stories, and so on. Enter it as a skeptic, full of confidence you'll be able to explain it away. Talk to people involved. Give them a chance to be heard. Empathize with them. Instead of pretending you're "disgusted" by the very same comparative dismissal you yourself are hawking, while somehow laying claim to a moral grounding in this when you've been behaving anything but about it.

Recently my grandmother, whom I had just helped out of an ambulance and back into her apartment, told me that she had just come back home after meeting with a neighbor. I was not "accusing" her of something, nor insulting her, when I called her doctor to let them know she was having delusions.

Similarly, when someone is reporting something we know to be impossible or extremely improbable from other considerations, we are not accusing them of something when we say that their experience or memory of that experience was delusional (or mistaken, depending on the details). Again, I was insulting when I called such people "delusional", as it implies they often have such hallucinations, which of course I can't know and don't believe - and, again, for this I apologize.

Now, the major difference to accusations of sexual assault is the plausibility of the claim. I of course do not personally know if Harvey Weinstein assaulted any of the women that accused him. However, I know that such accusations are painful and risky for the person making them; and I know that sexual assault is something that can absolutely happen; so, the witness testimony carries a lot of weight.

If on the other hand the exact same women accused Harvey Weinstein of stealing their souls through satanic rituals, I would not think much of these claims, and I would believe, and feel justified in believing, that the women are either lying or have had some hallucinations that have convinced them of this (or are having false memories).

Of course, if you tend to believe that aliens (or angels, curses etc) are plausible, you may lend more credence to these testimonies, even without scientific style evidence for what may have happened.

I still believe that comparing the certainty we can have that sexual assault is a real thing that real men and women may experience to the certainty that aliens (or demons and ghosts) are real is deeply insulting to victims of sexual assault.

I also don't believe there are millions of people claiming to have experienced alien abductions. Looking around a bit, I assume this claim is coming from a Roper Poll that found 119 out of some 6000 respondents had experiences which were considered typical of alien abduction, which would be extrapolated to 3.7 million out of the 185 million people for which the poll was representative. Crucially, the respondents were not claiming that they had had an experience of being abducted by aliens, they were claiming that they had had some experiences like "waking up paralyzed and feeling a presence in the room", "finding puzzling scars on your body", "seeing unexplained lights in a room" - all of which require a significant jump to conclude "ALIENS!". In the best case, they could be used to claim unknown phenomena are real, but to pick any specific posited phenomenon would be deeply wrong: these are as likely to be signs of aliens as they are of being fairies or ancestor spirits or mind/body dualism or anything else; including altered mental states (especially as the poll didn't even ask about the respondent's belief that the experience was real - for all we know, some of those 119 people could have sought psychiatric help themselves after these experiences).

- thanks for proving my point. you doubt granny because you know her to already be of inconstant and diseased mind, and you are involved in and know the facts of what actually happened, because you were there. so you're in a reasonable position of authroity to dispute her suggested history as well as label it as a delusion. but wrong that you equate this with your unfair, unreasonable, arrogant and abusive criticism of people with alien/UFO stories as deluded, or delusions. equivalently, you place yourself above them, pretend with zero justification you knew better, were somehow ahold of the facts of the situation or were there, you weren't, and have zero klnowledge of their mental state but blanket critcize humiliate and dismiss them. yet insiste you were still right to do so, because you care for you granny? sickening to abuse the love for you granny to try to pass of your abusive behaviour on others as okay. also sickening that this analogy is one where the power imbalance is great, you are in a carer position for granny, you have power in relation to her, and you are deciding things for her. sickening and revealing how you think about these people whose stories you trashed.

it's not disrespectful to true UFO experiencers, or abductees, nor to true victims of drug abuse, sexual assault and rape to comapare their claims to UFO and alien witnesses, and to each other, because it's about evidence and the truth. if we discount the standard of evidence we undermine justice which is the very thing that can strive to protect and remedy real victims. it is disrespectful to undermine the standards of truth and evidence underlying criminal culpability and conviction by applying a biased standard to some and not others because you're saying we'll believe you because of our pre-existing beliefs not because of the facts of the case and your story, applying this discount to the standards required is totally disrespectful to true victims of crime because it lowers the percieved quality of evidence and allows the true claims to be swamped by false ones. It's false to believe something occurs because in general you believe it to occur therefore in a specific instance it is more likely. Each case must be considered on its evidence and merits. Even tho your opinins have no legal impact, they risk damaging the public narrative and discourse around these topics by degrading the reliability of real witnesses by demonstrating a bias toward believing claimaints that align with particular beliefs versus otherwise. This essentially reduces rape (and sexual abuse, etc) to a culturally relative, temporally relative, belief relative consturct, rather than the rock solid legal position it can be to solidly prosecutre and punish true perpetrators, and bring justice to real victims. You don't seem to see that degrading the standards of evidence by giving preferential treatment to those things you believe, rather than taking cases on their merits and comparing them equally regardless of the topic of the story or its current status in the cultural milieu is the best way to bring justice to victims and their families, everyone involved, and society as a whole. That's the empathic and compassionate position to take: to hear everyone's story, but adjudicate each claim in a balanced and unbiased way free of discrimination (based on belief) or prejudgement. That's the essence of judgement, and under the guise of you thinking you're being just you're just undermining it.

looking at that honestly is the ebst way to respect true victims of sexual abuse, parental abuse, accusations of drug abuse (vs planted evidence). again, you're so deluded or deliberately deceptive in that you think you're being good, but were actually being abusive, and protest when people stand up against that, and also think that trashing that value of witness testimony, while holding up a biased standard because you have reason to think that in "general" these things happen, therefore specifically it happened -- that's not the weight of testimony at all! that's undermining everything. you have reason to think that in "general" alien things happen because of the preponderance of evidence, but you're biased, revealing a lack of even handedness that's actually harmful and disrespectful to true victims and to justice. casting doubt on stories because people look at it preferentially or in a biased way. that's not the weight of testimony at all, that undermines it. you casually disregard the pain and fear of people sharing UFO stories while ignoring the obvious humiliation and abuse and dismissals and disbelief they are subjected to, just as you wanted to subject them to, yet you stand there and pretend to be for victims of sexual abuse. so disrespectful, and disingenuous! you may have pesonal experience but that doesn't mean you stand for victims and justice when you undermine people like this in these biased and unfair ways.

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