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Comment by integricho | Hacker News Reader

I think skepticism can go to the same kinds of extremes as believing. While a significant percentage of reports is surely a mixture of crackpots / people with unknown agendas, I find it hard to discard just about everything on one of these basis.

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No, skepticism should be your default stance w.r.t. extraordinary claims.

That many people are heedless, shallow of thought, and frightened of ignorance in similar patterns should not be taken as evidence that _some_ of their flights of fancy are fact.

There is a difference between healthy skepticism and blind, fanatic skepticism. The latter is not far from the dark ages when the church was burning people for claiming the earth is not flat or not the center of the universe, only in a more civilized environment, but still anything outside the currently accepted norm is disregarded as impossible and the people with such claims are ridiculed, just as it is happening with me now, and not even because of claiming something, just giving it the benefit of the doubt. This is not how scientific progress is made. Given the amount of evidence and witnesses, it at least deserves to be studied, not just coldly dismissed.

Sort of off topic, but I got stung by the "AKSHUALLY" bug. I just wanted to say that the term, "fanatic skepticism", isn't a possible outcome. Definitionally, skepticism clearly means you wouldn't be fanatic of anything. In reality this is cognitive dissonance, not skepticism.

Anyway, personally, I think this is a topic that needs serious skeptical focus. I don't just want immediate knee-jerk reactionary opinions on what people saw -- I want honesty as new information is gained. New thoughts on what you saw? Give those updates.

I hope that we're not alone in the universe and, honestly, I think it would probably impact me more if we were alone in such a vast *thing*.

Yes, cognitive dissonance might be the correct description of this, thanks! still, the definition of it holds for this case. I also don't want to rely on speculation / jumping to conclusions, but just the same, don't want it entirely dismissed as some outrageous "cannot happen" thing. Serious research needs to be done.

It's entirely possible the government exposes individuals with SCI type clearance to disinformation or fabrications to convince them they are real, and then watches them to see if they can keep it a secret. This would be a ideal way to conduct audits within groups exposed to leading technology. Then, to be fair, many of these people are conveying their observations truthfully but were just encouraged to draw to wrong conclusions from the experience.

sure, that's entirely possible, and even that all the recently released information is just that. but again, until this is proven, it's unfair to dismiss everything with such an explanation. it deserves a thorough investigation and study.

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