Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

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> I think the capitalistic "greed" caused all those old reports

Speaking as a USAF Veteran, they are very strict about honesty, and there's actually a whole set of meta-laws (the UCMJ, https://www.military.com/join-armed-forces/the-uniform-code-...) which are stricter than civilian laws, that all members of the US military must adhere to. (Let's just say I got one personal taste of this during a "white lie" incident I was a part of.)

The pilots who reported "foo fighters" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/what-were-... in WW2 were under the same rules.

I would therefore consider any reports by active military to be head and shoulders above others, at least on the assumption of dishonesty. (That still leaves the possibility of misperception, mis-recall, etc.... but if you consider each person an imperfect detector of information, then the more people reporting a thing, the more accurate the picture becomes thanks to sensor fusion/the Kalman filter: https://medium.com/@cotra.marko/wtf-is-sensor-fusion-part-1-... )

Also speaking as a USAF veteran, many of the people I worked with were bigots and liars. The enlisted corps is basically a cross section of the disadvantaged and uneducated while the officers are lightly educated nationalists. Hardly the paragons of virtue and integrity, the USAF core values aside.

> but if you consider each person an imperfect detector of information, then the more people reporting a thing, the more accurate the picture becomes thanks to sensor fusion/the Kalman filter:

Not necessarily. Adding a bunch of extra imperfect sensors is not the same as adding imperfect sensors with imperfect interpretations. The storage medium that interpretation is stored in is also imperfect. An accounting of that interpretation will change non-linearly depending on how many times it's described and how recently from the event it's described.

Adding more and more of these recountings don't necessarily mean you've got better data.

Yes it does. If you simply treat that drift as additional "error", you're still fundamentally dealing with an imperfect sensor with an error rate. And mathematically, that makes it all still fall under the Kalman filter metrics. (To be fair, you'd still need to quantify the reported thing somehow.)

Which should make intuitive sense. If 1 person claims they got raped by someone, and that is the only evidence against them, you might be skeptical. If 50 people claim they got raped by someone, and that is the only evidence against them, a reasonable position IMHO would be that the chances that this person is not a rapist are vanishingly small, even if (on average) 5 to 10% of the reports are non-truthful and motivated by perverse incentives (such as avoiding shame of promiscuity).

At some point we need to figure out how to deal with eyewitness evidence without complete dismissal, because complete dismissal of it is wrong (it's literally gaslighting- telling people that their reported experiences are irrelevant/invalid, which is the same as asserting that they didn't happen IMHO). Plenty of experiences (both positive and negative) happen that only have the retelling as the evidence, and ignoring all retellings omits a possibly large amount of evidential source of truth.

These military people are claiming other military people are lying and covering up evidence. So I guess it's a paradox, since no one in the military lies.

People aren't all that different no matter what group they join and no matter what values they espouse. Believing someone is above reproach just because they say they are is what let the Catholic Church get away with its atrocities for so long.

yep. And there's certainly examples of that:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/202...

hits from multiple radars simultaneously are not "camera quirks"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPrYVmYkL5w#t=49

at some point if you have to bend over completely backwards in order to fit a square peg theory into a round hole (when all you have is the square peg, and the only reason why you don't have a round one is your incredulity), it starts to get ridiculous

I'll tell you what's ludicrous, the idea that we live alone in an unimaginably large universe and that no other intelligence has figured out FTL travel when we already know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

this is starting to look a lot like the people who didn't believe in meteorites despite all the claims of people reporting rocks from space landing in their backyards (granted, that's better physical evidence, at least, than we have now)

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1803-rain-rocks-he...

It literally took 3,000 meteorites landing at once and numerous witnesses before the scientific community acknowledged that meteorites were real, despite the fact that they had no explanation for them at the time (which was the reason for their initial dismissal)

Sometimes, when a bunch of people report something for which the physical evidence is still scant, it's not always mass hysteria

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