Why Bigfoot is unlikely only if you know what "unlikely" means
blogs.scientificamerican.com
blogs.scientificamerican.com
That sounds more like a verificationist idea of science than a Popperian falsification process. Is verificationism coming back in vogue in the sciences? Wouldn't it be a much better criticism to say that the cryptozoologists are not scientific because they do not make falsifiable predictions?
But if cryptozoologists are unscientific by the Popperian criteria then so is SETI.
Not at all. Cryptozoologists assume their subject exists, SETI researchers assume it doesn't. Surely you don't think SETI people assume a priori that they will hear a transmission from an intelligent alien species? Or that they have heard such a thing?
There's a single report of an anomalous reception, now called the "Wow" signal, that no serious SETI person thinks represents an alien broadcast. By contrast, there are any number of books and articles by cryptozoologists that analyze, but don't doubt, the many reports of Bigfoot, Yeti, Nessie, etc. sightings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
Quote: "Ehman has voiced doubts that the signal was of intelligent extraterrestrial origin: 'We should have seen it again when we looked for it 50 times. Something suggests it was an Earth-sourced signal that simply got reflected off a piece of space debris.'"
Spoken like a true scientist.
Actually, it's an informal statement of the null hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_hypothesis
In the null hypothesis, supposedly the basis for all experimental science, you start with the assumption that there is no effect, and let the evidence force you to a different conclusion. In other words, you assume nothing out of the ordinary and take no position on the subject of study.
> Wouldn't it be a much better criticism to say that the cryptozoologists are not scientific because they do not make falsifiable predictions?
Yes, it would, but that's not a very popular definition of science these days. If it were, psychiatrists and psychologists would be immediately excluded -- they make plenty of predictions, but the predictions don't work out.
It is a popular definition of science in some circles for exactly that reason. Psychoanalysis in particular is heavily criticized for this.
Cameras are not very good at catching sharp movement of low lit objects. Just to photograph sports clearly requires several thousand dollars in equipment and you can be as close as 50 meters most of the game.
That will change a lot over the years as sensor technology continues to improve and eventually your point will be important.
I do like the thought process though - if it's supposedly this common but still unproven, it's less likely to be true. Do we put ghosts in the same category?
There is still potential for mass-fraud, but repeated seemingly uncoordinated reports improves credibility. Maybe they're all Photoshopping the same thing from different angles, but that is less likely than a single person doing it.
^ I mean come on, if you were an alien, where would you go first? I'd totally go to New York. Here is another rule of thumb: if the aliens are doing something boring, like stealing cows or fucking with corn fields, they probably aren't real.
Hmm. That would be an interesting piece of fraud (oops I mean public art) to architect. Make a Blender scene of Central Park, populate the scene with bystanders with phones (yes, this will take time to source realistic models and skeletal animations). Each phone gets to be a camera in the scene. Not all cameras start and stop at the same time, and a few of them will have to capture video before and after the event without the actual event included. Timestamp and tag the videos appropriately, including clock drift, then have fun with avconv/ffmpeg converting the formats to different video formats based on known phone sales and what default formats iOS/Android encodes to (ugh, I actually had to do this once back when zencoder/pandavideo).
Create twitter accounts in advance, make them look real by copying other twitter users, and the day of the event just start uploading the youtube videos all at the same time and get your fake tweets flowing.
Now, what could this pipeline be useful for? Suppose you know that the videos are fake, but also suppose you can be reasonably sure that others will accept this data as real news. What could you do with that? First idea is some killer marketing stunt..
I think maybe you could do it by actually filming in Central Park with some sort of structure with white balls on it, in a certain known arrangement, that you could automate a lot of the video editing from various angles.. I'm not sure about that but I suspect it is feasible. If you get everyone to film different angles at the same basic time then the scene would be the same (just from different angles) and you'd have everyone else filming in the background that would lend credibility.
Professor Jacobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Jacobs has researched the subject scientifically for decades.
That isn't proof of anything.
Also this is subject is very taboo, most people reject the subject immediately as ridiculous and compare it to fairies and ghosts. Maybe they are afraid, closed minded or really belive we are alone in this vast universe.
You're asserting false dichotomies. The universe may be teeming with life, but that still wouldn't lend any credence to the scenario of alien abduction. You don't have to be afraid or close-minded to doubt it, you just have to be rational.
It isn't proof, simply because it's entirely subjective. It exists inside people's minds.
I was trying to find an explanation for the immediate rejection of the subject as silly.
> It exists inside people's minds.
The strange thing is that millions have the same thing in their minds, could this be a collective mental illness? but why do all of them report the same things and have the same details?
If you read Jacobs reports you will see that many people that never met experienced similar events, how can this be explained?
You could at least see read some of the reports or see some of the "non" evidence before rejecting it as silly.
"Space is big", "boy who cried wolf", or a combination of both.
But I don't understand the ridicule and lack of arguments, I fell like I'm in 1400 saying that the earth is round.
Also why the hate and downvotes?
It's true that there is no real public evidence, no flesh and bone alien or goverment confirmation but I think the main difference from religion is that there are all kind of information bits that seem to support it, the sexual experiments on abductees and very similar details they provide in their stories still don't have any other explanation to disprove it, just read Jacobs reports or see his video presentations, remember that he has a Ph.D and years of research on this so you can't compare him to a conspiracy nut on the internet.
Also there is the impact on society of such discovery, the world would literally panic, most people will interpret this in all kind of apocaliptic ways.
So the most credible argument on the lack of evidence is that human society is not ready to accept the fact that they are not alone, people rejected throughout history the ideea that they are not the center of the universe so this will be very hard to accept.
Trust me, I'm not afraid of the concept of aliens. Far from it, I am damn near certain that we are not the only life the universe has ever seen. Other life visiting this planet though? Without evidence of it... there isn't evidence of it. No reason to make that any more complex than it is, since it is a pretty fucking simple concept.
Now, this idea of people rejecting an idea because they are afraid of it? I am sorry, but you are clearly not very familiar with the history of religion and cults. People dig doomsday shit. They love to be frightened, they love reasons to believe their life won't matter soon (for whatever definition of 'matter' they are working off of), they love feeling irrelevant. I mean, you clearly dig this shit. What, you think you are special in this regard?
This hypothesis of yours, that people "can't handle the truth, because it is too intense for them", but they totally dig Revelations? Give me a break.
People always searched for things like this but it never happenend, if it happened how do you thing they would react?
You also want aliens to land on your backyard or the president to say it on tv but you dismiss the fact if they are so advanced maybe they don't care talking to us and don't need to explain to us, see zoo hypotesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoo_hypothesis and the president will never tell this on tv because of the the first argument, even in the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident case the military first released a press conference that said they found an unknown object and later they changed their statement, why do you think they changed their mind? They probably didn't thought about the consequences of the statement.
You can't really refute all the adbudcation experiences and people experiences without scientific research just because it seems unlikely to be true, a very small percentage of them are not hoaxes and they can't be scientifically explained.
It's sad that even at scientific level peope reject it as silly instead of looking at the facts and research it and gives us a scientific proof that this true or false.
Listen, this has been addressed many times now but you keep dodging it, so this is the last time I'm saying it: There isn't evidence for aliens visiting earth. The shit you cite as clear evidence is a fucking joke.
According to drake equation the probability of life in the universe is immense, the strange things is that nobody visited us, either they didn't or they didn't want to show us that they did like we don't disturb the life of the lions in the jungle when we film a documentary.
If this is so hard for you to understand then I give up, have a nice day.
Nut? If this conversation continues you would probably also call me a nazi, this is a classic for lack of arguments.
I know, you don't need arguments because et contact is so silly that it doesn't need arguments.
Grow up.
First, I don't know that it's necessarily true that "millions" of people have experienced this. But let me offer some evidence that at least to some degree this phenomenon whatever it is doesn't represent objective truth.
There was a point when the majority of UFO sightings comprised of airships and not what we would recognize as spacecraft. It's telling that this occurred at a time when there was no popular archetype of what qualities a spaceship might have to have. The denizens of these craft were described as basically human looking, and some claimed to be from Mars (at a time when the possibility of intelligent life on Mars was commonly accepted as possibility.)
One would expect an alien spacecraft to have some properties which are, well alien but all the descriptions i've seen and heard about don't often describe technology at a level far beyond the understanding of the time. Until it was scientifically proven impossible, many "aliens" appeared to be humans claiming to come from Mars or Venus.
Prior to this, many of the phenomena associated now with alien abduction was associated with demonic possession. There were no spaceships or airships, but plenty of hoary beast-men in the woods and wicked things convincing wizards to swap wives with each other.
My point being, the nature of this phenomenon never seems to rise above or to give information beyond what could be generated in the imagination of a single human being, and it seems to evolve as popular culture evolves. now we have to deal with the post-Lazar post-Roswell Post-Ancient Aliens/X-Files world of self-aware media irony in which it's claimed these aliens are responsible for practically every event and are behind every government and have portals everywhere and secret bases and yet despite the media and camera saturation... still nothing but mythology to account for any of it.
Now you could say the demons were aliens, and the airship captains were just taking on an appearance which we could comprehend. But again, while that makes for an internally consistent narrative, it doesn't really prove anything. The face on mars turned out to be a trick of the light, and i'm sitting here near the end of 2013, and it turns out the Mayans didn't know shit about the future after all.
meanwhile we do know there are such things as hallucinations, and hoaxes, and sleep paralysis, and any number of physiological and psychological phenomena to account for much if not all of the alien abduction scenario. What we don't have is strong, credible, independently verifiable publically credible evidence that aliens are abducting anyone. I'll tell you what it would look like - something undeniable and irrefutably alien. Not stories. Not weird lights someone's brother's cousin once heard someone saw one time. When they crash their saucer into the White House i'll maybe consider it. Until then, it's just faeries in the garden with updated costumes as far as i'm concerned.
The only argument that I see is that there is no real explanation for the fact that most abductees describe the same experiences down to extreme details and even if the grey alien figure can be traced to subconcious influenced by media I don't see what could influence abductees to imagine sexual experiments, until a real explanation for this is found I don't think we can dismiss the probability.
Maybe there are no other proofs because they are really good at leaving no traces and probably don't want to provide them yet to avoid panicking the masses, in a world that 88,5% of the population is religious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations I don't think this will be received too well and they probably understand this.
Not true. Before the current narrative of sexual examination and hybridization became commonplace, it was just as common for 'aliens' to 'abduct people' and tell them stories of the Aryan supermen from Atlantis. You have to account for the similarity in detail being due to the existence of the phenomenon being well known. You also have to account for your own assertion that since it's true that 99.99% percent of reports are either hoaxes or misinterpretation this also calls into question the bulk of those stories attached to alien abduction.
>I don't see what could influence abductees to imagine sexual experiments, until a real explanation for this is found I don't think we can dismiss the probability.
Your need for a "real" explanation assumes there must be a physical reality behind the phenomenon. That doesn't have to be the case.
>Maybe there are no other proofs because they are really good at leaving no traces and probably don't want to provide them yet to avoid panicking the masses, in a world that 88,5% of the population is religious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations I don't think this will be received too well and they probably understand this.
And maybe there's no other proof because it's fiction. That's the problem for someone arguing your point of view -- your fact is indistinguishable from fiction from an impartial point of view.
But what can explain the phenonemen? Currently there is no explanation for this. You could read some of Jacobs books, he found all kind of patterns, if this is just some collective halucination originating deep in our subconscious then is just as fascinating.
> That's the problem for someone arguing your point of view -- your fact is indistinguishable from fiction from an impartial point of view.
Indeed this is the biggest problem, because of lack of evidence it all looks sf. If the reason for the lack of evidence or encouter is the large percent of relious people or people with limited knowledge about the universe that can't cope with this fact then probably this will not change in our lifetime and we will not live to know if there was lack of evidence or it was all sf and we are alone in the universe or just never been in contact.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rational+explanation+for+ali...
There are explanations aplenty.
I clicked on some links and some of them explain the phenomenon by presenting people that say all kind of conspiracies and are not credible, others have confused it with sleep paralysis and some others cases that make the usual 99.99%. Also sleep paralysis can't be an explantion because as Jacobs says here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Jacobs "in numerous cases people report they were abducted when fully awake and conscious, and that therefore sleep paralysis is not a tenable hypothesis"
So I can say the same thing, where is the undeniable proof that the abduction phenonemon is not real? Because there is no scientific explanation to explains all cases yet. The same thing as in ufo sightins happens, the 0.01% is hard to see from all the hoaxes and disinformation.
This question betrays a very basic failure to understand the basis of science. I suggest you research on your own why I might say this. Research it, and make sure you really comprehend it.
Our science lacks the knowledge or the tools to prove or disprove it, remember what are we dealing with and or science is young and limited.
Science should prove or disprove some phenomena to be sure that is either true or false, otherwise there is still a probability, this is how it works.
If you have a valid scientific proof that the abduction phenomenon is a collective hallucination then you could dismiss the phenomenon, until then this is just unexplained and the probability remains.
No. Absolutely not. This is what I am talking about, a failure to understand what science is on the most basic of levels.
You don't prove a null hypothesis. Expecting proof of a null hypothesis is flat out retarded, you only disprove them. Without accepting null hypothesises until they are disproved, that is to say, without any functional sense of skepticism, you fall down the rabbit hole of believing all sorts of religious, supernatural, and pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
Have you disproved leprechauns? Xenu? Have you disproved the notion that I am in fact a god, descended from Mount Olympus on a mission to take out the Reptilian Queen?
Sane, rational, people do not expect these claims to be disproved. They expect them to be proved, and reject them until they are.
I don't have the time anymore to explain in more detail why you are wrong, you simply want to argue without arguments and you are right because you say so and because et contact is silly and of course because you know what science is.
"I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry"
...or understand that space is big. Really big.
But it seems rather flawed to group together all the various "large ape", "ape/human hybrid" type legends under the single umbrella of "bigfoot", so as to dismiss it as being "spotted too frequently to likely exist".
Why do this for "bigfoot" but not for giant squid? Surely the incredible breadth of "sea monster" legends and stories and sightings dwarfs the limited evidence that anyone had that a species of giant squids might exist.
No bigfoot-like creature has ever been found, nor any evidence. Is there a reason to differentiate between different varieties of them when none of those varieties have any evidence?
And, again, my point isn't whether Bigfoot does or doesn't exist. But whether the logical argument survives such abstraction. And I don't think it does.
The inexistence of bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest doesn't really speak to the (un)likelihood of the Yeti in the Himalayas. Nor does the lack of evidence for elves and goblins in Europe speak to the likelihood of an Orang Pendek.
Giant squid citings however are rare. The infrequent discovery of physical evidence is therefore not particularly troubling. (And before we found any credible physical evidence, the lack of physical evidence was still less troubling than the lack of physical evidence for bigfoot).
(Also not covered by the article: Thanks to sperm whales, who eat the things and sport scars from fights with them, we've actually had credible physical evidence of giant squid for quite some time. As far as I can tell nobody was mistaking these things for abnormally large regular squid since at least the 19th century, and people have been finding credible intact (although dead) specimens of them since about that same time: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_giant_squid_specimens_a...
"Steenstrup wrote a number of papers on giant squid in the 1850s. He first used the term "Architeuthus" (this was the spelling he chose) in a paper in 1857. A portion of a giant squid was secured by the French gunboat Alecton in 1861, leading to wider recognition of the genus in the scientific community. From 1870 to 1880, many squid were stranded on the shores of Newfoundland. For example, a specimen washed ashore in Thimble Tickle Bay, Newfoundland on 2 November 1878; its mantle was reported to be 6.1 m (20 ft) long, with one tentacle 10.7 m (35 ft) long, and it was estimated as weighing 2.2 tonnes.[citation needed] In 1873, a squid "attacked" a minister and a young boy in a dory in Bell Island, Newfoundland. Many strandings also occurred in New Zealand during the late 19th century.")
That's missing my question. Colossal squid sightings are rare, but "sea monsters" are sighted everywhere, all the time. And if we're expected to roll up the large bipeds (bigfoot, yeti, skunk ape, letiche, et al -- many of which with very distinct reported features) shouldn't we have rolled up "sea monsters" and dismissed the colossal squid until (almost literally) someone dropped it onto our faces? Granted, that isn't far from what happened, but shouldn't we have learned from that experience, rather than seek to codify the logic?
> "we've actually had credible physical evidence of giant squid for quite some time."
Accounts, but a dearth of specimen. Should someone discover the Orang Pendak tomorrow, surely hindsight will declare credible the records of the early 20th century dutch colonists. But as of this moment, it's far from generally accepted that these creatures exist, let alone that those accounts are actually credible.
And the logic of this article is literally arguing that we ought to weigh the likelihood of Orange Pendak, based on whether other creatures on other continents, that just happen to be roughly the same shape, have any credible evidence.
Rolling up all "sea monsters" and all "other great apes" only makes sense if all of these "sea monsters" are said to be basically big tentacled squidy things... The reason we roll all those "other great ape" claims together is because, frankly, it is all the same shit. Hairy biped, grunts a lot, leaves no trace like a model boyscout, etc. Same story, different continent.
> Accounts, but a dearth of specimen.
No. We have had credible specimens of giant squid since the 1800s. This isn't in hindsight, they were quickly accepted at the time by the scientific community as credible.
While living giant squid have only been filmed recently, their bodies have been washing ashore and studied for over a hundred years.
>It wasn't really until the 2000's and a live specimen was discovered that it was generally accepted that these things were real.
Not true. Many dead giant squids have been caught in fishing nets or have washed ashore and have been studied by scientists or even put on display in museums for years. Additionally, scars from giant squid suckers are common on certain whales.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_giant_squid_specimens_a...
Of course, memes cluster as well, so it's not really clean-cut...
If we had very very few observations of Loch Ness -- like say if it was Lake Vostok -- but we had a few Nessie sightings, that would be different. But we have only a few Nessie sightings in a place that's constantly being observed and photographed.
I think the majority would hacker news would be with me if I said that, on the whole, cryptozoologists are a little nutty. You don't need to resort to political smear tactics to say it.
However. You do need to use smear tactics if you want to create outrage. If that was the articles objective... then... good job I guess?
As a side note: squatchers is a great name.
Science isn't about what's fair, it's about what the evidence tells us. The fact that, in spite of no evidence whatsoever, Bigfoot stories, books and TV shows have escalated tremendously over the past 20 years, supports the claim you're objecting to.
> There are likely to be more reasonable cryptozooloigists that disregard discredited evidence, and would happily admit to hoaxes in this area.
Those aren't cryptozoologists, at least not gainfully employed ones. It's sort of like psychologists who know talk therapy is a waste of time -- they may still be psychologists, but they're not making a living at psychology.
> You do need to use smear tactics if you want to create outrage.
The article didn't need to use smear tactics, and it didn't use smear tactics -- it used evidence.
I know you hold anti psychology views, but some forms of talking therapy are evidence based and are as effective as medication for some mental illnesses. They are quick and achieve good rates of recovery (both amount of recovery, sometimes total, and length of recovery, sometimes many years.)
I'd agree if you'd used the terms "counselling" and "counsellors".
I said that talk therapy doesn't work. You say it's evidence-based. Both are true -- the evidence shows that talk therapy doesn't work.
> ... and are as effective as medication for some mental illnesses.
Yes, that's also true. Talk therapy doesn't work, and it's as effective as the available medications, which also don't work. Here's just one example:
"New Study: SSRI Antidepressants ‘Clinically Insignificant’ For Most People" http://www.spring.org.uk/2008/02/new-study-ssri-antidepressa...
On that basis, I think we're in agreement. Talk therapy is evidence based, and it is just as effective as many of the available medications.
> They are quick and achieve good rates of recovery ...
Yes, and in controlled studies, so does taking no action, sending the client home untreated, or the application of placebos -- all equally effective.
> I'd agree if you'd used the terms "counselling" and "counsellors".
It's well-established that counsellors, fortunetellers, bartenders, and psychologists have the same effectiveness rates in settings where one of the choices isn't unfairly stigmatized.
I posted what I did because it's relatively new and unfamiliar to many of psychology's advocates. As to talk therapy, these findings are in some cases decades old, with no change in the outcome.
"Science — psychology in particular..."
Psychology, in itself, is not a science. This diminishes any of his further arguments and not being evidence based.
PS. Sorry was meant for parent comment.
they arn't Scotsmen either.
Most assumptions are that there is life on Mars and time is simply whittling away at the probability, rather than, as the article says, assumptions are made that there is no life and probabilities are increased as evidence suggests that there is.
Certainly not, at least not among scientists. To a scientist, there's nothing up there but sand and thin air, until evidence proves otherwise. Popular reports naturally enough get this scientific, appropriately skeptical outlook completely wrong.
"Cryptozoological creatures like [God] are (supposedly) large animals living in large areas, and both have decades of 'evidence' to suggest that we might film one someday—as we did the giant squid."
Nope. Doesn't quite work.
Further, a religion is typically characterized as an organized system of beliefs, rituals and rules used to worship a god or group of gods. Maintaining one particular irrational belief does not a religion make.
(Although I'm sure "What Would Bigfoot Do?" bumper stickers would sell quite well.)
> Maintaining one particular irrational belief does not a religion make.
According to the article, cryptozoologists have many irrational beliefs, one for each creature.
As a concrete example: Tea leave reading and bigfoot sightings are both related to (really, both stemming from) apophenia, but accusing tea leave readers of being basically bigfoot-ologists is a rather... 'clumsy' way of handling the subject matter, for better or worse.
Sometimes it is certainly useful to point out that an underlying phenomenon is the basis for another absurd hypothesis, but that is something that you need to go into with some degree of fineness. If you just jump right into that, you'll be accused of being "rude, and therefore wrong" (illogical, I know...).
By the same token, your skepticism and rationality are also only neurological modules crafted evolutionary selection. It is not necessary (or even proveable) that those beliefs actually correspond to the true nature of the universe.
Natural selection can shape neurological modules for language in order to propagate genes, but after that there is nothing that stops language-using primates from improving and enhancing language, making it work better, building higher and more strictly defined classes of abstractions that eventually form math, logic and science.
As this relates to the original subject, the primary point was that people, cryptozoologists or the religiously devout, were judging correctness by what "seems" correct rather than by rigorous science. What seems correct is the strong influence of certain default neurological modules, absent training. Only with training do people appreciate how misguided one's instincts can be and how much better science is in communicating accurate observations.
Some like Bigfoot, some Aliens, some Nessie - me personally, I am fond of the tales I was told as a young child of a few remaining dinosaurs in the large remaining land masses, such as Central Africa, and Brazil. Probably unlikely, yet, nice to dream that perhaps, maybe, a few select dinosaurs are at this moment hiding away.