How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?

I'm saying it's equally ignorant to not consider a theory because it just seems improbable.

The issue with this plane crash is that most theories from the investigators have a plausibility level that has barely changed from the initial level. This is why it is worth considering to a certain extent some of the more non-mainstream theories.

50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choice: i) these people have odd beliefs ii) these people have a mental illness and odd beliefs. Even though i is more probable you have to explain the irrationality of the beliefs so yu pick ii, even though we know it's less likely.

Mental illness is very common (1 in 4 at any point in our lifetime; 1 in 6 right now) but these numbers talk about the widest interpretation of mental illhealth. Delusional thinking is thought to be less common. Mood disorders are thought to affect about 5% of the US population; schizophrenia about 1%. So you've suddenly diagnosed very many more people with a mental illness.

What really should be considered here is the fact that proof requires a scientific setting. One cannot prove anything that occurs outside of a controlled setting, simply because it's not repeatable. Theories, both those set in reality and those that exist outside it, will forever be subject to this fact, and therefore be very questionable to (ie, not accepted by) the masses.

I don't think it's fair to call this evolutionary trait as a "mental illness" either, since correlating cause and effect is what helped us learn to farm and such like. The hard part is separating linked events from coincidences - which is where the scientific method comes in of using larger sample groups, control groups and peer reviews. However lets also remember that this is an extremely recent development in our evolution.

As a footnote, it's also worth noting that these traits have also been observed in other species such as pigeons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_t...

In actuality nothing in science or in reality can be proven to be true. In science it is only possible to disprove or falsify theories. You can actually extract this concept from a famous statement in science and statistics:

"Correlation does not imply causation"

This basically means nothing can be proven, we can only correlate things. If you negate that statement it turns into:

"No Correlation does imply non-causation"

Which means by establishing that two things do not correlate we've disproved or falsified causation.

The probability of A + B cannot be higher than A or B alone.

Of course that doesn't mean that A + B didn't occur, just that it is less likely.

Isn't truth the only thing science cares about?

Of course truth alone doesn't mean much and we usually conduct science not just for the sake of it, but those are downstream concerns.

> Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them.

Science doesn't necessitate any "reliability" on the theories/premises it uses. You set up your premise apply your theory to it and reach a conclusion.

It's up to others (i.e. engineers) to worry about how valid the premises are.

Deciding to use or not use some other theory as a premise isn't about being or not being "stupid" but rather about being able to prove something that others (be it scientists or engineers) will be interested in reading.

http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/emirates-clark-s... says it well.

They would capture perfectly good pilots along with the plane.

You obviously don't understand Occams Razor.

I think this is something that can often backfire. If someone creates evidence that say's the plane crashed at location x, when location X is searched and there is no plane, I still have more information than I started. I know the evidence that led me to location x is incorrect. This could be because the data is bad, or due to tampering. If I'm now focused on tampering and able to corroborate that it is tampered with, I now have a new area to narrow my investigation, based on who has the skills, ability, and motives to tamper with that data.

Now, I would agree, if the goal was to create a short term disruption to the investigation, which didn't require holding up to scrutiny in the long run.

Making an aircraft disappear might have taken Ukraine off a few front pages, but the propaganda benefit to Russia was - as any reasonable person would have anticipated - minimal at best. It made essentially no difference to Western policy towards Russia, and if anything drew a bit more attention towards crashes involving Malaysian Airlines 777s than was good for Russian interests.

Conversely, the implications of being caught hijacking an aircraft full of civilians and flying it into their own airspace would have been very severe indeed, especially given the number of citizens of their neighbour and only major international ally on board.

Consider the reward is minimal at best, the cost of failure is exceptionally high, and the probability of failing to hijack and fly an aircraft several thousand miles over multiple jurisdictions without detection is comfortably above zero.

Assume that anyone with the acumen to pull this sort of stunt off successfully possesses the faculties to do some basic weighing up of risk and reward an ask yourself why on earth would they do something so risky for such a trivially achieved and insignificant objective as distracting news media

Just because a particular organization theoretically could pull off a particular course of action doesn't mean it's not ridiculous in the extreme to assume they would.

No one really knows the specifics of what's going to happen, but the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has started focusing on 'adaptation' as some degree of climate change is inevitable (and, indeed, has already happened). The IPCC would be my choice as the closest guess as to what the next century will look like [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report

--- Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.

In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature." Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.

---

Should we do nothing about climate change? Probably not. Panicking is not likely to help either. Given that the Cold War didn't end in a scorched earth I do believe we are capable of pulling together and dealing with what's in front of us.

(Edit: formatting)

    > it's less probable that a bunch of those people are
    > all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the
    > easier it is to trust.

My favourite is bloodletting. Everyone thought it was true, for thousands of years. If you'd argued against it people would have thought you were crazy. And we now know that it's rubbish. All those well-educated men of all those centuries were todies who didn't have a clue what they were doing. (Or - who knew exactly what they were doing - getting the good patronage and the good women)

Climage change is fun. It's easy to follow the money on - it's just the latest mysticism of 'educated people'. The rebranding thing from "global warming" is pure weasel.

There's a lot of sense in looking at the consensus opinion as a starting point. And you should be wary of going against consensus - it's easy to get burnt by its momentum, people will treat you as a crank, your counter theories may be wrong also. And - it's easy to excuse your actions if you go with consensus and it turns out to be wrong later. But its status as consensus should give it no actual credibility in your mind.

It's completely absurd. If the president of the United States was on that flight, I'd give it more credibility. However, which passenger on that flight was so valuable, and surrounded by so much security, that hijacking the flight made sense?

The same goes for cargo, it must be easier to make friends in the right places, or pay people off to have that cargo "misplaced".

[0] https://mh17.correctiv.org/english/

And I don't think they accidentally shot down the plane. They might've assumed it was a different plane, but from what I could tell, they intended to shoot it down. If I'm trying to avoid accidentally shooting down planes, I'm generally not firing surface-to-air missiles about the place.

It was an arms-length Russian crew then, and that could well have been the case with the other Malaysian plane. Professional support but professional deniability.

Considering that airline crashes are exceedingly rare on a per flight or per distance basis, what, exactly, are the usual circumstances of airline crashes?