Planet_X: Our 10th Planet

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 03:18:57 GMT, * wrote in
alt.fan.art-bell:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 21:00:55 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:20:06 GMT, "Clave"
wrote:


Awesome. Great link.


When you fix Usenet so it's no longer a text medium, then the saucer at
Groom Lake can be posted.




It's already not a text-only medium;

It's a 2-dimensional medium.

Yes, but it's multi-delusional.
--
V.G.

Change pobox dot alaska to gci.
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it is easier to harrass
rich women than it is motorcycle gangs." - Bumper Sticker
(This sig file contains not less than 80% recycled SPAM)

Sarcasm is my sword, Apathy is my shield.

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 02:54:19 GMT, * wrote in
alt.fan.art-bell:

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 09:54:24 -0900, "Vanilla Gorilla (Monkey Boy)"
wrote:

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:32:14 GMT, * wrote in
alt.fan.art-bell:

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 07:03:31 GMT, DrPostman wrote:

On Sat, 27 Mar 2004 15:15:36 GMT, * wrote:


You just don't have that happy camper vibe, ya know.

So what's a kook?


You're stupid, and that's sad.

A 200 IQ is stupid. okay. What's your IQ and what qualifies you to call
people kooks and stupid?

My IQ is 235, so that makes you an idiot. 200? I'm surprised you can
even dress yourself or tie your own shoes.

Then why can't you prove something doesn't exist, Mr. Genius?

Only an idiot would ask that question.
--
V.G.

Change pobox dot alaska to gci.
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it is easier to harrass
rich women than it is motorcycle gangs." - Bumper Sticker
(This sig file contains not less than 80% recycled SPAM)

Sarcasm is my sword, Apathy is my shield.

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:28:55 GMT, * wrote in
alt.fan.art-bell:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:49:54 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:32:51 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...}


Tell me.


You won't be able to understand. It's WAY beyond your ability to
comprehend.


I'm pretty bright. And there are some really smart folks here
that can help me if needed.

But, of course, I was asking what great work you had done with
your great IQ, which you should be able to explain to pretty
much anyone. Up to it?

I just finished making an ass of someone else on Usenet, are you sure you're
up to it?

Let's start he

CAUTION: DETOUR AHEAD 100 FEET

How do you feel about people attacking the United States of America and
disregarding the US Constitution?





--
V.G.

Change pobox dot alaska to gci.
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it is easier to harrass
rich women than it is motorcycle gangs." - Bumper Sticker
(This sig file contains not less than 80% recycled SPAM)

Sarcasm is my sword, Apathy is my shield.

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:37:05 GMT, * wrote in
alt.fan.art-bell:

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:33:02 GMT, "bookman"
wrote:


"Tom McDonald" wrote in message
...
* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:32:51 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...}


Tell me.


You won't be able to understand. It's WAY beyond your ability to
comprehend.

IOW, you have, at best, a pile of polysyllabic gobbledegook
designed to make you look impressive.

I don't have to design anything to be impressive, I am impressive.

Yes, but not in the way that you imagine.
--
V.G.

Change pobox dot alaska to gci.
"People are more violently opposed to fur than leather, because it is easier to harrass
rich women than it is motorcycle gangs." - Bumper Sticker
(This sig file contains not less than 80% recycled SPAM)

Sarcasm is my sword, Apathy is my shield.

"DrPostman" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 08:38:48 GMT, "bookman"
wrote:


"DrPostman" wrote in message
.. .
On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:57:24 GMT, * wrote:

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:48:23 GMT, DrPostman wrote:

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 05:53:11 GMT, * wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:48:22 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...]

Now, are you going to put up that website?

i have a few legal matters to take care of before doing so.

I will post the URL here when it's finished.


That's your cowardly way of saying "never".

No actually, I've planned it for a long time.


Do you EVER tell the truth?

Of course he doesn't.



I don't think it's a he.

Do you think that it's a she?

ESL!

--
Bookman
Kazoo Konspirator #668 (The Neighbor of the Beast)
We're not laughing _with_ bRay!
Clue-Bat Wrangler
Namer of the 10-gallon Creel
Keeper of the Nickname List
Despotic Kookologist of the New World Order

| The Logical Trickery of the UFO Skeptic
| By Brian Zeiler
|
[...]

| The answer, of course, lies in the incentive structure of the
| analyst.

Ad hominem.

| That's why the incentive structure of contemporary scientists is
| such tha they will not accept alien visitation unless they must,
| which would be when they get irrefutable physical proof.

Straw man. The standard is not irrefutability, but rather parsimony.

| ...even if the observations directly indicate, within normal
| scientific evidential standards, the presence of a solid object
| under intelligent control with propulsion technology beyond
| human understanding.

Ignoratio elenchi. The author here simply assumes his premises.
Conditionally, *if* such a situation could be demonstrated then science
would gladly accept the conclusion. However, it is in the demonstration of
the glossed-over premises that the UFO case falls down.

| Thus, the debunkers have failed to define the boundary of
| extraordinariness, which renders the declaration logically
| specious...

No. Rather the author has neglected to define "normal scientific evidential
standards" against which his evidence has been judged and found wanting.
The fact that the vast majority of strange sightings turn out, upon further
investigation, to be of generally accepted prosaic origins clearly favors
the prosaic explanation, absent special evidence to the contrary. Those
that remain unexplained are just that -- unexplained. No rule of logic or
principle of science requires us to assume that they are alien spacecraft
simply because they fail to fit some finite number of prosaic possibilities.

False dilemma.

| ...they merely apply a priori probabilities of nearly zero to the
| detection of anomalous vehicles, with no logical defensibility...

Not true. The logical defensibility is precisely in the fact that the null
hypothesis is *not* a priori, but rather based on prior observation and
investigation.

For questions of existence, it is always defensible logically to deny
existence until it is shown otherwise. The alternative leads to an
untestable case: it is impossible to prove that aliens do not exist, but it
is possible -- though admittedly difficult -- to prove they do.

| Do we know what alien energy resource stocks are?

Argument from ignorance. No, we do not know how to characterize aliens,
which is precisely why no conclusion can be rationally held on the basis of
a supposition of those technologies. Yet time and again the "holes" in UFO
enthusiasts' scenarios are explained away by the deus ex machina of supposed
alien omnipotence. Aliens are simply presumed to be capable of whatever
activity is needed to make the scenario possible.

| Therefore, alien visitation does not violate the laws of physics...

Begging the question.

| So they defend the near impossibility of interstellar travel,
| which contradicts a considerable portion of the scientific
| community.

No. Self-appointed authors and speculists do not belong to the "scientific
community." If by interstellar travel is meant travel faster than the speed
of light, the scientific community is fairly resolute on the issue.

| This type of logic can be successfully applied to any claim [e.g.,
| to dinosaurs].

No. The fossil record provides ample evidence of objects that can only
rationally be explained by large species now understood to be extinct.
Fossilization is a proven fact. Extinction is a proven fact. Methods of
dating have held up under test. Reptilian and amphibian morphology is well
understood. The evidence is readily available for anyone to examine.

This is not an equivalent claim to various sporadic sightings of objects
which are then simply declared to be of extraterrestrial origin.

| If aliens were visiting, I find the expectation of physical
| proof quite illogical, since it's going to be hard to obtain.

Begging the question.

| ...one which is far beyond the scientific rigor that standard
| scientific methodology would require.

Repetition ad nauseam of an unsupported cliam. The author has simply
declared that evidence of alien visitation falls within the boundaries of
scientific rigor.

| How can one declare a claim to be extraordinary without sufficient
| information to defend a low a priori probability?

Fortunately scientists do not estimate probability this way in this case.

| Are there degrees of extraordinariness?

Of course. The degree to which extraordinary proof is required for a claim
is proportional to the expectation of having already seen that proof, among
other things. It is also proportional to the amount of available evidence
for other hypotheses that also explain the phenomenon.

| How does one relate a degree of extraordinariness to a fair
| and reasonable evidential threshold?

Through a consensus of investigators who bring various biases to the table.
The UFO crowd simply wants their evidence to be taken at face value, along
with all its inherent interpretations. Scientists will examine the
observations, but must be free to relax the interpretation if necessary.

| What is it about extraterrestrial visitation that implies the
| availability of physical proof?

The fact that all other forms of visitation leave physical proof.

| How can we obtain physical proof?

Through scientific investigation, which has shown itself adept at obtaining
physical proof in other avenues of inquiry.

| How can an evidential threshold be imposed with no logical
| defensibility nor any rational expectation of actually meeting
| such a stringent threshold?

Complex question. The standard of evidence is quite logically defensible.
Further, the assumption of impossibility is the author's.

If, in fact, one is unable to obtain convincing evidence, the proper course
of action is to suspend judgment. This is what most scientists have done
with respect to alien visitation and UFOs. It is the UFO enthusiast's
demand that the absence of evidence be decided in his favor that ruffles the
feathers of rational people. "You can't explain it, therefore it must be
what I say it is."

| What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations
| until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses...

Uncertainty of observation is part of investigation. So is the inadvertent
and unconscious admixture of raw fact with interpretation of by the
eyewitnesses. Consult Elizabeth Loftus et al. for a lengthy scholarly
treatment of this phenomenon.

For example, faced with an observation claiming that a very large object was
seen in the distance, the investigator must consider and, if possible,
eliminate the possibility that a small unfamiliar object was seen nearby and
interpreted as a very large object in the distance. And to continue the
example, the impossibly rapid and abrupt movements of the assumed-to-be
faraway object seem anomalous under the assumption that the object is
faraway and gigantic. But in UFO circles, such an observation is simply
touted as one more reason why a prosaic explanation does not hold.

| One should never alter the observations to conform with a
| hypothesis...

Wrong. Anomalous and untrustworthy observations happen, and dealing with
them is part of science.

Parsimony is *exactly* to favor a putatively parsimonious solution which
nevertheless requires re-examining the observations. If, in our example
above, we relax the interpretation that the object seen was faraway, then
the two "anomalies" simply disappear. It appeared extraordinarly large
because it was nearby, and nearby objects appear larger than faraway
objects. It appeared to move abruptly because the opinion of abruptness was
based on the presumption of its distance; the motion was quite consistent
with that of a nearby object. It is not necessary to conclusively identify
the object. It is sufficient to explain its anomalous nature as the product
of mistaken observation.

Take a concrete example. Despite claims to the contrary, there are many
eyewitnesses who saw an airliner crash into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
One of those witnesses, however, believes he saw a small private jet, not a
large commercial airliner. The conspiracy theorists have built upon that
one claim and postulated an unmanned drone, trying to cast doubt upon the
official accounts. So fanatical are they in taking every word of every
statement at face value, that they ignore the possibility that one witness
out of many was simply mistaken.

| ...is that science? Or is that dogma? The answer, of course,
| is dogma.

It is difficult to believe this author has more than a passing relationship
with science. Anomalous data is part of scientific inquiry. Knowing when
it is proper to reject anomalous data is part of the skill of the scientist.

It's always amusing to hear people pontificate on the nature of parsimony
without realizing that parsimony is about falsifiability, not explicatory
power. If we accept that an eyewitness who may have seen an unfamiliar
nearby object and mistaken it for a faraway immense object can only be
telling the truth without any form of interpretation or deception, and we
hypothesize that this impossibly large vehicle must therefore be of
non-human origin, since no human-created object is known to behave that way,
then we are faced with how to test that hypothesis.

It's a simple fact that there is no evidence extraterrestrials are visiting
Earth. Yet that would be a premise in the hypothesis. Since that's an
untestable hypothesis for the time being, the hypothesis fails William of
Occam's test. For the goal of reducing unsupportable premises is precisely
to increase the testability of any candidate hypothesis.

| Does a lack of detection disprove the hypothesis that aliens are
| beaming mathematical constants at us? Certainly not, since our
| equipment may not be strong enough to detect them.

Obviously, which is why science does not deny the existence of aliens based
on our continued inability to receive signals from them. Straw man.

| Skeptics are skilled propagandists who appeal to base emotions...

Ad hominem.

| As has been explained throughout this essay...

This essay is a meaningless string of assumptions, unsupported claims, ad
hominem attacks, dramatic sweeping statements, and straw man
characterizations of science and scientists. That the author purports to be
conducting a logical analysis is immaterial. The essay is itself deeply
fallacious.

| Skeptics are mostly scientists, but that certainly doesn't mean
| they behave scientifically, as has been explained.

The author simply defines "scientific behavior" as he needs it to be in
order to give credence to his accusations. It's clear this author does not
understand what scientists do, nor why they behave the way they do.

| So, these scientists who are guilty of the logical infractions
| exposed in this essay are so consumed with the presumed validity
| of their opinions that, like a zealous religious fanatic, they
| must convert the masses to the side of truth in order to salvage
| their own self-image.

Affirmed consequent. The author has speciously eliminated the possibility
that scientists behave rationally or according to impartial principles. It
follows that there must be some other motivation for science's behavior
toward alien visitation. Therefore he concludes (i.e., plucks out of thin
air) some theory about emotional desire for credibility etc. that blinds
scientists to what the author insists is clear and indisputable fact. But
in fact the author has shown no evidence for that motivation; merely what he
believes to be the absence of evidence for some other motivation.

| When nature introduces an anomaly -- a violation of expectation --
| to science, the anomaly must be crushed. How dare nature violate
| science's laws and principles!

Dramatic sounding, but completely false. Science welcomes the anomalous and
actively searches for it. That's because science *begins* when an anomaly
is found. Where the universe is found to act contrary to science's model of
it, that's when scientists shift into high gear to characterize the anomaly
and expand or revise the model to account for it. When there are no more
anomalies to study, science's work is done and they will be out of a job.

It's a common tactic for those on the fringe to try to villify scientists as
some sort of cabal of ill-intentioned priesthood trying to maintain control
over the world. I'll refer you to the works of psychologist Michael Shirmer
to understand the mental illness that leads to this perception.

--
|
The universe is not required to conform | Jay Windley
to the expectations of the ignorant. | webmaster @ clavius.org

* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:48:22 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...]


Now, are you going to put up that website?


i have a few legal matters to take care of before doing so.

I will post the URL here when it's finished.

I'll look forward to seeing it. Do you have an idea when it
will be ready?

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 13:43:16 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:48:22 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...]


Now, are you going to put up that website?


i have a few legal matters to take care of before doing so.

I will post the URL here when it's finished.

I'll look forward to seeing it. Do you have an idea when it
will be ready?

Shortly after my death.

* wrote:

On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:49:54 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:


* wrote:


On Mon, 29 Mar 2004 23:32:51 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

{...}



Tell me.


You won't be able to understand. It's WAY beyond your ability to
comprehend.


I'm pretty bright. And there are some really smart folks here
that can help me if needed.

But, of course, I was asking what great work you had done with
your great IQ, which you should be able to explain to pretty
much anyone. Up to it?


I just finished making an ass of someone else on Usenet, are you sure you're
up to it?

Let's start he

How do you feel about people attacking the United States of America and
disregarding the US Constitution?

How does this relate to any great work you have done as a
result of your high IQ?

To answer your question, on the chance that it will lead to you
answering my question:

1. It depends on what you mean by 'attacking' the US. If you
mean people saying nasty things about us, then I may be
irritated, but am very glad that we allow that speech. If you
mean physical attacks on American persons or property, I am
against it. Very much against it.

2. What do you mean by 'disregarding the US Constitution? If
you mean non-Americans, they can disregard the Constitution as
much as they like (except, of course, when they are on American
territory). If you mean American officials disregarding the
Constitution, then I think they should be investigated and, if
found likely to have broken a law, prosecuted for it by a
competent body. I've been highly critical of many government
officials that, in my view, were acting in an unconstitutional
manner.

Tom McDonald

On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 13:51:00 -0600, Tom McDonald
wrote:

[...]

I just finished making an ass of someone else on Usenet, are you sure you're
up to it?

Let's start he

How do you feel about people attacking the United States of America and
disregarding the US Constitution?

How does this relate to any great work you have done as a
result of your high IQ?

I work for a higher authority.

To answer your question, on the chance that it will lead to you
answering my question:

1. It depends on what you mean by 'attacking' the US. If you
mean people saying nasty things about us, then I may be
irritated, but am very glad that we allow that speech. If you
mean physical attacks on American persons or property, I am
against it. Very much against it.

2. What do you mean by 'disregarding the US Constitution? If
you mean non-Americans, they can disregard the Constitution as
much as they like (except, of course, when they are on American
territory). If you mean American officials disregarding the
Constitution, then I think they should be investigated and, if
found likely to have broken a law, prosecuted for it by a
competent body. I've been highly critical of many government
officials that, in my view, were acting in an unconstitutional
manner.

Tom McDonald

Can't express your opinion, can you?

Your mind control handlers got you programmed?