The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.
Arguably its because in many cases mass delusion is adaptive - it organizes and simplifies how groups of people behave. Religion is a cultural mass delusion (don't worry, I'm not talking about YOUR religion, just the other ones) with significant adaptive qualities, people argue.
Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.
I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy.
As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.
While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.
Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it.
It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't.
Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?
People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.
> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.
It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks?
If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
Interesting that you mention textbooks. Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.
BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
> Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.
So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.
> So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
That's right.
I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.
The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.
Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.
Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method but it was slow and kind of random. If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
> Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method
When was 'before the scientific method' exactly?
> it was slow and kind of random.
I would argue it wasn't random at all -- it was directed towards human needs and desires as appropriate to the times. There was never a period where humans stopped using their intelligence and problem solving skills to improve their lives in whatever ways were available.
> If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
When did it become widespread? Where did it spread to? Did those places all show a similar increase in innovation in the years after?
It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference.
But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR.
The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.
With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria?
...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so?
I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.
For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode).
The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.
It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.
This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
> More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.
That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
I am tickled by a theory I heard that a lot of ancient creativity went into preventing change. Like that's the original value of creativity, maintaining stability by stopping other people from innovating.
> That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it. I am sure all sorts of useful things have been invented by slaves, but if you yourself are property I don't know how you expect credit for your intellectual property.
> You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The free markets are about efficient allocation and exploitation of resources. People are incentivized to create things that help with that. The byproduct of such efficiency is free time and access to those resources.
> The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
Well, it isn't exactly easy to invent a lightbulb when you don't have access to vacuum pumps, transparent glass, filaments, and electric generators. I'm sure if you had a hunk of ore and a hearth you would be making machined parts within a fortnight but our ancestors had to wait for crucial inventions and materials science advances before they move from sails to steam.
If you can't come up with a scenario where a slave would improve their life by innovating the tools and objects they had available to them, or a scenario in which a master is not a one dimensional caricature, or a scenario where a slave is not a stupid pack animal that can only follow orders, then the burden is not on history to convince you otherwise.
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly
... explained by(?)
> History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
We have just gone through the most massive event in this category in the lifetime of most people alive today, and the next such event is quite openly being planned for execution.
Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.
What? What great war did we all live through and what's being openly planned? I feel like either you're being dramatic or I'm waaaayyyyy more out of touch than I thought I was.
We went through covid, just a couple of years ago. Each of us know how we reacted and how we behaved. The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. European and Russian media has reached a war frenzy that probably hasn't been seen since WWI.
The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides.
I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
Today from Russian media: "All NATO decision-makers from countries that provided military assistance to Bandera Ukraine are participating in a hybrid or conventional war against Russia… All these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state,” Medvedev said"
Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.
There is talk about necessary defensive preparations for a larger conflict. The primary goal of which is to deter such a conflict from starting in the first place.
But that is not the same as saying that "war is being planned". The latter implies an actual intent/desire to start a war, the former does not.
Today from Russian media: "Bandera Ukraine, blah, blah"
That phrase on its own should indicate that what you are reading is pure verbal flatulence. The speaker in this case (Medvedev) should be another strong indication.
If you read Nordic message boards, most users are ...
I was referring to actual reality (i.e. what decision makers at the state level are planning). Not what randos on the message boardz are saying.
It took me around 20 years to kind of key into that, but then it took almost another 20 for it to properly click.
I find it pretty hard to get on the same wavelength as most people about it. A lot of us feel distinctly human as opposed to, I don’t know, like a smooth ape that is neurotic enough to develop space travel.
I’m half joking. I’ve found the revelation made me love animals a lot more than I had. It brings a sense of unity to my life. Dogs really are family, birds are not nearly as different from us as they seem, and even creatures like fish or squid share remarkable traits with us. These fundamental aspects of being animals.
I really enjoy it. I think it’s a great thing to contemplate and embrace.
Although there is one part of my brain which tells me I and other people are rational beings, my own behavior tells me otherwise. Why else would I eat a candy when I rationally know I don’t need it?
For people interested, I can highly recommend Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. It tells many interesting stories about social interactions between apes that look surprisingly human. By the way, did you know that apes pick their nose, just like humans?
Watching animals have familiar interactions and experiences is kind of amazing. I know we can’t know their experiences without empirical evidence, but as you mentioned, apes do a great job of providing some of that evidence. We are way more alike than I would have assumed before I was exposed to this stuff.
I believe this extends to all kinds of species besides apes (especially mammals, but others as well), and there’s certainly compelling evidence of sentience in places we wouldn’t have thought to find it, but there’s still plenty of research to be done before we can draw conclusions.
meth vs adderall is more about dosage. If for some reason you decided to consume massive amounts of adderall the same way crazy homeless people consume meth (1000mg instead of 30mg), you could get addicted to it. Pretty much nobody does this with adderall, but the theory is solid. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-dru...
> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.
> The psychostimulants d-amphetamine (AMPH) and methamphetamine (METH) release excess dopamine (DA) into the synaptic clefts of dopaminergic neurons. Abnormal DA release is thought to occur by reverse transport through the DA transporter (DAT), and it is believed to underlie the severe behavioral effects of these drugs. Here we compare structurally similar AMPH and METH on DAT function in a heterologous expression system and in an animal model. In the in vitro expression system, DAT-mediated whole-cell currents were greater for METH stimulation than for AMPH. At the same voltage and concentration, METH released five times more DA than AMPH and did so at physiological membrane potentials. At maximally effective concentrations, METH released twice as much [Ca2+]i from internal stores compared with AMPH. [Ca2+]i responses to both drugs were independent of membrane voltage but inhibited by DAT antagonists.
Do you intentionally cite way out of date scientific research? What is your background in pharmacology? The simple addition of the methyl group is known to effect absorption and potency.
Maybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.
I don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.
I think the vast majority of people are just astonishingly suggestible. That combined with a dash of main character syndrome and horrid sleep patterns and you’ve got millions driving home from work in the dark, ready to immediately assume that whatever is out their windshield is what they heard about on the radio that morning.
I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.
My brother and I used to take our grandmother to church for Easter mass, and a friend of mine goes once a month with his wife's family, despite all three of us being atheists. I really don't think that 2% is guaranteed to be polling error, as Lizardman's Constant would suggest.
It's a clear planetary majority. There is no consensus about the indoctrination day per se. Not participating is punishable in many regions.
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
I love the notion perpetuated by American god botherers that Marx and Jesus do not occupy the exact same circle in the “economic policies” Venn diagram. Given the low uptake of Marxism in the US (either real or that which is imagined by the US right) I would suggest your hypothesis would have more evidence behind it if you replaced Marxism with current US crony capitalism and rent-seeking behavior.
A free market requires a government that will enforce laws against fraud and force. Government also plays a role in dealing with externalities. A free market is not "completely unregulated".
> Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets
How does that fit in with single payer health care, rent control, universal basic income, calls for wealth taxes, calls to eliminate wealth "inequality", government football stadiums, government deciding who can play on sports teams, government funded TV, Amtrak, government subsidies, government bailouts, "you didn't build that", and, of course, the ever-increasing taxes and catastrophic amounts of spending?
Even well-funded and widely-supported notions, projects, and institutions prove to be mere facades when we demand evidence and verifiable predictability.
So to actually be provocative, I suggest that we set aside theoretical economic constructs and mention the hypothesis of Democracy itself.
Government itself becomes the consensus of the wealthy. And for any lesser hysteria, we can consider the uncomfortable lessons described in "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". [1]
Are you one of those people who think that regular modern capitalist societies with any kind of social safety net or publicly funded healthcare are communism?
Just be careful that “prosperous” is actually the metric you care about and that you have some sane way of measuring said prosperity as it applies to everyone.
For myself as a Canadian, I can see that America is more “prosperous” in the sense that the averages on wealth and income look good, but I’ll take my socialized medicine and higher education thank you very much, not to mention median standard of living numbers.
It's hard to ignore the astounding success of the free market when it's applied.
The immigrants to the US were pretty much people with nothing but a suitcase. With the American free market, the country rose from subsistence farming to superpower. Scores of millions of people were lifted out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.
It's not terrifying.
It's how people are, and it's destressing to me that so few people seem to be aware of it.
No amount of explaining what confirmation bias is will convince people that drones in the sky aren't aliens.
The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.
The fundamental issue with skeptical truth and science is that it is boring in terms of mass market marketing.
Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.
Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.
So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.
Intellectuals have the same blind spots. During COVID (At least the ones I worked with) made fun of the disease when it started spreading and refused to take it seriously, then did a complete 180 when their social circles took it seriously. And then did insane stuff like wipe down their groceries with bleach and obsessively washed their hands long after the science was clear that it spreading through the air.
No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.
I assume this is why this was posted on HN. My first thought when I heard the drone stories was “you’re just noticing them now?” Anyone who has ever spent any time watching the skies knows that there is an amazing variety of things in the sky.
To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name.
I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.
We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last.
Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.
That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
This is like saying you're more likely to fall for scams if you think you're too smart to fall for them.
I don't think it works that way.
I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories.
Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart person both consider themselves smart.
1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.
2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.
People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.
I think it works exactly that way. It's doubt that protects you. If you think you're too smart to fall for it, then you've now got a blind spot that can be exploited.
I’ve heard a different version “believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you read”, variously attributed to Mark Twain, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Douglas Adams.
I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.
Apart from the fact that conspiracies also do exist. Before serious reporting was done, people would've called you a crackpot for talking about half the things that the CIA got up to under Allen Dulles, such as with Operation Gladio, MKUltra, PBSuccess, Propaganda Due, etc., or mass surveillance under the NSA and GCHQ.
Human beings are the most dangerous, potentially-violent, and destructive animal this planet has ever known... and far more dangerous in larger groups. None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out".
This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?"
There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.
> There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives
Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.
And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.
What's the term for when people's attention and outrage is directed by an unreliable third party (let's say a partisan news channel) towards certain issues/threats, and away from other equally (or more) significant issues/threats?
I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas.
For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.
It's always been like that, but now you and many more people have this information available to you and can take it into consideration – arguably you're better off than before :)
the seed oil thing is so funny to me because, like, yeah. also, no.
it's actually true. they cause serious inflammation which aggravates serious downstream health problems. like, you shouldn't be eating seed oils in any large quantity that you would get from regularly eating deep fried foods
oh but wait, eating foods with beef tallow and other saturated fats also causes health problems. except, those problems only show up when you eat large quantities of them, such as if you were regularly eating deep fried foods
so what if it wasn't the seed oils that were the problem for many people, but rather, consuming lots of seed oil - as you might find if you ate a lot of deep fried food?
what if it's not the seed oils that are causing you to get fat and feel like shit all the time? what if it's the quantity of fats that you're consuming? and, what if not eating seed oils is actually an easy an effective way to avoid eating deep fried foods as a second order effect?
that'd be crazy. better just jump on the new fad diet.
I eat a pretty low carb (but not very low/keto!), high protein diet. Lots of vegetables, tofu, and chicken. I eat a head of cauliflower and two heads of cabbage a week. My broccoli bill is off the charts. But I'm also 210 lbs at 17% body fat so maybe my goals are different from most people's.
I usually use seed oils, in very small amounts (to get a pan going). I consume red meats infrequently (just not my favorite thing, idk im weird), but when I do, I totally use the fats from them to cook the rest of the meal.
Anyways, having been eating "clean" for a year, I always feel like shit after eating fried foods. Or maybe, I just notice that I feel it more.
I mean my conclusion is people just plain don't want to eat in moderation, and really don't want to weigh things since it might hold their own habits accountable to them.
If fats are good and carbs are bad, it's the message people want to hear: do not moderate or change your habits, just eat as much as you want of the "good" thing because it's good!
Every ten years or so there's a new batch of evidence that eating a lot of something has some health effects for some folks. Then a minority turns it into a morality cult against the thing and the media picks it up as "you woudn't guess what common food could be killing you"
And then ten years later new evidence for that thing comes out that's like "maybe not so bad after all!" and a new set of backlash morality. These things are politically affiliated now too if they can be depending on who picks up which evidence first.
Each decade people get bored and find something new to be upset about.
"gluten" is definitely way down these days and "seed oils" haven't yet hit their peak.
This was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on flight radar apps that show every commercial flight and which any civilian can access.
But since then we've also had airport shutdowns, incursions over airforce bases, drones in no-fly zones. These are easy to Google:
There's a lot more I could post about, but most importantly Chuck Schumer is trying to get Robin drone radar detectors deployed, and I'm predicting that he's the smart guy in the room who will get us answers.
> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones...
These are the same people who have panic attacks when they think they've been exposed to fentanyl (which usually involves them describing symptoms not consistent with opiate exposure, and mysteriously the officers never seem to test positive for it in the hospital). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8810663/
> pure, liquid, lab-grade fentanyl ... just washes their hands.
Your description is a little hyperbolic! That pubmed paper referenced "10 microgram fentanyl citrate base per ml" approx 0.00001% fentanyl "over a large skin surface area".
American cops pass out when they see a salt crystal thinking it’s fentanyl. Even the ones who didn’t touch it. Pouring a bunch of it in liquid form onto unprotected skin in a lab does nothing. Draw conclusions accordingly.
> The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer.
I think they played this exactly right: Most people will never accept a null result (or something close to it, like "there were a couple of weird drones, but mostly it was people newly looking up at the night sky") or even follow this news story long enough for the actual resolution to matter. The only thing they'll remember was their mayor or governor staying silent when they were scared/angry vs. shouting at the feds to let them shoot down some drones.
> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones:
The only thing we can conclude from this is that the NJ police wasn't able to detect a heat signature, but not whether there really wasn't one.
Governor of Maryland posted a video of Orion's Belt claiming they were drones.
A local news station posted a video of Venus claiming drones.
There's a lot of baloney mixed in to this event.
Chuck Schumer is trying to mollify his constituents. The one thing a politician can never tell his constituents is that they are being morons, even when it's true.
Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?
And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.
The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.
Again, with no proof and likely not real. If there was a crashed drone, you'd imagine that they'd release a photo or something. The reality is that law enforcement officers are just as susceptible to mass hysteria as everyone else.
You can buy satellite pictures of almost anywhere on earth with pretty good definition and so I deduce that the US government with almost 100 StarShield satellites plus who knows how many ones with huge cameras probably can almost livestream any place on earth GTA top view style. So shouldn't be hard to see what it is and where it came from unless cloud cover is bad.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of drones he saw hovering for 45 minutes, and he decried the lack of action and info from the feds. Something must be done!
It was the constellation Orion and some other stars. He literally saw some stars and thought they were drones hovering near his house.
Why shouldn’t I believe that they’re really this dumb?
The funny thing is, in this thread they're all certain the drones are just mass hysteria. In the thread a week ago, there were tons of people certain these drones were just secret USA drones, nothing to worry about. "Almost no chance these are not US military.", "I guarantee it's some local police agency that got them donated by the military.", etc.
Completely incompatible hand-wave theories living side by side, rarely bothering to debate each other or provide anything beyond opinions.
In the context of the fact that, according to TFA, the pits were there all along: you'll really notice how pitted your current windshield is when you go get a new, crystal-clear one. The folks in TFA just skipped the "go get a new one" step, and for the first time took a really hard look at their windshield.
> Some thought that the Navy’s new million-watt radio transmitter at Jim Creek near Arlington was [absurd theory deleted]
There actually is a problem some Washington residents occasionally have from powerful navy transmitters.
Every so often in Bremerton many garage door opener remotes and car keyless entry systems become very unreliable for a few days to a week or two. This generally corresponds to when aircraft carriers visit the Bremerton naval shipyard.
There are often multiple kinds of use allowed on a given radio frequency band. The different allowed uses will be grouped into different priority classes and the general rule is that (1) lower priority uses are not allowed to interfere with higher priority uses, and (2) if a higher priority use interferes with a lower priority use it is up to the later to deal with it (move to another frequency, use better shielding to keep the interference out, etc).
Many garage door remotes and keyless entry systems use frequency bands that overlap with bands used for Navy radar and communications and as you can probably guess the Navy's uses are the higher priority.
So a carrier comes in to the shipyard for maintenance or upgrades, and as part of that they test the radar and communication systems and so for however long that takes you've got ridiculously powerful transmitters blasting out on the frequencies your stuff wants to use.
In 70 years, articles will talk about the strange drone invasion only for it to be discovered that planes and drones were always in the air, but people just never bothered to look up until everyone started talking about it.
Basically a lot of people mistakenly thought something had been damaging their windshields, but it was just regular wear and tear they had never noticed before.
The damage appeared to spread as more people talked about it
The pictures weren't clear to me either, probably because they're pictures of ordinary windshields lol
Good post. It's important to understand that there's really not that much new under the sun and we've never been that great at understanding large social phenomena.
People just don’t want to accept simple, no drama and explanations, even more so if it means they have to accept they are wrong. This is a trait we as a species had all along apparently but manifested much more during covid. I am just amazed we made this much progress cumulatively in which a short time. May be because we let it happen because the growth itself is so fantastic!
The difference these days seems to be that the frequency of the hysterical events has gone up. One every other month, rather than every other year.
What happens to a society that has been desensitized to mass-hysteria, where no single event can evoke a reaction? Is it a horseshoe, where we're so vigilant that nothing fazes us anymore? Do we lose our humanity in the process?
Slippery slope. I posit that there are news items that deserve real cause for concern, but because we're so overwhelmed with information, we throw it into the same "gossip" bucket with the rest of the slop.
A lot of news that positions itself as "you should be concerned about this" seeks to exploit the "always alert ready to respond to an emergency" part of our brains.
In reality almost nothing truly deserves that kind of attention. But since humans are bad at separating important from urgent, news broadcasts will continue to exploit with "24/7 Breaking News".
Few news items ever rise to that level and fewer still deserve immediate attention.
Daily news is merely a first rough draft of history and I'd argue most people would be better off instead reading later drafts - after much of the confusion/gossip/rumor/panic that plagues daily news clears.
Sadly there's not a lot of news sources that limit themselves to writing articles about month+ old well-covered news.
The subreddit /r/njdrones is sooo off the rails right now. It started out as "I think this is a drone, maybe military?" to classifying different drones as energy "orbs" and "mimics" that only look like airplanes when photographed.
What can I say. You refuse to engage with evidence in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405429 that the phenomenon might in fact be real, so you fall into the quite predictable conclusion that all of it is hysteria.
It's probably regular airplanes, stars, and Venus, and now, I assume civilian drones. Once people started claiming drones, other people who never bothered to look in to the sky started seeing lights they didn't understand (planes, stars, planets) because they never bothered to study the night sky in even a basic way, and they are suggestible. Then people probably started flying their own drones to do investigation + prank people.
+ StarLinks or other low orbit satellites and space stations. In 2014, when Russian invasion started in Ukraine, we had so many reports from folks about drones in the sky about ISS or Venus. I saw this myself when I was at Chongar, near to Russian occupied Crimea: my comrades pointed to bright Venus in the night sky and said that it can be a Russian drone. I dismissed the claim by pointing out that army doesn't turn lights on when on mission.
As the story reads this isn't really a mass delusion - people read about pits in windshields, people examined their windshields, people saw pits in their windshields. If it was about the "Jersey Devil" and people started claiming to have spotted the "Jersey Devil", now that would be a delusion.
The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
Since we all know what this is actually commenting on, I'll answer that directly. The noise on the UFO topic has reached a massed hysteria pitch. When that happens, the overall signal to noise ratio of internet sourced sightings goes from "very poor" to "nearly invisible." I blame a lot of that on the recent congressional hearings bringing stories to the public's front of mind.
But. And I think its a very very important but, these sightings of phenomena go back decades, and just because the public at large is not a reliable reporter, does mean there are not many, many kernels of truth of an unexplained, repeated phenomena.
And otherwise you can always, always be skeptical, but at what point does skepticism stretch into denial?
^ maybe those are targeting flares, and thats why they're dripping, but if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
^ maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? (so, so many orb videos to repeat this logic with, you get the idea.)
If you're interested in finding more, you need to get very used to seeing lots of balloons, planes, commercial drones, planets, stars, satellites, flares, skydivers, lens flare, insects and birds and there's common examples of all of them. The ones we should be interested in are usually uniformly luminous, follow non linear flight paths, exhibit extraordinary acceleration (for which you need size to estimate distance which is tough with only one camera), and/or exhibit extraordinary altitude. Whether they're controlled by a non-human intelligence or some government, they do exist and are super interesting to watch. You're just gonna have to wade through an absolute mountain of bullshit.
> maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax?
Asked and answered. We live in a world where "flashlight enthusiast" is a real niche thing; "bright drone" is not an implausible thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/
And what I'm saying is I understand that perspective. I think you can do that song and dance going back 80 years. You can watch all these people, all these witnesses, all these videos and pictures (and a complete and stunning absence of military radar data) and you can explain to them, each and every single one of them how they're wrong, how its swamp gas reflected off Venus, and in each individual case you might be right. When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.
But that doesn't match my experience, of pilots, of lifetime military officers, of people as a whole, that they're all incompetent or crazy or hoaxers. At some point I think that level of myopic-skepticism moves towards the absurd and cannot be maintained any longer.
Each of the videos you linked to have extremely plausible, fairly mundane explanations other than "aliens". That fits the pattern. That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.
> When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.
The corollary here is the unfortunate fact that as soon as everyone got a camera in their pocket, aliens stopped landing in random cornfields to say hi to lonely farmers.
> That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.
That I post here a few easily accessible videos of interest on what is an enormous history that I have spent the past few years reading about tells me more about the lack of respect you immediately have for anyone on the topic.
> to lonely farmers.
That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
I think the thing watching the UFO topic has taught more more than any other is how aggressively and reflexively people of all levels of intelligence will hug their worldview.
Respect is earned. If I claim to be able to fly, and send you several links to me flying that are easily explicable, conclusions can be drawn.
> That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
The 1940s military had a hell of a lot of former farmers in it. The days of fighter pilots needing college degrees came in the 70s/80s; Chuck Yeager was a farm (!) kid who became a mechanic with the war.
That the UFO hysteria coincides with the rise of commercial air travel is both known to me and entirely unsurprising, and no more compelling to me than witch hysteria in the 1600s, which often came with similarly compelling witness testimony.
1. Most people will never believe in UFOs until they see one for themselves in an unambiguous way or hear a report from someone in person that they believe is credible. There is too much stigma around this topic.
2. There is a very large amount, probably 1000s records, of credible and consistent evidence out there. However 99% of it is circumstantial and will never be viewed by the public at large.
3. The military, after years of reporting and chasing, can’t be bothered investigating anymore. This seems to be cyclical.
4. A culture/civilization/whatever that has these kind of technologies would have immense power if they wanted it. It’s just too terrifying to believe in, especially if we don’t know what they want.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting?
I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
It's also clear that some more recent reports are trolls flying their Costco drones around. Amazingly, as documented on the news and YouTube, there are now people flying their personal drones at night in an effort to find and follow the 'original' drones (!) I assume they are now all following each other around, creating new reports of "Mysterious Drone Swarm Sighted". :-)
Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft.
Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
Even 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more.
And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights.
Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
The problem is that too many people don't know what 'normal' is and nobody can pay attention to everything all of the time. When attention is drawn to something, and without the ability to judge if something is unusual, the inclination is to believe that noticing for the first time is the same as occurring for the first time.
There is a BBC Radio program called More or Less, which covers analysis of statistics in the media. They have a motto "Is that a big number?" which is a great starting point for any investigation, essentially asking if the observation is what you would expect if nothing newsworthy were occurring. It's worth keeping that idea floating in your head.
Most people don't know what airplanes really look like or what lights they have on them. To most people, any flying object is unidentified and any aerial phenomenon is unexplained. We use pennies more regularly than we see airplanes, but how many can pick the right penny from this lineup? https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorial...
It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news outlets, the government as a whole and even specific senators/ex governors, fan the flames of conspiracy instead of common sense.
Not to mention, videos of "drones" are hot right now and get a lot of traffic, so if you can convince yourself that the lights you see in the sky above the airport are drones, you too can get some of those eyeballs
To me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse.
It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.
But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.
Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary.
I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night.
Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c.
> (seemed a few hundred feet up at most)
At night you have absolutely no way to tell
> And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
> Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
> People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way
It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
> 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks
A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones.
> At night you have absolutely no way to tell
I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of course that’s extremely rough unless you know the size of the aircraft.
> My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
I know, I never claimed it was aliens or a Chinese super weapon, I claimed they were drones. It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
> That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
That certainly occurs, what I meant is more that I felt an odd sensation having the news cycle and what I observed collide, in the sense that it didn’t feel quite real. I would normally notice at an aircraft that appeared to be as close as it was, and I would definitely pay more attention to it when I noticed the lights and movement pattern, regardless of the news cycle. It actually took me a second to connect the two.
People in LA freaking out because they saw the Milky Way is normal, people noticed something new and reacted to it. I would wager that more people responded with awe than with freaking out, but they weren’t as interesting to the media. Regardless of whether they were freaked out or not (and I wasn’t freaked out so much as it was freaky), they still saw something real.
You absolutely cannot determine the size, distance, altitude, or speed of an unknown object in the sky at any significant distance. It’s not even rough, it’s completely impossible. You can determine the ratios of those quantities, but the best you can do is come up with a wide minimum and maximum of, let’s say, 500ft to 50 miles of distance (more if it’s just one light).
If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
An unlit one or one with blinking or few lights, sure. This had four constantly illuminated nav lights, and I was in a car so I was able to see the parallax relative to the clouds. I couldn’t tell if it was 500 feet or a mile, but I could tell that it was either close enough to be audible, or many times bigger than the largest jetliners.
> If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
> I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.
Neither am I, but I am confident it was a drone. Does “given all the rest” mean I wrote so much I have to be crazy, or do you actually have an explanation that better fits what I saw? Given the light configuration I don’t see how it could be a plane. And helicopters make a very distinctive noise. Maybe I saw a military helicopter, but at that point drones seem more likely.
I am interested in alternative proposals that take into account everything I observed. Less so in single-point criticisms coming from the assumption that there’s nothing to see so I must be deluded if I think I saw something.
Nobody can explain what you saw because they didn't see it with you. Your vision is interpreted by your brain and memories are reinforced by whatever narrative you produce when you recollect them each time and grow stronger into that narrative. It will always have been a drone to you, no matter what anyone can say about why it probably wasn't.
I am not discounting what you saw and have no particular reason to doubt you, but human psychology operates in a way that is not conducive to being proven wrong about such things. Take that as you will.
All true. Although I meant all the observations I’ve noted here - namely the light pattern coupled with not being far enough to be silent if a plane (sure distance is extremely iffy at night but one can tell if a plane is six miles up or one without needing to know it’s exact size).
You’re right that my interpretation in the end will be heavily influenced by my expectations, but unless I completely hallucinated the light pattern or gained temporary telescopic vision such that I saw each nav light separated by multiple visual-field-feet (if that makes any sense) on a plane at cruising altitude, I just can’t think of any explanation that fits better than drone.
> It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
Well almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting, the case is all circumstantial. But I say that both because of a Reddit post that makes a strong case that at least some portion of sightings are a specific model of navy drone, and more so because their being military is the only situation where the government response makes sense to me.
If they were an enemy’s, one would expect them to be shot down. If they were an ally’s, they would need a damn good reason to be here and an even better reason why people can’t know. Maybe they’re a private citizen’s, but I struggle to imagine why a private entity would have a fleet of large drones that they covertly deploy along the coasts, and why our government would abide that. So as I see it, the two options that make sense are that they’re an enemy’s that we can’t shoot down for some terrifying reason, or they’re ours.
> I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
That’s exactly what you would expect from a regular airplane though. You can’t accurately differentiate „low and slow“ vs „high and fast“ at night. And quiet operation is what high flying planes seem to do regularly.
You can gauge rough distance/height pretty well by the angles and relative distances between the nav lights. If it is was high enough to be silent, it was at least 10x the size of a 747.
You can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed, which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.
I’m aware of that, and I tried to think that was what was happening. But the motion apart from speed was nothing like a typical plane, and the other factors led me to conclude it was a drone. When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.
> When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.
What? How do you get from a specific kind of lighting to „trans-wing drone“? What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
> What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
You’re right that I’m making a leap with the trans-wing part. I said that because it’s my understanding that some of the sightings have included airfoil and transforming drones, that a trans-wing drone would exhibit the light pattern I saw, and that the military (Navy I believe) does own trans-wing drones that match other the descriptions of other sightings. So to me the lights were the final nail that this wasn’t a plane, but I held on to it being a plane for a while.
> If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
So the FAA prevents me from using the scheme you described, but the drones you think you observed are exempt?
I still don’t see how you can draw any conclusion from the lighting, unless the lighting you saw is only permitted for a specific class of object.
I’m kind of baffled how incredulous the response to this comment has been.
Do people think there are 0 drones out at night? Is it that hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that someone actually saw one?
I understand that many are misinterpreting. Official statements make it clear that at some are not. The criticism of my account boils down to “you can’t tell how far something is at night” tata-isms, but you can to a very limited extent - whether it is at an altitude where it would be audible, or not. Similarly, you can observe how quickly it moves from overhead to the horizon. It’s difficult to tell close from far, but it’s trivial to tell far from really far.
Regardless, I was able to see it from both the side and behind, and the latter view showed an aircraft with two red lights on the outside, and two green ones on the inside. It was not an FAA-approved plane, and it was not a civilian helicopter (no noise). At this point, the other possible explanations are less likely than it being a drone.
The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.
It might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment.
A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.
The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion. A not yet explained phenomenon or even something as far fetched as "aliens" would have been a more comforting answer than "essentially we can all start losing our mind at once, and it takes very little to trigger it".
I think that people, on the whole, vastly underestimate the degree to which humans are animals.
I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it. History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
This applies to you too, reader. Many would read the above and fully agree with it, but fail to apply it to themselves and the groups they identify with. It is even more important to critically consider your own beliefs than the beliefs of others.
Arguably its because in many cases mass delusion is adaptive - it organizes and simplifies how groups of people behave. Religion is a cultural mass delusion (don't worry, I'm not talking about YOUR religion, just the other ones) with significant adaptive qualities, people argue.
Even more broadly, rationality and empiricism are extremely powerful tools for understanding the world, but they are also extremely difficult and costly to use, to say nothing of their known limitations at tackling complex systems. People have to and do believe stuff just to get through their day. I think this only becomes disturbing when its just one part of the culture which decides to believe some other complex of ideas than the mainstream one.
I've undergone psychiatric care for things not related to psychosis. As for psychosis, I am mentally healthy.
As a child I was obsessed with math. I had a pseudo-religious obsession with Platonism, connected with my childhood fear of mortality. A bizarre belief system.
While trying to make new friends in a new city, I was shunned from a new group for unknown reasons. I was going through a breakup from an abuser. I was depressed and grasping for explanations, thinking I was being conspired against. A persecution complex.
Lack of information and strong emotion are enough.
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly when we have so much history we are taught that demonstrates it.
It is the tendency to think that people in the past were dumb, and we aren't. Like, there always has to be some explanation involved when we learn that people did something unintuitive in the past -- people learned how to make beer by accidentally leaving leftover bread in liquid and then drank it when they were starving. Maybe? Or maybe they figured out that things ferment and played with it until it worked, like we would have done it? Why does it always have to be an accident?
People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
> People may have had less access to information and technology, but that didn't make them any dumber than we are now.
There's probably an aspect to people confusing "knowledge" with "brainpower". People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
We have the advantage of Millenia of stuff figured out and documented. So we know on average more about how the universe works than people in the distant past.
I’d say it: we know that some people currently know more, but, the average person mostly knows something about what is known, rather than knowing it directly.
> People in the past were just as good at figuring stuff out as we are today.
I seriously doubt that. My experience in college was not to learn facts and formulae, but to learn how to learn. I.e. training the mind.
It's similar to athletes. The worst Olympic athlete today would blow away the best from a century ago. That's not because people are inherently stronger today, but because we know how to train much better.
But again, that is access to knowledge. How good would your college education have been if there was no library or textbooks?
If you took the athletes today without their support team and sent them back in time two years before an Olympics event to compete on their own, I don't think it would be as big of a blowout as you suggest.
Interesting that you mention textbooks. Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.
BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
Kind of makes you wonder if there are other epistemological generators even more powerful than science waiting to be discovered.
> Most of my STEM classes in college did not have a textbook, or recommended a book that was kinda irrelevant to the direction the classes took.
So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
> BTW, the discovery of the Scientific Method was a great leap forward in how to discover more knowledge.
The scientific method is a set of protocols that are followed in order to formalize evidence and prediction. Putting it into a set of words is important, but not required. Humans managed to sail across oceans and build wonders just fine without it.
> So you went through classes with no written material? You listened to lecture, took notes, and then did assignments and passed tests with no documents to study?
That's right.
I learned to never miss a lecture, and take copious notes. I also never missed a retch session. And still sometimes I needed help from a patient classmate.
The fun thing about the notes was when reviewing them, I'd recall the verbal part of the lecture. This helped a great deal.
Sadly, the passage of decades has silenced that voice, and I have a hard time understanding the notes today. I've wished many times I'd have had the foresight to bring a cassette recorder to lecture and record them. Too bad all those lectures are lost to time. But nobody recorded lectures in those days, and it never occurred to me.
Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method but it was slow and kind of random. If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
> Humans made gradual progress before the scientific method
When was 'before the scientific method' exactly?
> it was slow and kind of random.
I would argue it wasn't random at all -- it was directed towards human needs and desires as appropriate to the times. There was never a period where humans stopped using their intelligence and problem solving skills to improve their lives in whatever ways were available.
> If you look at the historical pace of innovation it tremendously accelerated after the scientific method became widespread.
When did it become widespread? Where did it spread to? Did those places all show a similar increase in innovation in the years after?
It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference.
But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10
> even with 1920s equipment
Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?
Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR.
The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.
With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.
> Why does it always have to be an accident?
Because that's a surprisingly common way for things to be discovered.
Saccharine? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
Aspartame? Somebody working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and discovered it was sweet.
I think this is true of basically every major artificial sweetener except invert sugar.
Same as the famous discovery of Penicillin in a petri dish contaminated with a mold that killed off the bacteria?
...but now I'm starting to wonder how many people working in a lab didn't clean their hands well, licked their fingers, and died, because they had accidentally discovered a toxin?
Except it happened to be in a petri dish and it happened to be observed at the time by a scientist. Total accident!
Serendipity favours the prepared mind. That's all.
Initial technological progress was agonizingly slow. Presuming that man then was just as smart as today, why would that be so?
I suspect it is because the thought of what might be possible just never entered their minds.
For example, Edison invented the idea of the invention development laboratory. Very, very recently. The Wright Bros were the first to come up with the idea of a research and development laboratory - just over a century ago.
More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves. Agriculture, animal husbandry, arts, warfare, engineering were all very sophisticated, limited by the materials science available (firearms, for instance, need very strong metals not to explode).
The scientists that existed before the industrial age in the West were upper class, bored and educated men who did it for their own amusement.
It wasn't until the abandonment of the economic system which worked on the assumption that international economics was zero sum and capitalism (and imperialism) took hold that the incentive structure for creating novel technologies could exist.
This is all recollection based on various histories I have consumed and may not be entirely correct, but I'm pretty sure the idea is solid.
> More likely it was because the systems didn't exist that incentivized figuring out solutions to the problems which technology solves.
That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The evolution of guns is an interesting topic. So is the evolution of sailing ships. The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
You might want to investigate James Burke's "Connections" book and series. It's an entertaining overview of the history of invention.
I am tickled by a theory I heard that a lot of ancient creativity went into preventing change. Like that's the original value of creativity, maintaining stability by stopping other people from innovating.
I've heard that, too. Innovation happened in societies that had a much more flexible social structure.
> That is partially true. There is no incentive, for example, for slaves to make any improvements. I cannot think of any technology developed by slaves. That meant the few people in power were not enough to think of much new stuff.
You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it. I am sure all sorts of useful things have been invented by slaves, but if you yourself are property I don't know how you expect credit for your intellectual property.
> You could say free markets were the greatest invention, because it incentivized everyone to be a creator.
The free markets are about efficient allocation and exploitation of resources. People are incentivized to create things that help with that. The byproduct of such efficiency is free time and access to those resources.
> The latter occurred over thousands of years. Very very slow!
Well, it isn't exactly easy to invent a lightbulb when you don't have access to vacuum pumps, transparent glass, filaments, and electric generators. I'm sure if you had a hunk of ore and a hearth you would be making machined parts within a fortnight but our ancestors had to wait for crucial inventions and materials science advances before they move from sails to steam.
> You can't think of any technology developed by slaves because they wouldn't get credit for it.
Can you think of any in the US Confederacy? Any at all? The cotton gin comes to mind, but that was invented by Eli Whitney in the north.
Can you imagine this?
slave: "Boss, how about if we do it this way, we can be more productive?"
boss: "shut up and do what I told you to."
Slaves had every incentive to do as little as possible, not improve production.
If you can't come up with a scenario where a slave would improve their life by innovating the tools and objects they had available to them, or a scenario in which a master is not a one dimensional caricature, or a scenario where a slave is not a stupid pack animal that can only follow orders, then the burden is not on history to convince you otherwise.
thinking about lizard with lizard brain hard
> I don’t understand how people underestimate it so badly
... explained by(?)
> History makes it abundantly clear that it is a regular occurrence for large groups of people to collectively believe things for which there is little evidence, and furthermore, to take extreme actions based on such beliefs.
The counter delusion is a built in emergent property of the system.
We have just gone through the most massive event in this category in the lifetime of most people alive today, and the next such event is quite openly being planned for execution.
Each and every one of us knows very well by now how we reacted to mass psychological movements and how we will react to the next one, which is of course the next great war.
What? What great war did we all live through and what's being openly planned? I feel like either you're being dramatic or I'm waaaayyyyy more out of touch than I thought I was.
Both are possible, so I need some clarification.
We went through covid, just a couple of years ago. Each of us know how we reacted and how we behaved. The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides. European and Russian media has reached a war frenzy that probably hasn't been seen since WWI.
The great war between Russia and NATO is being openly planned right now, by both sides.
I don't see any basis for this view. There are indications that the two sides may be sleepwalking towards a great conflict. But neither side is specifically intending to start or escalate towards such a conflict.
Today from Russian media: "All NATO decision-makers from countries that provided military assistance to Bandera Ukraine are participating in a hybrid or conventional war against Russia… All these individuals can and should be considered legitimate military targets for the Russian state,” Medvedev said"
Every media outlet in Nordic countries talk about a Russia-NATO war within the near future or whether Russia and NATO already are at war. NATO leaders are publicly asking for more defense spending to combat Russia. If you read Nordic message boards, most users are cheerfully looking forward to "winning a war against Ruzzia", and I don't doubt that the same idiotic attitudes are found among the Russians as well.
There is talk about necessary defensive preparations for a larger conflict. The primary goal of which is to deter such a conflict from starting in the first place.
But that is not the same as saying that "war is being planned". The latter implies an actual intent/desire to start a war, the former does not.
Today from Russian media: "Bandera Ukraine, blah, blah"
That phrase on its own should indicate that what you are reading is pure verbal flatulence. The speaker in this case (Medvedev) should be another strong indication.
If you read Nordic message boards, most users are ...
I was referring to actual reality (i.e. what decision makers at the state level are planning). Not what randos on the message boardz are saying.
All I can say is that I regret taking your previous comment in good faith. I wasted my time.
There's no bad intent. I just don't think you're reading the tea leaves right.
It took me around 20 years to kind of key into that, but then it took almost another 20 for it to properly click.
I find it pretty hard to get on the same wavelength as most people about it. A lot of us feel distinctly human as opposed to, I don’t know, like a smooth ape that is neurotic enough to develop space travel.
I’m half joking. I’ve found the revelation made me love animals a lot more than I had. It brings a sense of unity to my life. Dogs really are family, birds are not nearly as different from us as they seem, and even creatures like fish or squid share remarkable traits with us. These fundamental aspects of being animals.
I really enjoy it. I think it’s a great thing to contemplate and embrace.
Although there is one part of my brain which tells me I and other people are rational beings, my own behavior tells me otherwise. Why else would I eat a candy when I rationally know I don’t need it?
For people interested, I can highly recommend Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. It tells many interesting stories about social interactions between apes that look surprisingly human. By the way, did you know that apes pick their nose, just like humans?
Watching animals have familiar interactions and experiences is kind of amazing. I know we can’t know their experiences without empirical evidence, but as you mentioned, apes do a great job of providing some of that evidence. We are way more alike than I would have assumed before I was exposed to this stuff.
I believe this extends to all kinds of species besides apes (especially mammals, but others as well), and there’s certainly compelling evidence of sentience in places we wouldn’t have thought to find it, but there’s still plenty of research to be done before we can draw conclusions.
because candy is to carbohydrates what meth is to adderall :)
meth vs adderall is more about dosage. If for some reason you decided to consume massive amounts of adderall the same way crazy homeless people consume meth (1000mg instead of 30mg), you could get addicted to it. Pretty much nobody does this with adderall, but the theory is solid. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/drug-users-use-a-lot-of-dru...
> Despite the repeated claims of METH being more addictive or preferred than AMPH, proven differences between METH and AMPH in addiction liability and in reward efficacy have evaded researchers. Animals self-administer METH and AMPH at comparable rates (Balster and Schuster 1973) and humans prefer similar doses (Martin et al. 1971). Also, neither humans nor animals discriminate between equal doses of METH and AMPH (Huang and Ho 1974; Kuhn et al. 1974; Lamb and Henningfield 1994). Furthermore, while METH is commonly believed to be a more potent central psychostimulant than AMPH, no direct comparison on the potency of the two drugs to stimulate central processes have been verified. In addition, no previous study has directly compared the acute effects of the two drugs on locomotor activity, an important central process that contributes tothe definition of psychostimulant. Moreover, there are no known neurobiological differences in action between METH and AMPH that would account for the putatively greater addictive, rewarding, or psychomotor properties of METH.
> The psychostimulants d-amphetamine (AMPH) and methamphetamine (METH) release excess dopamine (DA) into the synaptic clefts of dopaminergic neurons. Abnormal DA release is thought to occur by reverse transport through the DA transporter (DAT), and it is believed to underlie the severe behavioral effects of these drugs. Here we compare structurally similar AMPH and METH on DAT function in a heterologous expression system and in an animal model. In the in vitro expression system, DAT-mediated whole-cell currents were greater for METH stimulation than for AMPH. At the same voltage and concentration, METH released five times more DA than AMPH and did so at physiological membrane potentials. At maximally effective concentrations, METH released twice as much [Ca2+]i from internal stores compared with AMPH. [Ca2+]i responses to both drugs were independent of membrane voltage but inhibited by DAT antagonists.
Do you intentionally cite way out of date scientific research? What is your background in pharmacology? The simple addition of the methyl group is known to effect absorption and potency.
Maybe I'm more optimistic. Is it our animal nature? Or is it that science is hard, and most people don't have enough formal education in the relevant subjects to know they're out of their depth, let alone to understand these things.
I don’t take issue with the point of your last sentence, but rather the framing that “animal” is somehow a negative thing. Humans are animals, there’s no separate animal nature. We are animals, full stop. The scientific method is a skill we have developed to be more objective about complicated phenomena. Depth of knowledge and education certainly help an individual reason more carefully about cause and effect in various domains, but scientists and other highly educated people share the same set of biological behaviors as everyone else.
What separates men from animals is men have honor.
Some men have honor. FTFY
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Right back at you.
Especially in the first couple of nursing home outbreaks where the entire patient populace died within a few weeks.
There's a word for it: anthropocentrism. And another apt aphorism: arrogance.
I think the vast majority of people are just astonishingly suggestible. That combined with a dash of main character syndrome and horrid sleep patterns and you’ve got millions driving home from work in the dark, ready to immediately assume that whatever is out their windshield is what they heard about on the radio that morning.
The majority of people (in the US, at least) spend half a day a week being taught to believe in magic. From birth. Usually on Sunday.
It’s down to 30% in the US; it was over 40% twenty years ago:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...
Wow, today I learned.
I'm gratified to see that the lizardman coefficient is consistent. In the chart, 2% of "None/Atheist/Agnostic" apparently attends religious services every week.
My brother and I used to take our grandmother to church for Easter mass, and a friend of mine goes once a month with his wife's family, despite all three of us being atheists. I really don't think that 2% is guaranteed to be polling error, as Lizardman's Constant would suggest.
I know of people who go to church for social reasons, but are complete non-believers.
It's a clear planetary majority. There is no consensus about the indoctrination day per se. Not participating is punishable in many regions.
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
"The five largest religious groups by world population, estimated to account for 5.8 billion people and 84% of the population, are Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism (with the relative numbers for Buddhism and Hinduism dependent on the extent of syncretism), and traditional folk religions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion#Demographic_classific...
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I love the notion perpetuated by American god botherers that Marx and Jesus do not occupy the exact same circle in the “economic policies” Venn diagram. Given the low uptake of Marxism in the US (either real or that which is imagined by the US right) I would suggest your hypothesis would have more evidence behind it if you replaced Marxism with current US crony capitalism and rent-seeking behavior.
Hey criticizing this is heresy on hn!
I know. Being in favor of free markets isn't popular.
Its not about economics (at least on the surface) but a belief system that has transformed into a religion even when most won't admit or realize it.
This is such a lazy take Walter. Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets, just not completely unregulated ones.
A free market requires a government that will enforce laws against fraud and force. Government also plays a role in dealing with externalities. A free market is not "completely unregulated".
> Almost literally everyone here is in favour of free markets
How does that fit in with single payer health care, rent control, universal basic income, calls for wealth taxes, calls to eliminate wealth "inequality", government football stadiums, government deciding who can play on sports teams, government funded TV, Amtrak, government subsidies, government bailouts, "you didn't build that", and, of course, the ever-increasing taxes and catastrophic amounts of spending?
Universal basic income is about replacing government health care with free markets.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religi...
Even well-funded and widely-supported notions, projects, and institutions prove to be mere facades when we demand evidence and verifiable predictability.
So to actually be provocative, I suggest that we set aside theoretical economic constructs and mention the hypothesis of Democracy itself.
Government itself becomes the consensus of the wealthy. And for any lesser hysteria, we can consider the uncomfortable lessons described in "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". [1]
[1] _ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
Are you one of those people who think that regular modern capitalist societies with any kind of social safety net or publicly funded healthcare are communism?
There's a continuum between free markets and communism. It's not either-or.
But the more to the left the economy goes, the less prosperous it is, and there is a point when it comes unglued.
Just be careful that “prosperous” is actually the metric you care about and that you have some sane way of measuring said prosperity as it applies to everyone.
For myself as a Canadian, I can see that America is more “prosperous” in the sense that the averages on wealth and income look good, but I’ll take my socialized medicine and higher education thank you very much, not to mention median standard of living numbers.
It's hard to ignore the astounding success of the free market when it's applied.
The immigrants to the US were pretty much people with nothing but a suitcase. With the American free market, the country rose from subsistence farming to superpower. Scores of millions of people were lifted out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.
It's not terrifying. It's how people are, and it's destressing to me that so few people seem to be aware of it. No amount of explaining what confirmation bias is will convince people that drones in the sky aren't aliens.
The people who have looked behind the curtain and come to this realization about people and their behavior tend to be the ones who make the skeptic community, so we have that going for us at least.
The fundamental issue with skeptical truth and science is that it is boring in terms of mass market marketing.
Combined with the inherent anti intellectual bias of most of America inherited from the nerd hatred of us high schools, reality has no chance against fantasy.
Look at how newspapers treat science. Findings are held up like a freak zoo of "look at what the weirdo science nerds are saying now" as they sensationalize and warp things in the desperate need for clickbait.
So combine pseudoreality rules of media with pseudoreality of finance and economics, and the pseudoreality of politics, and reality simple doesn't have a chance.
Intellectuals have the same blind spots. During COVID (At least the ones I worked with) made fun of the disease when it started spreading and refused to take it seriously, then did a complete 180 when their social circles took it seriously. And then did insane stuff like wipe down their groceries with bleach and obsessively washed their hands long after the science was clear that it spreading through the air.
No amount of intelligence will protect you from confirmation bias, authority bias, social proof, and the numerous other vulnerabilities we all have built in. Actually intellectuals are more vulnerable, since intelligent people tend to have a cognitive bias where they over-estimate their expertise in unrelated fields to their own.
COVID is easily spread via air, but like most diseases that are spread that way, is also easily spread via surface contamination. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10531613/#:~:text=V....]
Speaking of blind spots.
It's all just memes?
Always has been.
All the way down.
It’s been fascinating to watch this play out with the drone stories in NJ too. Despite all our amazing tech, we still can’t tell truth from fiction.
I assume this is why this was posted on HN. My first thought when I heard the drone stories was “you’re just noticing them now?” Anyone who has ever spent any time watching the skies knows that there is an amazing variety of things in the sky.
To be honest I am kind of surprised that the current hysteria revolves around something plausible (foreign drones) given that past hysteria has been about the totally implausible (alien UFOs… or angels… or whatever).
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion.
And this is why "conspiracy" theories exist. I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories, as I fee that is a more accurate name.
I am do not intend to pass judgement on this commentor or on people who believe in these theories; in fact, I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.
We are truly living in an age of narrative; it's not the first and it won't be the last.
Book recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
> I prefer to call them Low Information High Satisfaction theories
If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
Ooh, I like that.
However, I think the original thinking behind the term "meme" is probably still the definitive discourse on the subject: in analogy to genes, ideas undergo natural selection for survival/reproduction and the attributes that promote this specific kind of fitness (ease of spread, satisfaction, advantage obtained by spreading) will be selected for in the course of social interaction. Qualities we might like to encourage (accuracy, completeness) will not be selected for except insofar as we can connect them back to the actual selection mechanism.
That said, "meme" really doesn't quite put as sharp of a point on the problem as "LIES."
I was about to recommend "Satisfaction High, Information Tenuous"
I like it.
Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying
Stories Pushing Imaginary Nonsence
I found it funny that your phrase: Low Information High Satisfaction > L.I.H.S. is a homonym with "lies".
Great phrase btw
This is like saying you're more likely to fall for scams if you think you're too smart to fall for them.
I don't think it works that way.
I wouldn't use the word smart to describe the people (that I know) that fall for scams/conspiracy theories.
Now, you could say that they incorrectly think they're to smart, but then that means how smart you consider yourself isn't relevant, i.e. a not-smart person and a smart person both consider themselves smart.
It...does work that. Unfortunately.
Scams rely on two things:
1. Over-confidence. The often (but not always) target the elderly because the elderly have pride that comes with long living. When you think you've seen it all, you think you know it all.
2. Emotional irrationality. The scammer is expert at quickly putting a person in an emotionally agitated state, negating good rational thinking. This is easier to do when pride creates a blind spot to catch someone off guard.
People fall for scams not because they are stupid, but because they are humans which tend to be easy to manipulate by playing our cognitive biased and emotions against us. Scamming is both an art and an industry as a result.
I think it works exactly that way. It's doubt that protects you. If you think you're too smart to fall for it, then you've now got a blind spot that can be exploited.
Assurance makes you a sucker.
I was always down with Edgar Allan: “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see”
But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.
I’ve heard a different version “believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you read”, variously attributed to Mark Twain, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Douglas Adams.
I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.
> I think that if you tell yourself "I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories", you are making yourself MORE likely to fall into one.
That's what they want you to think.
Apart from the fact that conspiracies also do exist. Before serious reporting was done, people would've called you a crackpot for talking about half the things that the CIA got up to under Allen Dulles, such as with Operation Gladio, MKUltra, PBSuccess, Propaganda Due, etc., or mass surveillance under the NSA and GCHQ.
It's the same reflex: the desire to apply a simple theory with apparent explanatory power.
Yeah I do agree with that.
I am too smart to believe in conspiracy theories. (And I'm not even particularly smart.)
> The conclusion is terrifying in my opinion.
Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.
Human beings are the most dangerous, potentially-violent, and destructive animal this planet has ever known... and far more dangerous in larger groups. None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I dunno, "collective delusion" sounds worse than a simpler "we weren't paying attention to the Thing, then media/memes sprung up and made us pay attention and we freaked out".
This happens all the time in our current media landscape. "Yeah health insurance denies claims sometimes, that's normal" to "wait actually health insurance denies claims routinely to increase its profits!?"
There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives. It's exhausting to freak out about all the things that deserve to be freaked out about.
> There are tons of things that we decide to ignore to go on with our lives
Absolutely, we all need to filter the overwhelming amount of information we're faced with. The part that seems terrifying is that occasionally our filters can line up in such a way as to pick up what's just pure noise and escalate it into an enormous positive feedback loop.
And of course there's a whole discussion about how those filters are shaped (by the media we consume, authorities we decide to trust, direct experience) and how that's changed over time.
We already have a more neutral term than "collective delusion"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias
What's the term for when people's attention and outrage is directed by an unreliable third party (let's say a partisan news channel) towards certain issues/threats, and away from other equally (or more) significant issues/threats?
I'm not talking about editorial bias. I'm talking about deliberately manipulating audience attention in order to control the perception of reality. Another way of putting it is to create a framework for rejecting or distracting from 'disagreeable' ideas.
For example, a partisan news organization might highlight the purported cultural and economic threat posed by immigration. Since people have a limited budget for their attention, having their attention and outrage focused on immigration might distract from other issues such as rising inequality.
Curation? Programming? Editorial discretion?
Propaganda? Two Minutes Hate?
Moral panic?
Maybe not all of us, but enough + the media indulging it.
It's always been like that, but now you and many more people have this information available to you and can take it into consideration – arguably you're better off than before :)
Why do you think introverts are the way they are?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 there's a lot of conflicting stories, but mass hallucinations and insanity are not an abnormal thing in history (unfortunately)
Welcome to the human race, we’re the scariest thing around
Drones over NJ, anyone? Communism scares in the 60s, Witch trials, etc
just like fear for seed oils.
the seed oil thing is so funny to me because, like, yeah. also, no.
it's actually true. they cause serious inflammation which aggravates serious downstream health problems. like, you shouldn't be eating seed oils in any large quantity that you would get from regularly eating deep fried foods
oh but wait, eating foods with beef tallow and other saturated fats also causes health problems. except, those problems only show up when you eat large quantities of them, such as if you were regularly eating deep fried foods
so what if it wasn't the seed oils that were the problem for many people, but rather, consuming lots of seed oil - as you might find if you ate a lot of deep fried food?
what if it's not the seed oils that are causing you to get fat and feel like shit all the time? what if it's the quantity of fats that you're consuming? and, what if not eating seed oils is actually an easy an effective way to avoid eating deep fried foods as a second order effect?
that'd be crazy. better just jump on the new fad diet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmY-VYUeAuc
lol!
I remember last year when fats were "good" and carbs were "bad", good times.
I mean, it could all be a psy-op by the animal agriculture lobby to get people to eat even more meat and less veggies.
brb frying broccoli and noodles
I eat a pretty low carb (but not very low/keto!), high protein diet. Lots of vegetables, tofu, and chicken. I eat a head of cauliflower and two heads of cabbage a week. My broccoli bill is off the charts. But I'm also 210 lbs at 17% body fat so maybe my goals are different from most people's.
I usually use seed oils, in very small amounts (to get a pan going). I consume red meats infrequently (just not my favorite thing, idk im weird), but when I do, I totally use the fats from them to cook the rest of the meal.
Anyways, having been eating "clean" for a year, I always feel like shit after eating fried foods. Or maybe, I just notice that I feel it more.
> high protein diet...I eat a head of cauliflower and two heads of cabbage a week. My broccoli bill is off the charts.
Your farts are probably legendary.
Anyone know if eggs are officially good or bad for us this year? I lost track.
I mean my conclusion is people just plain don't want to eat in moderation, and really don't want to weigh things since it might hold their own habits accountable to them.
If fats are good and carbs are bad, it's the message people want to hear: do not moderate or change your habits, just eat as much as you want of the "good" thing because it's good!
The consumption of which itself is driven by an unscientific scare about animal fat.
Or by cost of production or ethical considerations or perishability or smoke point or water content
It's not unscientific, there is a very direct link.
The real issue, as I see it, is that there was a huge change in pattern in availability and consumption of those fats in the last 50 years.
Every ten years or so there's a new batch of evidence that eating a lot of something has some health effects for some folks. Then a minority turns it into a morality cult against the thing and the media picks it up as "you woudn't guess what common food could be killing you"
And then ten years later new evidence for that thing comes out that's like "maybe not so bad after all!" and a new set of backlash morality. These things are politically affiliated now too if they can be depending on who picks up which evidence first.
Each decade people get bored and find something new to be upset about.
"gluten" is definitely way down these days and "seed oils" haven't yet hit their peak.
Witch!!!
Build a bridge out of her!
This happens all the time. See: drone sightings right now. Previously: Havana syndrome.
Havana syndrome can have a far less charitable explanation.
There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.
The veterinary world has a specific term for a condition they can’t diagnose, and I appreciate the intellectual honesty behind that.
do you know the specific term, or does your intellectual honesty prevent you from saying that you do?
"Idiopathic"?
Don't be so quick to characterize Havana Syndrome as hysteria.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/havana-syndrome-intelligence-re...
"House Intelligence leaders" are not exempt from hysteria.
Another good one is the "Mad Gasser Of Mattoon" incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Gasser_of_Mattoon
And also the Monkey Man of Delhi (though that urban legend wasn't confined to Delhi):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-man_of_Delhi
But the "Illinois Enema Bandit" was real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Kenyon
(coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois).
I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4
Also: killer clowns every few years. That one is a cultural icon by now.
Best example: A whole town thinking Bigfoot AND aliens were invading at the same time https://medium.com/@weirdones/the-pa-ufo-bigfoot-invasion-of...
This was literally my first thought for the anomalous drones like 2 weeks ago, and it was immediately obvious that the entire NJ police department should not be incompetent enough to fall for something so obvious. The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer. Even back then, we knew the sightings do not appear on flight radar apps that show every commercial flight and which any civilian can access.
But since then we've also had airport shutdowns, incursions over airforce bases, drones in no-fly zones. These are easy to Google:
https://www.recordonline.com/story/news/2024/12/16/stewart-a...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/us/us-air-force-base-closes-a...
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/article297295919.ht...
Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K98A4CLMwf4&t=209s
There's a lot more I could post about, but most importantly Chuck Schumer is trying to get Robin drone radar detectors deployed, and I'm predicting that he's the smart guy in the room who will get us answers.
> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones...
These are the same people who have panic attacks when they think they've been exposed to fentanyl (which usually involves them describing symptoms not consistent with opiate exposure, and mysteriously the officers never seem to test positive for it in the hospital). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8810663/
In reality, someone exposed to a large volume of pure, liquid, lab-grade fentanyl... just washes their hands. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35722948/
(See also: “poisoned” milkshakes: https://ny.eater.com/2020/6/23/21299721/nypd-officers-report...)
> pure, liquid, lab-grade fentanyl ... just washes their hands.
Your description is a little hyperbolic! That pubmed paper referenced "10 microgram fentanyl citrate base per ml" approx 0.00001% fentanyl "over a large skin surface area".
Pharmaceutical form for injection is fentanyl 50µg/mL (as citrate). https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/profs/Datasheet/f/Fentanylinj.pd...
American cops pass out when they see a salt crystal thinking it’s fentanyl. Even the ones who didn’t touch it. Pouring a bunch of it in liquid form onto unprotected skin in a lab does nothing. Draw conclusions accordingly.
> The mayors and governor should not be dumb enough to stake their reputations on this when the null hypothesis of "mass hysteria" is easier and safer.
I think they played this exactly right: Most people will never accept a null result (or something close to it, like "there were a couple of weird drones, but mostly it was people newly looking up at the night sky") or even follow this news story long enough for the actual resolution to matter. The only thing they'll remember was their mayor or governor staying silent when they were scared/angry vs. shouting at the feds to let them shoot down some drones.
> Also NJ police report the anomalous drones give off no heat signature like normal drones:
The only thing we can conclude from this is that the NJ police wasn't able to detect a heat signature, but not whether there really wasn't one.
i think the government giving credence to this is what made it spiral out of control
Governor of Maryland posted a video of Orion's Belt claiming they were drones. A local news station posted a video of Venus claiming drones. There's a lot of baloney mixed in to this event.
Chuck Schumer is trying to mollify his constituents. The one thing a politician can never tell his constituents is that they are being morons, even when it's true.
Your last link has the officer claiming it doesn't give off heat like regular drones, but just like the OP story where a police officer claimed the "mystery residue" reacted "violently" to a lead pencil, what does that even mean? Can we get an A/B test of what this officer calls a "regular" drone on heat vision versus one of these mystery drones?
And oh yeah, at about 4:30 into that link, the reporter puts up his own "authentic drone footage" that I am absolutely certain is a perfectly normal airplane.
The airport shutdown was real, sure, but that was dumb wannabe sleuths who were going to "solve the problem" using their own drones, thereby becoming the problem, or smart trolls who knew exactly how best to get a laugh out of the gullible public.
There was also a call in to a 911 department on the 13th of a drone crashing in someones backyard and then being swarmed by 10 others.
https://www.newsweek.com/drone-new-jersey-911-sighting-20002...
But I haven't seen a follow up from anyone on it yet.
Again, with no proof and likely not real. If there was a crashed drone, you'd imagine that they'd release a photo or something. The reality is that law enforcement officers are just as susceptible to mass hysteria as everyone else.
A drone crashes in my backyard most days. My drone.
The case referenced by Newsweek was a commercially available drone of the DJI variety.
You can buy satellite pictures of almost anywhere on earth with pretty good definition and so I deduce that the US government with almost 100 StarShield satellites plus who knows how many ones with huge cameras probably can almost livestream any place on earth GTA top view style. So shouldn't be hard to see what it is and where it came from unless cloud cover is bad.
It'd take a lot more than 100 for that.
The 100 would only be for the streaming in the example.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of drones he saw hovering for 45 minutes, and he decried the lack of action and info from the feds. Something must be done!
It was the constellation Orion and some other stars. He literally saw some stars and thought they were drones hovering near his house.
Why shouldn’t I believe that they’re really this dumb?
Are you talking about Larry Hogan, who hasn't been governor for 23 months and has nothing at stake?
You could have fact-checked that in less time than it took to write your post.
It is happening almost exactly the same way, but this time it has to be different...
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Lots of smart guys in this comment thread who already know what this stuff is. No need to panic folks, the armchair critics say everything is ok.
The funny thing is, in this thread they're all certain the drones are just mass hysteria. In the thread a week ago, there were tons of people certain these drones were just secret USA drones, nothing to worry about. "Almost no chance these are not US military.", "I guarantee it's some local police agency that got them donated by the military.", etc.
Completely incompatible hand-wave theories living side by side, rarely bothering to debate each other or provide anything beyond opinions.
In the context of the fact that, according to TFA, the pits were there all along: you'll really notice how pitted your current windshield is when you go get a new, crystal-clear one. The folks in TFA just skipped the "go get a new one" step, and for the first time took a really hard look at their windshield.
Some of the pictures in the article show several golf-ball-size holes in the windshield though. Not something that would go unnoticed.
Was windshield glass not laminated in that era?
> Some thought that the Navy’s new million-watt radio transmitter at Jim Creek near Arlington was [absurd theory deleted]
There actually is a problem some Washington residents occasionally have from powerful navy transmitters.
Every so often in Bremerton many garage door opener remotes and car keyless entry systems become very unreliable for a few days to a week or two. This generally corresponds to when aircraft carriers visit the Bremerton naval shipyard.
There are often multiple kinds of use allowed on a given radio frequency band. The different allowed uses will be grouped into different priority classes and the general rule is that (1) lower priority uses are not allowed to interfere with higher priority uses, and (2) if a higher priority use interferes with a lower priority use it is up to the later to deal with it (move to another frequency, use better shielding to keep the interference out, etc).
Many garage door remotes and keyless entry systems use frequency bands that overlap with bands used for Navy radar and communications and as you can probably guess the Navy's uses are the higher priority.
So a carrier comes in to the shipyard for maintenance or upgrades, and as part of that they test the radar and communication systems and so for however long that takes you've got ridiculously powerful transmitters blasting out on the frequencies your stuff wants to use.
Early car door openers were triggered by normal airplanes, so they’d just randomly open while the homeowners were away.
Lawsuits were filed, and a standard that didn’t have that problem took over.
(Calling the replacement standard “secure” would be overselling it, but I guess it was good enough to make the courts happy.)
The Omnibus Project (Ken Jennings and John Roderick) did a podcast on this back in June: https://www.omnibusproject.com/episodes/the-western-washingt...
In 70 years, articles will talk about the strange drone invasion only for it to be discovered that planes and drones were always in the air, but people just never bothered to look up until everyone started talking about it.
Life always imitates The Twilight Zone. My favorite episode actually: The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPOoEQ2vx7w
English is my second language, so this might explain what I'm going to say.
I really did not understand what this was all about. Even worse, the pictures were not clear.
AFAICT, there were some minor dents in windshields that caused some hysteria in the Seattle area but no further explanation was given.
The article was confusing indeed.
Basically a lot of people mistakenly thought something had been damaging their windshields, but it was just regular wear and tear they had never noticed before.
The damage appeared to spread as more people talked about it
The pictures weren't clear to me either, probably because they're pictures of ordinary windshields lol
Thanks for explaining this. You were much more clear than the whole article.
Good post. It's important to understand that there's really not that much new under the sun and we've never been that great at understanding large social phenomena.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable summary.
This stuff has been well understood for millennia.
What if we are living in a simulation and the new pitted glass texture was rolled out, but our collective memories weren't updated?
Patch V1954.1: New normal map support for car windshields. Requires DirectX9 or later.
What if they switch the simulation off an hour after we notice?
People just don’t want to accept simple, no drama and explanations, even more so if it means they have to accept they are wrong. This is a trait we as a species had all along apparently but manifested much more during covid. I am just amazed we made this much progress cumulatively in which a short time. May be because we let it happen because the growth itself is so fantastic!
The difference these days seems to be that the frequency of the hysterical events has gone up. One every other month, rather than every other year.
What happens to a society that has been desensitized to mass-hysteria, where no single event can evoke a reaction? Is it a horseshoe, where we're so vigilant that nothing fazes us anymore? Do we lose our humanity in the process?
Some just learn to ignore news gossip.
Slippery slope. I posit that there are news items that deserve real cause for concern, but because we're so overwhelmed with information, we throw it into the same "gossip" bucket with the rest of the slop.
A lot of news that positions itself as "you should be concerned about this" seeks to exploit the "always alert ready to respond to an emergency" part of our brains.
In reality almost nothing truly deserves that kind of attention. But since humans are bad at separating important from urgent, news broadcasts will continue to exploit with "24/7 Breaking News".
Few news items ever rise to that level and fewer still deserve immediate attention.
Daily news is merely a first rough draft of history and I'd argue most people would be better off instead reading later drafts - after much of the confusion/gossip/rumor/panic that plagues daily news clears.
Sadly there's not a lot of news sources that limit themselves to writing articles about month+ old well-covered news.
This feels like it was written as a satire based on the screenplay of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
The subreddit /r/njdrones is sooo off the rails right now. It started out as "I think this is a drone, maybe military?" to classifying different drones as energy "orbs" and "mimics" that only look like airplanes when photographed.
Consider that you are uninformed about the UAP phenomenon.
Consider that you actually have a socially transmitted mental illness.
What can I say. You refuse to engage with evidence in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405429 that the phenomenon might in fact be real, so you fall into the quite predictable conclusion that all of it is hysteria.
Be better.
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Is this in reference to the drone sightings over New Jersey / elsewhere? UAPs?
Are you saying the drones and planes have always been there and we are just noticing it now?
It's probably regular airplanes, stars, and Venus, and now, I assume civilian drones. Once people started claiming drones, other people who never bothered to look in to the sky started seeing lights they didn't understand (planes, stars, planets) because they never bothered to study the night sky in even a basic way, and they are suggestible. Then people probably started flying their own drones to do investigation + prank people.
+ StarLinks or other low orbit satellites and space stations. In 2014, when Russian invasion started in Ukraine, we had so many reports from folks about drones in the sky about ISS or Venus. I saw this myself when I was at Chongar, near to Russian occupied Crimea: my comrades pointed to bright Venus in the night sky and said that it can be a Russian drone. I dismissed the claim by pointing out that army doesn't turn lights on when on mission.
As the story reads this isn't really a mass delusion - people read about pits in windshields, people examined their windshields, people saw pits in their windshields. If it was about the "Jersey Devil" and people started claiming to have spotted the "Jersey Devil", now that would be a delusion.
The only possibly deluded people, as the story is told, are reporters, policemen and politicians - but as the adage goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
It is a delusion - the delusion is that the pits are new and suddenly appeared.
must be the drones
How many closed session hearings did the U.S. congress have over windshield pitting again?
Since we all know what this is actually commenting on, I'll answer that directly. The noise on the UFO topic has reached a massed hysteria pitch. When that happens, the overall signal to noise ratio of internet sourced sightings goes from "very poor" to "nearly invisible." I blame a lot of that on the recent congressional hearings bringing stories to the public's front of mind.
But. And I think its a very very important but, these sightings of phenomena go back decades, and just because the public at large is not a reliable reporter, does mean there are not many, many kernels of truth of an unexplained, repeated phenomena.
And otherwise you can always, always be skeptical, but at what point does skepticism stretch into denial?
IR cameras recording rocket impacts aren't mass hysteria. 2011 https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1gsdwl6/full_10_minut...
^ maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping?
2 days ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/InterdimensionalNHI/comments/1hfkcg...
^ maybe those are targeting flares, and thats why they're dripping, but if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
meanwhile 7 days ago https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1hcfaqw/glowing_orb_f...
^ maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax? (so, so many orb videos to repeat this logic with, you get the idea.)
If you're interested in finding more, you need to get very used to seeing lots of balloons, planes, commercial drones, planets, stars, satellites, flares, skydivers, lens flare, insects and birds and there's common examples of all of them. The ones we should be interested in are usually uniformly luminous, follow non linear flight paths, exhibit extraordinary acceleration (for which you need size to estimate distance which is tough with only one camera), and/or exhibit extraordinary altitude. Whether they're controlled by a non-human intelligence or some government, they do exist and are super interesting to watch. You're just gonna have to wade through an absolute mountain of bullshit.
> maybe those are targeting drones and the rocket missed. but then why are they dripping?
They're balloons carrying flares for target practice. You can see lots of falling embers in https://youtu.be/XHDXk9THJZM?si=CKSBB3AuslBizXxh&t=179 from a military flare.
> if they're flares why does the second one seem to fly away when the first is struck?
Because that's the maneuvering target drone (something like a QF-16, probably; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...) that's dropping the flares.
> maybe thats just a commercial drone modified to be super bright. But why fly it there, as a hoax?
Asked and answered. We live in a world where "flashlight enthusiast" is a real niche thing; "bright drone" is not an implausible thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/flashlight/
And what I'm saying is I understand that perspective. I think you can do that song and dance going back 80 years. You can watch all these people, all these witnesses, all these videos and pictures (and a complete and stunning absence of military radar data) and you can explain to them, each and every single one of them how they're wrong, how its swamp gas reflected off Venus, and in each individual case you might be right. When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.
But that doesn't match my experience, of pilots, of lifetime military officers, of people as a whole, that they're all incompetent or crazy or hoaxers. At some point I think that level of myopic-skepticism moves towards the absurd and cannot be maintained any longer.
Being competent in one thing doesn't make you competent in everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Each of the videos you linked to have extremely plausible, fairly mundane explanations other than "aliens". That fits the pattern. That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.
> When the video gets too good you can blame it on computer generated graphics.
The corollary here is the unfortunate fact that as soon as everyone got a camera in their pocket, aliens stopped landing in random cornfields to say hi to lonely farmers.
> That you find them compelling as evidence of extraterrestrials is not a great sign.
That I post here a few easily accessible videos of interest on what is an enormous history that I have spent the past few years reading about tells me more about the lack of respect you immediately have for anyone on the topic.
> to lonely farmers.
That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
I think the thing watching the UFO topic has taught more more than any other is how aggressively and reflexively people of all levels of intelligence will hug their worldview.
Respect is earned. If I claim to be able to fly, and send you several links to me flying that are easily explicable, conclusions can be drawn.
> That the public's UFO hysteria of the 1940s and 50s was originated entirely within the US military is similarly a fact of history I wouldn't expect you to know.
The 1940s military had a hell of a lot of former farmers in it. The days of fighter pilots needing college degrees came in the 70s/80s; Chuck Yeager was a farm (!) kid who became a mechanic with the war.
That the UFO hysteria coincides with the rise of commercial air travel is both known to me and entirely unsurprising, and no more compelling to me than witch hysteria in the 1600s, which often came with similarly compelling witness testimony.
> pilots, of lifetime military officers, of people as a whole, that they're all incompetent or crazy or hoaxers.
You don't have to be incompetent, crazy or a hoaxer to be confused, fooled or mistaken.
Or "haven't slept in 24 hours taking amphetamines to stay awake in combat". https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/
I’ve come to few conclusions about this recently.
1. Most people will never believe in UFOs until they see one for themselves in an unambiguous way or hear a report from someone in person that they believe is credible. There is too much stigma around this topic.
2. There is a very large amount, probably 1000s records, of credible and consistent evidence out there. However 99% of it is circumstantial and will never be viewed by the public at large.
3. The military, after years of reporting and chasing, can’t be bothered investigating anymore. This seems to be cyclical.
4. A culture/civilization/whatever that has these kind of technologies would have immense power if they wanted it. It’s just too terrifying to believe in, especially if we don’t know what they want.
The story completely misses that this period coincides with a temporary expansion of the habitat of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
The devil of the trees and terror of all loggers, forest rangers and apparently windshields.
A Tree Octopus Renku by Lyle Zapato [0]
I am one of today's lucky 10,000 — thank you! [1][0] https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201104210388.a_tree_octopus_...
[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
Timely, given the "lights in the sky" fever.
I don't get why someone would see lights in the sky and jump to anything other than "domestic/commercial aircraft". Why would aliens or foreign powers light their vehicles up for easy spotting?
I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
It's also clear that some more recent reports are trolls flying their Costco drones around. Amazingly, as documented on the news and YouTube, there are now people flying their personal drones at night in an effort to find and follow the 'original' drones (!) I assume they are now all following each other around, creating new reports of "Mysterious Drone Swarm Sighted". :-)
Of course, not all "Lights in the Sky" are airplanes, helicopters, drones, stars, satellites or reflections of ground-based lights. There was an interesting sighting in Arizona two weeks ago analyzed and explained by the indefatigable Mick West (2 min video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V00KT4PCd-0.
The Governor of Maryland posted a video of lights in the sky that were very clearly not any kind of aircraft.
Because they were stars. Naturally, this dimwit took the opportunity to blame the feds for failing to act.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily just never look up in their daily lives. And instead of thinking “I’m not familiar with this stuff so I don’t know what I’m seeing,” they manage to conclude “I’m seeing something strange and nobody knows what it is.”
Even 30 years ago, if you had a clear sky in countryside, you could see the occasional satellite. Very tiny, much tinier than airplane lights, and surprisingly fast. Today, there are a lot more.
And of course there have always been plenty of airplane lights.
Not to mention Venus, which more than one fighter pilot has tried to shoot down.
I got to see an ISS flare once, that was fun
The problem is that too many people don't know what 'normal' is and nobody can pay attention to everything all of the time. When attention is drawn to something, and without the ability to judge if something is unusual, the inclination is to believe that noticing for the first time is the same as occurring for the first time.
The additives added to tap water to make them generate rainbows is a good example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIYZvr3ueGw
There is a BBC Radio program called More or Less, which covers analysis of statistics in the media. They have a motto "Is that a big number?" which is a great starting point for any investigation, essentially asking if the observation is what you would expect if nothing newsworthy were occurring. It's worth keeping that idea floating in your head.
Aliens are just good neighbors and figured out FAA regulations before visiting.
Most people don't know what airplanes really look like or what lights they have on them. To most people, any flying object is unidentified and any aerial phenomenon is unexplained. We use pennies more regularly than we see airplanes, but how many can pick the right penny from this lineup? https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/groups/cognition/tutorial...
It gets easier to believe when supposed trustworthy sources: news outlets, the government as a whole and even specific senators/ex governors, fan the flames of conspiracy instead of common sense.
i have not used a penny in at least 5 years, i see planes on the daily - but get your point.
pennies are useless junk, straight to the recycling bin for me. really epitomizes our dysfunction that we are unable to stop making them
I have to keep making pennies to replace the ones you're throwing away! Don't destroy currency!
I put mine in baggies and use them as weights
dealing with them in any other way is literally not economical to me if it takes more than like a quarter of a second of time.
A quarter of a second or a bit of a second ain't worth a dime.
They were primed by social media and other sources to believe it.
Not to mention, videos of "drones" are hot right now and get a lot of traffic, so if you can convince yourself that the lights you see in the sky above the airport are drones, you too can get some of those eyeballs
Even then my first thought would be “military” or “idiot with a plane license” before worrying about “attack of the flying saucers”.
I worry more about things I can’t see…
Same reason people hearing moose or coyotes think they're about to get attacked by a skin walker: ignorance and being primed by social medias
To me, people are A) out of touch with how degenerate our information environment has gotten B) generally, how little people look into things outside their wheelhouse.
It's not any one individual thing. You can even reframe some (one?) of the factors as Great Democracy Saving.
But they add up to: it is rational to not really trust anything, and people don't mind if you were wrong if you just didn't trust The Man/They, so there's more incentive to not trust, than trust.
Hyperbole from people who should know better doesn't help. Ex. a quite intelligent AI commentator tweeted yesterday, asking why there hasn't been a reckoning for anyone who publicly worried about effects of AI imagery on truth.
Obviously they would have lights to blend in with all the other air traffic! /s
There are without a doubt large drones with nav lights flying around multiple states at night now. There are a lot of people seeing drones where they aren’t, too, and it would be odd if that weren’t happening. But to take that and say “nothing to see here” is ignoring the mass of solid video and official non-statement evidence to the contrary.
I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish. Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
EDIT: I thought that HN of all places would be able to pick what’s actually happening from what’s not; Mass hysteria occurring and drones being everywhere are not mutually exclusive, and a critical analysis of the info available makes it very clear that there are mysterious drones out at night. Seeing one article about people misidentifying things only tells you that people are misidentifying things, it says nothing about the countless videos showing positively identified drones, and certainly not about the fact that the government has repeatedly stated that there are drones doing this. And given all of that, downvoting someone giving their personal account with reasonable criticality is at best ignorant.
> ignoring the mass of solid video
100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks, &c.
> (seemed a few hundred feet up at most)
At night you have absolutely no way to tell
> And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
> Honestly, it kind of freaked me out having some previously abstract news-cycle object just floating ominously down the road across from me.
That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
> People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way
It's a natural approximation to a Total Perspective Vortex. Knowing what it represents probably makes the likelihood of an existential crisis more likely.
> 100% of the ones I looked into have been debunked, helicopters, planes, out of focus stars, fireworks
A lot of videos are bunk, I have seen at least one video that is certainly drones.
> At night you have absolutely no way to tell
I agree, but I’ve seen plenty of other aircraft at night and it appeared to be much closer than any of those. And you can get a rough guess based on apparent size of the lights, though of course that’s extremely rough unless you know the size of the aircraft.
> My $300 dji can accomplish that, it's not a chinese super weapon nor an alien craft
I know, I never claimed it was aliens or a Chinese super weapon, I claimed they were drones. It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
> That's the definition of media induced mass hysteria, you notice a lot of weird things when you look at things you usually don't bother looking at. People in Los Angeles freaked the fuck out when they saw the milky way during an electricity outage in 1994
That certainly occurs, what I meant is more that I felt an odd sensation having the news cycle and what I observed collide, in the sense that it didn’t feel quite real. I would normally notice at an aircraft that appeared to be as close as it was, and I would definitely pay more attention to it when I noticed the lights and movement pattern, regardless of the news cycle. It actually took me a second to connect the two.
People in LA freaking out because they saw the Milky Way is normal, people noticed something new and reacted to it. I would wager that more people responded with awe than with freaking out, but they weren’t as interesting to the media. Regardless of whether they were freaked out or not (and I wasn’t freaked out so much as it was freaky), they still saw something real.
You absolutely cannot determine the size, distance, altitude, or speed of an unknown object in the sky at any significant distance. It’s not even rough, it’s completely impossible. You can determine the ratios of those quantities, but the best you can do is come up with a wide minimum and maximum of, let’s say, 500ft to 50 miles of distance (more if it’s just one light).
If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
An unlit one or one with blinking or few lights, sure. This had four constantly illuminated nav lights, and I was in a car so I was able to see the parallax relative to the clouds. I couldn’t tell if it was 500 feet or a mile, but I could tell that it was either close enough to be audible, or many times bigger than the largest jetliners.
> If you saw an unknown object and it seemed closer to you than normal aircraft, that’s your brain suffering from an illusion. It’s not real information.
Ohhh, thanks for letting me know.
Parallax relative to the clouds doesn’t tell you anything unless you know how fast it’s moving or how far away it is.
Given all the rest, I have to say I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.
> I’m not super confident in your estimate of angular size.
Neither am I, but I am confident it was a drone. Does “given all the rest” mean I wrote so much I have to be crazy, or do you actually have an explanation that better fits what I saw? Given the light configuration I don’t see how it could be a plane. And helicopters make a very distinctive noise. Maybe I saw a military helicopter, but at that point drones seem more likely.
I am interested in alternative proposals that take into account everything I observed. Less so in single-point criticisms coming from the assumption that there’s nothing to see so I must be deluded if I think I saw something.
Nobody can explain what you saw because they didn't see it with you. Your vision is interpreted by your brain and memories are reinforced by whatever narrative you produce when you recollect them each time and grow stronger into that narrative. It will always have been a drone to you, no matter what anyone can say about why it probably wasn't.
I am not discounting what you saw and have no particular reason to doubt you, but human psychology operates in a way that is not conducive to being proven wrong about such things. Take that as you will.
All true. Although I meant all the observations I’ve noted here - namely the light pattern coupled with not being far enough to be silent if a plane (sure distance is extremely iffy at night but one can tell if a plane is six miles up or one without needing to know it’s exact size).
You’re right that my interpretation in the end will be heavily influenced by my expectations, but unless I completely hallucinated the light pattern or gained temporary telescopic vision such that I saw each nav light separated by multiple visual-field-feet (if that makes any sense) on a plane at cruising altitude, I just can’t think of any explanation that fits better than drone.
> It’s almost certain that they are military drones, and if I had to guess they’re searching for something that would cause real mass hysteria if told to the public.
Why is that almost certain?
Well almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting, the case is all circumstantial. But I say that both because of a Reddit post that makes a strong case that at least some portion of sightings are a specific model of navy drone, and more so because their being military is the only situation where the government response makes sense to me.
If they were an enemy’s, one would expect them to be shot down. If they were an ally’s, they would need a damn good reason to be here and an even better reason why people can’t know. Maybe they’re a private citizen’s, but I struggle to imagine why a private entity would have a fleet of large drones that they covertly deploy along the coasts, and why our government would abide that. So as I see it, the two options that make sense are that they’re an enemy’s that we can’t shoot down for some terrifying reason, or they’re ours.
Can you link the post?
> I myself saw a drone, and tried to paint it as a plane or helicopter at first, but it was too close to the ground (seemed a few hundred feet up at most), had the mismatched light pattern characteristic of trans-wing drones, and moved too slowly for other types of aircraft. And most damningly it didn’t make any noise audible from the ground, something not even stealth bombers can accomplish.
That’s exactly what you would expect from a regular airplane though. You can’t accurately differentiate „low and slow“ vs „high and fast“ at night. And quiet operation is what high flying planes seem to do regularly.
You can gauge rough distance/height pretty well by the angles and relative distances between the nav lights. If it is was high enough to be silent, it was at least 10x the size of a 747.
You can't gauge the airspeed of an airplane from the ground. What you are observing is the ground speed, which is affected by winds. So a small Cessna flying into a heavy headwind can appear to move very, very slowly relative to the ground.
I’m aware of that, and I tried to think that was what was happening. But the motion apart from speed was nothing like a typical plane, and the other factors led me to conclude it was a drone. When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.
> When I say the FAA light patterns were off, what I mean is that it had two red lights on the outside, and two green lights on the inside. AFAIK, the only type of aircraft that might have that configuration is a trans-wing drone.
What? How do you get from a specific kind of lighting to „trans-wing drone“? What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
> What prevents me from lighting a regular-wing RC plane with the same lighting configuration?
If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
You’re right that I’m making a leap with the trans-wing part. I said that because it’s my understanding that some of the sightings have included airfoil and transforming drones, that a trans-wing drone would exhibit the light pattern I saw, and that the military (Navy I believe) does own trans-wing drones that match other the descriptions of other sightings. So to me the lights were the final nail that this wasn’t a plane, but I held on to it being a plane for a while.
> If I’m not mistaken, the FAA does (unless RC planes aren’t covered?). Are you really positing that I saw an intentionally misconfigured RC plane flying in the middle of nowhere at 2 AM?
So the FAA prevents me from using the scheme you described, but the drones you think you observed are exempt?
I still don’t see how you can draw any conclusion from the lighting, unless the lighting you saw is only permitted for a specific class of object.
I’m kind of baffled how incredulous the response to this comment has been.
Do people think there are 0 drones out at night? Is it that hard to wrap one’s head around the idea that someone actually saw one?
I understand that many are misinterpreting. Official statements make it clear that at some are not. The criticism of my account boils down to “you can’t tell how far something is at night” tata-isms, but you can to a very limited extent - whether it is at an altitude where it would be audible, or not. Similarly, you can observe how quickly it moves from overhead to the horizon. It’s difficult to tell close from far, but it’s trivial to tell far from really far.
Regardless, I was able to see it from both the side and behind, and the latter view showed an aircraft with two red lights on the outside, and two green ones on the inside. It was not an FAA-approved plane, and it was not a civilian helicopter (no noise). At this point, the other possible explanations are less likely than it being a drone.
The scientific term is collective hysteria or mass-hysteria.
https://dictionary.apa.org/collective-hysteria
People noticing lights in the night sky is timely, with the darkest weeks of the year.
I'm assuming you posted this because of the drone sightings right?
I take it, sotto voce, that this is about the New Jersey drone sightings?
TL;DR - The drones sent by the UFOs did it in the drawing room with the candlestick.
The TLDR cause was:
The windshield pitting epidemic was a case of collective delusion, where heightened awareness, media influence, and misattributed environmental factors led people to notice and misinterpret existing, ordinary damage as a mysterious phenomenon.
Yes, probably -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
Nice. That probably explains why, say, we start seeing a model car everywhere the moment we decide to buy one.
This article was likely posted because of the drone sightings. People started looking more.
It might be better to say that it was a case of a collective shattered delusion, where the delusion was "my windshield normally is not pitted". In modern parlance, it was a collective "can't unsee" moment.
A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.
Don't be splitting hairs. The delusion is that the pitting happened recently and wasn't there before.
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