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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
My sense of kinship is weak with arthropods. Vertebrates are clearly kin. Birds and mammals are so clearly fellow beings, that I simply can't imagine caring about people if the concept of people must be narrowed to exclude them.
It goes the other way too. I find it easier to love my fellow human animals when I remember they are neurotic hairless apes wearing hats. Our intelligence is so new (in an evolutionary sense), we are just barely smart enough to pull this all off.
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?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declin...
"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...
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.
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.
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.
Always has been.
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
If you called them Low Information Excessive Satisfaction theories instead you'd end up with a much more satisfying acronym! :)
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."
Another tweak: Low Information Extra Satisfying
But now I think he was vastly over-optimistic.
I guess that proves their point, whoever they were.
Great phrase btw
That's what they want you to think.
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.
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.
Assurance makes you a sucker.
Like, I'm too stupid to understand the flat earth science.
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.
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.
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.
Hey, let's not go making something out of nothing.
There is no objective test for Havana syndrome, but being diagnosed with it grants significant financial and non-financial benefits.
(coincidentally, the "Mad Gasser" was also in Illinois).
I only know about this because of Frank Zappa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=352dVmsn7y4
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.
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...)
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...
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.
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.
https://www.newsweek.com/drone-new-jersey-911-sighting-20002...
But I haven't seen a follow up from anyone on it yet.
The case referenced by Newsweek was a commercially available drone of the DJI variety.
Physical evidence or GTFO (the video with the NJ police is physical evidence that they have a drone with thermal imagery and of nothing else).
Here's a gift link to yesterday's New York Times story: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/video/new-jersey-drones-p...
The vast majority of the videos appeared to show planes or helicopters,
moving across a part of the state that brims with airports. None of the
videos analyzed by The Times conclusively showed drones, though in some
cases that remains a plausible explanation.
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?
You could have fact-checked that in less time than it took to write your post.
My point stands. If this guy is that dumb then why should we think any of the rest are better?
Completely incompatible hand-wave theories living side by side, rarely bothering to debate each other or provide anything beyond opinions.
I would really start to worry if I spotted an aircraft at dusk/night with no lights on it.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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 worry more about things I can’t see…
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
You don't have to be incompetent, crazy or a hoaxer to be confused, fooled or mistaken.
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 make my posts about the subject on the idea that its important for people to have some warning, that its not something to dismiss, so they aren't surprised if/when something happens in our life time. For those who don't have the hobby of reading through those thousands of credible reports.
Not that I have any idea what I'm looking at, I don't think anymore than any ape on this planet. But those orbs exist and do very weird things, and probably have for a very long time, and isn't that neat.
But how do we know they aren’t doing harm in subtle ways? Thus I’m embracing cognitive dissonance. I think the evidence points to something but I refuse to decide it’s real.
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.
A delusion would imply that people were claiming their windshields were pitted and they weren't... but I'm sure they were.
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?
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.
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".
Was windshield glass not laminated in that era?
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.
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
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.
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.)
This stuff has been well understood for millennia.
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”.
https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
The devil of the trees and terror of all loggers, forest rangers and apparently windshields.
wisteria on pine --
a tree octopus climbs
there's a spectacle!
[0] https://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=201104210388.a_tree_octopus_...
I'd say that is more probable than collective delusion.