The idea that "eyewitness testimony is unreliable"

reply to post by MaximRecoil

Again, that's the concept behind film, video, and animation, and it is an intelligently designed illusion.

So are you making the case that we evolved this ability so we can be entertained? Or that aliens implanted us with this flaw to trick us.

Are you trying to make the case that the O'Hare UFO was a three-dimensional holographic laser projection, à la "Project Blue Beam"? Otherwise, nature can't do what you think it can.

People mistake natural illusions for real things all the time. Like someone saw a cat in a tree once but it turned out to be a shadow. Do you go outside ever? Are you implying that people don't make this kind of mistake ever? How many different examples do you need? Adding more straw man arguments is just adding more straw man arguments. Its a straw man so don't even try. I really encourage that you read something other than UFO books.

MaximRecoil
And yes, I know the story behind this, but regardless of that, it was a UFO sighting, and it still hasn't been 100% positively identified.

I will politely try to avoid falling off my chair in uncontrollable laughter.

THIS is your best 'astronaut evidence' that UFO reports reflect a fundamentally inexplicable phenomenon unknown to science?

Please, get serious and try again.

JimOberg

neoholographic
reply to post by JimOberg
..When you have eyewitness accounts from high ranking Government officials, Police Officers, Astronauts, Pilots and more talking about human levitation and Elvis sightings then I suggest you start a thread about these things and go over the evidence...

You're on. Name me one 'UFO sighting by an astronaut' you would stake your reputation as a reasonable human and good investgator on.

On the other hand, let's name an astronaut you have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort in trying to trash his reputation. With the greatest of respect Jim from reading the drivel you often post about the subject, your understanding of the human condition stretches from cod flawed back of a cereal box psychology to outright rubbish.

FireMoon

JimOberg

neoholographic
reply to post by JimOberg
..When you have eyewitness accounts from high ranking Government officials, Police Officers, Astronauts, Pilots and more talking about human levitation and Elvis sightings then I suggest you start a thread about these things and go over the evidence...

You're on. Name me one 'UFO sighting by an astronaut' you would stake your reputation as a reasonable human and good investgator on.

On the other hand, let's name an astronaut you have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort in trying to trash his reputation. With the greatest of respect Jim from reading the drivel you often post about the subject, your understanding of the human condition stretches from cod flawed back of a cereal box psychology to outright rubbish.

Don't you think Gordon Cooper was the one spending the time to sully his own reputation? What have I written about him that is not factually true? How much of what is true about him, do you wish people didn't know, or shouldn't believe? In other words, which of us is encouraging ignorance and deception, and which of us in increasing public access to facts?

reply to post by MaximRecoil

Here is an abstract by Donald D. Hoffman

The Construction of Visual Reality
This gives a more current view of perception than you seem have. It makes for some interesting reading and seems to be in line with what I am trying to get across. Please, if you have any articles, papers or whatever that support what your position is with this topic, I would be very interested in reading them because I have never come across anything like what you are describing in the last 15 years. Honestly, if you do have something for me to look at other than NACRAP reports, I am interested. Thanks.

Another objection that often comes to mind regards consensus. If a bus is
hurdling down the road, any normal observer will agree that they indeed see a
bus hurdling down the road. So, since we all agree about the bus, since there is
consensus, doesn’t that mean that we are all seeing the same truth?
But consensus does not logically imply that we are all seeing the truth. It
simply implies that we have similar perceptual interfaces, and that the rules of
visual construction that we use are similar.

What Mark et al. find is that true perceptions are not, in general, more fit.
In most cases of interest, an organism that sees none of the truth, but instead sees
abstract symbols related to utility, drives the truth perceivers to swift extinction.
Natural selection does not usually favor true perceptions. It generally drives
them to extinction.
One reason is that perceptual information does not come free. There are
costs in time and energy for each bit of information that perception reports about
the environment. For every calorie an organism spends on perception, it must
kill something and eat it to get the calorie. As a result, natural selection
pressures perception to be quick and cheap. Getting a detailed description of the
truth is too expensive in time and energy. It is also not usually relevant, since
utility, not truth, is what perception needs to report.

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by MaximRecoil

 

Tell me how long you need to "witness" this before you learn it:

zero seconds. see you keep switching the requirements from learning how to write to shape recognition? You didn't answer my question at all and just went on to the next intellectually dishonest Prozac straw man. Well its effective at avoiding an actual discussion.

First of all, why did you break your reply up into so many separate posts?

Also, it has already been established that you don't know what the bolded terms mean, so consider them dismissed out of hand.

And I haven't "switched any requirements" at all, much less have I done it repeatedly. Learning to write involves seeing shapes, remembering them, and then duplicating them. A circle can represent the letter "O", the number "0", a major part of the letters Q and C, and, as luck would have it, a commonly reported UFO shape, making it particularly relevant to this discussion, unlike the Asian characters you posted.

No absolutely not. I said I have no idea what it was. I am just talking about different ways we perceive things and you translate that into some anti-ufo nonsense I have.

You claim you "have no idea what it was", yet you've offered ideas about what it was, the most recent idea being a natural illusion (with zero support for that idea, I might add).

I honestly find it quite odd that people get so bent out of shape just by talking about perception and the way people misperceive. I am not trying to establish grounds for reasonable doubt. That's your game that you think I am playing. I am encouraging people to not be ignorant when they talk about perception. Specific to this case, I am looking at possibilities. If it applies, it applies if it doesn't it doesn't. Why would you discourage an open discussion about this?

I pointed out the lack of substance behind your ideas (you know, the ideas you say you don't have), such as when you said:

"The part you are missing is that perception of movement is probably one of the most common optical illusions and probably the most likely to occur naturally."

Even though natural illusions of motion are rare and specific, and there are none which present the illusion of an object moving from point A to point B.

Honestly, your example sucks. You are trying to translate this into UFO sightings and it doesn't apply in the slightest. I don't think we will get anywhere. I had hopes you could have an honest discussion this time around. Guess not. Here I will state what you want so you can throw rotten tomatoes at me.

My example does what I intended it to do, which is, to demonstrate the blanket claim of "Eyewitness testimonies are unreliable" to be false, therefore it inherently doesn't "suck", and there are countless other examples of eyewitness testimony being reliable (only one is needed to demonstrate the blanket claims to be false, which is the inherent problem with making blanket claims). I didn't "translate" it into anything; it was a simple example for the specific purpose of demonstrating the blanket claim to be false, period.

You have actually shown me why blanket statements are effective and used so much around here.

Except, they are not effective, given that the faulty ones are easily demonstrated to be false, thus negating them.

You have essentially a circular argument.

And this is yet another bizarrely misapplied term from you, which can be added to the list, along with "straw man" and "intellectual dishonesty".

Trying to get to what "witness testimony" actually means is going to be impossible.

I don't know what you're talking about. There is no question about what "witness testimony" means, except in your mind, apparently. It is simply when someone tells what they saw.

You are missing it. In sports psychology, its called "visualization". We "see" motion very effectively all the time without there being motion. It happens quite often in nature. All you need is fragments of information and your brain translates it automatically as a complete picture. Its quite impressive actually. And tis is EXACTLY what is happening in the examples you provided.

I'm not missing anything. In sports we do not "see motion very effectively all the time without there being motion"; when something like that happens it is known as a hallucination. We are able to predict/anticipate where an object in motion is headed based on its trajectory, but this has nothing to do with seeing motion where there is none. As I said, sports would be impossible if people of sound mind saw real objects in motion, when in fact they were stationary.

I don't. Please clue me in. I would consider this intellectual dishonesty.

"Yes, I know this could be completely wrong because there is a whole backstory that I am aware of that others might not be so lets not bring that up"

Again, you've misused the bolded term. Also, given that your attempted "translation" doesn't logically follow from my text, consider it dismissed. Aldrin did see a flying object that he couldn't identify, which is a "UFO" by definition. At some point he became "99.9%" sure of its identification, which is why I said it still hasn't been 100% identified.

So are you making the case that we evolved this ability so we can be entertained? Or that aliens implanted us with this flaw to trick us.

Say what? People took advantage of the way our vision system naturally works in order to design the illusion. In order for this type of illusion to happen in nature, an object would have to rapidly, repeatedly "teleport" to successive positions, i.e., a naturally occuring example of "stop-motion". This of course, doesn't happen in nature.

People mistake natural illusions for real things all the time. Like someone saw a cat in a tree once but it turned out to be a shadow. Do you go outside ever? Are you implying that people don't make this kind of mistake ever? How many different examples do you need?

This is a non sequitur. We were talking about alleged natural illusions of motion of the type that is relevant to the O'Hare sighting, i.e., an alleged natural illusion of motion which can make an object appear to rapidly accelerate out of sight. How many examples do I need? How about one?

Adding more straw man arguments is just adding more straw man arguments. Its a straw man so don't even try.

Again, you have no idea what a straw man is. By the way, in order to establish a straw man, you have to point out where someone has misrepresented your argument.

I really encourage that you read something other than UFO books.

I've never read a "UFO book", and though I appreciate your attempted crystal ball reading, I hope you don't expect me to pay for it.

JimOberg

MaximRecoil
And yes, I know the story behind this, but regardless of that, it was a UFO sighting, and it still hasn't been 100% positively identified.

I will politely try to avoid falling off my chair in uncontrollable laughter.

THIS is your best 'astronaut evidence' that UFO reports reflect a fundamentally inexplicable phenomenon unknown to science?

Please, get serious and try again.

This is a great post to illustrate the concept of a "straw man" to ZetaRediculian. You see JimOberg's sentence that I bolded? That is a textbook example of a straw man. You see, I never claimed, suggested, nor even hinted that the video was "'astronaut evidence' that UFO reports reflect a fundamentally inexplicable phenomenon unknown to science" at all, much less the best "'astronaut evidence' that UFO reports reflect a fundamentally inexplicable phenomenon unknown to science". So we have a case of him misrepresenting my argument. It is a particularly blatant case too, given that it wasn't just a minor misrepresentation, but rather, he fabricated an argument out of whole cloth and attributed it to me.

Thanks JimOberg, that was helpful. And, by the way, given that you presented no actual arguments, your tacit concession on this matter is noted.

reply to post by MaximRecoil

First of all, why did you break your reply up into so many separate posts?

Why do you complain about the way I post so much? First it was editing now I break them up to much? Jeez. Why are your posts so friggen long and why do jump all over the place with topics instead of staying on one thing?

reply to post by MaximRecoil

Also, it has already been established that you don't know what the bolded terms mean, so consider them dismissed out of hand.

I consider most of your postings basically rambling nonsense with absolutely no foundation whatsoever. You are correct though, its not intellectual dishonesty, its ignorance.

reply to post by MaximRecoil

And I haven't "switched any requirements" at all, much less have I done it repeatedly. Learning to write involves seeing shapes, remembering them, and then duplicating them. A circle can represent the letter "O", the number "0", a major part of the letters Q and C, and, as luck would have it, a commonly reported UFO shape, making it particularly relevant to this discussion, unlike the Asian characters you posted.

You went on about how people learn how to write then I asked how long would it take to learn a few Chinese characters and posted a circle. You lost me. OK you win people that learn how to write can see UFOs with deadly accuracy. The people that cant write cant see UFOs. The people that mistakenly see UFOs are illiterate. I get it now.

reply to post by MaximRecoil

You claim you "have no idea what it was", yet you've offered ideas about what it was, the most recent idea being a natural illusion (with zero support for that idea, I might add).

including an alien spaceship but an illusion you find offensive? why?

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by MaximRecoil

 

Here is an abstract by Donald D. Hoffman

The Construction of Visual Reality
This gives a more current view of perception than you seem have. It makes for some interesting reading and seems to be in line with what I am trying to get across. Please, if you have any articles, papers or whatever that support what your position is with this topic, I would be very interested in reading them because I have never come across anything like what you are describing in the last 15 years. Honestly, if you do have something for me to look at other than NACRAP reports, I am interested. Thanks.

You have "never come across anything like what [I am] describing in the last 15 years"? You mean the notion that people can see when an object they are watching zooms away? That's pretty common knowledge.

Another objection that often comes to mind regards consensus. If a bus is
hurdling down the road, any normal observer will agree that they indeed see a
bus hurdling down the road. So, since we all agree about the bus, since there is
consensus, doesn’t that mean that we are all seeing the same truth?
But consensus does not logically imply that we are all seeing the truth. It
simply implies that we have similar perceptual interfaces, and that the rules of
visual construction that we use are similar.

What does this have to do with anything? They all saw a bus hurtling down the road, which isn't surprising. If the goal is simply to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a bus was hurtling down the road, then the eyewitness testimonies here are reliable enough for that purpose. If the goal is to e.g. prove the license plate number beyond a reasonable doubt, well, the eyewitness testimonies probably won't be reliable enough for that.

What Mark et al. find is that true perceptions are not, in general, more fit.
In most cases of interest, an organism that sees none of the truth, but instead sees
abstract symbols related to utility, drives the truth perceivers to swift extinction.
Natural selection does not usually favor true perceptions. It generally drives
them to extinction.
One reason is that perceptual information does not come free. There are
costs in time and energy for each bit of information that perception reports about
the environment. For every calorie an organism spends on perception, it must
kill something and eat it to get the calorie. As a result, natural selection
pressures perception to be quick and cheap. Getting a detailed description of the
truth is too expensive in time and energy. It is also not usually relevant, since
utility, not truth, is what perception needs to report.

Again, relevance? Humans can generally recount recent events with enough accuracy for many purposes. It is very unusual for the eyewitness account of a recent event to be so far off the mark compared to reality as to be useless. Fortunately, UFO sightings often fall into that area of good eyewitness reliability, because the most important things (nature of movement and general shape) are so basic.

reply to post by MaximRecoil

I'm not missing anything. In sports we do not "see motion very effectively all the time without there being motion"; when something like that happens it is known as a hallucination. We are able to predict/anticipate where an object in motion is headed based on its trajectory, but this has nothing to do with seeing motion where there is none. As I said, sports would be impossible if people of sound mind saw real objects in motion, when in fact they were stationary.

Back up what you are saying. All I see is someone talking out their butt. You have absolutely NO idea what an hallucination is. Where are you getting your information from? Honestly. What you represent to me is absolute ignorance about a subject period. Its insulting to educated people. No wonder there is such an utter lack of representation from relevant fields. who the hell can put up with the level of absolute complete ignorance that you represent. It is absolutely staggering. Congratulations on remaining ignorant and making a fantastically great case why everyone else should remain ignorant.

MaximRecoil
Fortunately, UFO sightings often fall into that area of good eyewitness reliability, because the most important things (nature of movement and general shape) are so basic.

Until you get more than one witness, and then the differences in perception/interpretation begin to emerge.

Case in point: the Lebanon police sighting.

Multiple, credible witnesses still managed to describe the same object differently.

reply to post by MaximRecoil

1What does this have to do with anything?

Oh silly me, I meant post the article about how people learn how to read and can recognize shapes and then completely make up something that sounds factual.
oh, I forgot that people that go on dates can tell if they are dating a man or woman therefore they see UFOs.

So posting actual theories on perception is completely off topic because????? You have already figured it out? Because people can read and tell the difference between people and dogs. Got it.

well I guess you showed me.

ZetaRediculian
reply to post by MaximRecoil

 

First of all, why did you break your reply up into so many separate posts?

Why do you complain about the way I post so much? First it was editing now I break them up to much? Jeez. Why are your posts so friggen long and why do jump all over the place with topics instead of staying on one thing?

You edited in new content which fundamentally changed the meaning of your posts, after I'd already replied to the posts, and you don't think that sort of dishonesty is legitimate cause for complaint? The first time I noticed that you did it (and you may have done it in other places too; I haven't gone back and exhaustively checked), you originally agreed with two points. Then, after I'd already replied to the post, you went back and changed your agreement to arguments. If I hadn't noticed it, it would have appeared to the next reader that I had no answer for those arguments. It is hard to believe that you need it explained why such an attempted "retconning" stunt is dishonest.

Now you are making several replies to a single post, even though there is no actual reason to do so (such as reaching the character limit for a single post), which makes the topic more disjointed and confusing to read and reply to, not to mention inflating the post count of the thread beyond what's necessary. Many forums have rules against both of these stunts of yours, and for logical reasons.

My posts are long because you throw out a bunch of claims, and to properly address them all inherently results in a long post. Also, I haven't initiated new topics in this thread; if they seem like different topics then look elsewhere for the culprit (such as in the mirror), because my replies have been relevant to the content to which I'm replying.

Also, I'm not going to sort through your latest mess of posts for the purpose of replying, most of which are baseless editorials, and none of which actually refute anything I said. It simply isn't worth the hassle.

reply to post by draknoir2


Draknoir2...

Fair point, though the basics of that sighting were fairly consistant, at least among the officers...

As a side note, a new witness came forward in that case in 2012....

"As the witness approached 50 Highway and 47 Highway he saw a large, triangular craft with lights pointing down over the Wal-Mart that was traveling at approximately 25-30 mph. The witness said that the very bright lights on the object pointed downward, but did not light up the ground, seeming to stop approximately 100 feet up.The craft was approximately 500 above the ground."
www.examiner.com...

thesearchfortruth
reply to post by draknoir2

 

Draknoir2...

Fair point, though the basics of that sighting were fairly consistant, at least among the officers...

As a side note, a new witness came forward in that case in 2012....

"As the witness approached 50 Highway and 47 Highway he saw a large, triangular craft with lights pointing down over the Wal-Mart that was traveling at approximately 25-30 mph. The witness said that the very bright lights on the object pointed downward, but did not light up the ground, seeming to stop approximately 100 feet up.The craft was approximately 500 above the ground."
www.examiner.com...

I tend to be skeptical of late-comer testimony long after the event, what with the popularity of UFO shows now.

So we can assume from testimony that multiple witnesses saw a slow or fast moving triangular or rectangular object with a number of possible light configurations with possible windows. Not exactly consistent in all but the most general aspects, and it's those aspects which are most likely to be accurate to some degree. At least one other witness described it as something not of this world - probably not the most reliable of testimony. Point is that even with three or four very basic characteristics to recall and the most credible of witnesses, supposedly trained to be good observers, we still have inconsistencies. Now add in the other witnesses who are not as objective and more prone to speculative characterization things get less clear. Then decades later people suddenly come forward with new testimony. Even less clear now.

This is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.


And just for the record, a very close friend and my own father were witnesses to this very type of "craft" in the Lebanon area that year.

Being the evil skeptic that I am I believed them both without question.

reply to post by draknoir2

Draknoir,
thank you for the reply...

I tend to be skeptical of late-comer testimony long after the event, what with the popularity of UFO shows now.

A reasonable precaution.
Regardless, we should not dismiss such testimony without giving it a fair look.

Despite the unusual inconsistencies in the descriptions of the object, all but one described it as triangular shaped. Personally, I wouldn´t be concerned with the number of lights or windows on a UFO if it was hovering just ¨500 feet¨ above the ground. Would you?

thesearchfortruth
reply to post by draknoir2

 

Draknoir,
thank you for the reply...

I tend to be skeptical of late-comer testimony long after the event, what with the popularity of UFO shows now.

A reasonable precaution.
Regardless, we should not dismiss such testimony without giving it a fair look.

Despite the unusual inconsistencies in the descriptions of the object, all but one described it as triangular shaped. Personally, I wouldn´t be concerned with the number of lights or windows on a UFO if it was hovering just ¨500 feet¨ above the ground. Would you?

Probably not, which would render my eyewitness testimony of such details unreliable. I would expect no better performance from any other witness to such an event.

And I'm fairly certain nobody ran a 500' tape to the hull or broke out a rangefinder to verify the height. Arbitrary guesstimates pf size and distance add to the unreliability.