I swear the UFO is coming any minute(www.experimental-history.com)

98 pointsby Ariarule4 hours ago10 comments

bigbuppoan hour ago
One of the more recent "the UFO is coming" events were those people that sold their houses and traveled around in RVs because they thought the rapture was happening on a specific date... or at least that was the message. Turns out most of them just sort of liked the idea of selling their houses and traveling around in RVs.
Animats4 minutes ago
Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/
It's interesting that the proliferation of cell phone cameras has not improved the quality of UFO reports much.
Nor has the availability of automatic UFO-spotting cameras.[1] They pick up drones, flocks of birds, and the International Space Station. But no good UFO shots.
LINEAR and GEODSS, which find near-earth objects and satellites using a pair of large telescopes at each site, have been running for decades, somehow don't seem to be picking up UFOs.
[1] https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance
MarkusQ3 hours ago
Surprisingly many things seem to be spoiled by the "too many of the people being studied were actually other researchers trying to study the same thing" (or even more commonly, students being taught about the thing).
I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.
- maxbond10 minutes ago
  I don't know about the others referenced in the article or what else you might be referring to, but that wasn't the case with When Prophesy Fails or the Stanford Prison Experiment though. That was more or less fraud. The researchers put their thumb on the scale significantly.
  - MarkusQ5 minutes ago
    Oh yeah. I'm not saying that's the only way things can go off the rails. But with regard to "When Prophesy Fails" specifically, TFA says:
    "A new paper finds a different story in the archives of the lead author, Leon Festinger. Up to half of the attendees at cult meetings may have been undercover researchers. One of them became a leader in the cult and encouraged other members to make statements that would look good in the book."
- smsm42an hour ago
  There's a common joke that defines psychology as the scientific discipline studying the undergraduate psychology students. That is obviously due to the fact that a lot of research subjects are found where it's easiest to find them - right on campus, and a lot of people who have time and desire to participate in studies (instead of, you know, working) are the students themselves.
  - clickety_clack13 minutes ago
    I heard there’s a requirement to participate in the studies if you’re in some psychology undergrads.
    eszed7 minutes ago
    I was required when I took (two) undergraduate psychology classes. Also, when I was in grad school I did a few, because they paid (I think) £5 per - which was, in the days of £1 Green King pints and no outside income, well worth pursuing.
nicbou2 hours ago
Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. It's one of the few publications I read religiously.
wildzzzan hour ago
For the DCA noise complaints, a household (probably the same one as 2015) submitted 19000 complaints in 2016. That's 52 times a day or 3-4 per waking hour.
pnwan hour ago
IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.
jacquesman hour ago
> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.
This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.
Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.
themafiaan hour ago
> so what we remember is not exactly what we saw.
Yet there are savants with nearly perfect recall which has been tested multiple times. I strongly doubt there is a single model for memory or even a single mechanism for forming memories and as a result personal understandings of it poorly generalize across any random section of the population.
- stavros29 minutes ago
  99.9% of people understood that sentence to be correct, in the spirit in which it was written. Yet there are people who don't, but we still wouldn't say the sentence is false.
jongjong2 hours ago
You can never know if/when an unraveling event will occur.
A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.
A related concept in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that a complex system (or some mysterious adversary) is coming to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to mysterious reasons though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying. Without sufficient info and intelligence, the mind will try to transform complex problems that it cannot fully grasp into simple concepts that it can understand and that you can react to and communicate with your tribe (that they can also understand).
A UFO may be a metaphor for a powerful, mysterious, hidden adversary whose capabilities you do not understand. In any case, the correct response is to prepare, hide and flee.
keyle3 hours ago
What is this supposed to be about? Looks like rambling of a man in his personal blog. Some context would help.
Why do people upvote this en-masse while actually interesting tech related blogs just fly by without a vote?
(genuinely trying to understand).
Are you all sitting on Discord channels, chilling each other's posts for karma points?
- 5 minutes ago
  undefined
- judah2 hours ago
  I upvoted it after reading it. I thought there were a number of amusing, counter-intuitive studies in the post. Worth the read.
  - dcminter2 hours ago
    Same; I liked it so much I added it to my rss feed reader so I don't miss future posts.
- doogliusan hour ago
  Explained in the very first sentence, "This is the quarterly links ‘n’ updates post, a selection of things I’ve been reading and doing for the past few months."
- EA-31672 hours ago
  My first reflexive thought, and I suspect possibly yours too, was "Oh wow it's the same pattern I've seen here for years every time the new get-rich-quick career path drops!" Remember when people would look you dead in the eye and swear to God that you'd have your OS "running on the chain" and PoW would solve the energy hogging problems of crypto? It would be the new money, goodbye fiat, everything would change!
  Well a lot of the same players are cashing in on AI, but I'm sure the UFO will show up any day now.
- hard_times2 hours ago
  I wholeheartedly agree. Doesn't look organic at all. Guess it's the quality of Hacker News these days: blog spam.
  - bigbuppoan hour ago
    Wait until you find out most of the comments are shitposts.