Quote:
Originally Posted by Bladesman87
I think we want to be very careful before we say things like the "phenomena are really existing".
For sure. I believe the pilots and I assume that they know how distinguish some visual artifact from an aircraft, that they wouldn't risk sitting there are testifying to 60 minutes about something that had any decent chance of being a non aircraft. I think it's safe to assume the claims they are making have the technical endorsement of the military.
I am trying to put forward a process of analyzing things like this; frankly how to get to likely truths without being exploitable and without leading oneself into wild conspiracy theories. The premises I suggested, in which I happen to believe, aren't that important. The important thing is to focus on institutions, what those institutions are capable of, what their history of actions are, their modus operandi, their incentives, etc. instead of individuals or nonsensical, wide ranging networks that cross a dozen institutions. You put your observations and institutional analysis together and you can form some hypothesis that make sense. Then you can change the truth value of your premises as new information comes in and adjust your analysis.
So take the question of whether Michael Jordan was secretly suspended from the NBA during his baseball year. This is something a lot of people speculate about and many people believe to be true. It's not exactly super consequential in a material sense, but his retirement did send something of a shock wave.
Did David Stern suspend Jordan? Stern heads an institution called the NBA, essentially a collection of team owners. Was it in the interest of the NBA to take out a player who makes all the owners richer? Who generates interest in the NBA that translates into hundreds of millions of dollars? Obviously not. Obviously the NBA wouldn't intentionally cost itself a dumptruck brigade of cash for some secret execution of pointless punishment of an individual. There is no point in even reading about any speculation that considers something so counter to institutional aims.