The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

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Vixen said:
Don't twist my words. I did not say 'eyewitness testimony is highly reliable'. I said it can be highly valuable. Do keep up!
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Your claim was that people remember traumatic events more accurately, and that it was nonsense to claim otherwise. In any case, how is the value of eyewitness testimony distinguished from its reliability?
 
Vixen said:
[Björkman] is a private individual who can pontificate to his heart's content, as can you or I.
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You're citing him as an expert authority and expecting others to respect that authority.

[Kurm] is hardly going to spout conspiracy theories in his official capacity, even if he privately has his own views about things. He interviewed the crew. Think about it.
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I'm impressed that someone with such an obvious disdain for psychology is somehow able to discern the inner workings of the former Estsonia prosecutor's mind. You have no idea whether his statements to the press constitute personal or professional interest.

I have thought about the claims being made. For reasons that arise from the physical evidence, I think the claims are farfetched and wrong.
 
Vixen said:
Don't twist my words. I did not say 'eyewitness testimony is highly reliable'. I said it can be highly valuable. Do keep up!
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Here are your words:

Vixen said:
I didn't say I was an expert. I said I did a dissertation on memory (academic). I am quite aware that eye witness accounts can be faulty. These types of experiments tend to revolve around how many people spotted the gorilla whilst they counted a basketball being bounced around by a team, or similar party tricks. Also key are events that happen towards the beginning or a sequence or the end. HOWEVER, when it comes to traumatic incidents, actually your memory is likely to be OVER-vivid coming to hit you as 'flashbacks'. This is seen in post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, soldiers from war zones, whenever they hear a loud noise may trigger unpleasant memories of gunshot in the war zone. If an event has an emotional impact on a survivor (as a rapidly sinking ship will and seeing your fellow passengers vanish before your eyes, presumed drowned, then you are likely to remember events clearly, as though in slow motion. It is nonsense to claim the passenger survivors' memories might be poor when the reverse is probably true.
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JayUtah said:
Your claim was that people remember traumatic events more accurately, and that it was nonsense to claim otherwise. In any case, how is the value of eyewitness testimony distinguished from its reliability?
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Quote me in context. It is a fact that if something has an emotional meaning for you, you do tend remember it more intently. My dissertatin on memory proved this at a 95% significance level as per ANOVA, obviously for my particular laboratory project.

All Loftus concentrates on is eyewitness accounts in criminal law, which includes adults remembering child abuse from years ago, so her function is to come along as an 'expert witness' to sow that her studies prove that where memory is vague or from a long time ago, or when pressurised, perhaps by the police to 'remember', that people then fill in the gaps of the missing information, and this is where the distortion in recollection happens.

That has nothing to do with the Estonia. These are people remembering something strongly imprinted, not forgotten, or they get flashbacks as part of PTSD. Please quote me correctly I did not say ALL eye witness accounts are true and correct, we all know this cannot be so, especially when multiple people claim to have observed the same event with differing details from each other. It would be a bonkers thing to claim.


Loftus is not saying ALL MEMORY IS WRONG, she is just challenging witnesses in court who are adamant they saw this that or the other or experienced child abuse. I am resistant to the charge of 'false memory' just to get some flaky perv of a perv rap by hiring a gun-for-hire psychologist willing to call the perv's victim not a liar but someone who has 'false memory' and the perv walks free whilst his victim is seen as not quite there.
 
Vixen said:
You claimed the whole thing was a conspiracy theory. You prove it.
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Wait what? How about you prove the ferry was rammed by a sub, or exploded, or dustified by a D.E.W or whatever tangent you have decided to go off on next.

You're the one making the claims, prove them.
 
Vixen said:
Quote me in context.
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See above.

My dissertatin on memory proved this at a 95% significance level as per ANOVA, obviously for my particular laboratory project.
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Back to claiming to be an expert?

All Loftus concentrates on is eyewitness accounts in criminal law, which includes adults remembering child abuse from years ago...
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Except, of course, for the parts of her career that don't. Again, she wrote the definitive textbook on the subject before becoming involved in debunking recovered memories. And there are three other researchers I cited if you don't care for Loftus.

These are people remembering something strongly imprinted, not forgotten, or they get flashbacks as part of PTSD.
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The three other authors I mentioned specifically studied the effects of PTSD on memory amplification and malleability. They build on Loftus' work.

I am resistant to the charge of 'false memory' just to get some flaky perv of a perv rap by hiring a gun-for-hire psychologist willing to call the perv's victim not a liar but someone who has 'false memory' and the perv walks free whilst his victim is seen as not quite there.
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None of this vitriol makes the science go away.
 
Feeling like you can remember traumatic events clearly, correctly and in graphic detail, as if in slow-motion, can be a symptom of PTSD.
 
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Vixen said:
Loftus is not saying ALL MEMORY IS WRONG, she is just challenging witnesses in court who are adamant they saw this that or the other or experienced child abuse. .
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What is your evidence for this?
 
Vixen said:
Note the words: 'likely to' that is a conditional tense qualifier that does not include the word ALL.
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I never claimed anything about "all" eyewitness testimony. That's your straw man. In any case, the statement I highlighted above from your post a few days ago was the statement -- as you worded it -- for which I asked you to provide scientific evidence. You did not do so, so I reject the claim that witnesses to traumatic events are more likely to remember it correctly.
 
In fact, a well known psychological syndrome shows that when people are highly emotionally charged, they do remember things more vividly. The experiment was to have a subject meet an attractive person (supposedly randomly but planted by the psychologist experimenter) at a spot designed to cause a frisson of fear (danger), such as a swing bridge that seems perilous. Those who were in the 'perilous' (adrenaline inducing) situation were more likely to rate the stranger as highly attractive than in those at a neutral spot, such as a street. In other words, the meeting aroused a strong reaction and left a heightened memory of the encounter.

People in danger, such as a sinking ship, will be in an extreme high stress state and things do often appear in slow motion, or they can only remember complete silence even thought there must have been a cacophony. Of course that is not going to apply to ALL of the people ALL of the time. There are no absolutes. Some people will try to forget as quickly as possible, others cling on, replaying the same scene over and over again.

To dismiss all of this as 'false memory' and 'distorted' and as being useless in a public enquiry where >852 died, including children and teenagers is cruel and callous IMV.
 
Vixen said:
In fact, a well known psychological syndrome shows that when people are highly emotionally charged, they do remember things more vividly.
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That's the phenomenon known as memory amplification. However, as the researchers I cited pointed out, vividness is not the same as accuracy. They go on to study the effects of memory amplification on memory malleability. Subjects who have more vivid memories due to such effects as PTSD do not have more accurate memories.
 
RolandRat said:
Wait what? How about you prove the ferry was rammed by a sub, or exploded, or dustified by a D.E.W or whatever tangent you have decided to go off on next.

You're the one making the claims, prove them.
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I didn't say it was rammed by a submarine. Margus Kurm former Chief Estonian Prosecutor is making that claim and as a current affairs news item, I am reporting his claim, as are the newspapers.
 
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