Merged Is ufology a pseudoscience?

[Stray Cat]

Be specific ... what evidence?

Every post you make where you try to argue that anecdotes have any value in establishing the veracity of something that has not been shown to exist for starters.

 

[GeeMack]

big·ot·ry noun
prejudice and intolerance: intolerance toward people who hold different views, especially on matters of politics, religion, or ethnicity
Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999,2000

Notice the little © thingie?

The claims of skeptics have equated ufology with religion on numerous occasions, but even if you don't think they do, the prejudice and intolerance factor is plainly self-evident. You've lumped everyone into the same group and tarred and feathered them all so that you have an excuse to ridicule them. It's shameful.

There might be "ufologists" whose arguments don't merit ridicule. The ones we're most familiar with are the ones who come to this forum claiming to engage in "ufology". If you can point out any whose arguments are mainly rational and objective, maybe those particular "ufologists" should be un-lumped. As for the rest? Pseudoscience.

And your poor persecuted believer argument is at least as deserving of ridicule as any other the "ufologists" present. It's rather pathetic in fact. For one thing it's transparently dishonest. It sounds kind of desperate, kind of like something a Christian might try when they realize all their arguments have failed. Talk nonsense, abandon critical thinking, pretend faith is science, toss around logical fallacies like confetti. Yep. It's pseudoscience.

 

[GeeMack]

People here have been overly tolerant of your bastardisation of science, language and critical thinking.

This bears repeating. Although I might have spelled it with a "z". There is much tolerance for lies, deceit, and fraud here. Lousy arguments are tolerated. Poor logic is. Logical fallacies are. But none of it goes without notice. Tolerance doesn't mean giving pseudoscience a pass.

 

[Akhenaten]

Do that ... just remember images tend to be another story. If you want a decent resolution image of the USI emblem try asking. I might even grant permission and send it to you, provided it is used in a non-defamatory manner.

j.r.

Why on Earth do you think I'd be interested in having the emblem of a pseudoscientific organisation?

 

[John Albert]

The above is not accurate. For example, the Washington National sightings are a historical fact with verifiable people and places. There are real reports from real newspapers, radar operators, pilots, eywitnesses and investigators. All this can be put into a single report or with a collection of reports.

Agreed. At that point, it would be merely a collection of descriptions of a single "event." As long as it were simply reported without any effort to draw scientific-sounding conclusions, it would be neither science nor pseudoscience.

Doing so would be neither be science nor pseudoscience unless it was presented as being a "scientific report". Until then, it would only constiture a historical account of the events surrounding the Washington National UFO sightings and various others.

Yes, that would certainly qualify it as pseudoscience, but so would a study that purports to extrapolate one or more conclusions about the objective nature of the material Universe.

It is not necessary for a report or study to have "THIS IS SCIENCE!" emblazoned across the cover for it to qualify as pseudoscience. If this hypothetical report were to promote any conclusions about the purview of science without proper scientific procedure, then it would also be pseudoscience.

Are you really going to sit there and lie, when I already posted the quote along with a link to the original post to prove it?

Ufology stated that he wanted to apply critical thinking to the discussion of UFOs, then he immediately stacked the deck with special pleadings and cherry-picked, vague redefinitions of "critical thinking" to inhibit the use of actual critical thinking.

The above is not accurate. You are using what you call the strawman argument ( misrepresentation of an opponent's position ).

No, I'm not. What I did was critique your argument.

A strawman is the act of rewording somebody's argument inaccurately in the interest of making it easier to refute (that's the "strawman"), and then refuting the strawman argument instead of your opponent's real argument. Imagine a guy showing up to a fight carrying a scarecrow, which he proceeds to beat up and then claim victory over the enemy. That is a strawman argument, and it's not what I did.

I stand by my critique as a valid criticism. The organization that hosts these forums, The James Randi Educational Foundation, is a community dedicated to promoting critical thinking. Many of the people here are educated and knowledgeable about the proper techniques of academic and scientific research, observational and experimental data collection and analysis, application of logic and mathematics, forensic debate, general science, etc. You cannot deny that the majority of people here at the JREF are far more knowledgeable than yourself in this area. Most of them are far more knowledgeable than myself as well. I would certainly never try to pull a fast one around here, because somebody would slap me right back into line real quick.

So you've come to this community of critical-minded skeptics, dedicated to educating others about the principles and disciplines of critical thinking. You've started a thread wherein you try to weasel out of some major principles of critical thinking to shoehorn in your pet belief in extraterrestrial visitation. If you go back and read the first few pages of this thread, you might notice that everybody (except you and Rramjet, the resident ufologists) criticized your guidelines for the dishonesty of applying such loose criteria under the rubric of critical thinking. What does this tell you about the state of "critical thinking in ufology?"

No "redefinitions" were done. The actual definition used can be traced directly to the source at the Foundation For Critical Thinking. The rest is to provide context for the convenience of people who want to get started without doing the same level of background reading on what constitutes critical thinking as I did before starting the thread.

Instead of one of the many excellent and concise definitions to be found on websites all over the Internet, you deliberately cherry-picked the home page of a political organization containing a melange of vague, subjective definitions. Why did you do this?

It's obvious you're not interested in pursuing a more specific definition, at least not one that might be forwarded by this community of critical thinkers. When I proposed that we (as critical thinkers and members of an educational community) discuss an agreeable a set of criteria to delimit the discussion and avoid pointless bickering, you accused me of "moving the goalposts." I maintain that the converse its true; in your first post, you deliberately sought to stack the deck to thwart serious attempts at critical analysis that might question your pet belief in outer space aliens.

You deny that this discussion is an effort to circumvent the "Research, the Evidence" thread, but it appears to be precisely that. I don't think any of the JREF regulars are ever going to let that happen, so if that's your game you might as well just hang it up right now.

What do you think would happen if I joined the forums on your website, started flaunting my ignorance of UFOs all over the place, and propose to redefine the basic precepts and criteria of ufology? How well do you think that would go over? How long would I last before getting banned?

Ultimately I proposed that anything that advances the pursuit of truth is acceptable ... why would you have a problem with that? Or are you only concerned about proving your personal biases?

Because the pursuit of "truth" is only as noble as the methods you use to get there, and you guys use some very faulty and dishonest methods. My own personal biases are chiefly concerned with the elimination of all biases, including my own. There's a very reliable method for doing that. If you stick around long enough and start looking critically at your own arguments, you might even learn how to do it.

You are correct that we're not talking strictly about conclusive scientific empirical evidence here. We're talking about what is reasonable to accept as useful information in context to some topic related to ufology.

Well, the JREF forums is not exactly an ideal environment for the promotion of pseudoscience. So if you ever decide to drop the "ufologisms" and start confining your speculations to the real world, you'll find the goings much easier around here.

If your topic is the actual existence of UFOs in the context of a reasonable non-scientific rationale for what to believe, or have actual scientific data to present, then you are in the right place. However if you only want to demand scientific empirical conclusive proof from others and otherwise dismiss the discussion as irrelevant, you should go to the Evidence thread.

No, in this thread we discuss critical thinking as it relates to Ufology. It says so right up there in the title.


By the way, arguments by assertion reiterated ad nauseum only make you come off as a brainwashed dogmatist. You're not going to make many friends around here with that kind of rhetoric. Just sayin'.

 

[John Albert]

Really?
I thought it was a discussion about critical thinking in UFOlogy.
And to reach the conclusion that "it is reasonable to accept as 'useful information', anything that confirms my belief ignoring how inaccurate it may be" is not critical thinking.

Your statement quoted above is a straw man ( based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position ). It is pseudoskeptical and deserves no further comment.

That's not a strawman either. You really should not use words that you don't understand the definitions of. It makes you look rather foolish.

 

[John Albert]

SETI is also conducting pseudoscience.

Not for much longer. They're shutting down their array for lack of funding.

 

[Turgor]

That's not a strawman either. You really should not use words that you don't understand the definitions of. It makes you look rather foolish.

To be fair to ufology, the exact quote you used was in response to a post by me, not Stray Cat. Though ufology did accuse Stray Cat of using a strawman when they didn't either.

I think my argument wasn't a straw argument either. I merely pointed out that I think ufology's position, in his own words no less, makes no sense and is useless. But i think we can distil from his phrasing and the evidence in both this thread and the "Is ufology pseudoscience" thread that what he means to convey is that anecdotes should be considered as evidence for claims that some UFO's are of alien origin. He called it "All information" in the post i replied too.

Now if this is not ufology's position, and by this I mean that ufology explicitly states that anecdotes can not be accepted as evidence, then I might have misunderstood his post. I highly doubt that is the case though.

 

[ufology]

What I'm saying straight out, rather than just implying, is that ufology that "stands with all those people who honestly know from the evidence of their own conscious and unimpaired senses, that Earth is being visited by objects of alien origin" has nothing to do with critical thinking.

OK I can accept this as a starting point. It uses a definitive example to point out an alleged instance where a ufologist ( me ) is not using critical thought in the field. Let's examine that statement a little closer.

First, Since I'm the one who wrote the quote in question, we don't have to worry about conjecture as to what the original author intended. So anything I say regarding this quote cannot be disputed as being presumptuous of the original author's intent. So let's see if it has "nothing to do with critical thinking".

The statement itself presumes that there are people who know from the evidence of their own conscious and unimpaired senses, that Earth is being visited by objects of alien origin. For this I had to ask the question, "What information might there be to reasonably support that assumption?"

There are two factors I considered when coming to what I concluded is reasonable to believe Note: This is not the same as having "proved anything as a scientific fact." ... and scientific proof is not a required component in the critical thinking process.

So the first factor I considered is all the information provided by other people who claim to have seen a UFO. Note: We're talking UFO as in the replacement word the USAF created using to replace the term "flying saucers", which were presumed to have been alien craft. So the word UFO is simply a euphemism for an alien craft. So the first step in the critical thinking process involved gathering and considering information. A lot of it.

This involved reading tens of thousands of pages on the subject and talking with hundreds of people about their experiences over a period of some 40 years. In the process of reading and evaluating these reports and experiences, it became apparent that the number of incidents involving what seems to be some sort of alien technology number in the thousands.

Out of all those reports, there are some that I think are reasonable to believe have substance. Most of these involve pilot sightings and some are backed circumstantially by radar reports and independent corroborating witnesses ( or so the books claim ). Rather than include every bit of source material, I'll just suggest that before you can comment on my reasoning, you'll need to review at least some of the information yourself. I can't post it all here because it's too lengthy. You can start by reading just one book ... Beyond Top Secret by author Timothy Good.

So the second factor in my critical thinking process was to distill the information down to a level where it was reasonable to believe that actual UFO sightings had taken place. This involved a process of elimination based on the information in the reports and the seeming credibility of the source reporter and authors.

The third factor is my own experience. The object I observed clearly demonstrated controlled flight and possessed performance characteristics beyond any Earthly technology. How do I know this?

I've had an interest in aircraft since an early age. At the age of 10 I used to ride my bicycle out to the Calgary airport just to watch jetliners and match them up to an ID sheet I had gotten from a travel agent. By the age of 12 I had seen literally hundreds of them and could tell you every make and model that flew over.

I also grew up during the Space Race and acquired a basic understanding of the space program. I could tell you how many stages the rocket had, what it was called, how many engines it had, how tall it was, how fast it traveled, what the LEM was ... and so on. I have an Illustrated World Encyclopedia of Aircraft with over 2500 entries including specifications for matching visual sightings to known aircraft. I've ridden in jetliners, light aircraft and helicopters. I've observed thousands of aircraft in the sky, both day and night with and without visual aid and watched numerous documentaries.

Simply put, even the average person can identify an aircraft, and I've devoured far more information than the average person. By attempting to match what I saw against all the available data on the configuration and performance characteristics of terrestrial technology, I was not ( and am still not ) able to find anything that comes close to what the UFO I saw pulled off.

The next step was to look for any other way to support the idea that others have had a genuine UFO experience. I took the position that if the phenomenon was not unique to my personal experience then there must be other people who have seen similar objects. It turns out I was right. Not only did three of us see the same object at the same time, others had seen the same thing in the past, and then there were all the other hundreds of UFO reports I had sifted through. At this point it did not seem reasonable for me to believe that since the phenomena was obviously real ( to me based on firsthand knowledge and corroborating witnesses ), that others had not shared the same or similar experiences. It would be arrogant and self-deceiving to think that only we three were some special group of chosen ones, or the only ones in the right place and the right time to have such an experience, especially with so many others claiming to have seen the same or similar phenomena.

So now we have these elements of the critical thinking process being employed.

• Gathering information from independent sources
• Evaluating the information from independent sources
• Considering personal experience
• Evaluationg personal experience
• Determining from the above if it is reasonable to believe that more people than me have seen a UFO
• Determining if it is reasonable to provide other people who have seen a UFO with a show of support.

To conclude. It is plain that my statement, "USI stands with all those people who honestly know from the evidence of their own conscious and unimpaired senses, that Earth is being visited by objects of alien origin" is indeed based on multiple elements of critical thinking including,

• Gathering information
• Personal experience
• Evaluation of information

Therefore the assertion that my statement "has nothing to do with critical thinking" is clearly false.

j.r.

 

[GeeMack]

The statement itself presumes that there are people who know from the evidence of their own conscious and unimpaired senses, that Earth is being visited by objects of alien origin. For this I had to ask the question, "What information might there be to reasonably support that assumption?"

Critical thinking tossed out the window. You start with the preconceived notion that aliens are visiting the Earth, then you proceed to justify your belief. That's not science. It's pseudoscience. But critical thinking? Absolutely not. It's dishonest to suggest that it is.

 

[GeeMack]

Therefore the assertion that my statement "has nothing to do with critical thinking" is clearly false.

Sure, it has something to do with critical thinking. It has to do with flushing it down the toilet because critical thinking is an impediment to all the arguments you attempt to use to bolster your faith in aliens.

 

[Akhenaten]

The statement itself presumes that there are people who know from the evidence of their own conscious and unimpaired senses, that Earth is being visited by objects of alien origin. For this I had to ask the question, "What information might there be to reasonably support that assumption?"

Fail.

 

[Turgor]

<snipalot>Therefore the assertion that my statement "has nothing to do with critical thinking" is clearly false.

j.r.

That was an awful lot of words to say that you want critical thinking to be redefined in such a way that accepting anecdotes as evidence is acceptable. Come to think of it, that is what you argue in most of your posts about this topic. The steadfast refusal by skeptical minded people to grant you this redefinition, including the reasons why this would be detrimental to critical thinking, should by now have let anyone who considers himself a "critical thinker" rethink their position.

Your refusal to do so is another reason why we can safely conclude that you do not engage in critical thinking when it comes to ufology as practised by you.

 

[RoboTimbo]

OK I can accept this as a starting point. It uses a definitive example to point out an alleged instance where a ufologist ( me ) is not using critical thought in the field. Let's examine that statement a little closer.

<snipped uncritical pseudoscientific personal anecdote>

Therefore the assertion that my statement "has nothing to do with critical thinking" is clearly false.

j.r.

I liken your perception of your ability to recognize everything that can possibly be in our skies with your perception of your ability to judge character.

Psuedoscientific and uncritical blustering.

You're welcome to believe it all you want. Just don't confuse it with critical thinking.

 

[The Man]

Thanks for the quote on the Cargo Cults. I've known about them for a long time and have used it as an analogy to some of the ufo cults and woofology that goes on. The important thing to remember in the analogy is that the aircraft were real. Of course a mere analogy doesn't prove UFOs are real either, but the idea that an optical stimulus has causal consequences is valid. It is also interesting to note that if the description of the headphones and other details that could have only been identified from the ground are true, then we also have the analogy that the cult's actions actually led to a "contact" type situation. All very interesting to reflect on.

j.r.

Yes the aircraft were real but the purported “science” wasn’t. It was just going through the motions without any substance and pretending that could make a difference. “an optical stimulus has causal consequences”? Guess what, that is exactly what they were doing. Trying to recreate the optical stimulus and thus the "causal consequences". However, it doesn’t work like that. Just because you can “see it” doesn’t make it real. You are engaging in the exact cargo cult science and “woofology” you so desperately seem to want to separate yourself from. So much so you’re trying to redefine critical thinking to accept what has been demonstrated to be the most unreliable source of information, anecdotal accounts. The faux controller of those cargo cults had more substance than your faux critical thinking as at least theirs was made of something tangible and was intended to at least look something like what it was meant to represent. You’ve gone the complete opposite and simply attempt to assemble any semblance of credibility from only credulity.

 

[John Albert]

Thanks for the quote on the Cargo Cults. I've known about them for a long time and have used it as an analogy to some of the ufo cults and woofology that goes on. The important thing to remember in the analogy is that the aircraft were real. Of course a mere analogy doesn't prove UFOs are real either, but the idea that an optical stimulus has causal consequences is valid. It is also interesting to note that if the description of the headphones and other details that could have only been identified from the ground are true, then we also have the analogy that the cult's actions actually led to a "contact" type situation. All very interesting to reflect on.

j.r.

Even the "cargo cultists" based their religion on material evidence, ie. the cargo drops from the airplanes they later came to worship.

 

[John Albert]

If you guys are ever interested in learning the real meaning of critical thinking and mastering the related disciplines, I'm sure there are plenty of people around here who'd be glad to help.

Just putting that out there.

 

[Turgor]

Even the "cargo cultists" based their religion on material evidence, ie. the cargo drops from the airplanes they later came to worship.

Ah, but you see, material evidence is weaker than anecdotes according to ufology:

There have been claims of recovered alien technology. But if it exists the public has no access to it. I'm a bit surprised that you would accept such spurious evidence as ship fragments and ray guns as "proof". Humans can build ray guns and space ships.<sniptherest>

ufology is surprised that we would accept a ship fragment, which we could independently examine, as evidence when we do not accept the anecdotes of jet fighters, who surely don't lie and always accurately interpret what they see.

 

[Pixel42]

The important thing to remember in the analogy is that the aircraft were real.

The important thing to remember is that the cargo cultists were copying methods and procedures they didn't understand to try to produce the same result as the people who did understand them were able to produce. And just how fundamental that misunderstanding was.

The analogy Feynman was making was between the islanders misunderstanding and misapplication of the process required to produce planes, and pseudoscientists misunderstanding and misapplication of the process required to produce meaningful scientific results.

By misunderstanding what Feynman was saying so completely you have provided a good example of it.

 

[Pixel42]

This involved reading tens of thousands of pages on the subject and talking with hundreds of people about their experiences over a period of some 40 years. In the process of reading and evaluating these reports and experiences, it became apparent that the number of incidents involving what seems to be some sort of alien technology number in the thousands.

You can substitute ghosts, successful homeopathic treatments, Santa Claus - almost any woo belief - for "some sort of alien technology" there and this would still be the case.

A lot of people who might have been fooled by their fallible perceptions is no more convincing evidence than one person who might have been fooled by their fallible perceptions. Why do you find this basic fact so difficult to grasp?

Simply put, even the average person can identify an aircraft, and I've devoured far more information than the average person. By attempting to match what I saw against all the available data on the configuration and performance characteristics of terrestrial technology, I was not ( and am still not ) able to find anything that comes close to what the UFO I saw pulled off.

So your assumption that what you were looking at was the size and distance of an aircraft is clearly questionable. How did you then eliminate all the other possible explanations based on assuming different sizes and distances for the object?