Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by propercoil 1019 days ago
https://twitter.com/hogrbe
6 comments

>Frank Hoogerbeets @hogrbe

>Feb 3

>Sooner or later there will be a ~M 7.5 #earthquake in this region (South-Central Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon). #deprem

The earthquake happened 3 days after. This seems prescient, until you realize the wording suggests an ambiguous timeline. The area is a known fault zone, one happening "sooner or later" isn't exactly some deep insight. If he knew about that specific earthquake, why didn't he give a more specific prediction of "within the next week"?

He did the same 3 days ago before the earthquake

>A few days ago a fluctuations chart was published marking the region west of Portugal, which is an approximation.

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1699414822008348968

Again, this seems like confirmation bias. From the same tweet:

>I guess #Spain and #Italy should also be on extra alert.

He warned Spain and Italy, but not Morocco? Also for whatever reason he warned italy even though it's not a region marked by the map. Why?

Also, if you scroll through his timeline, it's littered with predictions that didn't come to pass:

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1633919887243370497

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1630518718886191104

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1625941900631867395

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1623399446573719557

This guy has predicted about 30 of the last 2 earthquakes. That is less than useless.
Is there any proof that he is not just predicting a ton of different earh quakes and then deletes them when he is wrong?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Why? He was relatively accurate. We have records of it. What is your skepticism based off outside of resistance to the new ?
Well, does he have some theory how planetary positions play a role in earthquakes, specifically how their positions could lead to an earthquake in turkey but not peru? Is just saying "there will be an earthquake sometime in this earthquake prone region" really that insightful?
FYI: They essentially murdered Semmelweis for not having a theory for how washing hands after examining cadavers and before delivering babies could save lives. He sadly came up with this nutty idea a few decades before we had germ theory and such.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

There's a difference between that, where a small additional step improved safety, and this, where the credibility of the prediction would need to be assessed to be able to mobilize the wide response which would be needed ahead of time.
FYI that was 200 years ago.
Things haven't really changed all that much.
Is this documented scientifically that planet positions can affect earth seismic activity? Like the moon affects sea tides?
It looks like yes if I understand correctly this usgs.gov link.

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-position-moon-or-planets-affec...

Or a similar idea about a correlation between solar activity and earthquakes:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-67860-3

- "It looks like yes if I understand correctly this usgs.gov link"

The USGS answer is a definitive "no" with regards to planets:

- "The relative amount of influence is proportional to the objects mass, and inversely proportional to the third power of its distance from the earth"

That's (inter-planet) tidal forces weaker than 10^-6 the strength of the moon's.

I am sorry, even if English is not my mother tongue, this article certainly does not give a "no" to interactions between planets and sun.

Actually the sentence just before the one you cite says:

"The moon, sun, and other planets have an influence on the earth in the form of perturbations (small changes) to the gravitational field. "

And anyway if you search for other scientific articles on this topic, you can find at least a handful of them.

Then you can criticize the quality of this research (single author, unknown univ, etc) but it exists.

This discussion reminds me how the plaque tectonic theory was rejected for 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift#Rejection_of...

One of his tweets:

Yes, there is much resistance within the scientific community regarding the influence of the planets and the Moon. But there's no extended research that 'disproves' it. It's merely an assumption. In fact, a scientific paper in Nature suggests otherwise.

https://twitter.com/hogrbe/status/1622641784869322754

"there is much resistance within the scientific community" is the usual euphemism used by pseudo-scientists to justify their claim. There’s absolutely no evidence that you can predict earthquakes by looking at the positions of the planets, and this "researcher" is known for his very vague "predictions" that sometimes appear to be true, sometimes not. It’s the scientific equivalent of a broken clock.
This could have been said before every major scientific discovery.

The scientific community must be wrong by definition if science is to learn something new. It’s more than proven that things most scientists find absurd and impossible end up being doable and proven.

I’d give this person more leeway. He’s not reading astrology, he’s working patterns and clearly has not determined whether his research is accurate yet or not. He himself says there’s not enough data in some regards.

So what is your resistance based off outside of reflexive skepticism ?

> So what is your resistance based off outside of reflexive skepticism ?

This has been debunked over and over [1][2][3][4] and is by no mean different from fortune telling. He has not published a single paper nor has detailed its method, which is summarized by various sources as making a lot of predictions about earthquakes in regions that are known to often have earthquakes. Most of these predictions end up wrong, but we only talk about the "right" ones.

[1]: https://www.newarab.com/news/arab-osint-platform-debunks-dut...

[2]: https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/02/did-earthquake-guru-frank...

[3]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6469019/Top-Austral...

[4]: https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/03/01/dutch-earthquake-enth...

Ok so this is far more substantial. Thanks for sharing.
"It’s more than proven that things most scientists find absurd and impossible end up being doable and proven"

Are there many examples besides quantum physics? And eventually and in quite short time, they made their way into the mainstream science, because they modelled the world better. So if this guy can show that his approach can reliable help with predication of earthquakes, he will win. Simple as that. So far I am not convinced, but sure, the moon and the planets are a real force.

Tectonic plates were considered ridiculous. Evolution was debated for decades. Galileo went on trial. Pasteur afaik didn’t find it easy to convince people. Virtually all breakthroughs I can think of, “eminent men” came and told everyone it was hogwash, till it wasn’t.

That’s not say you should defend bad science. Just that great Science might appear like nonsense - at first.

I know exactly nothing about this guy. I'm the person who asked for a name.

I was just quoting his own Twitter feed where he himself indicates this is not scientifically proven.

He apparently calls it research. I'm personally fine with that and followed him before it was said here he predicts this based on planetary influences (and hadn't noticed it myself).

> I know exactly nothing about this guy. I'm the person who asked for a name.

I know that and I’m just commenting his claim; I’m not attacking you in any way.

Okay, for the record, you are officially an antibeleiver who thinks simply asking the question and investigating it and trying to answer it makes one a nutter.

For the record, I hate this out-of-hand dismissal of anyone who asks "What if..." about anything outside the current Overton Window.

No, not at all. This "researcher" is a fraud.
That his research subject has not given "proper" scientific results yet (or ever) doesn't make him a fraud. We wouldn't go far if researchers could only research proven concepts.
> That his research subject has not given "proper" scientific results yet (or ever) doesn't make him a fraud. We wouldn't go far if researchers could only research proven concepts.

The problem is we’re looking at the correct predictions only. He’s a broken clock, he "predicted" numerous earthquakes in various regions and only a small number ended up true.

> The idea that planetary alignments can predict earthquakes has been long rebuffed by scientists. The USGS has stated that neither it nor any other scientist is able to predict a specific earthquake, but that it can calculate the probability of future temblors. Andrew Michael, a geophysicist for the agency, called alignment-based predictions "easy to refute" in a statement sent to Snopes.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/03/01/dutch-earthquake-enth...

Confirmation bias is a known human weakness. Based on what little I've seen, he does not appear to be guilty of it. If other people are overemphasizing his "correct" predictions and ignoring his incorrect ones, this should not be conflated with his position.

He seems fairly reasonable at first glance.

>Confirmation bias is a known human weakness. Based on what little I've seen, he does not appear to be guilty of it.

I scrolled through his timeline and found plenty of predictions that failed to materialize https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37446472

Thank you.