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by onion2k 708 days ago
Ah, the curse of knowledge. The author is clearly very experienced in his domain, so when a daft-but-useful meme happened to stray across into an area he knows about he felt empowered to refute it. The problem is that the meme, like most memes, is a wildly simplified abstraction for something else, not really a story about planes, and the story at its heart is more like a parable than a factual statement. Everyone who hears about the plane and the dots and the armour eventually understands it's about looking at a piece of evidence and realizing you need to look at the whole picture instead of what's immediately apparent (eg "planes that get shot" versus "planes that get shot and survive").

The author knows more about plane survivability than most, but couldn't see past the facts to understand the meaning.
1 comments
readthenotes1 707 days ago
The moral of the story is somewhat diminished by the story being a lie, though, don't you believe?

Perhaps then, the moral is also a lie. Well, at least groundless until another story is invented to support it...

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onion2k 707 days ago
The moral of the story is somewhat diminished by the story being a lie, though, don't you believe?

It's illustrating a point. The truth the meme demonstrates is still very real.

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Tao3300 707 days ago
> lie

The word you're looking for is "fiction", and the moral of a story isn't diminished simply because the story is fictional. Parables, allegories, fables, myths, and fairy tales often contain truth despite not having actually happened. The opposite happens too, where the occasional real life anecdote is believed to contain some general truth despite being a one-off occurrence.

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readthenotes1 707 days ago
When I heard the story, it was represented as a real life experience, not a fable, not fiction.

Since you're going there, there's a lot of people who claim to be Christian who would be kind of surprised if you said that it didn't matter if Jesus never existed. Same for Muslims with Muhammad, and Buddhist with Buddha.

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shermantanktop 707 days ago
There’s a certain type of person who smugly debunks the factual elements in a fable from Aesop or a fairytale. I understand some people are rather literal, but…come on.
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