[foltik]

If a “category of claims” has shared causal structure, then the category’s track record absolutely does tell you something about the next claim in it.

It’s not arbitrary. Alien UFOs, Chem-Trails, and Flat Earth are obviously all generated from the same distribution of bullshit: ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by positing a vast hidden conspiracy.

[marshray]

Every person on Earth could agree that Earth is flat and it wouldn't affect the reality of whether or not extraterrestrials visit earth even a little bit.

[rapnie]

The shared causal structure is the absence of facts and denial of science. Nearly every religion on earth also suffers from that in their gospel, where many fictitious and supernatural phenomena are bundled together and sold for truth.

[marshray]

> the absence of facts

I'd prefer to speak about "evidence in support of/against" rather than "facts", which often conceals a presuming-the-consequent kind of fallacy.

> denial of science

Whether "science" is believed or denied by any particular person has no effect on whether or not extraterrestrial intelligence has or is visiting earth.

Demanding that "science" be believed is un-scientific. I am not drawing an equivalence between science and religion here, but pointing out that your argument is a super hand-wavey appeal to an inviolable "gospel". I'm old enough to remember when a theory like intra-galactic panspermia was regarded like canals-on-Mars.

In my view, ETI theories are lacking any credible evidence and this makes me sad.

[hnfong]

There is nothing anti-science about the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. In fact its apparent absence is has a name -- it's called the Fermi Paradox.

And the facts are just ... released. It's the interpretation of the observations that are disputed. And unless you think they are all fake, the explanations that do not involve alien tech are non-trivial to say the least.

I'm not sure why you'd think there is any shared causal structure with flat earthers at all.

[quickthrowman]

Extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the universe, and extraterrestrial life visiting Earth are two distinct things, and the former is vastly more probable than the latter.

[rapnie]

Yes, and to bring it back to GP's point, if someone comes telling you they just saw a flying saucer rise on a big chem trail above the flat earth's horizon, then you perhaps don't take their next claim all too serious.

[cubefox]

You are assuming that the people who are arguing about "transients", or people like Avi Loeb, are also people who believe in flat earth or flying saucers.

[notahacker]

True, but if you don't have sufficient knowledge of IR to assess the claim that a particular photo cannot be a bird, the tendency of the people making and believing that claim are usually equally confident that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams and that vaccines contain microchips is a compelling argument against it.

Similarly the absence of a conspiracy of freemasons running something does not inhibit the existence of a conspiracy of Taylor Swift fans running it in any possible way. But I think any objective assessment of whether the Swiftie conspiracy is likely to be real or not should probably take into account the possibility people positing Swiftie conspiracies have been influenced more by well established tropes about freemasons and Jews, and if the alternate hypothesis that a common human failure mode involves positing the idea groups they distrust secretly conspire to achieve unrelated outcome they dislike is well supported and the claim of an actual Swiftie conspiracy isn't...

The only thing that cuts against this is that if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.

[marshray]

> if I was an intelligent extraterrestrial wishing to remain secret at a time of widespread interest in the possibility of extraterrestrials, I'd probably actively select the sort of people that might discredit the existence of UFOs by pattern matching all sorts of rubbish to reveal myself to.

I've read claims that the Cold War-era US Gov employed exactly this strategy on the people camping out along the fence at sites like Area 51, taking pictures of advanced aircraft under development. I.e., they actually took some people down into the basement and showed them "alien bodies" to confuse the Soviets.

[cubefox]

What about Avi Loeb's theory that 'Oumuamua is an UFO with a solar sail, which would explain its apparently unusually flat pancake-like shape?

[tsimionescu]

That's an example of ambiguous or misunderstood phenomena explained by a professor who decided that there's more money in UFO BS than in his previous career (or sincerely lost his grip on reality, who knows).

[cubefox]

I don't know, he seems to be really smart. Maybe it's a good UFO theory for a change.

[blincoln]

It was an interesting thoery, but IMO his habit of making similar claims every time an interstellar object is discovered cast doubt on that original theory.

[cubefox]

I'm not aware of any similar claims. I thought the other two interstellar objects were not anomalous.

[matt_kantor]

You can read a summary on his Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb#Claims_about_alien_li...