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Post by Lounge Lizard on May 22, 2012 2:02:51 GMT -5
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Post by caucasoididiot on May 22, 2012 8:45:52 GMT -5
Well, never having heard of this one I have nothing to go one but the wiki and its sources, most of which are in (to me) illegible Russian. But a lot of it seems to be hearsay not very well sourced. I immediately noticed the "highly radioactive" claim about the clothing, but could never find a quantified figure or any indication of who measured this, how or when.
Thus, for myself, there's not enough there to compel me to look for more.
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Post by Emperor Cupcake on May 22, 2012 12:43:27 GMT -5
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Post by BJ on May 22, 2012 13:05:34 GMT -5
Like most of the stuff I've read on Cracked, that wasn't, ummm, good. I'm a natural skeptic, but you can't just make things up in order to solve mysteries and debunk conspiracy theories. They basically could have written Occam's Razor over and over again with the quality of their explanations. If it were all that simple, historians wouldn't still be arguing about Roanoke Island all these years later, or discovering more about the oddities of the southwest Atlantic.
Sorry for the rant, I just hate bad logic. A lack of magic doesn't mean a lack of mystery.
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Post by Lounge Lizard on May 22, 2012 14:02:14 GMT -5
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Post by Emperor Cupcake on May 22, 2012 19:29:25 GMT -5
To be honest, the "lost colony of Roanoke" is a really good example of this kinda thing. I genuinely have NO idea why anyone would still think there's any kind of mystery there; same with Dyatlov Pass. It just seems like people are willing to eschew simple deductive reasoning to make something seem more "spooky."
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Post by BJ on May 22, 2012 21:39:56 GMT -5
It really has nothing to do with "spooky", it's just that there's not enough evidence to confirm exactly what happened in either case. The Russian story raises more questions than answers, partially due to the lack of credible facts. A group of people who seemed to be doing well suddenly cut their tent, left camp in various states of undress, and died. That's interesting to me, and Cracked's explanation is simply a guess that isn't entirely supported by what happened. If a detective were that dismissive of contradictory evidence, they'd be laughed out of the courtroom.
If you think it's so obvious that the settlers mingled with the Croatoans, how and why did that happen? Was it difficult integrating a colony of English with the indigenous tribe, or were they basically taken captive? Is there any evidence remaining other than DNA, and why do other tribes claim to have Roanoke lineage? Etc., etc.
That's what people like to know, and why a good mystery will always intrigue the population, creating myths, hoaxes and supernatural tales. Without a concrete line of facts confirming a story, people will always wonder if something was missed, misinterpreted or intentionally hidden. That constant questioning of accepted "truths" is basically what science is, and why the Piltdown Man isn't on the evolutionary chart today. Reducing every mystery to the simplest possible explanation is just as harmful as the people who attribute them to aliens, ghosts or god.
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Post by caucasoididiot on May 23, 2012 8:53:56 GMT -5
Plissken, I find that a good argument, but I'm also very sympathetic to Cupcake's position. There will always be far more questions than time and resources for a person to answer, and thus a person needs to prioritize them.
Certainly there's a risk in being dismissive about anything; even if few mysteries are likely to lead to discoveries of vast significance, many more might lead to some personal insight. It's a bit like Thomas Kuhn's argument that scientific paradigms don't generate questions that undercut themselves, though I think his argument that therefore science can only advance through revolutionary breaks is overstated, not to mention a boon to crackpots.
I once saw a T-shirt that read, "If you keep an open mind, someone will throw their garbage in it." which pretty well encapsulates the other side of the dilemma. Even without that, pursuing some mystery whose payoff ends up trivial risks distracting from another that might have had a better return.
For me to get interested enough to go digging on something like this, two criteria have to be met. The first is that there must be a suggestion of something fairly significant going on: alien visitors, unknown assassins, you name it. The other is that there must be a suggestion that enough solid evidence will come to hand to make the analysis worthwhile, and it's this latter point especially where a lot of these break down. You touch on the latter above, and my only real objection is that before asking whether there's enough evidence to disprove a certain contention we have to be asking if there's enough to take the claim seriously in the first place.
This particular example doesn't--at first blush, anyway--really seem to fit either criterion, though it might still be stimulating in the way any good mystery is. UFOs are a phenomenon I have read up on quite a bit in the past, though, and toward which I can articulate my reaction. Growing up in the '70s I just sort of drank in the mood of the times that of course the government was covering them up out of fear of their own powerlessness. Later, on reading things beyond the gosh-wow school, I became embarrassed at how uncritically I'd accepted the earlier view.
Hmm, I'd be getting off topic to go too far down this road, but the UFO phenomenon does have it all. It's a huge body of poorly documented noise salted with rare solidly factual incidents. This has engendered both over-facile debunking that does little good and fandom whose uncritical babble and elaboration makes any truly significant evidence far harder to tease out. Very rarely there's some careful research that does generate useful insights, though mostly about human phenomena of perception, both private and public. But having explored this thicket in the past, it takes something pretty significant to reawaken my interest in it today; one more story without any particular documentation of solid provenance doesn't grab me, whatever interesting new twists it might have.
The upshot is that while being dismissive is always risky, practically speaking it's also unavoidable. I suppose it comes down to a matter of choosing your enigmas wisely.
But I still keep hoping to wake up and find a monolith in the room . . .
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Post by BJ on May 23, 2012 10:20:59 GMT -5
Oh, I totally understand that, although I don't think I said it. I'm more referring to dismissing other people for mysteries that interest them. There's plenty of stories I've read where I think "I don't know, I don't care, but this simple thing probably happened." If someone else gets into that mystery and wants to research it, good for them. As long as they're not delusional and it doesn't become a Fox Mulder like obsession, there isn't anything wrong with that. You never know what one might find.
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Post by caucasoididiot on May 23, 2012 10:38:52 GMT -5
Yeah, I figured that was where you were coming from. Personal interest is inevitably part of the equation of which mysteries one chooses to pursue. As long as I sense that someone is genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of their chosen mystery I generally can't fault them.
Where I do lose patience are with people like Stanton Friedman, who, in the UFO field (sorry for drifting so far from your original topic, Lounge Lizard) strikes me as someone too intelligent to miss the internal inconsistency of what he's putting forth. I suspect him of being in the UFO "business," which isn't about solutions but about keeping the pot bubbling enough to keep the books selling. Similarly, John Mack was a guy with impressive credentials but who seemed to get so romantically (I guess that's the word) involved with his work on alien abductions that he lost all ability to judge it coherently.
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