alt Hacker NewsI think it takes time. I can only imagine the hours required to research, develop and shoot such well-evidenced explanations, given that part of his audience is true believers searching for any gap through which they can sustain their beliefs. But look at his website: https://www.metabunk.org. A quick search there for "Transients" returned several pages of posts, some from Mick himself.
Frankly, I don't follow it these days as I have nowhere near Mick's saintly level of patience to so calmly endure a never-ending game of whac-a-mole. Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to. Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
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> Because, apparently, a consistent trend of 100 consecutive falsifications implies nothing about the likelihood of #101. And at the end of the day, it's impossible to conclusively prove a negative.
That's right. Not sure why you sound a bit unhappy with this.
In particular, a source can become more untrustworthy over time if the source is repeatedly proven to lie or be reckless about the truth. I'm not sure you can apply the same logic to "categories of claims". What is the rationale behind your implied frustration that people are not "learning" that some "categories of claims" tend to be untrue? (not to mention the arbitrary grouping of totally disparate ones like Chem-Trails and Flat Earth)
>Rational, evidence-based skeptics like Mick are doomed to Sisyphean toil because even after they've resoundingly explained a hundred vague claims, UFO (and Chem-Trail, Flat Earth, etc) true believers will always find a new one to hitch their belief to.
Right. And I do think that meticulous effort is invaluable because it heightens the cost of cognitive dissonance which can be important to reaching people on the sidelines.
But it makes you wonder if the debunking community should be a bit more intentional about intercepting whatever these psychological processes are that make people immune to evidence-based correction, and target those mechanisms the same meticulousness in patients of a debunk.
Although obviously I think the trouble with that is such a task would amount to helping steer such people into a fabric of social and cultural connectedness that's more valuable to them than the conspiracies are. Which seems a tall order. But maybe engineering an alternative psychological virus that crowds out the conspiracies in favor of something else is a more efficient option.