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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

Now apply Occam’s razor to the following two choices:

1. Aliens have visited Earth. They crashed their spaceships or we shot them down. The US Government (and possibly other governments) retrieved and studied their technology and managed to keep it a secret for decades

2. Aliens have not visited Earth

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"Occam’s razor" is merely a heuristic, not some sort of law. Neither logical nor otherwise.

Here, you are even using it wrong. You present a false dichotomy and rely on top of that on the faulty, but commonly held assumption, one choice was vastly less probable than the other.

If the US government has covered up the topic for the last 80 years, you must assume your priors to be faulty.

Ok, let’s add a third scenario: aliens have visited Earth undetected. Hell, you can add as many scenarios as you like, I’m still going to go with ‘Aliens have not visited earth’ unless presented with overwhelmingly concrete evidence.

Anecdotes and eyewitness accounts from falliable humans and weird sensor readings from non-scientific sensors that are designed for war are not the least bit convincing to me.

Being visited by alien beings would be the most consequential event in human history, I’m personally fine with having an extremely high bar for any evidence or proof before I even entertain the possibility.

I do believe it’s probable that intelligent life exists in the universe, for what it’s worth.

You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists.

One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian.

There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.

It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.

Evidence of what is a different question. But the scientific approach starts with "That's interesting and unexpected" and develops from there.

Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."

> You don't want evidence, you want someone important to say convincing evidence exists. One is factual and scientific, the other is authoritarian. There are decades of evidence of sightings and encounters, collected by government and military agencies in multiple countries.

No, I want concrete evidence, not eyewitness testimony from pilots, ‘whistleblowers’ who report secondhand accounts of witnesses, videos, and sensor data. None of those things are concrete evidence of alien spacecraft visiting earth. There certainly are a lot of aerial anomalies, which makes sense as many nation states are flying all kinds of things all over the world and our vision, cameras and sensors are all fallible.

> It's nonsense to claim no evidence of anomalies exists when that's just not factually correct.

I am saying I don’t believe any of the alleged sightings are real alien spacecraft, not that there aren’t reports of anomalous aircraft.

> Not from "I can't imagine this is happening and it makes me anxious, so I'll just pretend there's nothing real to worry about."

I’m not anxious about aliens existing, I think the discovery of alien life would be the most exciting thing that has happened in human history. I’d be glad to be alive for that, regardless of the outcome. I just don’t think it’s happened yet.

And somehow these alien crafts are capable to cross interstellar distances but then crash at a rate higher than our airplanes, unless of course there's a shitload of them flying around here.

Scenario 1: the alien craft are piloted by teenagers and stolen from their parents to go on joyrides.

Scenario 2: the aliens are bumbling and incompetent, and stole their spacecraft tech from some more intelligent race. (You could call them "pacleds")

People invoke Occam's razor too often that it has become pretty much a thought-terminating meme. Occam's razor only gets you the simple, convenient explanation, it says nothing about the truth. Epistemologists understand this very well. It's easy to find counter-examples where simple explanations reflects nothing of reality.

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