Is ufology a pseudoscience? + The reliability of psychiatric diagnosis + AI doomerism

#1
C C Offline
How the bad science of AI doomerism is good for big business
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-21473-post-90314.html


Is ufology a science or a pseudo-science?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...do-science

KEY POINTS: Karl Popper articulated falsifiability to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. While ufology has been considered a pseudo-science, there may be some ways to make it more scientific. UFOs might be light-based phenomena like holograms and not solid, material objects. [...] If they're not such objects ... then we could begin to make progress in other, more promising directions toward a true understanding of what these things are and why they're here. (MORE - details)


The reliability of psychiatric diagnosis
https://imperfectcognitions.blogspot.com...nosis.html

EXCERPTS: What happens if two psychiatrists assess the same patient? Most people, including many clinicians, would probably expect them to reach the same diagnosis. After all, modern psychiatry has spent decades developing operational diagnostic criteria intended to improve diagnostic reliability. But how reliable are psychiatric diagnoses today?

[...] To examine whether this hope has been fulfilled, we asked more than 1,000 medical doctors working in psychiatry across 19 countries on two continents to diagnose standardised clinical case vignettes. ... The overall picture was striking. Two doctors agreed on the diagnosis only 55% of the time, corresponding to a Krippendorff's alpha of 0.48, a value that must be called ‘modest’ at best... (MORE - details)
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:This UFOs-are-light hypothesis does not speak to reports of crashed crafts people claim to have touched or physical traces like purported burn marks left at UFO crash sites.

Took the words right out of my mouth. And once again the devil is in the details, which only people who have been studying this phenomena thru its whole 80 year history can really hone in on. For instance take the notorious black triangle UAPs that began showing up in the 90's. Huge dark manta-shaped craft that occlude stars and the backlit nightsky. A hologram made of light? Also take into consideration all the daytime sightings of metallic disks and orbs that suggest solid materiality and not just a light projection. Not to mention how UFOs and UAPs have largely been detected with FLIR cameras, radar, and infrared technologies as well as having been observed diving into and emerging from the ocean and detected on sonar. Emission effects on eyewitnesses like microwave burns and EM fields and stalled car engines and malfunctioning cellphones. Then there's those accounts, usually of uaps close to the ground, where eyewitnesses hear a hum like from a transformer. And of course all light images are projected. So what is projecting the image? Details like these definitely suggest material solidity.
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#3
Syne Offline
Quote:These elusive UFOs we can see but never catch invoke the metaphorical cat chasing the laser pointer around the living room.
LOL! So true.
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