Originally posted by gortex
reply to post by xszawe

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I think your confusing a skeptic of UFOs with someone who doesn't believe in ET life ... they are different

www.nicap.org...
Skeptics in the scientific community resist the evidence for extraterrestrial visitation because of
the implications it raises and because of the questions it begs.

Originally posted by RandyBragg
reply to post by xszawe

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I stopped reading at the first sentence

www.nicap.org...
Skeptics in the scientific community resist the evidence for extraterrestrial visitation because of
the implications it raises and because of the questions it begs.

That is just wrong, skeptics are skeptical about the "evidence" of alien visitation because there is no hard evidence. It has nothing to do with the implications or the question it begs. It is the same as me saying that gullible people believe in every UFO story because of the implications it raises and the questions it begs .

Originally posted by xszawe
i thought this was a good read about how skeptics work
just sharing for atsers to read

www.nicap.org...

edit on 31-1-2013 by xszawe because: (no reason given)

For instance, if SETI receives an anomalous repeating signal with intelligent content such as a
mathematical constant, and rules out all known causes of terrestrial and deep-space interference,
do they need a chunk of the alien radio dish or a dead alien to attribute it to alien origin? It would
be just as easy to apply UFO-skeptic logic and insist that the signal is nothing more than
anomalous until we obtain physical proof of aliens; after all, why ascribe a radio signal to alien
origin before we have physical proof of the existence of aliens? After all, we cannot rule out
malfunction, fraud, or human error with 100% certainty, so the simplest explanation is an
undetected flaw, not an alien message. Right

edit on 31-1-2013 by xszawe because: (no reason given)

click link for the full article

edit on 31-1-2013 by xszawe because: (no reason given)

Originally posted by BlueMule

Don't call them skeptics. They aren't really skeptics, they are believers who can't fit data into their narrow world-view. True skeptics have symmetrical doubt, they don't deny. Call them pseudo-skeptics.

en.wikipedia.org...

The UFO skeptics don't understand Occam's Razor, and they abuse it regularly. They think they understand it, but they don't. What it means is that when several hypotheses of varying complexity can explain a set of observations with equal ability, the first one to be tested should be the one that invokes the fewest number of uncorroborated assumptions. If this simplest hypothesis is proven incorrect, the next simplest is chosen, and so forth.

But the skeptics forget two parts: the part regarding the test of the simpler hypotheses, and the part regarding explaining all of the observations. What a debunker will do is mutilate and butcher the observations until it can be "explained" by one of the simpler hypotheses, which is the inverse of the proper approach.

Originally posted by xszawe

Originally posted by gortex
reply to post by xszawe

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I think your confusing a skeptic of UFOs with someone who doesn't believe in ET life ... they are different

im not confusing anything
all i said was it is a good read
you know what we say when you assume

Originally posted by BlueMule
Don't call them skeptics. They aren't really skeptics, they are believers who can't fit data into their narrow world-view. True skeptics have symmetrical doubt, they don't deny. Call them pseudo-skeptics.

en.wikipedia.org...

edit on 31-1-2013 by BlueMule because: (no reason given)

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved. He asserts that the claimant has not borne the burden of proof and that science must continue to build its cognitive map of reality without incorporating the extraordinary claim as a new "fact." Since the true skeptic does not assert a claim, he has no burden to prove anything. He just goes on using the established theories of "conventional science" as usual. But if a critic asserts that there is evidence for disproof, that he has a negative hypothesis—saying, for instance, that a seeming psi result was actually due to an artifact—he is making a claim and therefore also has to bear a burden of proof.

— Marcello Truzzi, "On Pseudo-Skepticism", Zetetic Scholar, 12/13, pp3-4, 1987[5]

They aren't really skeptics, they are believers who can't fit data into their narrow world-view.