On Proof

I generally like XKCD.  I like the science nerdery, but this isn't a particularly reasonable or scientific statement.  It's proof by hand-waving.  Yes, I know this is a joke, but it's a joke that's supposed to be funny because it's true, and it just isn't.  A fairer statement, but one which would not leave much room for a joke, is:  legions of cell phones have not yielded any conclusive proof of paranormal topics like bigfoot, lake monsters, flying saucers and ghosts.

I have more I want to write on this later, and really this comic is just a convenient jumping point for stuff I've wanted to talk about for a while, but for now let me quickly go over how poor a dataset just having a cell phone is for proof of the paranormal.  First, people looking down at their phones, aren't likely to be particularly aware of their environment.  Just having a cell phone on you, doesn't mean you would have the wherewithal to pull it out and snap a crisp, well-defined picture while seeing something unsettling and outside of your normal realm of experience.  Cell phone cameras do not take good, high-quality pictures in the dark, or at a distance.  Everyone in the world, with a cellphone isn't religiously monitoring the skies, lakes and forests for UFO's, lake monsters and big foot.  People aren't inclined to report the strange thinks they see for fear of being made fun of by "reasonable" people.  Youtube is full of strange videos of UFO encounters some of which are undoubtedly fake, some of which are more convincing.  But the first thing anyone will say is "that's fake" whether it could be real or not, because CGI exists and has gotten very good.  So how could the video from an amateur on a phone be taken at face value? Anything abnormal will be assumed to be fake, regardless of it's seeming validity.  Entire towns (Phoenix, Stephenville, TX) have had mass UFO sightings that are as yet unexplained, and everyone just hand-waves it away as some kind of hysteria.  So no, the fact that people have cell phones now is NOT proof that UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts and lake monsters don't exist.

Of course, there's still no conclusive proof that any of it does exist, so I think reasonable people are perfectly justified in not giving too much attention to UFOs, bigfoot or lake monsters, no matter what experiences people claim to have had.  There's certainly no evidence that this is something we should be overly concerned about in our daily lives.  But I'm getting tired of the people constantly and self-righteously claiming to be the most reasonable people on the planet making grandiose and unsupportable claims about what is and isn't proven.  There's some shit we just don't have enough evidence for to say for certain either way, and that's okay.  I understand the push back to people claiming with wide eyes that all these things exist, especially considering how many sightings/experiences turn out to be frauds or entirely explicable.  But it goes too far to say "you can't possibly have experienced what you experienced because other people didn't see it." or "we've completely disproven these events because I haven't seen any evidence that convinces me."  It's reason enough not to worry about it to much, or not believe in it, but it's not reason or evidence enough to declare the truth of the matter.  I think it's enough to say we don't know, and there's not enough evidence to do anything about it right now without declaring other people crazy for having an experience they can't verify or declaring what is an isn't the ultimate truth of the universe because we have some emotional need to have our world view validated.  And an emotional need to have a world view validated can be something "reasonable" materialists can be prone to as much as anyone else.