Istvan said:
Therumancer said:
Nothing to do with this article, but truthfully I think those people who are so quick to scream "hoax" due to there being so many of them, are just as bad as those perpetuating the hoaxes. Especially when it comes down to a lot of debunkers and such being just as bad as the hoaxsters in many cases.
It's very easy to say hoax to things because the sceptics require people to follow the scientific method.
In this case people have observed that there is unusual remains of a human, and have jumped straight to the conclusion that it is an alien, when the proper procedure would be to publish a hypothesis, test and then debate the results.
The entirety of this case therefore relies on the appeal to authority fallacy rather than any sound arguments. It does not debunk anything but it also doesn't prove anything, the rational conclusion is therefore that we know unusual human remains have been found in Peru.
Yes and no. Arguements in defense of the scientific method tend to largely be made when it either reinforces, or delays, something people don't want to believe in or accept. Generally speaking this usually comes down to a situation where for something to be "accepted" it needs to be peer reviewed. That means politics come into play, as most of those "peers" by definition have their own theories and findings from which their fame, power, respect and authority are derived. They have a vested interest in not supporting anything that doesn't support whatever made them an expert to begin with, or works counter to other theories they are working on.
In the case of many scientific discoveries, especially big ones, the guys doing it usually wound up on the outs with the general scientific community for exactly this reason.
Granted this DOES create a sort of no-win scenario, in a case like this proof is mostly going to come down to things like DNA testing if and when it happens, rather than a close adherance to the scientific method and acceptance through those channels. Right now we know very little about it.
As far as me commenting on debunkers being as bad as the hoaxsters, while it's not a direct analogy I tend to look at things like the statues on Easter Island as an example. They were allegedly debunked due to the natives in the region saying "okay we admit it, we made those, and here is how we did it", the thing is that the techniques they said they used were those conceived by engineering majors years before about how it could have been done using what was availible to a primitive people, as unlikely as that was. The methods though relied on a degree of engineering knowhow in putting everything together well beyond the people in question, if they had possessed those techniques their entire civilization would have been far differant in terms of their own buildings and capabilities since they would have been applied to more than just building some statues for the lulz. In short what basically happened was that the debunkers/investigators wound up creating an answer someone else liked and then embraced without supporting evidence. This is just one example since it was on TV again a few years ago, but there has actually been similar events over the years where those doing the debunking have themselves been debunked.... oftentimes the same way when dealing with peoples who like to think of their own anscestors as having been more advanced and civilized than they actually were. Basically "if they did something like this in this fashion, they would have used it routinely and had done this and this, and we'd find evidence".
In the case of this article we don't know this is an alien, but we do not know that it is either. The remains don't show the kind of markings you would have expected from head binding and similar things. Deformity is also a possibility. While Occam's razor would lead me to believe it IS likely a set of unusual human remains, we do not yet know that for sure, only that it's likely. Truthfully the biggest support for it being an alien body is that there were 5 experts who examined it and said it was not human remains. That's in question because their identities have not been revealed and it might not have happened. However given how well known the regional practices are in deforming the heads of childen and such if there WERE 5 doctors and suck all looking at it seperatly and they all agreed that did not happen and it wasn't a human body... well that right there DOES mean something. Right now though the lack of identification on the experts leads to the question as to whether they were ever there or if the guy reporting the article made that up.
