It Will Not Make Any Difference

[JDL]

Has anyone considered that some reports may, in fact, be misidentified dmaker sightings?

[Guest Stan Norton]

But for them to be true he would have to see you seeing him seeing you seeing him etc etc, otherwise it never happened.

[Guest DWA]

It may be that most of his life, for scientific purposes, 'never happened.'  Not sure how that would make me feel.

 

One thing's for sure:  if science operated the way he thinks it does...well, we'd never have gotten there.  If humans thought that way, leopards hyenas and eagles would have done us in well before Homo erectus.

[WSA]

Glad our boy dmaker is attending properly to his practical education DWA. The boy has promise…nothing a few 100k miles and several dozens of birthdays can’t cure. If he keeps it up, he may find the cranium only doubles as a hat hook.

One more for anecdotal evidence I see…trail cam shot of a black panther in Clay County , AL just surfaced. Gosh, who knew…?

[Guest DWA]

Melanistic panthers.  As someone who saw a black whitetail deer once, I tell you that it cannot happen, not in this universe.  Might as well expect to find a coelacanth.

[Bonehead74]

Glad our boy dmaker is attending properly to his practical education DWA. The boy has promise…nothing a few 100k miles and several dozens of birthdays can’t cure. If he keeps it up, he may find the cranium only doubles as a hat hook.

Wow. The condescension is staggering. Is there any hope that the rest of us of the great unwashed could someday join the vaunted ranks of your good-old boys Bigfoot Experts Club? A tutorial or checklist of some sort, perhaps?

[Guest DWA]

^^^Well, one could address the staggering condescenscion behind the view to which WSA is responding first, given what appears to be informing it.  That's the way I like to work.

 

I mean, here's a guy saying that if you saw this, you're mistaken, all of you, and it's obvious, and he's basing that on, well, just 'coz.  And basically said that and, oh, Jeff Meldrum, Grover Krantz and John Bindernagel too, you are wrong too, and totally and the science you are using and the people who agree with me are not using, yeah, so what? and why?  Um, yeah.  For 7,000 posts.

Edited August 27, 2014 by DWA

[hiflier]

Hello Bonehead74,

 

Stemming that tide is a full time job. It's not like a certain one of these folks start their own threads or anything. Heaven forbid but instead use everyone else's threads as a staging ground for promoting a consistent diatribe couched in biased, blind suppositions. Furthering objective critique of the evidence isn't part of the equation and my hat is off to the members of this fine Forum for not indescrimately getting on that bandwagon. Books are written from a biased approach. Conferences are launched from the same perspective. Evidence, if at all not hoaxed, is viewed and disseminated with a slanted mindset. 

 

There's little if any objectivity involved behind the dialogue which is meant to gather thinking into a narrow focus involving a one-sided element- that being total conviction of the general public in the unquestionable existence of a large predator in the forest. The task of keeping thought and dialogue in the realm of logical discernment of the available information without leaping into the preconceived mentality drummed up by assumption and speculation regarding the data is daunting at times. What's worse is the dead response to anyone addressing the attempted misguidance of objective thought into one that keeps the blinders on.

 

I suspect it's done to promote discussion and as a flame to ignite member antipathy which is pretty sad to think of as a motive. The incessant nature of a dialogue that ignores all attempts to soften the one-sided steamroller is a good indication of an agenda not favorable to open mature thinking. Is that sad or what. I get tired of the childish rhetoric.     

Edited August 27, 2014 by hiflier

[WSA]

Somebody needs to supply knowledge you can't find in books around here. Book smarts, we got. The other kind? Call up a new supplier cuz we is fresh out as far as I can tell. You only get that, usually, by hard experience, years and miles...sorry, no real exceptions to that rule down here. Some don't get it even then, tragically. The only difference between me and those who have buckets more knowledge than me on this subject, but who don't weight in here, is probably they see no point in arguing sculpture with brick masons. On a bad day, neither do I, but hey, life is belly, belly good these days mon!

[Guest DWA]

What doesn't seem to be making any difference around here (while we're referring back to that OP) is our general tendency to consider people's observations interesting, and to trust them if there is no inherent reason not to.

 

When I hear that thousands of people are seeing something it is automatically interesting.  People lie; people are impaired; people try to be helpful; people are not sure and give the best account they can...but full-on mass hallucinations of something, complete with very consistent details across the observations, well, they just don't happen that much.  It is, in fact, more or less a basic scientific tenet, specifically expressed in the literature, that if there is nothing that obviously compromises an account, the account is taken at face value.  This is the basis on which scientists evaluate anecdotes:  do we have any reason to believe that this anecdote is not the legitimate experience of the person reporting it?  If we have no such reason, we accept the anecdote at least as plausible.  If there are numerous such, we know that it pays more to find out what is causing the anecdotes to happen than to waterboard each and every witness in the name of Ultimate Truth.

 

I can understand people who hear "bigfoot," chuckle, and go back to their own personal reality.  I do not, however, understand people who come here and sit around seeing what all of us see here, for months, and all without accreting one thing that wasn't in their heads when they first got here.  What I have to say about such an approach is not complimentary and I'm not really deadly concerned about that.

[Guest Stan Norton]

Part of the issue here is the failure to comprehend that there is no single accepted 'science'. Proponent and sceptic and outright denialist alike are coloured by their own individual perception of what science is. My own personal beef is with the current view that science equates to ultra empiricism, the almost absurd level of strict reductionism that would dismiss a sasquatch report from the woods from Friday when existence is confirmed from the same woods on Saturday. That's not real science, that's ultra empiricism. Real life events are linked, there are myriad causal relationships not discrete points of data. It has no relationship to the real world. It is rooted in a very definable philosophical movement in science and is in fact very old thinking.

On the other hand is the utter failure of many proponents to critique any purported report and take it all hook, line and sinker.

As ever, the actual reality will be an ephemeral wave, shifting around some middle ground. It is incumbent upon those of us truly concerned with getting near the truth to have humility and work towards a common goal without unnecessarily chiding the other.

Edited August 27, 2014 by Stan Norton

[Guest Stan Norton]

Actually, in short: analysis of anecdotal evidence can lead to hypotheses. These can then be tested by the more statistically rigorous methods. It's that straightforward.

Science is multi and trans disciplinary. Ironically, reductionism becomes increasingly useless.

[Guest DWA]

Part of the issue here is the failure to comprehend that there is no single accepted 'science'. Proponent and sceptic and outright denialist alike are coloured by their own individual perception of what science is.

 

Good point.  In astronomy, most of what is 'proven' wouldn't even be close by the standards of the biological sciences.  In fact, the data points for sasquatch would put it way ahead of most cosmological theories, on points. Only sasquatch isn't an astronomical subject.  Which doesn't matter.  When the level of evidence for something gets here, that something has legs, regardless the science.

 

My own personal beef is with the current view that science equates to ultra empiricism, the almost absurd level of strict reductionism that would dismiss a sasquatch report from the woods from Friday when existence is confirmed from the same woods on Saturday. That's not real science, that's ultra empiricism. Real life events are linked, there are myriad causal relationships not discrete points of data. It has no relationship to the real world. It is rooted in a very definable philosophical movement in science and is in fact very old thinking.

 

Real science accepts groping with the uncertain.  It simply picks its spots; and discarding something that appears compelling, or even just interesting, because it doesn't stand alone as proof just isn't done when science is done correctly.

On the other hand is the utter failure of many proponents to critique any purported report and take it all hook, line and sinker.

 

A problem here is that many of these proponents seem at war with Big Science, and almost take satisfaction in the repellent properties of this kind of thinking to scientists.

As ever, the actual reality will be an ephemeral wave, shifting around some middle ground. It is incumbent upon those of us truly concerned with getting near the truth to have humility and work towards a common goal without unnecessarily chiding the other.

 

And in general, nothing to disagree with there.

 

I have wondered many times why so many people seem utterly at war with an idea that isn't that far-fetched at all.  It skewed my perceptions at first too.  But I spent the time with it to figure out that we aren't talking about something stranger than which has been found many times in the biological sciences alone.  It helps greatly if one is armed with the basic information and interest level, which sad to say (from my eyeball estimate at least) most coming to this topic aren't.

Edited August 27, 2014 by DWA

[Rockape]

Somebody needs to supply knowledge you can't find in books around here. Book smarts, we got. The other kind? Call up a new supplier cuz we is fresh out as far as I can tell. You only get that, usually, by hard experience, years and miles...sorry, no real exceptions to that rule down here. Some don't get it even then, tragically. The only difference between me and those who have buckets more knowledge than me on this subject, but who don't weight in here, is probably they see no point in arguing sculpture with brick masons. On a bad day, neither do I, but hey, life is belly, belly good these days mon!

 

Have a hard time finding a hat to fit that head?

[WSA]

You miss it completely RockApe...it is a position of humility that proposes that I don't know everything that goes on in this world, quite the opposite view of many here who claim to have all the answers. And let me beat you to that punch…DWA is not saying he has all the answers either. He isn’t and trust me on that one.

 

There is a fundamental misappreciation of what truly forms the true basis of knowledge in this world, and it begins with the thought, "Crap, I probably am not as smart as I think I am..." Go there. I am there. You resist the messenger to the point you have a knee-jerk to the message. The message won't change, because it never does...curiosity and exploration trump smug certainty about how things “are†any day.

 

 "We don't know, but I want to worry the question like a dog with a bone." Say it, and I promise you it won't sting but a little.

 

Obtuseness merely shuts down dialogue. You've got people on this board with hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of field research time and wildlife observation ...knowledge they could bring, but why bother? They are on the side of answering the outstanding issue we all care about, but what profit they by coming here and talking about it with the likes of some? The supreme irony is this attitude stifles the very conversation ALL of us could learn from. As I’ve said many times, it squanders a valuable resource for the sake of position statements. A simple shame, is all.