"Anyhow, it's really easy to just make shit up on television - by which I don't (just) mean lying, making things up is just a natural consequence of rationality failure. The unreliability of eyewitness testimony and all that."
The Wikipedia-article on reliability of eye witness testimony only mentions this statistics:
"The Innocence Project reports eyewitness misidentification occurs in approximately 75% of convictions that are overturned"
Unfortunately this statistics will be very hard to generalize, as argued by me in another comment: "I guess it is mostly the cases that have previously been screened for being likely overturning candidates that are actually brought to court to get overturned. Even more selection arises in the courts decision to overturn or not. Thus, only looking at cases that actually got overturned will give us a highly distorted view. We need statistics on the eye witness quality of random persons." Source: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ffd/struck_with_a_belief_in_alien_presence/7t4w
We need statistics that can explain why every single person among thousands of witnesses has consistently fumbled in their eye-sight roll. Also we need to forget the fact that this US military report on UFOs only attributes 1,5% of sightings as being caused by psychological factors:
"Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blue_Book#Project_Blue_Book_Special_Report_No._14
"Only 1.5% of all cases were judged to be psychological or "crackpot" cases"
Looks like they mean psychological as in hallucination, not psychological as in mistaking something that actually exists for a UFO and then making stuff up because you're not being rational - if you mistake the moon for a UFO (seriously happens), and say "it's moving this way, it has all these lights all over it" (which is the sort of thing I mean by "making stuff up"), that would be "86% of the knowns were aircraft, balloons, or had ...
Recently I've been struck with a belief in Aliens being present on this Earth. It happened after I watched this documenary (and subsequently several others). My feeling of belief is not particular interesting in itself - I could be lunatic or otherwise psychological dysfunctional. What I'm interested in knowing is to what extend other people, who consider themselves rationalists, feel belief in the existence of aliens on this earth, after watching this documentary. Is anyone willing to try and watch it and then report back?
Another question arising in this matter is how to treat evidence of extraordinary things. Should one require 'extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims'? I somehow feel that this notion is misguided - it discriminates evidence prior to observation. That is not the right time to start discriminating. At most we should ascribe a prior probability of zero and then do some Bayesian updating to get a posterior. Hmm, if no one has seen a black swan and some bayesian thinking person then sees a black swan a) in the distance or b) up front, what will his a posterior probability of the existence of black swans then be?