Watched the first 15 minutes, didn't seem super convincing, so I stopped - have to put bread in the oven soon. 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 only things in the first 15 minutes that weren't eyewitness were the picture and the geiger counter reading. If you go back and look at the picture, it's a shitty non-equilateral triangle made out of two things that look sort of like indentations, if we're being charitable (which really, we shouldn't be), and one thing that just looks like a stick. The geiger counter reading is reported as "10 times background," which sounds impressive if you've never held a geiger counter, but really just means a nearby rock had some potassium in it, or a dozen other possibilities.
And on the "how to handle evidence part," try checking out this: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes
"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: &q...
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?