ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: beedarko on April 26, 2013, 06:42:23 PM
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Interesting read...
WEDNESDAY, APR 24, 2013 03:10 PM MDT
Why people believe in conspiracy theories
An expert explains the psychology of conspiratorial thinking
BY ALEX SEITZ-WALD
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/
We’ve written before about the historical and social aspects of conspiracy theories, but wanted to learn more about the psychology of people who believe, for instance, that the Boston Marathon bombing was a government “false flag” operation. Psychological forces like motivated reasoning have long been associated with conspiracy thinking, but scientists are learning more every year. For instance, a British study published last year found that people who believe one conspiracy theory are prone to believe many, even ones that are completely contradictory.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Western Australia, published a paper late last month in the journal Psychological Science that has received widespread praise for looking at the thinking behind conspiracy theories about science and climate change. We asked him to explain the psychology of conspiracy theories. This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
First of all, why do people believe conspiracy theories?
There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness.
What are the psychological forces at play in conspiracy thinking?
Basically what’s happening in any conspiracy theory is that people have a need or a motivation to believe in this theory, and it’s psychologically different from evidence-based thinking. A conspiracy theory is immune to evidence, and that can pretty well serve as the definition of one. If you reject evidence, or reinterpret the evidence to be confirmation of your theory, or you ignore mountains of evidence to focus on just one thing, you’re probably a conspiracy theorist. We call that a self-sealing nature of reasoning.
more... (http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/)
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I don't think that article says anything new.
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I don't think that article says anything new.
Too bad you can't unread it.
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Interesting read...
There are number of factors, but probably one of the most important ones in this instance is that, paradoxically, it gives people a sense of control. People hate randomness, they dread the sort of random occurrences that can destroy their lives, so as a mechanism against that dread, it turns out that it’s much easier to believe in a conspiracy. Then you have someone to blame, it’s not just randomness.
FWIW I usually get the impression that it's not just randomness, but a desire to ignore their own faults (judging by the i.e. the Hoaxers we have around, being obnoxious, dumb and lazy)
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Poor hunchbacked. He's actually one of the more "pleasant" HBs around. He never seems to get angry and abusive, although he may politely tell you that you're evidently not intelligent enough to understand what he's talking about.
Over on YT, he's currently abusing the laws of physics in the form of orbital mechanics (specifically the descent of the LM) - I think he's using the same material he was advocating here two or three years ago.
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It would be really nice to get him to write a computer program to simulate all this so he could see for himself that NASA had good reason to land the LM as they did. A genius like him should have all the skills needed to do this, but he sees his current position as so obviously true that it needs no confirmation. And if someone else were to do it, he would simply label him/her as a "disinformer".
That's a HB-bestowed title I proudly bear, btw.
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It would be really nice to get him to write a computer program to simulate all this so he could see for himself that NASA had good reason to land the LM as they did. A genius like him should have all the skills needed to do this, but he sees his current position as so obviously true that it needs no confirmation. And if someone else were to do it, he would simply label him/her as a "disinformer".
That's a HB-bestowed title I proudly bear, btw.
Oh, he did.
http://youtu.be/Jo9kS4agkMM (http://youtu.be/Jo9kS4agkMM)
According to it, the LM crashed 102o after the DOI burn.
He has also given a precise description of his research technique - see my sig.
(http://i627.photobucket.com/albums/tt353/jarvisn/double-facepalm1_zps9b854ad7.jpg)
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Oh, goodie. "Look at the picture" science. That's always so accurate!
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I can't help but notice your new signature. This guy sounds like such an archetype.
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I can't help but notice your new signature. This guy sounds like such an archetype douche-bag idiot
Corrected, for accuracy....
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I know Gillianren doesn't like to talk about another's possible mental illness, but I've been following hunchbacked for so long, and he seems to exhibit so many of the classic signs, that it's very hard not to.
Every time he talks about "NASA whistleblowers" trying to get information past their evil but stupid CIA masters I can't help but think about Dr. John Nash's delusion of looking for secret messages from the Russians hidden in newspapers and magazines.
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I know Gillianren doesn't like to talk about another's possible mental illness, but I've been following hunchbacked for so long, and he seems to exhibit so many of the classic signs, that it's very hard not to.
That's in part because my first question was "classic signs of what?" It's clear from your second paragraph that you're talking about schizophrenia; you're comparing him directly to a schizophrenic. However, "mental illness" covers a lot of ground, and the signs of one are not the signs of another.
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I know Gillianren doesn't like to talk about another's possible mental illness, but I've been following hunchbacked for so long, and he seems to exhibit so many of the classic signs, that it's very hard not to.
That's in part because my first question was "classic signs of what?" It's clear from your second paragraph that you're talking about schizophrenia; you're comparing him directly to a schizophrenic. However, "mental illness" covers a lot of ground, and the signs of one are not the signs of another.
Gillianren, I'm pretty much in agreement with you, and maybe even more skeptical than you are about diagnosing mental health issues based on a person's writings, but in the case of hunchbacked/Inquisitivemind, I (and others) have been fencing with him for so long that it's hard to believe that either (a) he's deliberately playing the foole for his own entertainment, or (b) 'sumpin's wrong with that boy'.
He's voiced some strange and complex theories involving JFK, the CIA, the Russians, and a 'cast of thousands'. Wild-ass theories aren't the same as delusions, though. The one thing I can point to that could possibly be a delusion is that he adamantly claims to have a degree in Engineering from the École nationale supérieure de l'aéronautique et de l'espace in France. He has even displayed scans of his diploma and other documentation (with the name blacked out) on YT and on his personal website. He certainly seems very sincere in this claim.
However, while he does demonstrate a superficial knowledge of the concepts involved, I think ka9q will agree with me that his understanding of basic physics and related subjects (optics, electronics, orbital mechanics, you-name-it) is deeply flawed; if he ever did have advanced training in the field, it has either left his mind or become thoroughly distorted.
His most evident other deficiency (IMO) is his total inability to look at a picture and understand what he's looking at. That hardly sets him apart from other HBs, though.
One thing I will say for him, though - he's much more civil and even tempered than the average HB... I don't think I've ever seen him resort to name-calling. He may tell you that you are evidently not intelligent enough to understand the point he's making, but he never seems angry about it - just serenely confident in his own viewpoint.
ka9q, would you say that's pretty accurate? Additions / deletions / ugly remarks?
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He's voiced some strange and complex theories involving JFK, the CIA, the Russians, and a 'cast of thousands'. Wild-ass theories aren't the same as delusions, though. The one thing I can point to that could possibly be a delusion is that he adamantly claims to have a degree in Engineering from the École nationale supérieure de l'aéronautique et de l'espace in France. He has even displayed scans of his diploma and other documentation (with the name blacked out) on YT and on his personal website. He certainly seems very sincere in this claim.
However, while he does demonstrate a superficial knowledge of the concepts involved, I think ka9q will agree with me that his understanding of basic physics and related subjects (optics, electronics, orbital mechanics, you-name-it) is deeply flawed; if he ever did have advanced training in the field, it has either left his mind or become thoroughly distorted.
Which is so common, especially in people who go on to work in another field, that I can't fathom using it as evidence of anything. And where do you propose he got the allegedly faked documentation?
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He's voiced some strange and complex theories involving JFK, the CIA, the Russians, and a 'cast of thousands'. Wild-ass theories aren't the same as delusions, though. The one thing I can point to that could possibly be a delusion is that he adamantly claims to have a degree in Engineering from the École nationale supérieure de l'aéronautique et de l'espace in France. He has even displayed scans of his diploma and other documentation (with the name blacked out) on YT and on his personal website. He certainly seems very sincere in this claim.
However, while he does demonstrate a superficial knowledge of the concepts involved, I think ka9q will agree with me that his understanding of basic physics and related subjects (optics, electronics, orbital mechanics, you-name-it) is deeply flawed; if he ever did have advanced training in the field, it has either left his mind or become thoroughly distorted.
Which is so common, especially in people who go on to work in another field, that I can't fathom using it as evidence of anything. And where do you propose he got the allegedly faked documentation?
If you mean that people often forget or misremember things they once learned, especially if they haven't kept up with the field, I completely agree. But I think that everyone I've known in that circumstance is aware that they don't remember.
I think maybe I haven't gotten across the degree of his variance from standard knowledge. Honestly, wouldn't you wonder about someone who claimed to have a B.A. in English who was absolutely certain that Hemingway was a noted British author who was a lifelong teetotaler and died fighting as a member of the French Resistance? Or that Eudora Welty was one of the most underappreciated Canadian poets of the Victorian Era?
People may forget specifics, but my experience has been that they seldom completely forget principles. You see my sig about his view of research. Does that sound like someone who has ever been trained in the rigors of science? He was here on this board a couple of years ago as inquisitivemind; back then your comment to him was:
And again, this proves to me that you are not a scientist of any fashion. Not a scholar. Not someone with any kind of understanding of how proper research works. What if I decided that your name was Gargleplatz? Now, that's not your name. It's not what anyone else calls you. But I've gotten used to it, and I think everyone knows who I mean, so that's what I'm going to call you from now on.
Gargleplatz, have you not understood that, among the rocket scientists who think you are wrong are several members of this board? There are people who post here who know you're wrong, because if you were right, the thing they do for a living wouldn't work if they operated the way they're telling you they should.
Out of context, of course, but evidently you were convinced. And the claims he is making are exactly what they were back then.
As to his diploma, I didn't say, or mean to imply, that it was fake. In fact I have no opinion on its authenticity; I lack sufficient data. This is what he presented:
(http://i627.photobucket.com/albums/tt353/jarvisn/HBDiplome_zps253d5ba0.jpg)
Is this what a diploma from that school looked like? I have no idea.
Unusual for the CT crowd, hunchbacked even displayed a sense of humor about skeptical responses to his educational claims:
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This is what he presented:
(http://i627.photobucket.com/albums/tt353/jarvisn/HBDiplome_zps253d5ba0.jpg)
Is this what a diploma from that school looked like? I have no idea.
Interesting that the subject (option) on the diploma is "Avionique"
If hunchbacked is an Avionics Engineer, well, I'll go he!!
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If you mean that people often forget or misremember things they once learned, especially if they haven't kept up with the field, I completely agree. But I think that everyone I've known in that circumstance is aware that they don't remember.
I don't, to be honest. Memory is malleable.
I think maybe I haven't gotten across the degree of his variance from standard knowledge. Honestly, wouldn't you wonder about someone who claimed to have a B.A. in English who was absolutely certain that Hemingway was a noted British author who was a lifelong teetotaler and died fighting as a member of the French Resistance? Or that Eudora Welty was one of the most underappreciated Canadian poets of the Victorian Era?
Yes, in that case, I would probably assume they were lying. (Though I'll point out that I once encountered a headline about Eudora Welty's death and was astonished--because it meant she was still alive. I thought she'd died decades ago!) However, I know plenty of English majors who don't remember things like comma rules--and don't remember that they don't remember.
People may forget specifics, but my experience has been that they seldom completely forget principles. You see my sig about his view of research. Does that sound like someone who has ever been trained in the rigors of science? He was here on this board a couple of years ago as inquisitivemind; back then your comment to him was:
Oh, that guy. You see, I don't remember them all, and I certainly don't keep track of the specifics. Yeah, I'll accept that guy as a liar. However, even that doesn't automatically assume mentally ill to me for reasons I'll get to in a minute.
Out of context, of course, but evidently you were convinced. And the claims he is making are exactly what they were back then.
The specific claim I was rebutting there, as I recall, was "you all know what I'm talking about, so why should I bother using proper terminology?" Which, to my mind, is a much more clear indication of someone who is lying about their background than merely forgetting even things that seem obvious.
As to his diploma, I didn't say, or mean to imply, that it was fake. In fact I have no opinion on its authenticity; I lack sufficient data. This is what he presented:[clipped image]
Is this what a diploma from that school looked like? I have no idea.
No, and nor do I. If I cared more about him than I do, that's something I'd look up. Heck, maybe someone here knows without looking it up?
Unusual for the CT crowd, hunchbacked even displayed a sense of humor about skeptical responses to his educational claims:
Sorry; I basically don't watch YouTube videos, and I never watch hoax videos.
Okay. So the reason I am as hesitant in the situation as in any other to claim mental illness is that we don't know how he acts in day-to-day life. This is important. This is really the most important thing about diagnosing mental illness. Knowing how a person behaves in one aspect of their life is never enough. Does he believe way-out things? I can't even be sure of that, to be honest. He might be involved in an elaborate leg-pull, for all I know. However, assuming he believes it, and even assuming he's lying about that documentation, that still isn't enough to prove mental illness to me, and it certainly isn't enough to prove schizophrenia.
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Sorry; I basically don't watch YouTube videos, and I never watch hoax videos.
Sun Tzu would say that is a mistake!
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."
- The Art of War; Ch3
The more information you have about your opponent and how he thinks, the better you will be able to argue against his cause.
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Sorry; I basically don't watch YouTube videos, and I never watch hoax videos.
Then you're missing out on some real howlers, like (Title: A Command module or the Nautilus?") in which he claims a 16mm movie of "Buzz Aldrin" aboard the Columbia making a sandwich in 0-g was actually shot on earth under water with the role of "Buzz Aldrin" played by an imposter wearing a Buzz Aldrin mask. The small wires in his headset were actually hoses carrying oxygen to the actor.
No, I'm not making this up. This was the moment I realized for certain that his elevator doesn't go all the way to the top and that I had no chance of ever reaching him with logic based on verifiable facts.
Hunchbacked got such a reaction that he doubled down and followed up with (Title: "It really happens in water"). There he does admit his assertion seems weird (an understatement, I must say) but he gives every indication of being perfectly serious.
Okay. So the reason I am as hesitant in the situation as in any other to claim mental illness is that we don't know how he acts in day-to-day life. This is important.
Agreed, but judging from the sheer number of videos he's made in recent years I'd say that his day-to-day life consists of little more than making Apollo hoax videos for Youtube. From time to time he does take a breather to make Youtube videos about JFK and his assassination and even the Amanda Knox case. He doesn't cut much slack even for those who maintain neutrality, such as when I said I had no opinion about the Knox case because I knew very little about it and thought it had little importance in the grand scheme of things.
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Feeding oxygen through wires?
Where's that stupid burns pic?
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So the reason I am as hesitant in the situation as in any other to claim mental illness is that we don't know how he acts in day-to-day life. This is important. This is really the most important thing about diagnosing mental illness. Knowing how a person behaves in one aspect of their life is never enough.
No-one who diagnoses mental illness in anyone else knows how the person really acts in day to day life. Doctors and other medical professionals only see what is presented at the time of the consultation and what the patient chooses to share in that room at that time - ie in one aspect of his or her life.
Mental illness is routinely diagnosed here in a single seven minute appointment by someone who might have never met the patient before, so I don't think your argument about what it takes to make a diagnosis is entirely correct.
It may or may not be possible or fair (or ethical) to diagnose mental illness online. However, it can be useful to know how to interact with someone displaying such symptoms.
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I basically don't watch YouTube videos, and I never watch hoax videos.
I can understand the later, (they just make me mad), but not the former...
By pure coincidence, I just posted a youtube link in the reality of Apollo section...a video celebrating the 40th anniversary of the flight of Apollo 15...and it is well worth watching for anyone interested in Apollo/spaceflight/etc.
This is just one example, of many, many treasures to be found on youtube...so I "guess" I am disagreeing with gillianren. (Hey, it had to happen eventually. :) )
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The reason I don't watch YouTube videos is that I watch a lot of DVDs. I'm sure there are great things on YouTube, and it has occasionally been the only way to track down something I really cared about. (When Maurice Sendak died, I reviewed Really Rosie by watching it on YouTube, because it wasn't available anywhere else accessible.) However, I own hundreds of DVDs. I get probably an average of ten items on DVD a week from the library, which includes seasons of TV shows. I have a Netflix subscription. I'm getting along just fine for content without adding YouTube onto that.
As for why I don't watch hoax videos, well, they aren't that interesting to me for the most part. I think the information can almost always be conveyed better in text. I'm only really interested in the dialogue; the comments section of a YouTube page isn't dialogue, and I have considerably better things to do with my time than make videos in response, even if, again, I thought videos were a decent way of having the discussion. Which I don't. Are the HB videos funny? Possibly. However, so are some of the things I have on hold from the library, and they aren't funny in a painful way.
Seven minutes, Andromeda? I would imagine the rate of false diagnosis from that is huge. And missed diagnosis. I'm actually horrified to discover that; even my low-cost, constantly overbooked clinic doesn't do intake in less than an hour, and a lot of their patients have something as relatively simple as addiction or an abusive relationship, not even a full-blown mental illness. The doctors also get a lot of documentation, such as histories of hospitalization and so forth, that can also make a lot of difference.
But if someone's schizophrenic, the way to deal with their delusions is not to. You can't talk my best friend's aunt out of her fears about the Klan (despite the fact that the Klan is made up of people who look like her, not attacking people like her), because she's schizophrenic. The only thing that will help is mental health care, which we are none of us qualified to provide and certainly not able to properly provide online. And since all we interact with is the delusion, then is the right answer to just ignore them? Or is it better to assume that they're mentally healthy sans this particular glitch and continue to engage? Or can we even assume that the glitch is not a mental defect and try to engage as equals? I prefer that last, because any other assumption is unwarranted, unjustified, and unjust. And, again, if it's a mental illness, there is literally no point in engaging, because you're not going to convince the person--and you stand a decent chance of looking like a bully.
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I hope you realize I was just kiddin' around... :)
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This is just one example, of many, many treasures to be found on youtube...
That's actually quite true. We talk a lot about the conspiracy kooks and utter garbage on Youtube, and there's no question that there's plenty of it. Sturgeon's Law never applied to anything with greater force. But if 90% of everything is crap, then 10% of it is still pretty good. That may be optimistic for Youtube, but there are also some real gems that make slogging through the dreck all worth it.
Such as the excellent science-oriented videos by Brady Haran: periodic videos (chemistry), numberphile (math), sixtysymbols (physics) and others. There's SmarterEveryDay, self-described "redneck science" from Alabama; he's got a nifty high speed camera and he's not afraid to use it. There's Ben Krasnow, a plain-spoken guy who always seems to be doing something thoroughly fascinating in his workshop.
Youtube has a few excellent Apollo conspiracy debunkers who aren't in our community here (to my knowledge). Two stand out: Astrobrant2 and GreaterSapien. (Astrobrant2 must be doing something right: He Who Must Not Be Named constantly files bogus DMCA takedowns against him. GreaterSapien hasn't actually done that many, but the ones he's done show a razor-sharp wit and a remarkable resistance to being pulled down to their level that I wish I had.) And there are some people who've done amazing Apollo-related work having nothing to do with making or breaking conspiracy theories but who remind us just how great that program was. Like agcfanatic, who has built a working hardware replica of the Apollo Guidance Computer. (Of course Hunchbacked insists it doesn't prove the original worked. And he's a computer expert, with a diploma to prove it...)
Seriously, give Youtube a try. Think about it, there's so much stuff there that you know there has to be something good. You just have to work to find it; the usual crowdsourcing ratings schemes don't seem to work well for people with our tastes. Or maybe I just haven't found a compatible crowd over there yet.
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Here's a couple of links to some of the youtube apollo proponents:
Philwebb59 http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2keGTQ8NvY86WyeUHGGweQ
Astrobrant2 http://www.youtube.com/feed/UCgWXC-yoy3fcaDYW_5Sh8kg
Jeff Quitley http://www.youtube.com/user/webdev17/videos
GoneToPlaid http://www.youtube.com/feed/UCkFkkO1vqbh9fQkSn5Reibw
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Seven minutes, Andromeda? I would imagine the rate of false diagnosis from that is huge. And missed diagnosis. I'm actually horrified to discover that; even my low-cost, constantly overbooked clinic doesn't do intake in less than an hour, and a lot of their patients have something as relatively simple as addiction or an abusive relationship, not even a full-blown mental illness. The doctors also get a lot of documentation, such as histories of hospitalization and so forth, that can also make a lot of difference.
That's the length of a standard GP appointment. I have no idea what the rates of false and missed diagnosis are.
The only thing that will help is mental health care, which we are none of us qualified to provide and certainly not able to properly provide online.
That's quite an assumption. Mental health professionals often do not talk about their work online - there may well be qualified therapists among us. Also, some therapists do work online.
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That's quite an assumption...snip... there may well be qualified therapists among us.
How is this not an assumption on your part?
Also, some therapists do work online.
Personally, I'd be very uncomfortable taking any medical "advice" without being able to meet the person giving that advice, in person.
Just sayin'.
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That's quite an assumption...snip... there may well be qualified therapists among us.
How is this not an assumption on your part?
I don't understand what you mean. Gillian said there are no qualified therapists here. Either there are or there are not, we don't know - so I said there "may be" therapists here.
Also, some therapists do work online.
Personally, I'd be very uncomfortable taking any medical "advice" without being able to meet the person giving that advice, in person.
Just sayin'.
It isn't done entirely online, talking therapy by Skype is becoming more and more common. Counselling and psychotherapy are also not "medical advice".
And I really hate the "just sayin'", it sounds very snarky.
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No, I said none of us are qualified to provide help in this setting. I can see getting therapy by Skype; actually, that would make a lot of sense in a lot of situations. But this isn't therapy by Skype. This is, in my experience, being condescending in a forum. In order for any of us to provide meaningful assistance, we would have to have one-on-one interaction with the person, and the person would have to be willing to accept our help. The only advice I am generally willing to give with people who seek my assistance online (and people have!) is "get professional help." If I were a qualified therapist, would someone whose disorder included the kind of delusions we're discussing trust me anyway? Of course not! They first encountered me as someone who is arguing with their delusions, which means I'm one of Them. It is simply not possible for any of us, even if any of us were qualified, to turn a refutation of the person's delusion into meaningful therapy.
As for YouTube, I'm awfully tired of people ignoring why I'm not interested. It only makes me less interested than I already was. Yes, I could watch some science documentary or another, but it would take time away from what I'm already doing. And if I took the suggestion of "no, watch just this one thing!" from everyone who tries to persuade me to spend more time on YouTube, I wouldn't have time to watch the things I already want to from my library.
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No, I said none of us are qualified to provide help in this setting.
Actually, you said "The only thing that will help is mental health care, which we are none of us qualified to provide". I thought you meant that no-one here was qualified to provide any mental health care at all, I didn't realise you meant specifically to provide it here (and I agree with you there, it would be very unethical).
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That's quite an assumption...snip... there may well be qualified therapists among us.
How is this not an assumption on your part?
I don't understand what you mean.
You "chastised" Gillianren for making an assumption, then immediately make an assumption yourself...no, not the same assumption, but still...???
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That's quite an assumption...snip... there may well be qualified therapists among us.
How is this not an assumption on your part?
I don't understand what you mean.
You "chastised" Gillianren for making an assumption, then immediately make an assumption yourself...no, not the same assumption, but still...???
I didn't make an assumption. I explained that I didn't make an assumption in the post you have quoted here, but for some reason you didn't include that bit.
Again, Gillian said (in my understanding at the time) that there were no qualified therapists here. I said there might be. That's not an assumption.
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And I really hate the "just sayin'", it sounds very snarky.
Wasn't my intention...it's just a phrase I occasionally use is all.
Trust me, if I decide to get "snarky" with you, there will be absolutely no doubt about it.
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You "chastised" Gillianren for making an assumption, then immediately make an assumption yourself...no, not the same assumption, but still...???
RAF, how exactly is 'there may be some qualified therapists here' an assumption? 'There are none' is an assumption. 'There are some' would be an assumption. 'There may be some' is a statement that makes no assumptions either way. It's no more an assumption than me saying there may be some Welsh people here, or there may be some people who enjoy a bit of Wagner, or that you may have blond hair. In the absence of any evidence either way it's a perfectly valid statement until proved one way or the other.
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how exactly is 'there may be some qualified therapists here' an assumption?
I don't know...sure sounds like an assumption to me...
If I'm in error, I'm sure you and Andromeda will delight in showing me wrong...
...but I won't be here to see it...
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RAF, why are you suddenly being like this to me? What have I ever done to you that you would say something so mean like that?
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how exactly is 'there may be some qualified therapists here' an assumption?
I don't know...sure sounds like an assumption to me...
If I'm in error, I'm sure you and Andromeda will delight in showing me wrong...
...but I won't be here to see it...
What's the snark for, RAF? I take no delight from this interaction at all.
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There may well be some. However, I'm pretty sure everyone who is participating in this conversation has, at one time or another, made it quite clear that they are not a qualified therapist.
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No disrespect intended, but I fail to see why expressing an opinion about the state of someone's mental health (based on their observed on-line or public behaviour) is a problem, and I don't see how it is any different from expressing an opinion about anything else, dogs, trees, history, science and even Martha Stewart's cooking. However, if I claim to be a psychologist, and I claimto be making a clinical diagnosis, THEN it becomes a problem.
I say
"Anyone who still believes that the Lunar landings were faked, despite being presented with comprehensive and overwhelming evidence that they in fact did take place, and despite also being presented with comprehensive and overwhelming evidence that it would have been impossible to fake given the state of video technology at the time, has a serious defect in their wiring."
That was merely stating an opinion; nothing more. Why should it be considered inappropriate merely because I question his mental state?
Take a look at Bart Sibrel, who stalked Buzz Aldrin, accusing him of dishonesty and calling him a liar; provoking Aldrin until he reacted with physical violence. At some later date, Sibrel was arrested for jumping up and down on the bonnet of a car because its driver hadn't, in his view, pulled out of a parking space quickly enough.
IMO Sibrel definitely has something untoward going on with his wiring. His behaviour, surely, is not that of a normal person. What is wrong with staying this?
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For one thing, I keep having to deal with the appalling ignorance of a large number of people, because they all think like that--and that, if I'm mentally ill, than I'm also mentally defective. (Which, arguably, I technically am. But you know what I mean.) There are in fact several mental illnesses strongly correlated with high intelligence and/or creativity, but that doesn't stop people from making unwarranted assumptions about me. I mean, you don't have to think I'm a genius or anything, but I think we can all agree that I'm not stupid.
For another, fairly or not, concerns about someone's mental health can put a serious damper on things like their hiring prospects, whether they're true or not. This is, in fact, one of the reasons I'm so outspoken about my own mental illness. It's important to me that the average person knows that, yes, you can be mentally ill and not the way "everyone knows mentally ill people are."
And, for a third, mentally ill people aren't the way a lot of people assume mentally ill people are. Yes, some of them act the way certain CTs do, but the majority of them don't. Further, the majority of CTs don't act in a way comparable to any mental illness. (Except that I'm given to understand that extreme conspiracism is actually going to be listed as a disorder unto itself in the DSM-V. But think about it--would they have to do that if it fit a previous diagnosis?) I have known one or two and known of one or two others who do seem, to my untrained perspective, to fit the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. However, because I am not an expert, you should take even my above-layman's perspective with a grain of salt.
And finally, it isn't like expressing an opinion of anything other than medical issues. Because mental illness is a medical issue.
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With all due respect, gillianren, I think you underestimate a lot of people. Clearly, there are degrees and variations in the aspect of mental health, and I think most people understand it. I don't know what your exact medical diagnosis is, and I'm not going to ask. That is your private business, and none of mine. Clearly, you are coherent, informed and intelligent. This does not, in my laymans view, mean much when assessing a person's mental health. I know people through my sport, who are diagnosed with mental issues, which are coherent and intelligent, and I know people who are regarded as healthy, who certainly aren't.
That aside - I can't for the life of me understand the conspiracists, who make a strange claim, which does defy physics, chemistry, biology or any other of a number of sciences. When shown where they are wrong, they just persist in their strange idea. That must mean something, maybe just an inflated sense of pride, an inability to admit when they are wrong, or maybe a sign of a disturbed mind.
Whatever the idea, the hoax believers must have (in my laymans opinion) a larger segment of people with problems, than the population as a whole.
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To be perfectly honest, I agree with your last point. I do think conspiracism is more common in certain mental illnesses than in the general population. However, that still does not to me mean that it's a large percentage. I might go so high as fifteen or twenty percent, which is admittedly quite high relative to the general population but extremely low compared to the number of people I've seen accused of mental illness. And, yes, I have seen people accused of mental illness simply for espousing Kennedy assassination theories. If that's all it takes, the numbers of mentally ill people are much, much higher than imagined.
That's the thing. I am not pulling my irritation out of thin air, here. People in a marginalized group are more sensitive to the prejudices that group suffers. Sometimes, that makes them oversensitive. Heck, given the irrational nature of mental illness, I'll concede that I'm probably oversensitive, even though paranoia isn't a symptom of my particular condition. However, I have seen biochemically normal people make wild, rash assumptions about what "those people" are like, and, when it's pointed out that I (and quite a few of my friends) would therefore fit those assumptions, I have been told that it's "obvious" that they don't mean me.
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However, I have seen biochemically normal people make wild, rash assumptions about what "those people" are like, and, when it's pointed out that I (and quite a few of my friends) would therefore fit those assumptions, I have been told that it's "obvious" that they don't mean me.
You could take out "biochemically normal" and what you have said could apply to any oppressed group.
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You should not take the opinion of an uninformed group, and transfer it's bias to another, perhaps more informed group. I regard myself as above average informed, and I don't have that bias. Of course I accept your opinion as valid for the population as a whole.
Another point, why the conspiracist act like they do, is perhaps the wish to belong to a group, the wish to get attention. By having these beliefs, they feel less alone, can attract attention from a wide range of people, from their own ranks, where they can pat themselves on the shoulders in a wide circle, to the people who try to convince them otherwise. They get the attention by being contrarian, like children in the "no"-age.
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For another, fairly or not, concerns about someone's mental health can put a serious damper on things like their hiring prospects, whether they're true or not.
Believe me, I can't imagine anything that anyone could say that would put a greater damper on Hunchbacked's hiring prospects than what Hunchbacked himself says.
And note that we're calling him by his Youtube handle, the name he himself uses in public in connection with his conspiracy claims, and not his real name. Although I believe I know what it is, and he has used it in other forums, it simply isn't relevant. On the net he goes by the name Hunchbacked, and since I am addressing (or discussing) this same persona, it's the right name to refer to him.
But I sure wouldn't hire him if he came looking for a job and I knew it was him, that's for sure.
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You should not take the opinion of an uninformed group, and transfer it's bias to another, perhaps more informed group. I regard myself as above average informed, and I don't have that bias. Of course I accept your opinion as valid for the population as a whole.
Mmm. I have seen that bias in groups that I'm pretty sure you wouldn't think have it. Someone on BAUT several years ago referred to bipolar people as "'tards." As in, abbreviated from "retards." That person isn't here, and his is the most extreme, but I can dig up quite a few examples both here and there of cruel, dismissive attitudes sweepingly applied to the entire mentally ill population. Oh, and inaccurate, which goes without saying.
Another point, why the conspiracist act like they do, is perhaps the wish to belong to a group, the wish to get attention. By having these beliefs, they feel less alone, can attract attention from a wide range of people, from their own ranks, where they can pat themselves on the shoulders in a wide circle, to the people who try to convince them otherwise. They get the attention by being contrarian, like children in the "no"-age.
Yes; I think that's much more common than diagnosable mental illness. Just wanting to fit in somewhere can be a powerful motivator for foolish behaviour. Think back to when you yourself were in high school. I wasn't enormously concerned about fitting in, and I can still think of examples of stupid things I did in the attempt!
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Interesting NYT article here I picked up from a post at JREF
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&
It seems that CTs and HBs might just be normal people after all, although I can't see how this could possibly apply to obsessed conspiritards like Jarrah....
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Well, it's all a spectrum, after all, just like all mental health issues. A perfectly rational person can believe, for example, that a shadowy cabal was behind the assassination of JFK. (They'd be wrong, but that's not the point. And I'm curious if that article even counts JFK as "a political conspiracy theory," because if they do, I think their number is low.) However, eventually, it becomes a real problem. If that's all that you think about all day, or if you've lost friendships over it, or things like that. For most people, it's something they believe but only really act on at election time.
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Interesting NYT article here I picked up from a post at JREF
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/magazine/why-rational-people-buy-into-conspiracy-theories.html?pagewanted=all&_r=3&
It seems that CTs and HBs might just be normal people after all, although I can't see how this could possibly apply to obsessed conspiritards like Jarrah....
I can't help but notice, though,, that in the example used in the article - the Boston bombing - the so-called CTs the writer refers to seem to be limited to who was "really" behind the bombing. The hard-core CT crowd that I was seeing were the ones who were (and are) claiming that there was, in fact, no bombing. It was all "smoke and mirrors", simulated injuries with heavily moulaged amputees playing the injured victims.
It seems to me that there is a spectrum of sorts among Conspiracy Theories and their proponents/believers. At one end there are those who accept the reality of what happened but have their doubts about the "public story" of who did it and their motives, and at the other there are those who seem to regard every event as a, well, "Disney Production" seems to be a common catchphrase.
Whether there is a correlation with mental health issues is another question altogether and one which, I'm afraid, is 'way above my pay grade.
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It seems to me that there is a spectrum of sorts among Conspiracy Theories and their proponents/believers. At one end there are those who accept the reality of what happened but have their doubts about the "public story" of who did it and their motives, and at the other there are those who seem to regard every event as a, well, "Disney Production" seems to be a common catchphrase.
I shudder to think what conspiracy theorists would be making of the Woolwich killing... :(
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I shudder to think what conspiracy theorists would be making of the Woolwich killing... :(
It's obvious. The presently growing body of evidence of incompetence by the security services will be spun into proof of collusion, just like 9/11.
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I shudder to think what conspiracy theorists would be making of the Woolwich killing... :(
It's obvious. The presently growing body of evidence of incompetence by the security services will be spun into proof of collusion, just like 9/11.
With it be just collusion or will it be the whole thing never happened.
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I shudder to think what conspiracy theorists would be making of the Woolwich killing... :(
Usual rate of thinking. I am finding the level of intelligence displayed in trying to second guess the events, rather bewildering. They are piecing it together nicely in their own image. If you find it hard to step back from the stupid, best do not go there. It really is that bad. That is before some of them say it was actors.
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"Truth Frequency Radio" is claiming it was a staged event, because of the lack of blood on the ground (a familiar claim by conspiracists), because people on the scene aren't behaving according to their limited understanding of human behaviour, and because there is paint on the road and pavement (sidewalk) that they have interpreted as actors cue markers (they're marks left by council and utilities workers indicating where repairs need to be made and are a familiar sight on British streets).
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It's not unfamiliar on American streets, either.
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(they're marks left by council and utilities workers indicating where repairs need to be made and are a familiar sight on British streets).
Too familiar nowadays.
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You mean those paint markers are left there for actors to see where to stand? Oh NO! I have a blue line across the street right in front of my house!
Sarcasm aside.
I feel sorry for those people, who need to "justify" random street killings with being part of a "master plan". But even more, I feel sorry for the real victims. Those who go about their daily life, and are attacked by people, who are to amoral and confused and uneducated to understand the deeper issues.
Just the other day, a man walking his dog, was attacked and possibly killed (still in coma from a burst bloodvessel in his brain) by 3 kids, who wanted his WATERBOTTLE! In my town! Luckily, the police has caught them already. 15,15 and 16 years old.
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It's not unfamiliar on American streets, either.
Ah. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt because I thought it might be done differently in the US. Obviously they're just idiots.
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It's not unfamiliar on American streets, either.
Ah. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt because I thought it might be done differently in the US. Obviously they're just idiots.
Or the kind of people who only notice things that directly impact themselves personally. "I never noticed this before, so it must be new!"
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It's not unfamiliar on American streets, either.
Ah. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt because I thought it might be done differently in the US. Obviously they're just idiots.
Or the kind of people who only notice things that directly impact themselves personally. "I never noticed this before, so it must be new!"
Now you're reminding me of a story from about a decade ago, which I think I saw on the old old BA forum. IIRC it was a YouTube video, and it featured an American woman freaking out at seeing a rainbow caused by a garden sprinkler - she'd never seen a rainbow that way before, so obviously it was scarily significant.
By contrast I keep a constant lookout for interesting things to show my sons (currently 5 and 2) so that hopefully they'll learn to do it naturally too. A little over a week ago, we saw a fairly narrow crescent Moon in the early afternoon, quite high in the sky - something I'm sure a lot of people have never seen.
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"Crazy Sprinkler Lady" -
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"Truth Frequency Radio" is claiming it was a staged event, because of the lack of blood on the ground (a familiar claim by conspiracists), because people on the scene aren't behaving according to their limited understanding of human behaviour, and because there is paint on the road and pavement (sidewalk) that they have interpreted as actors cue markers (they're marks left by council and utilities workers indicating where repairs need to be made and are a familiar sight on British streets).
Hang on! The council were fixing the road? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
Seriously though, the modern tendency to make the conspiracy theory that it was faked rather than just not what it seemed is a whole new level of illucidity.
The one about the Tavistock Square bus is still the funniest though.
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Now you're reminding me of a story from about a decade ago, which I think I saw on the old old BA forum. IIRC it was a YouTube video, and it featured an American woman freaking out at seeing a rainbow caused by a garden sprinkler - she'd never seen a rainbow that way before, so obviously it was scarily significant.
I actually thought about her as I was typing.
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"Crazy Sprinkler Lady" -
Hilarious.
Was that meant to be ironic? You sometimes can't tell.
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Seriously though, the modern tendency to make the conspiracy theory that it was faked rather than just not what it seemed is a whole new level of illucidity.
Obviously this is leakage from the Apollo Hoax believers. If you can swallow that, then I guess nothing is beyond the pale. According to this worldview, everything the media reports is fake and none of the threats we're told about is real, from terrorism to Global Warming and all the way up to nuclear weapons!
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"Crazy Sprinkler Lady" -
Awesome... even the cops were responding and racing to the scene...
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You mean those paint markers are left there for actors to see where to stand? Oh NO! I have a blue line across the street right in front of my house!
Some unknown covert New Zealand Government agency must be about to stage a terrorist attack outside the front of my shop!
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/ApolloHoax/DSCF5829.JPG)
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That's going to be a doozy. Did you see them rehearsing? Maybe you should set a few cameras up - you could make a fortune with the right footage. Unless you're one of the "innocent bystanders" targetted? Any strange people in the shop recently? In dark suits and sunglasses?
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That's going to be a doozy. Did you see them rehearsing? Maybe you should set a few cameras up - you could make a fortune with the right footage. Unless you're one of the "innocent bystanders" targetted? Any strange people in the shop recently? In dark suits and sunglasses?
Hmmmm. There was a woman walking a pug dog past the shop on Saturday. She was talking to it, and I could have sworn I heard the dog say "If you don't like it you can kiss my furry little butt!!".
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Was that meant to be ironic? You sometimes can't tell.
That was my thought.
What is oozing out of our ground? I think I know the answer to that question - it's water.
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Yes, the dreaded dihydrogen monoxide - a major factor in every drowning every year. A byproduct from cars and rockets and airplanes - it's chemtrails! It is in our alcohol! And our food!
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"Crazy Sprinkler Lady" -
Hilarious.
Was that meant to be ironic? You sometimes can't tell.
Sadly she was serious.
I had a look at her original youtube channel and it was full of the same type of stuff.
Although she did delete this one quickly enough...
Edit :
Here's the channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/dbootsthediva
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Some unknown covert New Zealand Government agency must be about to stage a terrorist attack outside the front of my shop!
Looks like you use much the same utility-marking colors as here:
Yellow - natural gas
Red - electric power
Blue - potable water
Green - sewer
Orange - telecom
Purple - reclaimed (nonpotable) water - common here in San Diego for landscaping
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Some unknown covert New Zealand Government agency must be about to stage a terrorist attack outside the front of my shop!
Looks like you use much the same utility-marking colors as here:
Yellow - natural gas
Red - electric power
Blue - potable water
Green - sewer
Orange - telecom
Purple - reclaimed (nonpotable) water - common here in San Diego for landscaping
Makes sense. The only colours from your list missing are yellow (we don't have reticulated gas mains in this town) and red (power comes in at the back end of the shop) and while we don't have reclaimed non-potable water, we do have separate stormwater (purple) and sewer (green) drains.
All I know is, the real reason for all the markings is they are about to dig up the footpaths along the entire main st of Richmond to put in ultrafast broadband fibre-optic cables. Those two terminal boxes part way up the wall are where the telephone comes into my shop (on the left) and the shop next door (on the right).
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Wondered what those boxes were. No, not mini speakers to give the actors their lines.
Slightly back on topic. These recent past terrible events in the last 12 months have been an eye opener in the way the conspiracy develops. A while ago I watched the story develop in the Windmill having a bad day and how that was a UFO etc etc and that was amusing. These recent events I have had to back off before I signed up to a forum or two only to probably get banned. The outright denial that is was anything other than a set up from some people should not be a surprise but it was still an eye opener.
The feeling I get on the level of research for example as they try to identify an image from a camera or google earth is astounding. The image must fit the theory, it is hammered into place with zeal and woe betide anyone who challenges it. The mob protect protect the image and accept it without query. They are zealots.
What is scary here is watching it in real time rather than trying to second guess someone working on a historic event.
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Seriously though, the modern tendency to make the conspiracy theory that it was faked rather than just not what it seemed is a whole new level of illucidity.
Obviously this is leakage from the Apollo Hoax believers. If you can swallow that, then I guess nothing is beyond the pale. According to this worldview, everything the media reports is fake and none of the threats we're told about is real, from terrorism to Global Warming and all the way up to nuclear weapons!
Yes. 9/11 happened just as the Apollohoax conspiracy theory was gaining recognition. The Fox Special had aired that summer.
The trope of looking at photos and footage and crying fake was established just in time for it to be picked up for the 9/11 conspiracy theory. From there it was established as something you just do.
Of course, for all the stupidity of the Apollohoax, it is at least one thing to suggest that photos and footage taken on another celestial body were fake. Saying that fakery for an event that happens in a populated city is a whole other thing.
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What is scary here is watching it in real time rather than trying to second guess someone working on a historic event.
Though fascinating, if you're interested in psychology. Though I do firmly believe that few of them are suffering from anything clinical, even the psychology of the edges of normality are fascinating to me. Possibly more so, to see what people can be like and still fit into "normal."
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The feeling I get on the level of research for example as they try to identify an image from a camera or google earth is astounding. The image must fit the theory, it is hammered into place with zeal and woe betide anyone who challenges it. The mob protect protect the image and accept it without query. They are zealots.
Which also touches on a pet peeve of mine: the evidently innumerable people who cannot or will not accept that images recorded in the chemicals of camera film or, more recently, the pixels of an electronic sensor are not only not reality, they are not even exactly the same thing the human eye sees when looking at the same scene (stars in the sky being a prime example).
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Which also touches on a pet peeve of mine: the evidently innumerable people who cannot or will not accept that images recorded in the chemicals of camera film or, more recently, the pixels of an electronic sensor are not only not reality, they are not even exactly the same thing the human eye sees when looking at the same scene (stars in the sky being a prime example).
Amen to that.
As the owner of a Photo Lab, I deal with this misconception on a daily basis.
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What is scary here is watching it in real time rather than trying to second guess someone working on a historic event.
Though fascinating, if you're interested in psychology. Though I do firmly believe that few of them are suffering from anything clinical, even the psychology of the edges of normality are fascinating to me. Possibly more so, to see what people can be like and still fit into "normal."
Bit that I think I am seeing is that it is the norm. Unless you are going to dig into something for your own needs, if it fits what your stance is, what the heck, go with it. It has already had a mention here, but you are sure of yourself, you are in company with what you hope are like minded and it is reinforced. Tribal if you will. To speak out risks being kicked outside the safety of the fence that surrounds your world. But then you are sure it was an inside job because that is what happens according to the more learned. Where they got their knowledge is not really challenged.
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The feeling I get on the level of research for example as they try to identify an image from a camera or google earth is astounding. The image must fit the theory, it is hammered into place with zeal and woe betide anyone who challenges it. The mob protect protect the image and accept it without query. They are zealots.
Which also touches on a pet peeve of mine: the evidently innumerable people who cannot or will not accept that images recorded in the chemicals of camera film or, more recently, the pixels of an electronic sensor are not only not reality, they are not even exactly the same thing the human eye sees when looking at the same scene (stars in the sky being a prime example).
I just have a basic understanding. I do think I have a reasonable understanding within my first comment in this reply if that makes sense. But some of the comments on the shape of a nose, looks the same as that nose, must be an actor etc etc. Colours are all wrong on the blood and so on.
My Mac has never really been set up correctly and neither has my laptop (windows). I use both for my photo's and neither will show the same image correctly and neither will show them the same, one is a CRT and one a LCD. I am not really bothered as long as I can get them looking what seems to be OK to me. Wonder how much "analysis" has been done and theories concocted on this.
I was watching a small bit rate transmission in MPEG 4:2:0 and saw the process move a bit of scaffold into someone's head as a camera panned around. The MPEG thought that that a bit of colour matched the hat the gentleman was wearing and transposed the scaffold. Looked like Herman Munster with some serious bolt bar minus the nuts. (at least that is what I assumed the mpeg process was doing)
Probably teaching granny to suck eggs here.
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All I know is, the real reason for all the markings is they are about to dig up the footpaths
Ah, yes, civil engineering. The original weapon of mass destruction. :)
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I have this theory. One utility company will dig up the street and then fill it in. The others all come along and dig it up again in the same spot, I reckon its because they are looking for the original utility hole digger treasure that they think they have hidden there. After all, they are all pirates.
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I was watching a small bit rate transmission in MPEG 4:2:0 and saw the process move a bit of scaffold into someone's head as a camera panned around. The MPEG thought that that a bit of colour matched the hat the gentleman was wearing and transposed the scaffold. Looked like Herman Munster with some serious bolt bar minus the nuts. (at least that is what I assumed the mpeg process was doing)
I don't know the video you saw, but I do know how MPEG works. Like all lossy compression, it's about discarding information that you won't miss -- but sometimes you do miss it.
The main difference between MPEG (for video) and JPEG (for stills) is inter-frame coding; since each frame of a movie usually resembles the previous frame rather closely, a lot of data can be dropped by simply describing the changes to the previous frame instead of sending the entire new frame. If those differences are judged to be "small enough" then they might not even be sent at all. What's considered "small enough" is the main thing that gets adjusted when you vary the compression ratio, so you're much more likely to see these kinds of artifacts on video that has been very heavily compressed.
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Modern compression methods use both I-frames ("image frames") and P-frames ("predicted frames"), and sometimes B-frames (bidirectionally predicted frames, using data from following frames as well as previous ones). I-frames are basically just standalone images, and are used to provide periodic starting points for decoding.
If you for some reason miss an I-frame due to corruption or other issues, you can end up with the decoder out of sync, decoding using differences from a substantially different image than intended. And the compression works better with groups of frames that are similar to each other, so a smart decoder will tend to put an I-frame at scene changes and other places with sudden shifts in the image. Losing one of those can result in the effects described.
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Modern compression methods use both I-frames ("image frames") and P-frames ("predicted frames"), and sometimes B-frames (bidirectionally predicted frames, using data from following frames as well as previous ones).
Which means in order to interpret B-frames you need to send the relevant P-frames first. So a stream intended to be played back as IBBBPBBBPBBB must be encoded and sent in the order IPBBBPBBBPBBB. I.e., out of order. Software encoders to do this are dime-a-dozen. However, when you're doing it in real time, and combining one MPEG stream with another, adaptively, to achieve a steady bit rate, it requires some impressive hardware. Back when we were diddling with the Boeing 601HP and 701 chassis and assorted upgrades and operational checkouts, we had just such equipment. The 601HP broad-beam transponders operating in the Ku band on the spacecraft achieved a downlink peak bit rate of about 32 Mbps. The 601X chassis, which was a Hughes design being upgraded by Boeing, would accommodate around 24 such transponders, and then additional narrow-beam transponders on the 701. It was the job of the stream injectors on the ground to take a set of around 8 NTSC video and audio signals and build the MPEG-2 transport stream that would achieve near perfect use of the bit rate with minimal loss of quality on any one set of packetized elementary streams before sending them to the uplink modulator. The dropped-frame phenomenon where you interpret B-frames from stale I- and P-frames was deemed unacceptable. The stream injectors were $200K 4U rack-mounted units that you could only get from Motorola on an ARO basis, because they hand-built each of them. That's the difference between broadcast quality and web quality.
I think where this became relevant was having the three monitors side-by-side so that you could watch Program, Uplink, and Downlink together and catch artifacts. Program taps into the NTSC stream prior to stream injection. Uplink puts a consumer MPEG decoder on the pre-modulation stream, and it's 2-3 seconds behind due to the balancing effect of the stream injector and the store-ahead requirements of P-before-B encoding. And the downlink is several seconds behind because, well, "it's going to space so give it a second."
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Been a few years now since I did a course on MPEG. They started to mess with the IPBBP etc to see what would happen and how far could you go. Interesting stuff though I am an abuser of the kit rather than an expert in what goes on inside, still try to keep my hand in though (in what is the question....)
Interesting stuff there JayUtah.
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I still have all the standards docs somewhere. We had to know the whole data path from ground to spacecraft to ground and duplicate it, so we ended up building what amounted to our own TV station. Part of what we really had to do, however, was achieve higher-grain pointing constraints to keep the narrow-beam transponders from wandering off axis. That means holding something perfectly still that's the size of a delivery fan, with 70-foot solar wings. And it's 22,280 miles away from your desk.
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Modern compression methods use both I-frames ("image frames") and P-frames ("predicted frames"), and sometimes B-frames (bidirectionally predicted frames, using data from following frames as well as previous ones). I-frames are basically just standalone images, and are used to provide periodic starting points for decoding.
Right, and this is why channel-changing is so annoyingly slow on most digital TV systems (cable, broadcast and satellite). The RF tuners, demodulators and error correctors usually change very quickly, but the MPEG decoder has to wait for those I frames before it can start producing decoded video. They're big, so getting a good compression ratio may limit them to once every few seconds.
AT&T U-verse, which uses Microsoft's IPTV system, has an interesting way around this problem. Although the video channels are sent using Internet multicast, which is much like broadcasting with everyone getting a copy of a single data stream, for the first couple seconds after you change the channel you are sent your own unicast (private) version of the new channel structured such that the decoder can almost immediately start producing video. If you stay on the channel, the set-top box joins the appropriate multicast group and switches seamlessly to it.
You can often tell by looking how often I frames are sent. Watch the compression artifacts in a solid area, preferably black. They're usually fairly static with just a few random changes between frames, but then the artifacts will suddenly change to a different pattern that again remains fairly static for a few seconds. Each of those sudden changes corresponds to an I frame where the whole scene is re-encoded from scratch, with the slight amount of noise generating a different set of random compression artifacts. The smaller changes that occur on every video frame are the result of modifications by the in-between frames modifying only a few parts of the image at any time.
If you for some reason miss an I-frame due to corruption or other issues, you can end up with the decoder out of sync, decoding using differences from a substantially different image than intended.
Yes, but this usually produces very dramatic and obvious artifacts, and I assumed that's not what Tedward was seeing. It sounds like he was seeing the ordinary compression artifacts.
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Right, and this is why channel-changing is so annoyingly slow on most digital TV systems (cable, broadcast and satellite). The RF tuners, demodulators and error correctors usually change very quickly, but the MPEG decoder has to wait for those I frames before it can start producing decoded video. They're big, so getting a good compression ratio may limit them to once every few seconds.
It's also an issue with anything supposed to resemble real-time video. You have to have data from frames following the one you're currently decoding, so display must lag reception of a frame by several frame times. And to encode that frame in the first place, you have to wait for subsequent frames to be captured. There's an unavoidable delay there that can't be avoided by just adding processing power. Low-latency video requires doing things like encoding a stream entirely with I frames, which is basically equivalent to a stream of JPEG images...which means much poorer compression ratios.
Yes, but this usually produces very dramatic and obvious artifacts, and I assumed that's not what Tedward was seeing. It sounds like he was seeing the ordinary compression artifacts.
Leaving a chunk of scaffold image in place of part of a guy's head seems fairly dramatic and obvious. Something like a mangled double exposure between a stale still picture and whatever the current video is...
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t
Yes, but this usually produces very dramatic and obvious artifacts, and I assumed that's not what Tedward was seeing. It sounds like he was seeing the ordinary compression artifacts.
It was a camera pan across a football crowd and must have been the down link to boot. There was a bit of scaffold attached to a support column and with the fans heads all around as part of the shot, all around cheering a booing as they do. During this pan one head picked up the scaffold. It was a good few years ago and that encoder is keeping dust off a shelf somewhere now, we also had CRT monitors.
Edit. Actually I think it was a camera adjustment not a full pan? That is the operator settling on a different framing so there was movement? It was a good few years ago now but the effect still lingers in my mind.
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It was a camera pan across a football crowd and must have been the down link to boot.
Camera (and subject) motion is so common that MPEG makes special provisions for it. Each block (typically 8x8 pixels) is encoded by telling the decoder to start with the block of pixels from the last decoded frame at a certain x,y position offset. If the camera is panning right at 10 pixels/frame, typically the encoder will tell the decoder to start with an offset 10 pixels to the right. If it's zooming, the offset will vary with the location of the block in the image, being smallest in the center.
The encoder uses a brute force search, trying a range of offsets in both directions and looking for the one that provides the most compact encoded representation. This is the chief reason encoding is slower than decoding, and it's such a CPU hog that one of Intel's earliest vector instructions was one specifically designed to help speed it up: sum of absolute byte differences. (The smallest such sum represents the best match.)
MPEG actually gets its bit savings much the same way as JPEG, by converting each block into the frequency domain and quantizing the individual bins. Many bins contain small values that are quantized to zero especially at the more aggressive compression levels, and when this happens in a difference frame the effect is that the previous image, though it may be shifted on the screen to track camera motion, isn't actually updated to reflect the (small) changes that have occurred in those pixels between frames. That's one way to get combinations of old and new pixels, possibly including your example of a scaffold through somebody's head.
It's also possible that there was simply a transmission error, or more likely the encoder was forced to drop some data to stay under its bit rate cap. This often happens in sporting events when there's lots of rapidly changing detail. It also shows up a lot in choppy water surfaces for the same reason.
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Right, and this is why channel-changing is so annoyingly slow on most digital TV systems (cable, broadcast and satellite).
Yes, I tried writing a new channel-changer for our in-house TiVo satellite version, and I really couldn't improve it.
The RF tuners, demodulators and error correctors usually change very quickly...
Meh, sorta. In satellite systems you often not only have to change the RF tuner to a new frequency, you also have to change the feedhorn to a different polarity: horizontal, vertical, circular-left, or circular-right. And with multiple feedhorn systems sometimes you need to connect a different feedhorn to the backhaul in order to access a different spacecraft. So polarity changes, frequency changes, feedhorn changes, PLL sync, do take a significant amount of time in the worst case.
...but the MPEG decoder has to wait for those I frames before it can start producing decoded video.
Indeed and that's still typically quite a bit longer than the electronics resychronization time. In addition most systems want to buffer the stream a bit too in RAM.
They're big, so getting a good compression ratio may limit them to once every few seconds.
Frame type mixing is a black art for satellite systems. One technique, for example, mixes content such as CSPAN on the same transport stream as other streams such as ESPN. Sports programs typically have dynamic content and require a higher key-to-intermediate ratio than Talking Head programs that typically just aim the camera and some droning blowhard. Those programs don't require many I-frames, and so they're typically sent only as often as customer tolerance allows for the decoder and buffer latency. Not every program takes the same fraction of the available bandwidth in a transport stream, so over time they can be load-balanced.
...for the first couple seconds after you change the channel you are sent your own unicast (private) version of the new channel structured such that the decoder can almost immediately start producing video. If you stay on the channel, the set-top box joins the appropriate multicast group and switches seamlessly to it.
Since some consumer satellite systems also incorporate internet-by-satellite, this might be an option. But when I was involved with this in the mid-1990s it really wasn't. Nor could the systems at the time listen effectively on more than one transport stream in the hopes of buffering other content; the feedhorn can physically receive only one polarity at a time.
You can often tell by looking how often I frames are sent.
We had low-level decoders and software to measure that. But yes, your method works informally. The encoders are adaptive. They know how "dirty" the decoded stream is likely to be and decide when to send I-frames based on that, in connection with the available bandwidth in the stream into which they are injecting, and according to the QoS "floor" set by the content provider. Ground stations are highly sophisticated, with health monitoring in real time from the spacecraft, QoS monitoring on the downlink, consensus-based load-balancing between stream injectors, and enterprise-wide load-balancing among spacecraft and transponders. Plus there is a dedicated team of knob-tweakers who manage the subjective portion of the QoS.
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Indeed and that's still typically quite a bit longer than the electronics resychronization time. In addition most systems want to buffer the stream a bit too in RAM.
Right. Some frames take more work to decode than others. It takes more processing power to consistently decode of 1 frame per frame time than to decode 10 frames per 10 frame times...the buffer gives the decoder some slack to handle occasional more difficult frames, catching up on the easier ones. By using more RAM and higher latency you can use a cheaper, slower, lower-power CPU. But this adds another considerable chunk of latency...it's not something you want in the loop when working with an interactive user interface, remotely operated equipment, etc.
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Right. Some frames take more work to decode than others. It takes more processing power to consistently decode of 1 frame per frame time than to decode 10 frames per 10 frame times...the buffer gives the decoder some slack to handle occasional more difficult frames, catching up on the easier ones. By using more RAM and higher latency you can use a cheaper, slower, lower-power CPU. But this adds another considerable chunk of latency...it's not something you want in the loop when working with an interactive user interface, remotely operated equipment, etc.
And as the economics of the system were explained to me, they'd rather spend $200 million on a spacecraft and $50 million on a ground station so that they can shave $10 off the cost of the set-top boxes they provide for "free." It's the economy of scale. Beefing up the MPEG decoders and CPUs on the set-top boxes costs [some number] multiplied by the millions of units they'll need to order. Hence the brains are in the spacecraft and in the ground stations, so that they can talk to millions of extremely stupid set-top boxes and throwaway dishes.
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Hence the brains are in the spacecraft and in the ground stations, so that they can talk to millions of extremely stupid set-top boxes and throwaway dishes.
Yes. And this is a nice match to formats like MPEG, where you can nail down the meaning of the bits on the channel and what the decoder is supposed to do with them, and then tinker with the encoding algorithms to tinker and improve encoder speed, channel bit rate, delay, subjective quality, etc.
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Yes, I tried writing a new channel-changer for our in-house TiVo satellite version, and I really couldn't improve it.
The only way I can think of doing it in a one-way broadcast system is to have multiple tuners and decoders and guess which channel you're most likely to tune to next. Doesn't seem worth it.
Meh, sorta. In satellite systems you often not only have to change the RF tuner to a new frequency, you also have to change the feedhorn to a different polarity: horizontal, vertical, circular-left, or circular-right. And with multiple feedhorn systems sometimes you need to connect a different feedhorn to the backhaul in order to access a different spacecraft. So polarity changes, frequency changes, feedhorn changes, PLL sync, do take a significant amount of time in the worst case.
Those are all fast operations. Polarity switches are electronic; you send a signaling voltage up the coax and it changes. Multi-feed dishes are common for DirecTV and similar systems, so again the switching is instant. Retuning is almost as fast. The demodulator and decoder take a little more time, but their lockup times are in terms of channel bit times. The data rate is very high, so again in real terms they're very fast.
As far as I've ever been able to tell, the delay is all in the MPEG decoder and its requirement to buffer up I frames so it can decode between frames using pictures from the "future".
Indeed and that's still typically quite a bit longer than the electronics resychronization time. In addition most systems want to buffer the stream a bit too in RAM.
Buffering is the only way to smooth out the random fluctuations in bit rate to avoid hitting the bit rate caps too often. The greater the delay, the better the subjective quality (with diminishing returns).
Frame type mixing is a black art for satellite systems. One technique, for example, mixes content such as CSPAN on the same transport stream as other streams such as ESPN. Sports programs typically have dynamic content and require a higher key-to-intermediate ratio than Talking Head programs that typically just aim the camera and some droning blowhard. Those programs don't require many I-frames, and so they're typically sent only as often as customer tolerance allows for the decoder and buffer latency. Not every program takes the same fraction of the available bandwidth in a transport stream, so over time they can be load-balanced.
I've wondered about that. It's a classic statistical queueing problem. As I said, the longer the queue the more you'll smooth out all those statistical fluctuations and the better you'll do at the expense of greater latency.
I used to watch CNN via DirectTV during shuttle landings at Edwards while also listening on UHF (easily heard down here in San Diego while at high altitude). There was an amusingly long delay between hearing them direct on UHF and hearing them on TV. I could only begin to count all the likely delay sources: multiple satellite hops, multiple MPEG codings, etc.
Since some consumer satellite systems also incorporate internet-by-satellite, this might be an option.
Even if you had the capacity to unicast data to each customer during a channel change, you've also got the extra speed-of-light delay. I don't think it would work. It's a good match to a terrestrial IP-based system like U-verse, though. I'm surprised they don't push it more in their advertising.
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I came across this expression at JREF the other day. I thought it applies very well to a number of HB's I have encountered;
"Definition: Fractal Wrongness
The state of being so wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution, that from any distance, their world view is incorrect. Even if you zoom in on any small part of that person's world view, that part is just as wrong as the whole world view.
Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time."
IMO, it applies beautifully to both Jarrah White and Heiwa. Any others?
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Hunchbacked. Definitely.
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I came across this expression at JREF the other day. I thought it applies very well to a number of HB's I have encountered;
"Definition: Fractal Wrongness
The state of being so wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution, that from any distance, their world view is incorrect. Even if you zoom in on any small part of that person's world view, that part is just as wrong as the whole world view.
Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time."
IMO, it applies beautifully to both Jarrah White and Heiwa. Any others?
Anything at the Clues forum
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That has a passing resemblance to one of my in-laws.
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I notice a couple of strange commonalities among some of the more persistent posters on the pro-hoax side:
1. An inability to stay on topic. I can't believe that they have all learned intentionally to use the Gish Gallup as a diversionary tactic - I think many are led to their HB position because they go "oh, SHINY!" at every "anomaly" and don't try to come up with a coherent position.
2. An inability to keep their computers running. Far be it from me to speculate on what websites these people have been visiting, but several of them claimed that they could not respond with evidence because "you guys hacked me," and left them with only the ability to post non-relevant materials.
3. The inability to follow a line of thinking to its conclusion without saying, "wait, this doesn't make sense." So, we have people who start out claiming only that "a few people" would have been necessary to pull off a self-contained hoax, and ending up with a position that the Cold War, and most of the events of the 20th century, were a massive illusion created by the Illuminati.
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I came across this expression at JREF the other day. I thought it applies very well to a number of HB's I have encountered;
"Definition: Fractal Wrongness
The state of being so wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution, that from any distance, their world view is incorrect. Even if you zoom in on any small part of that person's world view, that part is just as wrong as the whole world view.
Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time."
IMO, it applies beautifully to both Jarrah White and Heiwa. Any others?
That quote came straight from RationalWiki. (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness) Add Patrick "Dr. Socks" Tekeli to the list.
Fred