Well let me ask you this so I can attempt to understand what you are saying: Suppose John asserts that the moon-landing was faked and the way he knows it is that his uncle who worked for NASA told him so.
Would you say John’s statement counts as evidence that the moon landing was faked?
You keep saying this, but it’s unclear to everyone except you why this is so. I think it’s less than useless to scrutinize mentally ill people’s delusions.
I found the usefulness had diminishing returns - after evaluating five or six hoax claims and finding them useless, it is logical to decline further claims by default, unless they start with something particularly novel or interesting. “My uncle who worked for NASA said so,” doesn’t qualify, in my book, even if it’s completely true that the claimant’s uncle said such a thing. Let the uncle present the claim directly, starting with his NASA credentials. That might get him 30 seconds of my time.
Nice to know that you are the spokesman for the board. Anyway, I provided an explanation in my first post in this thread. What about it did you not understand?
If I present a photograph of Obama standing aside Adolf Hitler and giving a Nazi salute, does that count as evidence that Obama is a fascist?
How about a world map with a dotted line around the border of India, and the word “India” replaced by a question mark? Evidence of the non-existence of India?
Let’s say Vinyl Turnip knows a friend of a friend who camped out in the bushes outside brazil84’s house with binoculars and saw him wearing a Tigger costume. Does VT’s statement count as evidence that brazil84 is a furry?
If the definition of “evidence” includes “any claim made by anyone,” I would like to add these three pieces of evidence to the record for further investigation.
Lionel Hutz: “We have plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence”
Hearsay does potentially count as evidence as that word is normally used in courtrooms. Sometimes it’s admissible and sometimes not. Sometimes it’s strong and sometimes it’s weak.
Would hearsay be enough evidence in court to, say, convict NASA of a massive decades-long fraud?
Nah, all those people were faked too.
I’ve been fortunate enough not to have encountered any Moon Hoaxers in my real life, but I would tell them the same thing I tell the handful of 9/11 Truthers I’ve run across:
In 1972, a couple guys broke into an office in a Washington hotel. The handful of people who knew about it couldn’t manage to keep it a secret, and it brought down a presidential administration.
As conspiracies go, Watergate was pretty small potatoes, yet the conspiracy failed. What makes anybody think that a hoax on the scale of faking the moon landing or 9/11 could possibly remain covered up after all these years?
Watergate was leaked on purpose just to make the idea of a lasting conspiracy unlikely in the minds of the sheeple, allowing the real conspiracies to continue unchecked.
Even smaller, Bill Clinton couldn’t get a blowjob without it becoming a national scandal.
This thread has devolved into an argument about epistemology?
I’ll agree with brazil84 that it’s useful to, at some point in your life, consider questions such as, how do I know India is real? How do I know that the Moon landings happened? Since there’s no evidence that a god doesn’t exist, does it therefore warrant my belief in God?
Then you use that and move on.
To be fair, that’s not really an iron-clad argument that conspiracies inevitably come to light. We don’t know about the secrets that are successfully kept, only the ones which aren’t.
It’s not iron clad, but it’s a big indicator for how hard it is to keep a secret like that. If something only a few people knew about couldnt be kept secret, how can hundreds or thousands of people do it?
The head of the CIA couldnt keep an affair quiet. That’s how hard it is.
That argument is useless:
“There is evidence showing that there is a conspiracy!”
“There is no evidence, which is evidence that there is a conspiracy”
It also depends on the hoax proponent not being familiar with some basics of science. Most of these conspiracy theories are examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which “unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.”
This is why the proponents are bumpkins with leaf blowers and not MIT alums. They don’t know how much they don’t know; they have no basis for how outlandish their claims are because they have no grounding in the field of study (engineering, physics, etc) they’re addressing.