Just wanted to share a ridiculous blog post for people to mock from a professor of philosophy who thinks the Grusch story is a teachable moment on “critical thinking”. I think it’s a good example of how determined a lot of people are to not look at what is right before their eyes.
I’ll just post his “conclusion” in case you don’t want to read the whole thing. There are good rebuttals in the comments section, but good lord, it’s a pretty awful and sloppy piece.
“The last step is to compare the hypothesis according to the criteria of adequacy: testability, fruitfulness, scope, parsimony, and conservatism. I don’t have the space to explain what each of these is, but the most relevant is conservatism: does it conflict with things we already have good reason to believe are true? In this case, hypothesis 1 is the least conservative. If aliens have visited Earth, then all modern science and physics is not just incomplete, but fundamentally wrong. Given what we know about the size of the universe and how the laws of physics put limits on propulsion speeds, the chance that an alien species even could visit Earth while our species exists is near zero. The second hypothesis just assumes that people are lying or mistaken; and we already know that can and does happen; it happens every day.
To be fair, Grusch doesn’t think these aliens came from another planet; he thinks they came from another dimension. I don’t think this actually makes the first hypothesis any more conservative (while some theories in physics hypothesize “extra-dimensions,” that’s not the same as thing as “other dimensions/universes” where “aliens” might live). But I know it makes the first hypothesis less “parsimonious.” It requires us to assume the existence of unprovable inconceivable “dimension jumping” technology. The second hypothesis just calls us to assume that people are easily mistaken—which, again, we already know is the case. To put it simply, Occam’s razor favors hypothesis 2. Clearly, it is the more reasonable of the two.
I’d be glad to be proven wrong; if aliens have visited Earth, maybe they can help us with climate change (which, let’s be honest, given that we just lived through the hottest month (July) on record (and in 120,000 years), that’s what we should be talking about.) But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To date, David Grusch has provided none. “
Again, this trope about Grusch providing no evidence is just completely off base, I don’t understand why it keeps getting repeated. He has provided evidence, but it’s classified and so we can’t get access to it. But beyond that, his testimony is evidence and even if it’s not sufficient evidence for someone to believe in the reality of NHI, certainly his credentials and him testifying under oath is sufficient to warrant a full blown investigations of his claims. That, btw, is the exact reason for the whistle blower legislation. Is this guy brain dead? The question being presented is whether there is sufficient evidence for further inquiry, not whether UFOs exist. This guy has a job teaching students critical thinking?
submitted by /u/DKC_TheBrainSupreme
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