Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he had to kick them out.

However, he then carefully proceeds to discribe how he did pretty much the same. Spent his own money and time building this complicated theory of super smart and efficient russian spies hacking into a satcom of a flying aircraft, also somehow, incapacitation everyone else on board, etc. In the meantime he is dropping clues how his own wife doesn't even believe him.

I think many people here, judging by the comments, misunderstood the goal of the article and took it too literaly.

But, there is a good lesson here. This stuff happens if you program and design software. There are lot of moving parts and lot of imperfect knowledge -- market needs, tools, langauges, platforms, APIs, architectures desicions, etc etc. Sometimes if you start to "just write code" too early. You end up committed to a bad path and it becomes hard mentally to throw it away and restart. Or, alternatively, you spend so much time picking the right combination of tools or redesigning the system that it becomes too later to do anything (someone else already built the system or there is no need for it anymore somehow).

This is how conspiracy theories get started, and if this guy really understands how unlikely all this is, it is arguably irresponsible of him to put it forward. What kind of journalism gets published with such little substantiation?

Nobody, not even the tinfoil hat-wearers in his own forum take him seriously, but because he's a cable news expert, his credibility means a million people hear his shitty pet idea. And plenty of people are going to take it at face value.

There is probably little someone can do to really stop conspiracy theories. People certainly shouldn't censor themselves.

50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choice: i) these people have odd beliefs ii) these people have a mental illness and odd beliefs. Even though i is more probable you have to explain the irrationality of the beliefs so yu pick ii, even though we know it's less likely.

Mental illness is very common (1 in 4 at any point in our lifetime; 1 in 6 right now) but these numbers talk about the widest interpretation of mental illhealth. Delusional thinking is thought to be less common. Mood disorders are thought to affect about 5% of the US population; schizophrenia about 1%. So you've suddenly diagnosed very many more people with a mental illness.

> half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man

This is a fantastic explanation, it just doesn't originate from science.

> 50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.

This is a perfectly logical thing to believe even in the absence of evidence. It's reasonable for any assassination of a prominent figure.

> 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.

This topic is super-politicized. Uncritical acceptance would be unreasonable (and many do accept one side of this without questioning it). Most people aren't going to do any research into the topic. The 65% who believe global warming probably didn't do any research either.

I think it's not even very fair to call these 'odd beliefs'.

Even the creationist theory - we have to admit that the story of a bearded man putting dinosaur bones in the ground is pretty silly. But who knows if 65% realy believe that - maybe the majority of those believes in an alternate creationist theory which basically boils down to the universe having an inherent intelligence and an inherent purpose. Which is something that I personally do believe and which people who believe in the "random co-incidence" universe will at least discuss.

Either way the only thing that can be said with absolute certainty of any belief is that it will turn out to be false.

We know that "mental illness and odd beliefs" is less likely than "odd beliefs". That doesn't mean we know that "mental illness and odd beliefs" is less likely than "no mental illness and odd beliefs", which is the relevant comparison here.

(But, for what it's worth, I think most people who embrace conspiracy theories don't do so as a result of anything that would be diagnosed as a mental illness.)

The vast majority of "conspiracies" are more like Underpants Gnomes business models. There's no explantory proposition anywhere. There's no overwhelming theory - put ten truthers in a room and you'll get ten wildly different theories (if you get a theory at all), and no overwhelming facts.

Watergate didn't require any theory - people connected with the Nixon administration were caught red-handed breaking and entering. It's obvious why they might do what they did and to ask who knew what/when. It was obvious people had a motive for covering up a criminal action. It was just a matter of documenting it.

When Iran leaked the Iran-hostage story via a Lebanese newspaper, nobody had a conspiracy theory before that. There was no "why would Reagan do that?" - the motivation was obvious and it was in print. When the -Contra side came out, no one had a conspiracy theory about a connection there. It was more investigation/leaks and a total surprise.

So I don't see where Conspiracy Theories really equate to uncovering Criminal Conspiracies. They seem to be more exclusive than related to each other.

If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional and your explanation would have been bizarre and unreal. Yet here we are today with clear evidence that all these things are being done with no repercussions for the perpetrators.

A person can still be operating under a conspiracy theory and talk about pervasive government surveillance. Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

But also, for your example, anyone paying attention had been saying, pretty loudly, that governments were surveiling their populations. See, for example, the EU parliament report into ECHELON. We know about ECHELON in the early 1990s. Thus, if someone had said "They've done it before, look at ECHELON, they're probably doing it now" -- that's a reasonable bit of evidence and a reasonable conclusion. If someone says "I hear clicks on my phone line and so the government is spying on me" that's a conspiracy theory (because the evidence is bogus) even though it's true (governments do spy on citizens).

It's also a typical trait of conspiracy theories (in the negative sense) that they pretend to have figured out more than they possibly could have.

I mean they don't just sell you suspicions (that might even be reasonable), but overdetailed debunkings which are clearly fabricated.

As if they believed that the winner is whoever provides more details, wherever these would come from.

If they can't do that, their "theory" isn't worth my time. Now if one of the crazies keeps bugging me with his theory, I might apply critical thinking to shut him up, if I don't lose patience and punch him in the face first.

Conspiracy theorists usually show a strong belief in something pretty improbable without a shred of tangible evidence. I think it's fair to label them as "crazies" because they tend to be very vocal about it and impervious to logical flaws in their own theories. And they're annoying, when you annoy people, you can expect some kind of negative feedback, like being mocked or called names.

Something that confuses a lot of conspiracy theorists is that global issues just aren't as important as local issues to people. Having a house, doing your job, raising your kids, spending time with loved ones, and anything that directly affects your ability to do so (e.g. your health, actions of people around you) are important and have a profound impact on your life.

Sometimes the actions of authorities have a direct impact on your life as well, but mostly at a much smaller scale and with less relevance.

Treating MH370 as something that's important to anyone other than people related to those involved leads to typical thinking errors like assuming Russia would care about this plane, or that people are being deluded. The horrible truth is that the whole thing just doesn't matter much.

As for conspiracy theorists these people generally have had atleast 1 experience in the past, where they had picked the right trail and were mislead. These guys generally tend to negate everything they get from mainstream sources and continue to advertise their version of events. I am not saying they are wrong or right, its just psychology. Most of these guys just need a single clue to say to themselves, "You see, i was right".

That's a reasonable stance. I tend to agree with you. It seems uncontroversial that it is important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts.

I wonder what do you make of this public statement, published by Le Monde and written by 34 French scholars, made in February of 1979:

"The question of how technically such a mass murder was possible should not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred... There is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas chambers."

Do historians get a pass? Do they not need to look for supporting evidence and gather facts?

I don't mean to be inflammatory so please don't vote me down. The point I'm making is that it's easy to dismiss "conspiracy theorists" for their silly ideas, and have these lofty goals of "evidence first", but when an extraordinary claim that is politically motivated stands on very shaky grounds, and "evidence first" is called into action as a modus operandi, then people are told they should not raise questions.

I'd like to remind everyone that it is not controversial to state that there is no documentary evidence for the use of gas chambers between 1942 and 1945. This much has been stated in public television by Tim Sebastian in a 2000 BBC "Hardtalk" interview with a WW2 historian, and stated under oath by the leading WW2 atrocities historian Raul Hilberg.

It's also important to talk about this because this places 99% of people firmly in the "conspiracy theorist" camp, as most people believe these unquestionable claims based on hearsay and not on any body of evidence. If someone disagrees and can show me wrong, please do so without naively assuming that I must have some racial agenda, which I can assure you - I don't.

This is bizarre, because you have written a confused set of paragraphs taken out of the playbook of Holocaust deniers. You have quoted a small piece of an article from Le Monde (out of context). The context was the need to debunk claims by Robert Faurisson, who was and is a notorious Holocaust denier.

You have also made truly outrageous claims about gas chambers, with justification, amazingly, from a television interview (unsourced) and a noted historian (unsourced). I am unconvinced.

The only way I can make sense of what you have written is as an ironic gesture -- an unhinged collage of junk from one of the oldest conspiracy theories, the one that believes in a Jewish cabal.

I have no problem sourcing the statements I made here. For the BBC interview, see here (timestamp: 3:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF4GFGMNm3g which I quote below:

David: "The judge says 'I always assumed that there was the evidence that Auschwitz had gas chambers, I was surprised to find that there wasn't until this case came along"

Tim: "There wasn't documentary evidence, is what he said, he doesn't say there wasn't any evidence, he said there wasn't documentary evidence"

David: "There were eyewitnesses and he relies on half a dozen eyewitnesses"

The transcripts for the trial are available for you to investigate for yourself, but the BBC acknowledging in public there's no documentary evidence for it, and quoting from the trial itself, should be enough for you to investigate for yourself from now on, and should be convincing enough.

I do not believe in the racial conspiracy theories you're trying to accuse me of. Nor do I need to. I do not need to believe in any conspiracy theory in order to be interested in the facts about WW2, and in order to understand that in the reality we live in, there is no documentary evidence for an event that is heavily glorified and propagandized in the mainstream education system and media.

The gap between the Le Monde excerpt you quote and your claim about what it shows is similarly large.

You are not arguing honestly, so I'm done.

What really should be considered here is the fact that proof requires a scientific setting. One cannot prove anything that occurs outside of a controlled setting, simply because it's not repeatable. Theories, both those set in reality and those that exist outside it, will forever be subject to this fact, and therefore be very questionable to (ie, not accepted by) the masses.

I don't think it's fair to call this evolutionary trait as a "mental illness" either, since correlating cause and effect is what helped us learn to farm and such like. The hard part is separating linked events from coincidences - which is where the scientific method comes in of using larger sample groups, control groups and peer reviews. However lets also remember that this is an extremely recent development in our evolution.

As a footnote, it's also worth noting that these traits have also been observed in other species such as pigeons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_t...

    "The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy
    theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. 
    The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is 
    not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot 
    reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more
    frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless."

    "Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of 
    conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those 
    conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. 
    If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing 
    to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody 
    on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead."

Next thing you know, "People who don't want to be snooped on by the government have a mental illness and don't understand why it's a good thing."

Uhh....so, so much of journalism today is exactly that; to the point that articles that are substantial are the exception.

"Ohm's initial publication was met with ridicule and dismissal; called "a tissue of naked fantasy." Approx. twenty years passed before scientists began to recognize its great importance."

The site here has a whole list of these "maverick scientists": http://amasci.com/weird/vindac.html#j9

I think the other lesson we need to consider is, just because an idea appears to be crazy, doesn't mean it is...

The Author, by presenting his theory in a way that also illustrates his awareness of the possibility that he himself is also crazy, was able to get it published by the New Yorker as a symbolic piece on the dangers of getting sucked into a conspiracy theory. If this was his plan, I think it's a good one as there's too many technical summaries, pictures and diagrams for this not be an article that is in part promoting a conspiracy theory.

People love to point to underdog scientists who were later "vindicated" and then compare their own pet theories to them. 1) That's incredibly arrogant. 2) That disregards the 10^n other theories that are discredited correctly every day. 3) The scientists who "nobody believed" were right because they did an incredible amount of very careful, thorough research which bolstered their case well past the point where it could be ignored. They weren't wild hunches.

> published by the New Yorker

New York Magazine. Big difference there.

I'm saying it's equally ignorant to not consider a theory because it just seems improbable.

A theory should be accepted only when the null hypothesis is more improbable.

As opposed to events that have not occurred. E.g. it seems improbable that ten flips of a fair coin will yield ten heads. Is it improbable? Yes by most definitions of improbable, it is improbable.

"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

-- Carl Sagan

I can, and it is a much, much smaller number than either:

1) a theory was widely accepted because "it just made sense" and turned out to be false (bloodletting, Aristotle's physics, caloric, aether, bad air causing disease...)

or

2) a theory being ridiculed and it turning out to be nonsense (n-rays, Cartesian vortices, cold fusion...)

Take-home: the initial plausibility of any theory will vary widely between people (plausibility is subjective, probability is objective). But as evidence accumulates the beliefs of all good Bayesians will converge.

Ergo: initial plausibility isn't the least bit interesting. Validation by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and/or Bayesian inference is. So bringing up initial plausibility--in either direction--is not so interesting, except in the case (as in this one) where a nearly infinite number of theories have almost identical initial plausibility, because we know with as much certainty as we know anything that air travel is incredibly safe, so failures are necessarily due to bizarre low-probability anomalies.

Under those circumstances, anyone who promotes their particular theory as vastly more plausible than any of the equally implausible alternatives is necessarily nuts: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364

The issue with this plane crash is that most theories from the investigators have a plausibility level that has barely changed from the initial level. This is why it is worth considering to a certain extent some of the more non-mainstream theories.

A famous example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Over the past several months, I've been putting an increasing level of thought into how people reach conclusions and investigate technical problems, and looking at things like confirmation bias, and I see it happen in myself and others.

The best example I have, is a vendor I work with had an outage in their platform, and we spent weeks going through the data, where the vendor jumped to a conclusion about the cause of the outage, even though it poorly or in no way explained the data we had compiled. No matter how hard I tried, I was not able to convince this vendor that the conclusion they reached was incorrect, every piece of evidence, was manipulated in a way to explain their theory. That is until they developed the fix, applied it, and had another outage occur after they thought they fixed it.

It troubles me, to know that we wasted so much effort, due to these biases.

While not 100% related, one story I like to remind myself of to try and disrupt my own biases, goes something along the lines of: - A little girl was helping her mom make banana bread one day, and asks her mom, why do you cut the ends off before you serve it. - The mom replies, I don't know, that's the way my mom always made it. - Next they ask the girls grand mother, why did you cut the ends off the bread - She replies, I don't know that's the way I always made it. - They manage to ask the great grand mother, why did you cut the ends off... - The response was, my serving plate was too small, so I used to cut the ends off so it would fit on the plate.

If anyone knows the attribution for that story, it would be great, I'm unable to find it so my recollection is probably wrong. However, I still really like this story, as I use it as a way to remind myself and others, that we need to be ready to question everything, when it comes to understanding a problem. It doesn't mean that we can afford to question every bias, but it does mean that we need to gain enough evidence to corroborate any theory that may come up, or if necessary, invalidate it.

Where I work, I believe it's something we need to spend greater effort on, is questioning our biases and make sure we're reaching the right conclusions.

No. Make sure to understand, deeply, ("speak to the great great grandmother") before you give in to that urge.

Monkey's at work hey, quite pertinent actually. Time to start looking for a new job :/

1. http://johnstepper.com/2013/10/26/the-five-monkeys-experimen...

    My gut still tells me I’m right, but my brain knows 
    better than to trust my gut.

Your gut often does follow some kind of logic, it's just you don't have access to what it did to arrive at that uneasy feeling in your stomach.

Though you don't realize it but our ability to see in three dimensions is a subconscious process. If you look at a cube you cannot choose how or when you process that image. In fact you don't even have a choice, once you look at a cube your brain forces you to know what you're looking at. Additionally, you don't even know what your brain did to interoperate that image as a cube. Yet you do know that there is some powerful subconscious calculation going on that derives that analysis.

In short, don't underestimate your gut.

It shows how much a good story-telling can go with convincing others that you know the truth.

I'm hoping that nobody seriously believes the NYT published this article backing the belief that MH 370 didn't crash.

I mean, it starts with the title of the story - the key line in this entire story is this:

And yet, once I started looking for evidence, I found it.

And, just in case people hadn't picked up on his actual thesis, he explicitly states it near the end:

"Still, it occurred to me that, for all the passion I had for my theory, I might be the only person in the world who felt this way. Neurobiologist Robert A. Burton points out in his book "On Being Certain" that the sensation of being sure about one’s beliefs is an emotional response separate from the processing of those beliefs."

Reading this article sort of left me feeling the same way I imagine a child might feel when reading Erich von Daniken or a book about Roswell or something like that: a set of allegations that are (1) surprising, (2) seem to make sense, and (3) that are totally beyond the reader's capacity for counterargument.

I will deliver one counter-argument: I think the focus on Yubileyniy might be unwarranted. The extrapolation of the flight-path is mere speculation, and don't forget that there are lots of places to land a plane, even a very large one. Out of all the larger airfields on the eastern hemisphere of our planet, I'm not surprised to see one that's large enough for this plane and that had some apparently-unusual things going on within the last few months. Statistically, I just regard such an event as probable to occur, independently of any missing planes.

Anyway, it was an interesting read.

If this was the goal, then it was achieved admirably - a mystery was provided, and the press took the bait, and largely ignored the brewing unrest in Ukraine.

In terms of the plausibility of his theory... it's plausible. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's plausible. I've been to Baikonur, and it's in the middle of absolutely nothing, has very, very high (Russian) security, and is a pretty ideal place to disappear anything.

The one thing I think he does get wrong is that he thinks building demolition in freezing temperatures is weird. This becomes a hell of a lot less weird when you realise that in the summer, temperatures there reach 50+ Celsius, and doing outdoor work in the dry cold is vastly preferable to doing it under the blazing sun.

It becomes even less weird when you consider that Baikonur is being edged towards end-of-life, as Russia are building their new cosmodrome at Vostochny.

Making an aircraft disappear might have taken Ukraine off a few front pages, but the propaganda benefit to Russia was - as any reasonable person would have anticipated - minimal at best. It made essentially no difference to Western policy towards Russia, and if anything drew a bit more attention towards crashes involving Malaysian Airlines 777s than was good for Russian interests.

Conversely, the implications of being caught hijacking an aircraft full of civilians and flying it into their own airspace would have been very severe indeed, especially given the number of citizens of their neighbour and only major international ally on board.

Consider the reward is minimal at best, the cost of failure is exceptionally high, and the probability of failing to hijack and fly an aircraft several thousand miles over multiple jurisdictions without detection is comfortably above zero.

Assume that anyone with the acumen to pull this sort of stunt off successfully possesses the faculties to do some basic weighing up of risk and reward an ask yourself why on earth would they do something so risky for such a trivially achieved and insignificant objective as distracting news media

Just because a particular organization theoretically could pull off a particular course of action doesn't mean it's not ridiculous in the extreme to assume they would.

I think this is something that can often backfire. If someone creates evidence that say's the plane crashed at location x, when location X is searched and there is no plane, I still have more information than I started. I know the evidence that led me to location x is incorrect. This could be because the data is bad, or due to tampering. If I'm now focused on tampering and able to corroborate that it is tampered with, I now have a new area to narrow my investigation, based on who has the skills, ability, and motives to tamper with that data.

Now, I would agree, if the goal was to create a short term disruption to the investigation, which didn't require holding up to scrutiny in the long run.

Because this is where you can bury your evidence real deep.

But in this case, there is no single simple theory; a crash is a simple theory but is very unlikely, given the available data and the searches that were performed.

The OP's theory of Putin stealing the plane and hiding it in Kazakhstan sure seems far-fetched, extremely complex and, well, crazy, but he acknowledges that fact, and it's still an interesting theory.

Occam's Razor is only useful when one hypothesis stands out above all the rest in prior plausibility. In the case of major air disasters no such single hypothesis is favoured. Almost any prior, up to but not including "zapped by aliens", is sufficiently likely to be in the running.

It is important to remember that when we are dealing with scientific theories, we are not really all that concerned with truth. Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them. However, there are data to show that Newton's laws don't hold in other situations. Newton's laws are not "truth" -- they are useful.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a scientific theory must make predictions which are falsifiable. In other words, it must not only fit data in the past, it must continue to fit data into the future. If your idea has no predictions, then it isn't a scientific theory to begin with and Occam's Razor doesn't apply.

In this case, the author has a theory which (presumably -- I haven't checked) fits the data in the past. Even if we had a simpler theory that also fits the data, we couldn't invoke Occam's Razor, because neither theory makes predictions about the future. The event is already finished and will not happen again. With Occam's Razor, I'm saying, "Well, we could imagine it to be like X or like Y and no matter how you slice it, it's going to work the same. I will pick X because it is simpler". But with this event, it makes a huge difference which "theory" I pick, so I can't use Occam's Razor.

Even if I could pick two equivalent theories -- let's say I had a theory that the plane crashed into a mountain and I had another theory that said the plane did a loop-de-loop and then crashed into the mountain. Maybe both ideas fit the data in the past and I could go and verify that the plane ended up crashing into the mountain. Both theories fit the data in the past and fit data in the future. I'll pick the simplest one because, hey, it really doesn't matter if the plane did a loop-de-loop before it crashed.

Now, maybe some people really care about the loop-de-loop. If they can't find any data that supports the loop-de-loop but doesn't support the straight-on-crash, then we are still going to reject the loop-de-loop theory. Why needlessly complicate things when there is no data to differentiate the two theories? But this does not mean that the plane did not do a loop-de-loop. There is no justification for saying that at all. We don't have any data to support one position or the other. We are just accepting the simple answer because it makes our lives easy.

Where most people get this wrong is: - They try to apply it to non-scientific theories. - They try to apply it to a single theory rather than a set of equivalent theories. - They try to apply it to a set of non-equivalent theories. - They believe that the result is "true".

That last one is pernicious because if you believe that something is true just because it is the simplest explanation that fits your data, you have stepped from science to religion.

The probability of A + B cannot be higher than A or B alone.

Of course that doesn't mean that A + B didn't occur, just that it is less likely.

If that were true then we would never have been able to do chemistry in the first place and get anything done by synthesis. The same applies to manufacturing. It's by careful planning and science that you overcome the probabilities and make it possible to conduct a series of events with perfection.

A + B become increasingly more likely if you contrive circumstances for them to occur together. But even then the overall probability is increasingly small if you consider the number of events that have to have occurred over the previous 13 or billin years.

Isn't truth the only thing science cares about?

Of course truth alone doesn't mean much and we usually conduct science not just for the sake of it, but those are downstream concerns.

> Are Newton's laws "true"? Well, they work reliably given certain constraints and they are definitely more simple than other theories, so it would be stupid not to use them.

Science doesn't necessitate any "reliability" on the theories/premises it uses. You set up your premise apply your theory to it and reach a conclusion.

It's up to others (i.e. engineers) to worry about how valid the premises are.

Deciding to use or not use some other theory as a premise isn't about being or not being "stupid" but rather about being able to prove something that others (be it scientists or engineers) will be interested in reading.

The degree with which that model corresponds with reality is a measure of truth, for some definitions of truth. But it's still always a map, a projection from reality according to some set of rules. It never actually is reality.

The thing that science cares about is building a better model of reality. Better models mean better predictions and better storytelling. The former is highly useful. The latter, I'm not so sure. Convincing storytelling can elevate a model higher than it's worth. There's a lot of storytelling in macroeconomics, and similarly in evolutionary biology's just-so stories.

I wonder if viewing science through the lens of "true" stories about reality, rather than as a ratchet for generating more precise predictive models, encourages overweighted stories too much.

Not really. Truth is what math cares about. In science, there is no truth, there is just what is measurable, but that's just a proxy for reality, not the objective truth. Then you work with whatever measurements you have and try to predict more measurements.

You're wrong. Random variables can be uncorrelated but not independent [1].

In general, you can't apply "algebra" to logic as you attempted above and explained below. Logic is very precise. To "prove" that `A => B` is equivalent `~B => ~A`, you use truth tables:

    | A | B | A => B | ~B => ~A |
    +---+---+--------+----------+
    | 0 | 0 |    1   |     1    |
    | 0 | 1 |    1   |     1    |
    | 1 | 0 |    0   |     0    |
    | 1 | 1 |    1   |     1    |

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normally_distributed_and_uncorr...

>In actuality nothing in science or in reality can be proven to be true.

If this were the case, the word "true" would have no meaning. We prove things in science all the time. We proved that you can cross a river without getting wet, for instance. We proved that humans can travel to the moon.

The examples are endless, really.

Not exactly sure what you're referring to here. Still let me give you some detail on how I negated that statement:

I'm essentially negating phrases within the sentence using the distributive property from algebra:

~(<Correlation> <does not imply> <causation>) = (<No Correlation> <does imply> <no causation>)

If the positive statement is valid the negated statement is also valid. Negating +2 into -2 doesn't make the -2 any less true then the +2, in fact it's not even applicable.

You should note that the negated statement (No Correlation does imply no causation) is a fundamental pillar in science experiments. It's part of the reason why researchers always convert their hypothesis to null hypothesis and then try to disprove it.

----------------------------------------------------------

>If this were the case, the word "true" would have no meaning. We prove things in science all the time. We proved that you can cross a river without getting wet, for instance. We proved that humans can travel to the moon. The examples are endless, really.

I want to emphasize that what I'm talking about isn't some theory I made up. This is established scientific philosophy within academia. It's actually one of the harder things to understand because it flies in the face of our natural intuition.

None of your examples have been "proven." What is happening is that you have formed a very reliable conclusion based on intuition, you haven't gathered proof. Lets take a look at your river example...

One way in attempt to gather proof that crossing a river makes you wet is to observe 500 people crossing the river. If you observe that 500 people cross a river and all 500 got wet, what you have established is not a proof but a correlation that crossing the river is correlated to getting wet. Intuitively we assume that this is a proof, but from a rigorous and more philosophical standpoint not only have we not proven anything, it is actually fundamentally impossible to establish a "proof." Try to wrap your head around that.

Let me give you an example that's easier to understand and more inline with our intuitive understanding of the world. The following link is a research study on the correlation between birthrate and the population of storks: http://web.stanford.edu/class/hrp259/2007/regression/storke....

They arrive at the conclusion that baby's are delivered by storks because of the positive correlation. Our intuition tells us that this conclusion is improbable despite the correlation. Note that correlation, intuition and proof are completely separate things.

It is however possible to disprove things. If I establish that there is no correlation between cancer rates and heights then it is by logic impossible for height to cause higher cancer rates. What I have done is disproven height as a causative factor for cancer.

It is fundamentally impossible to prove anything. It is only possible to establish correlations. Correlations can only be used to falsify things or demonstrate the possibility of causation. This is not some weird thing I made up, this is established knowledge. I don't blame people for voting my OP down; Many researchers don't consider or even learn about the implications that the scientific method has on reality as we know it.

Well, I'm sure that is proof of its correctness?

>What is happening is that you have formed a very reliable conclusion based on intuition, you haven't gathered proof.

That's what proof is. Saying proof is not proof is not all that useful a conclusion to draw.

>it is actually fundamentally impossible to establish a "proof."

See? That's why it's a stupid conclusion.

>None of your examples have been "proven."

Did we go to the moon or didn't we? If going to the moon is not proof that we can go to the moon, then I don't see what business you have to say any of this.

>It is fundamentally impossible to prove anything. It is only possible to establish correlations.

Correlations are what the word "proof" refers to.

>This is not some weird thing I made up, this is established knowledge.

Well, congratulations. You've just established that God exists, too.

---

"Proof" is that which is convincing to a 'fair and rational' mind. All you need are correlations that marginalize error. Things that are proven are true up to the invalidation of your assumptions. In science, those assumptions are experiences. In mathematics, they are axioms. There is no fundamental difference between the two, because mathematical axioms are also observed linguistic experiences.

No. Proof is a synonym for causation not correlation. Establishing correlation between stork population and baby population is not establishing proof that storks bring babies to mothers. Proof and correlation are entirely different things.

>See? That's why it's a stupid conclusion.

Sure applying the scientific method to daily life is stupid, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about the nature of logic itself. That is the context of this debate. You're attempting to deny the validity of my argument by shifting the context into some vague definition of the word proof.

Proof will compel rational systems into agreement. If I submit a proof to a computer, it will consume it and output that-which-was-proved. The correlation between the structure of the inputs and outputs are what the word 'proof' refers to. It's not that complicated.

>You're attempting to deny the validity of my argument by shifting the context into some vague definition of the word proof.

I'm not defining proof, I'm just telling you what it is. Words don't require definition to have meaning.

>Sure applying the scientific method to daily life is stupid

I don't know why you'd say this or why you think I'd agree with it.

You are starting from the assumption that science doesn't proof things (a statement that you no doubt have no proof of) and used it to conclude that proof is meaningless. What a fine conclusion -- it's utterly useless. But rather than imagine that your assumption was wrong, you want to dig in because "so many people" told you it was correct. Well? Give me a proof. Why should anyone believe these things? What rational advantage do you have by claiming proof is impossible?

Furthermore, why would you -- while saying proof is impossible -- ignore the fact that mathematics -- a discipline completely enamored with proof -- be a useful basis for science if science had no need of proof? Does that not strike you as completely absurd? Why would you believe such a thing?

Rational advantage? You think I'm just stating bullshit for some kind of advantage? Look it up yourself. When did I say "so many people" told me so. Nobody told me shit, You can look this stuff up, it's established academic knowledge. Here's a link to start off with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

>Furthermore, why would you -- while saying proof is impossible -- ignore the fact that mathematics -- a discipline completely enamored with proof -- be a useful basis for science if science had no need of proof? Does that not strike you as completely absurd? Why would you believe such a thing?

Look up the mathematics section on that wikipedia page I just linked. first line: "Many philosophers believe that mathematics is not experimentally falsifiable, and thus not a science"

Now the question you should ask yourself is not why I would believe such a thing but why it strikes you as completely absurd when it's common knowledge in science.

>You are starting from the assumption that science doesn't proof things (a statement that you no doubt have no proof of) and used it to conclude that proof is meaningless. What a fine conclusion -- it's utterly useless. But rather than imagine that your assumption was wrong, you want to dig in because "so many people" told you it was correct. Well? Give me a proof. Why should anyone believe these things?

Have you ever done science? You know the first thing they do after they come up with a hypothesis? I can tell you they don't immediately try to prove the hypothesis. The first thing they do is convert the hypothesis to a NULL hypothesis and then they try to DISPROVE it. It is the central tenant and quest of science to disprove the NULL hypothesis. Why do you think they do this? Does this not strike you as odd?

If you STILL don't believe me then take a look at the following page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_evidence#Concept_of_...

I found this page on wikipedia searching for "scientific proof." Anyway, to "prove" what I say has legitimacy please read the following:

Under the section "Utility of Scientific Evidence": "Philosophers, such as Karl R. Popper, have provided influential theories of the scientific method within which scientific evidence plays a central role.[6] In summary, Popper provides that a scientist creatively develops a theory which may be falsified by testing the theory against evidence or known facts. Popper's theory presents an asymmetry in that evidence can prove a theory wrong, by establishing facts that are inconsistent with the theory. In contrast, evidence cannot prove a theory correct because other evidence, yet to be discovered, may exist that is inconsistent with the theory.[7]"

Did you get that? He says "Science cannot prove a theory correct." Read that and understand it. I guarantee your perspective of the world will widen as a result. I know we're a little hostile right now but if you put that aside and try to internalize and understand what he says then this knowledge you gain will represent a paradigm shift in your understanding of the world. It did for me.

Now go to the end of that page and read the last paragraph: "While the phrase "scientific proof" is often used in the popular media,[13] many scientists have argued that there is really no such thing. For example, Karl Popper once wrote that "In the empirical sciences, which alone can furnish us with information about the world we live in, proofs do not occur, if we mean by 'proof' an argument which establishes once and for ever the truth of a theory,"[14] and Satoshi Kanazawa has argued that "Proofs exist only in mathematics and logic, not in science."[15]"

If you understood what you just read then not only should you know why proving things is impossible, you should also know that the nonexistence of proof in reality is established scientific knowledge.

>he first thing they do is convert the hypothesis to a NULL hypothesis and then they try to DISPROVE it.

Yes, you do a straightforward bijective transformation using no new information, and apparently everything is different. That's not important. You're just highlighting a duality between proof and disproof. You're proving invalidity rather than validity. It's still proof.

As for the rest of your post: Appeal to authority is not an argument. Appeal to popularity is not an argument. These people are wrong. That's essentially what I'm arguing.

I'm not claiming that everyone agrees with me. So why would I debate that? Why are you debating that?

> It’s not possible to spoof the BFO data on just any plane. The plane must be of a certain make and model, 17equipped with a certain make and model of satellite-communications equipment,18 and flying a certain kind of route19 in a region covered by a certain kind of Inmarsat satellite.20 If you put all the conditions together, it seemed unlikely that any aircraft would satisfy them. Yet MH370 did.

If your goal was stealing a large airplane, I think there's easier ways of doing that. If your goal was getting at the cargo or the passengers, it's highly probable that doing it on the ground is also much easier.

http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/emirates-clark-s... says it well.

They would capture perfectly good pilots along with the plane.

No convoluted conspiracy theories necessary.

You obviously don't understand Occams Razor.

If it was a conspiracy, it must have been carried out by some group. Who was that group? What are the goals of that group? Why did that group decide that the proposed plan was the best way to use their limited resources to achieve their goal, as opposed to some other plan?

I suppose the group here would be Putin and/or some group of Russian nationalists, and the goal would be to get the Ukrainian conflict out of the news.

Then the plan would involve a highly elaborate scheme of secretly designing sophisticated equipment, performing careful analysis, and smuggling highly-trained personnel onto a flight for the purpose of secretly diverting it to an obscure airfield. Then you'd have to execute all of the passengers who weren't in on it and dispose of their bodies and the plane somewhere where they won't be found for a long time, and make sure that none of the people who were in on it ever talk about it. And if you screw any of that up at any point, then you get the opposite of what your goal was - massive media attention of what a world-class asshole you are.

But if the goal is to disappear the flight for news coverage, why bother with all of that when 1% of the effort and even less risk would get it to crash somewhere in the Indian ocean, where it would likely never be found?

Why bother with any of it at all? Aren't there lots of much simpler ways to distract the news media? Does anybody in Russia even care that much what the Western media thinks?

Another thing - what about China? As far as I know, the US and Europe are currently unhappy at Russian interference in the Ukraine, but China don't seem to care much. There were a lot of Chinese nationals on that flight, though, and I bet China would be very unhappy indeed if it was ever discovered that they were killed by Russia in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the Western media. Possibly enough to lead to a change in the Chinese position on the conflict, including diplomatic, economic, and maybe military support for the Western position. Why would Russia take that risk, when there must be far simpler options out there?

I find that a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart under this type of analysis, without even paying much attention to the technical details. If you want me to believe that this happened, you've gotta come up with a group and set of goals that make it look like a good idea.

"The Ultimate Conspiracy Debunker" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hug0rfFC_L8

The idea in this video is also that most conspiracy theories are easy to debunk without even analyzing the contents of the theory, just looking at political factors.

One thing I try to pay attention to is consensus. It's probably very easy to get duped by a single voice that's smarter than you (or just knows more about a specific subject), but it's less probable that a bunch of those people are all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the easier it is to trust.

I think I have read (source?) that the consensus level on the broad category of climate change and whether it's likely to end badly for us is pretty near the high 90% if not close to the 99-100% mark. But then when it comes to the more detailed bits like how bad, and how soon, that's where I don't know who to listen to. Any suggestions?

[1] - I don't like the word debate here because it feels loaded, but I can't think of a better one.

Update: I feel silly even amending this, but upon re-reading my post, I see there may be some doubt as to whether I believe in climate change. I do, and only after a healthy amount of research and some level of blind trust in consensus of people more knowledgeable than myself. The uncertainty I have is around what the effects will be, how severe, and how soon. The answers to those help to inform my choices on how to go about helping fix it.

No one really knows the specifics of what's going to happen, but the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has started focusing on 'adaptation' as some degree of climate change is inevitable (and, indeed, has already happened). The IPCC would be my choice as the closest guess as to what the next century will look like [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_c...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fifth_Assessment_Report

--- Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.

In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature." Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.

---

Should we do nothing about climate change? Probably not. Panicking is not likely to help either. Given that the Cold War didn't end in a scorched earth I do believe we are capable of pulling together and dealing with what's in front of us.

(Edit: formatting)

- It stretches the imagination that in the Post-9/11 world, hijackers could access a panel in the cabin without raising passenger and crew suspicion. So the hijackers would have required some way to control the passengers. Smuggling this past airport security is already a huge risk to the operation.

- The northern route may be the optimal route for someone looking to avoid detection, but there is still a massive risk that one of these countries might notice the plane on military or other radar. This would be an unqualified disaster to the sponsors of the operation.

- The most probable final ping locations are so far out that the aircraft was almost certainly at or on the verge of fuel exhaustion. How would the hijackers have known the precise amount of fuel on board? How would they deal with unexpectedly high head winds, or some other in-flight issue? Any crash landing would be difficult to conceal.

The sophistication, danger, and lack of motivation for such an operation makes this sound more like a movie plot than a credible theory.

And radar coverage is much bigger in the northern arc.

China/Russia/India/Pakistan, etc

Oh yes. This is a great insight. Thanks. Why would take great risks when you are on top?

Theorising on the internet is one thing, but real people don't deserve terrorism accusations, except through due process of law. Boston bomb media lynching is a case in point.

Obviously accusations such as these are not very nice for the families of those gentlemen but not really the same as doxing.

> I soon realized the germ of every TV-news segment is: “Officials say X.” The validity of the story derives from the authority of the source. The expert, such as myself, is on hand to add dimension or clarity. Truth flowed one way: from the official source, through the anchor, past the expert, and onward into the great sea of viewerdom.

1) As an expert, I appear on TV to repeat the Official News Updates

2) I'm there all week, so I'm a regular

3) The experts don't agree at all

4) The experts don't like conspiracy theorists (lightning?)

5) The experts can be conspiracy theorists, too! (Putin!?)

Even his book summary lays out the same trope: CNN Aviation Analyst Jeff Wise sweeps aside the conspiracy theories and misconceptions, then just down below, once they've made the appeal to authority, a radical new hypothesis ought to be considered. Bizarre. A very entertaining read.

1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're using a stolen plane?

2) Why go through all this trouble with a mission that could go catastrophically wrong, when you could just buy it through your regular black-budget process?

True, but not in Malaysia. It is a muslim country with high alcohol tax which could be two reasons that Russians, like many other Westerners, holiday in Thailand and not Malaysia.

It's completely absurd. If the president of the United States was on that flight, I'd give it more credibility. However, which passenger on that flight was so valuable, and surrounded by so much security, that hijacking the flight made sense?

The same goes for cargo, it must be easier to make friends in the right places, or pay people off to have that cargo "misplaced".

He tries to pass off the idea that you can avoid radar by flying along borders with nothing more than the word of an anonymous military navigator. Maybe he should rent a plane in Kashmir and try flying along the Chinese-India border for a few hours and see if that actually works.

Also, am I the only one disturbed by OP's implicating the 3 Russian passengers? It's not backed by any investigation, just speculation. And more likely than not those 3 Russians were simply victims.

Someone did claim to see a fireball. http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/03/oil-rig-worker-says-he...

Incidentally, the kiwi oil rig worker who claimed he saw MH370 come down in a fireball was sacked for saying that, and hasn't worked since.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...

The best explanation I could find of why he was fired was that his email caused computer problems related to the resulting traffic, which was in no way his fault.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13748349

There were a large number of different nations involved in various "war games", "search and rescue practices", and general provocative actions at the time. http://tass.ru/en/world/725908

    “‘That’s right’ is a feeling you get so that you can move on,” Burton told me.
    It’s a kind of subconscious laziness.
    Just as it’s harder to go for a run than to plop onto the sofa,
    it’s harder to reexamine one’s assumptions than it is to embrace certainty.
    At one end of the spectrum of skeptics are scientists, who by disposition or training resist the easy path;
    at the other end are conspiracy theorists, who’ll leap effortlessly into the sweet bosom of certainty.

Speculation on the location of MH370 is evidence of innumeracy, at best. Insanity, at worst: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1364

tl;dr: because air disasters are incredibly improbable, the range for speculation is almost completely unbounded, and therefore the probability that any particular speculation is correct is vanishingly small.

It was one of those rare stories where I was looking at my scroll position hoping I wasn't near the end. Usually it is the other way around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A

Can anyone fix American news?

You could get all of the news that matters in thirty seconds if someone went through the work to organize it that way.

Print news will die even sooner.

Internet/app news (or print resurrected in Internet form) is also in serious trouble. It's a money problem at the end of the day. News agencies are literally making pennies when they used to make dollars [2]. Turns out if you're making 1/10 of what you used to make it's hard to keep people on staff. Those people on staff were the writers and fact-checkers, so now instead of being able to spend a long time thoughtfully reporting there's a lot of "I need three stories on my desk by the end of the day" going on. Combine that with the fact that now your local newspaper competes with every other newspaper, and most of the industry is pretty much screwed.

Yet, I say that as someone who is starting a news company (https://grasswire.com). I think at the end of the day citizen journalism and fact-checking (allowing more participation from non-paid parties) can not only produce higher quality journalism, but can actually save the news from its monetization woes. (In other words, our thesis is that instead of trying to squeeze more out of the monetization end as a result of increase in supply, we should just let that increase in supply decrease the value of each printed word). Basically we're trying to create an open Wikipedia-like newsroom where anyone can curate and fact-check in real-time. It has been working beautifully in private beta, so we'll see.

[1] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/network-news-the-pace-of...

[2] http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2012/newspapers-building-digi...

Of course there is, this is a planet of six billion people.

I'm sure from your endeavours you are familiar with BBC Monitoring which summarises news from thousands of global media sources. 50%+ of those stories never reach the western mainstream news.

And that's just one possible source.

Typical 24 hour news has its market. Younger markets will always have some equivalent format.

If they were trying to put things in context as expected from journalists, they would have a lot more to say.

It's like watching a Fox News anchor have a melt-down on TV regarding the ethnicity of Santa Claus...[1]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XYlJqf4dLI

I dunno anymore, I feel sometimes like I'm living in some crazy world where everyone decided to start using "bad" drugs a while back and forgot to tell me to join in.

If Russia did it, and if China finds out, does anybody think China will say, "Well, it's Russia, we'll protest at UN and demand economic sanction"? Moscow and Beijing will be in rubbles when the dusts clear.

Well they were mostly middle-class normal tourists. Probably not important enough for the Chinese leaders to care about.

[0] https://mh17.correctiv.org/english/

And I don't think they accidentally shot down the plane. They might've assumed it was a different plane, but from what I could tell, they intended to shoot it down. If I'm trying to avoid accidentally shooting down planes, I'm generally not firing surface-to-air missiles about the place.

It was an arms-length Russian crew then, and that could well have been the case with the other Malaysian plane. Professional support but professional deniability.

reminds me of sting's "russian" song, specifically, "i hope the russians love their children too..."

If that were the case I can only imagine that something went wrong and they were unable to announce the takeover or there is some sort of cover up that is being implemented to prevent any groups from getting credit for hijacking a plane. Nothing really seems to make a lot of sense to me. I do think it's interesting that the author doesn't really seem to sure himself and thinks that he may be crazy to think he has the answer. It seems that a lot of events when thrown into a strange context can seem to both explain something yet sound/be completely crazy(the work to hide the airplane in Kazakhstan in the middle of winter) It could have just been some government project that just so happened to wrap up around that time. I wonder if this plane will be found...

That's some seriously messed up moderation. Who is this guy and what forum is he talking about?

I have no experience moderating a large online community, but this feels like a particularly bad way to do so.

This is like "9/11 inside job" level of thinking.

We can't even get special forces to do their jobs without publishing books about it, what makes you think more than a handful of people can keep a secret about anything?

>This is like "9/11 inside job" level of thinking.

precise may be not. Opportunistic - definitely. While i have no doubts about WTC, when i first time saw the released security cam video with Pentagon hit i was surprised how it looks like a hit by a cruise missile not by a huge plane - speed, approach angle and height, explosion style, etc... That immediately prompted me to really look at the damage photos and i just wasn't able to make myself to see a huge plane hit damage, instead i see a damage from a cruise missile.

Russia hijacked the plain, spoofed the satellite data, landed it in Baikonur and then buried under the ground.

Is Australia still actively looking for it? who is paying for all these efforts?

Its being shared between Malaysia, Australia & China, but what % each I don't know. I think Australia has spent the most so far.

There's just not enough real information to gain certainty, and the number of plausible sounding theories create a cacaphony.

But one thing seems certain. The series of unusual, '(in)convenient' (a plane full of AIDs reseachers!) and mysterious circumstances have triggered enough minds to where is not controversial to conclude that something unusual and extraordinary is going on. I wonder if we'll ever know.

No, not really. 2014 actually had less crashes of large planes (6) than any previous year on record, it's just that three of them were particularly large -- and the death toll was still less than 2005 (or 2002 or 2001 or 2000). http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm

I've recieved some other numbers (12; aviation-safety.com for 2014) but the consensus is that 2014 is the safest year on record.

Considering that airline crashes are exceedingly rare on a per flight or per distance basis, what, exactly, are the usual circumstances of airline crashes?

The problems they face are:

1. underfunded startup airlines (Indonesia, India) 2. energetic and not well-understood equatorial Pacific storms 3. uneven quality of candidates and training 4. Asian cultural issues in the cockpit, esp. S. Korea 5. demanding weather (monsoons) and terrain (low-viz)

The NTSB did a lot (well, everything) for the current safety of American airlines, but there's no comparable safety body in Asia.

So Asian airline safety should really be compared with Africa, not the West.

http://askakorean.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/culturalism-gladwe...

http://www.jacdec.de/airline-safety-ranking-2015/

And weren't both Malaysian disasters the result of foul play?