Moon landing a fake? ..Stanley Kubrick

[Telecaster]

One major factor in conspiracy "theories" getting created and then taking hold has to do with our exceedingly poor grasp of probability. If the odds of a lone gunman standing at a window of a book depository with a rifle, shooting at a man riding past on the street below in the backseat of an open car and killing him are 1 in (say) 50000…then if you run the scenario 50000 times the man in the car will, with 100% certainty, be killed once. Even on the first run-through the odds are >0. But we're made uneasy by this intrusion into the world of simple cause & effect scenarios—which we're primed to seek out—and so tune it out, preferring to equate improbable with impossible. Then we make up explanatory stories to rationalize our unease.

At the core of moon landing denial is the rejection of cosmologies that allow space travel. If you believe space, as a medium you can enter and move about within, either doesn't exist or is off-limits to human beings then of course such travel is impossible. And anyone claiming to have done it must be lying. No matter how absurd the denial becomes in the face of contrary evidence, the denialists have a deep psychological & emotional investment in their cosmology and therefore have no choice but to keep doubling down on it.

-Dave-

[EricV]

Probability is indeed diffucult to grasp   The probability of a kill in your scenario is only around 65%.  For the mathematically inclined, the survival probability approaches 1/e as the number of trials increases. 

[Telecaster]

Probability is indeed diffucult to grasp   The probability of a kill in your scenario is only around 65%.  For the mathematically inclined, the survival probability approaches 1/e as the number of trials increases.

Oops, I did get it wrong. Instead imagine 50000 parallel & identical (up to this point) worlds where the scenario plays out simultaneously. That should work: the guy in the car will be killed once. Otherwise, yes, the situation is different and—on the surface—counterintuitive…as in, for instance, the Monty Hall problem.

-Dave-

[EricV]

Sorry, the math is still not that simple.  For this scenario, you need a Poisson distribution.  The probability of no kill in any of the parallel worlds is roughly 37%.  The probability of a kill in exactly one parallel world is also 37%.  But we are getting far off topic ....

[Telecaster]

Oh well, back to class. 

My original intent was to link the equating of improbable with impossible to conspiratorial reasoning. As in "the man in the car just couldn't possibly have been killed by a lone gunman, therefore [insert preferred conspiracy scenario]." This is the sort of post-hoc argument made to rationalize a belief held for deeper (emotional, psychological (including innate tendencies that may have genetic links), tribal) reasons.

-Dave-

(Note: posted this earlier minus the last sentence due to my friend's young son wanting an iPad lesson. He's almost 2 now. Priorities…    )

[razrblck]

NASA recently released 14.000+ scans from the Apollo missions. These are all pictures taken with the iconic Hasselblad cameras modified for the Apollo program.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums

As much as people like to think that one video and a couple of pictures were faked, it would be impossible to 1) make tens of thousands of people involved in the program keep their mouth shut for all these years, and 2) fake the humongous amount of photographic and video evidence (as well as real stuff like crap we left on the moon and other bits you can kind of see with a good telescope).

Besides, going to space is not as hard as people think. Doing it safely is much harder, but we didn't think about that too much back during the Cold War, did we?

[Telecaster]

Sure, the evidence for the moon landings is mountainous, overwhelming even. Besides all the photos, including recent ones of the landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the fact that until recently we regularly bounced laser light off mirrors left on the lunar surface to measure Earth-to-Moon distance (and the variability thereof), there's the loads of bureaucratic paperwork left behind. And the documented astronaut training. And all the tech created. Etc. Attributing it all to a conspiracy is absurd beyond absurd.

But to people who can't accept the moon landings none of that matters. Their need to believe it didn't happen trumps everything else. Attempting to reason with them is usually fruitless…in fact it tends to reinforce their refusal to evaluate the evidence rationally (the "backfire effect"). About all you can do is present the evidence as clearly as possible, while accepting that some folks can't/won't deal with it reasonably.

Then there are people who claim not to accept this, that or the other as part of a chain-yanking exercise. Sometimes this can even be useful, as in deflating excessive pedantry. 

-Dave-

[Michael West]

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it obviously make a sound?

If a tree falls in a forest and the police wasn't around, does it make a sound?

If a tree falls in a forest and the police is investigating, but the prosecutor decides not to press charges (for insufficient evidence of violating the forest noise ordinance, for instance - the officer did not have a calibrated decibel meter with him at the time), does it make a sound?

If eight trees fall in a forest and someone was around to hear it, do other falling trees in the forest make a sound?

If trees in a a forest in a land, far, far away, fall and plenty were around to hear it and record it, do falling trees on the other side of the land far, far away make a sound? Or our trees are perhaps different species of trees?

these days the trees make selfies as they fall and text them to the tress on the other side of the world!

[Phil Indeblanc]

It's the video just after the one showing Big Foot getting lost in the Bermuda triangle.
How anyone with a lick of intelligence could watch this silly video and think it's real is beyond me. Just a waste of 2 minutes of my life....

Well I certainly am glad to have taken the 2min, as I think some of the posts here are great :-)

I was actually hoping to get a better understanding of the footage that some people claim it was faked. I was hoping some folks here could help in that area, and demystify things... if applicable.

Questioning the moon landing is very reasonable when the only source you have is the news. Also when you detach yourself from the time that it happened and are not linked to that period, it is even easier to question it, don't you think?

Reading Bernard's post, I have to agree...If I understood it right.

[digitaldog]

Questioning the moon landing is very reasonable when the only source you have is the news. Also when you detach yourself from the time that it happened and are not linked to that period, it is even easier to question it, don't you think?

No, I don't think that's reasonable.

[Phil Indeblanc]

...because.....
?

[digitaldog]

...because.....

Because I have no problem when the 'only source' is the news (I tend to read many differing news sources). I believe the earth is round, not because I've flown over it from outer space, but because 'the news' from differing sources have provided solid evidence of this fact. I don't think I need to detach myself from the time. I was alive and recall seeing the moon landing 'on the news'.
Lastly, there isn't a lick of proof that the moon landing was faked, just the opposite. Many of those facts have already been provided here.

[Phil Indeblanc]

Because I have no problem when the 'only source' is the news (I tend to read many differing news sources). I believe the earth is round, not because I've flown over it from outer space, but because 'the news' from differing sources have provided solid evidence of this fact. I don't think I need to detach myself from the time. I was alive and recall seeing the moon landing 'on the news'.
Lastly, there isn't a lick of proof that the moon landing was faked, just the opposite. Many of those facts have already been provided here.

Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days. Well in the case of the OP "story", we have the agreed news sources claiming it is so. So its A perspective. Very possible. Probable? Perhaps? After some events, you can't help but not believe the news. So knowing this now, it casts some doubt to past news that is questionable. Some where in the what little I have read, there was some mention of Buzz Aldrin's brother or some "noise" perhaps that there was something. Not anything conclusive.

As for the earth being round, I would think it is.  I can't prove it to you. But there are a number of credible sources that make logical sense, and I can accept this as a "default". There are ideas theories that are proven by evidence. The more the evidence, the more likelihood that the theaory can be proven to be so.

Lastly, I was not watching any news or around at the time the moon landing was announced, but I have only heard of reports of it from the local agencies. Otherwise, I have heard some "sources" claiming that it is fake, because, the shadows and background and such don't make sense to those that say its a fake. I have not looked into it. If I did, I can't say that I would be able to be sure of things without someone explaining it. Unless there are obvious "cloning" artifacts :-) . Now with Photoshop or Premier, etc...they could have had a field day about the moon...if they wanted to fake it!

...So its interesting to know, or see in a photograph or video....if there is a way to reveal what the shadows or backgrounds and air, or lack of should depict.

[digitaldog]

Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days

"All generalizations are false, including this one".
-Mark Twain

[Phil Indeblanc]

"All generalizations are false, including this one".
-Mark Twain

True :-)

Though...
I'm not sure if anyone is generalizing anything...

I was watching a study, or test being done....
They put 150,000 marbles in a large jar. Then they started asking random people to guess how many marbles they thought were in the jar....
Guesses were coming in from as little as 50 to millions, etc...
But the more they had sample guesses, after averaging the guess entries, it was shocking how close the average answer was. It was off by a couple hundred or something very small.

[Telecaster]

Reading *many different* "news sources" doesn't say a whole lot now a days.

It's a good thing IMO to maintain a healthy degree of skepticism about what you see, hear & read in the "news." But this is ultimately unrelated to denialism and conspiracy theorizing. These phenomena are driven not by skepticism but by an a priori belief in or commitment to something else that prevents acknowledgment or acceptance of the thing or event being denied. The denying & theorizing are post-hoc rationalizations intended to smooth over contradictions between what is known and what is believed.

-Dave-

[Phil Indeblanc]

After those 3 buildings came down... anything is possible for a powerful media to convince the public.
If you're not skeptic, you're experiencing bliss.

[Telecaster]

After those 3 buildings came down... anything is possible for a powerful media to convince the public.
If you're not skeptic, you're experiencing bliss.

It's equally important to be equally skeptical of wild & crazy alternate explanations of what the media "inform" you about. Occams's Razor applies to both.

-Dave-

[hjulenissen]

So in the 2003 build up to the Iraq war, European and US media obviously had highly different interpretations of reality. I think it is fair to claim that those interpretations contributed to the publics opinion, although this could be a case of "hen and egg" where (local) media tends to bias its interpretations towards what their target audience believes in the first place. Would it be conspiratoric of me, then, to claim that the political leaders of the US seemed to have a creative view on truth? Or that for any politician with ambitions to do some particular thing, there is an enormous gain to be had by swaying media your way, thereby getting the people to side with you?

As a cynic, I like to play games of "follow the money". In many classic conspiracy theories, you single out one (e.g. ethnic) group as "bad", and the thinking is that if we only put those in jail, throw them out of the country etc, everything will be good. This plays well into majority populations that are (perhaps) struck by unemployment, poverty, starvation, or the general feeling of being dethroned. I guess this is similar to creating an external enemy (i.e. going to war) in order to make your people more coherent. So (some) political leaders have potentially a lot to gain by those conspiracy theories.

But the moon landing? Who would "gain" by having it declared fake? Anti NASA-ers? It does not make sense to me, even ignoring the massive evidence that it happened.

-h

[hjulenissen]

I was watching a study, or test being done....
They put 150,000 marbles in a large jar. Then they started asking random people to guess how many marbles they thought were in the jar....
Guesses were coming in from as little as 50 to millions, etc...
But the more they had sample guesses, after averaging the guess entries, it was shocking how close the average answer was. It was off by a couple hundred or something very small.

If you ask 10.000 people, their averaged response can, according to some claims (often) be "better" than the single response from an expert. At least in somewhat more complex questions than guessing the number of rubbles, things like "will Russia enter/exit Syria this year?". The thinking seems to be that in a large population there will be hidden (perhaps unconscious) knowledge that no single expert have. Is there not a name for this? I guess that democracy, free trade/stock markets, wikipedia, crowdsourcing are all related to your reported experiment.

I guess that this works well as long as the population is "unbiased"; their errors are just some noisy distribution around the true mean. In questions where there is a significant bias, this approach ought not to work.

The "bandwagon effect" describes what happens when physicists do (publish) experiments after another (respected) physicists; they tend to cluster close to the initial experimenter, even if she was wrong. Perhaps they will reject (not publish) results that are too far away from historic results. This means that if you look at a bunch of independent published papers, there might be a consistent bias towards the initial "respected" one, instead of a non-biased spread around the true mean:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0508199.pdf
http://joerojasburke.com/2014/06/11/overconfidence-bias/

or:

http://xkcd.com/385/

In perceptual psychological experiments, it has often been found that some random person from the street will have the same preference in e.g. loudspeakers as a trained expert, but will need significantly more time for training/averaging due to "noisy" responses (or equivalently, more people needed). But also, people will generally prefer the sound of a blue loudspeaker over a black loudspeaker even when they are acoustically identical. One might expect "experts" to be aware of some such phenomena and (perhaps) being able to reduce their own bias in some such cases.

-h