Reminds me of the saying Ex-Muslims say what (they think) Islamic Apologists think: To enter Islam you need only say the Shahada. To leave Islam, you need a PhD in Islamic and Quranic studies.
I'm all for rigor in exploring every claim, but I'm also for equal standards of reasonable expectations for one to accept/reject a claim.
I have to say I agree with Scott, and cringed when I read the section of Evan's article where he gets to the "trig on pants stains" area. Frankly, it comes off like he has no understanding of the subject matter but wants to disagree, so he pulls out two rhetorical tools. First is this weird "woe is me look how much I've written, you have to admit I've engaged"--well, the fact that this moaning is standing in for an area of the argument you don't understand means you certainly haven't engaged with this part! Maybe you've engaged with other parts, but there are no participation trophies in truth-seeking. And second is the sneer--what the fuck are we doing here, it's just silly, ridiculous, and again I've spent all of my Sunday on it. Neither of these are good tools of rational analysis, I actually think Scott could've probably been harsher.
Hard disagree with this. The point of Evan's "look how hard I've worked" is to prevent accusations that he isn't engaging in good faith, which were being hurled by Ethan, Bentham, and many others. By that point he had already spent multiples more time and energy than anyone else on Substack investigating Ethan's claims. Would it not be fair to say he earned some credibility even if he turned back at the end? Sure, by the standards of Scott's piece, in retrospect Evan's efforts seem less robust- but at this point the debate was mostly being conducted among 20-year-olds in-between their college classrooms. Seems unfair to levy too much criticism here.
Also, giving up at the trigonometry had nothing to do with not understanding the subject matter. Rather, he's incredulous at the lengths that are being stretched to try to find evidence for the claims presented.
Dylan Black, who does understand the subject matter, was in my comment section recently regarding the optics specifically:
>> "There is an unbelievable level of self-confidence in the analysis of physical phenomena. It is horribly difficult to conclude things from still images, let alone that the drying pattern of clothes at the miracle “suggests that this ‘heat ray’ had an unusually IR-rich, blue/UV-poor spectrum.”
>> My PhD was largely optics, so I become even more skeptical when people stray into my field. It is VERY hard to draw conclusions from bad data that stand up to close scrutiny, even when you took it yourself—one of my formative experiences as a young graduate student was nearly publishing data that was complete BS, despite matching my simulations exactly. Analyses of 100 year old photographs to infer the angular distribution of light sources? Inferring their spectra?? Insisting that no other explanations are “tenable”??? Oy."
Regarding your 2nd point on the sneer, that is better placed criticism- but I refrain from judging his entire effort by the concluding tone, especially in the context of the heated debate that was ongoing. And Scott does also criticize this "snobbish skepticism", so it's not like this escaped judgement.
I’m not making any claim on the object level of that section, but Evan basically has nothing to say about it, and rather than saying: “I won’t pretend to understand this stuff but I am intuitively skeptical of optics on hundred year old photos” he puts the “look how much I’ve engaged” part there instead, which of holds zero persuasive power. It’s like a weightlifter saying “look how strong I am” instead of just posting a video of how much weight he can lift.
I also reject the claim that you can’t spend a bunch of time on something and still fail to engage with its merits.
Evan is absolutely correct not to waste his time attempting to do justice to analyzing shadows in photos to determine light source characteristics--it's very, very hard.
I skimmed Dalleur's paper briefly, enough to recognize the basic approach he took, which is more or less the correct approach with the level of evidence available (locate the scene, model in Blender or some other raytracing program, attempt to rotate the "picture view" into a 3D model view and estimate). But this is a *very* hard problem attempted with *very* poor quality data. To his credit, Dalleur gives us some uncertainty estimates! But he himself, in his Future Work section notes that even state-of-the-art AR and mixed reality systems (which are faced with similar problems) have 5-20 degree error in light source location estimation on *much* better quality data.
Note that here we have a scientific mission that took photographs as data on *purpose*, with a known single light source, no atmosphere, and well documented camera specs. And it is *still* hard.
The thing is given that we only have a limited amount of time. It is reasonable for someone to say that they have spent enough time on this. Even if they didn’t engage with literally every part and sneering at somebody defending a miracle is not that unreasonable because frankly, while arguments may seem beautiful as a matter of truth seeking a rock which says never believe in a miracle will outperform a clever philosopher with Arguments for believing in a miracle, pretty much all the time. The ability to generate clever arguments is not that much of a constraint. You can find philosophers through history, presenting arguments for lots of absurd positions and indeed, most of them have to be wrong because they disagree with each other so much. The fact of the matter is saying you intuitively think some evidence is mistaken When you are as sceptical as most of us are about the miracle does not actually convey different information from sneering at It. In fact, this sneer makes it more clear. just how unlikely we think the miracle is to be true. As a factual matter for most of us sceptics, the evidence in the portion about the miracle of the sun is just laughably weak for just how extraordinary the claim is. From the point of view of a sceptic trying to show the miracle could have been explained in this or that particular way is like explaining a magic trick, you aren’t really generating new information about whether the miracle happened because the probability of that is already so low, you are just explaining stuff to other people and helping them reach the truth so the cost benefit of such a post is incredibly unfavourable to you because you yourself don’t learn anything you weren’t already expecting to learn. You just conveying information to other people and perhaps satisfying your curiosity about exactly what naturalist cause is responsible for this miracle. Even if you think that researching, the miracle will convince them or at least teach them new things, they do not expect to face that outcome, so if you make the incentives around this kind of deep dive unfavourable, they just won’t bother, which is bad for all parties involved. The way Evan handled this has to be above the 95th percentile of how Scott wishes sceptics to behave, so it’s counter-productive for him to criticise Evan. Setting the bar as high as Scott does does means people will just give up and not bother, which is not what Scott wants.
I think Evan just ran out of steam at that point. Alexander also ran out of steam at some point and he notes it was fortunate this didn't happened before he came across some of the better examples of related phenomena. I can relate to Evans humanity here. Also, the piece that started this had a criminal presentation of the background information and doesn't seem to have engaged with the photo analysis much better than Evans. There's a good argument that if that was your basis for exploring the case you could dismiss it fairly quickly based solely on the writer being shallow and unreliable if not misleading.
I was impressed by Scott’s piece, but in retrospect I feel it was written in a way to seem more impressive. He doesn’t give his predecessors enough credit. He writes dismissively about Meessen in the beginning but the conclusion he eventually comes to isn’t that different al least as based on what is on Wikipedia:
Others, such as professor of physics Auguste Meessen, suggest that optical effects created by the human eye can account for the reported phenomenon. Meessen presented his analysis of apparitions and "Miracles of the Sun" at the International Symposium "Science, Religion and Conscience" in 2003.[52][53] While Meessen felt those who claim to have experienced miracles were "honestly experiencing what they report", he stated Sun miracles cannot be taken at face value and that the reported observations were optical effects caused by prolonged staring at the Sun.[7] Meessen contends that retinal after-images produced after brief periods of Sun gazing are a likely cause of the observed dancing effects. Similarly, Meessen concluded that the color changes witnessed were most likely caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells.[7] Shortly after the miracle, the Catholic lawyer named Coelho said in his article that a few days later, he saw the exact same motions and colour changes in the Sun as he did on 13 October. He says, "One doubt remained with us however. Was what we saw in the Sun an exceptional thing? Or could it be reproduced in analogous circumstances? Now it was precisely this analogy of circumstances that presented itself to us yesterday. We could see the Sun half overcast as on Saturday. And sincerely, we saw on that day the same succession of colors, the same rotary movement, etc."[54]
Meessen observes that Sun Miracles have been witnessed in many places where religiously charged pilgrims have been encouraged to stare at the Sun. He cites the apparitions at Heroldsbach, Germany (1949) as an example, where many people within a crowd of over 10,000 testified to witnessing similar observations as at Fátima.[7] Meessen also cites a British Journal of Ophthalmology article that discusses some modern examples of Sun Miracles.
Definitely agree. Having read Evan's article already before Scott's, I found his criticism of it a bit strange. Even the part he quoted and presented as lazy I think is perfectly reasonable: He was pointing out that all this wild speculation about two light sources separate from the Sun that supposedly prove that the Miracle of the Sun was the result of an objective, physical phenomenon caused by supernatural intervention was based on extremely weak evidence. There's no possible circumstance under which you can find strong enough evidence to prove that a miraculous light source emitted the exact amount of radiation needed to completely dry people's clothes but not fry them just by looking at dark spots on grainy black-and-white photos. And there's no way you can come to such hyperspecific conclusions about exactly what light sources caused the miracle just from the evidence provided. I found that part to be the weakest part of Ethan's original article - the speculation about the light sources was just so out there and goofy (not because miracles are automatically goofy, but because of how thin the evidence was), as was the analysis of dark spots on the photos. I would even be willing to call it pseudoscientific.
Reminds me of the saying Ex-Muslims say what (they think) Islamic Apologists think: To enter Islam you need only say the Shahada. To leave Islam, you need a PhD in Islamic and Quranic studies.
I'm all for rigor in exploring every claim, but I'm also for equal standards of reasonable expectations for one to accept/reject a claim.
All this time expended and none of you all spent like 60 seconds praying to God about it
I have to say I agree with Scott, and cringed when I read the section of Evan's article where he gets to the "trig on pants stains" area. Frankly, it comes off like he has no understanding of the subject matter but wants to disagree, so he pulls out two rhetorical tools. First is this weird "woe is me look how much I've written, you have to admit I've engaged"--well, the fact that this moaning is standing in for an area of the argument you don't understand means you certainly haven't engaged with this part! Maybe you've engaged with other parts, but there are no participation trophies in truth-seeking. And second is the sneer--what the fuck are we doing here, it's just silly, ridiculous, and again I've spent all of my Sunday on it. Neither of these are good tools of rational analysis, I actually think Scott could've probably been harsher.
Hard disagree with this. The point of Evan's "look how hard I've worked" is to prevent accusations that he isn't engaging in good faith, which were being hurled by Ethan, Bentham, and many others. By that point he had already spent multiples more time and energy than anyone else on Substack investigating Ethan's claims. Would it not be fair to say he earned some credibility even if he turned back at the end? Sure, by the standards of Scott's piece, in retrospect Evan's efforts seem less robust- but at this point the debate was mostly being conducted among 20-year-olds in-between their college classrooms. Seems unfair to levy too much criticism here.
Also, giving up at the trigonometry had nothing to do with not understanding the subject matter. Rather, he's incredulous at the lengths that are being stretched to try to find evidence for the claims presented.
Dylan Black, who does understand the subject matter, was in my comment section recently regarding the optics specifically:
>> "There is an unbelievable level of self-confidence in the analysis of physical phenomena. It is horribly difficult to conclude things from still images, let alone that the drying pattern of clothes at the miracle “suggests that this ‘heat ray’ had an unusually IR-rich, blue/UV-poor spectrum.”
>> My PhD was largely optics, so I become even more skeptical when people stray into my field. It is VERY hard to draw conclusions from bad data that stand up to close scrutiny, even when you took it yourself—one of my formative experiences as a young graduate student was nearly publishing data that was complete BS, despite matching my simulations exactly. Analyses of 100 year old photographs to infer the angular distribution of light sources? Inferring their spectra?? Insisting that no other explanations are “tenable”??? Oy."
Regarding your 2nd point on the sneer, that is better placed criticism- but I refrain from judging his entire effort by the concluding tone, especially in the context of the heated debate that was ongoing. And Scott does also criticize this "snobbish skepticism", so it's not like this escaped judgement.
I’m not making any claim on the object level of that section, but Evan basically has nothing to say about it, and rather than saying: “I won’t pretend to understand this stuff but I am intuitively skeptical of optics on hundred year old photos” he puts the “look how much I’ve engaged” part there instead, which of holds zero persuasive power. It’s like a weightlifter saying “look how strong I am” instead of just posting a video of how much weight he can lift.
I also reject the claim that you can’t spend a bunch of time on something and still fail to engage with its merits.
Evan is absolutely correct not to waste his time attempting to do justice to analyzing shadows in photos to determine light source characteristics--it's very, very hard.
I skimmed Dalleur's paper briefly, enough to recognize the basic approach he took, which is more or less the correct approach with the level of evidence available (locate the scene, model in Blender or some other raytracing program, attempt to rotate the "picture view" into a 3D model view and estimate). But this is a *very* hard problem attempted with *very* poor quality data. To his credit, Dalleur gives us some uncertainty estimates! But he himself, in his Future Work section notes that even state-of-the-art AR and mixed reality systems (which are faced with similar problems) have 5-20 degree error in light source location estimation on *much* better quality data.
To get an idea of what it looks like to do this well, take a look at some photogrammetry (analysis of still images to reconstruct 3D scenes) from Apollo 11 here: https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a11/a11Photogrammetry.html
Note that here we have a scientific mission that took photographs as data on *purpose*, with a known single light source, no atmosphere, and well documented camera specs. And it is *still* hard.
The issue is that Scott himself sidesteps half of the miracle. The only difference between him and Evan is that they sidestepped different parts.
The thing is given that we only have a limited amount of time. It is reasonable for someone to say that they have spent enough time on this. Even if they didn’t engage with literally every part and sneering at somebody defending a miracle is not that unreasonable because frankly, while arguments may seem beautiful as a matter of truth seeking a rock which says never believe in a miracle will outperform a clever philosopher with Arguments for believing in a miracle, pretty much all the time. The ability to generate clever arguments is not that much of a constraint. You can find philosophers through history, presenting arguments for lots of absurd positions and indeed, most of them have to be wrong because they disagree with each other so much. The fact of the matter is saying you intuitively think some evidence is mistaken When you are as sceptical as most of us are about the miracle does not actually convey different information from sneering at It. In fact, this sneer makes it more clear. just how unlikely we think the miracle is to be true. As a factual matter for most of us sceptics, the evidence in the portion about the miracle of the sun is just laughably weak for just how extraordinary the claim is. From the point of view of a sceptic trying to show the miracle could have been explained in this or that particular way is like explaining a magic trick, you aren’t really generating new information about whether the miracle happened because the probability of that is already so low, you are just explaining stuff to other people and helping them reach the truth so the cost benefit of such a post is incredibly unfavourable to you because you yourself don’t learn anything you weren’t already expecting to learn. You just conveying information to other people and perhaps satisfying your curiosity about exactly what naturalist cause is responsible for this miracle. Even if you think that researching, the miracle will convince them or at least teach them new things, they do not expect to face that outcome, so if you make the incentives around this kind of deep dive unfavourable, they just won’t bother, which is bad for all parties involved. The way Evan handled this has to be above the 95th percentile of how Scott wishes sceptics to behave, so it’s counter-productive for him to criticise Evan. Setting the bar as high as Scott does does means people will just give up and not bother, which is not what Scott wants.
I think Evan just ran out of steam at that point. Alexander also ran out of steam at some point and he notes it was fortunate this didn't happened before he came across some of the better examples of related phenomena. I can relate to Evans humanity here. Also, the piece that started this had a criminal presentation of the background information and doesn't seem to have engaged with the photo analysis much better than Evans. There's a good argument that if that was your basis for exploring the case you could dismiss it fairly quickly based solely on the writer being shallow and unreliable if not misleading.
I was impressed by Scott’s piece, but in retrospect I feel it was written in a way to seem more impressive. He doesn’t give his predecessors enough credit. He writes dismissively about Meessen in the beginning but the conclusion he eventually comes to isn’t that different al least as based on what is on Wikipedia:
Others, such as professor of physics Auguste Meessen, suggest that optical effects created by the human eye can account for the reported phenomenon. Meessen presented his analysis of apparitions and "Miracles of the Sun" at the International Symposium "Science, Religion and Conscience" in 2003.[52][53] While Meessen felt those who claim to have experienced miracles were "honestly experiencing what they report", he stated Sun miracles cannot be taken at face value and that the reported observations were optical effects caused by prolonged staring at the Sun.[7] Meessen contends that retinal after-images produced after brief periods of Sun gazing are a likely cause of the observed dancing effects. Similarly, Meessen concluded that the color changes witnessed were most likely caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells.[7] Shortly after the miracle, the Catholic lawyer named Coelho said in his article that a few days later, he saw the exact same motions and colour changes in the Sun as he did on 13 October. He says, "One doubt remained with us however. Was what we saw in the Sun an exceptional thing? Or could it be reproduced in analogous circumstances? Now it was precisely this analogy of circumstances that presented itself to us yesterday. We could see the Sun half overcast as on Saturday. And sincerely, we saw on that day the same succession of colors, the same rotary movement, etc."[54]
Meessen observes that Sun Miracles have been witnessed in many places where religiously charged pilgrims have been encouraged to stare at the Sun. He cites the apparitions at Heroldsbach, Germany (1949) as an example, where many people within a crowd of over 10,000 testified to witnessing similar observations as at Fátima.[7] Meessen also cites a British Journal of Ophthalmology article that discusses some modern examples of Sun Miracles.
Definitely agree. Having read Evan's article already before Scott's, I found his criticism of it a bit strange. Even the part he quoted and presented as lazy I think is perfectly reasonable: He was pointing out that all this wild speculation about two light sources separate from the Sun that supposedly prove that the Miracle of the Sun was the result of an objective, physical phenomenon caused by supernatural intervention was based on extremely weak evidence. There's no possible circumstance under which you can find strong enough evidence to prove that a miraculous light source emitted the exact amount of radiation needed to completely dry people's clothes but not fry them just by looking at dark spots on grainy black-and-white photos. And there's no way you can come to such hyperspecific conclusions about exactly what light sources caused the miracle just from the evidence provided. I found that part to be the weakest part of Ethan's original article - the speculation about the light sources was just so out there and goofy (not because miracles are automatically goofy, but because of how thin the evidence was), as was the analysis of dark spots on the photos. I would even be willing to call it pseudoscientific.