Thread by @jeffjarvis

The reborn UFO mania is driving me insane.
It is a symptom of human hubris that we think we must be able to explain everything we see, and if we cannot, then the source must be sinister or other-worldly.
Welcome back to the pre-Enlightenment. 1/nytimes.com/2021/06/25/us/…

As I wrote here, with help by @dweinberger & Alex Rosenberg, we face a crisis of cognition, of a failure of our our powers of explanation regarding neuroscience & machine learning/AI: that which we cannot predict or understand must be of malign origin. 2/
medium.com/whither-news/a…

I'd've hoped journalism might be a torch-bearer for enlightenment, evidence, & exploration. But, no. UFOs are circulation-bait. Especially Fox "News" but also all mass media are falling prone to the supermarket-tabloid sensationalism of the UFO story. video.foxnews.com/v/6261064511001 3/

The hubris of humanity is that we can understand anything. The hubris of journalism is that it can explain anything. That is the seduction of the story in its completeness. If Fox is (and always has been) the Weekly World News, the rest of news is becoming the X-Files. 4/

Humanity--especially its journalists--are loathe to say "I don't know." They prefer "it could be, couldn't it?" Can't journalists see such talk of UFOs in their news is of the exact same root as conspiracy: It could be that blip is an alien, or Hillary Clinton getting pizza? 5/

The key skill of the journalist should be to say what we do *not* know. We do not know what brought the apartment building down. We do not know what that blip is. But that skill is beyond us and our egos. buzzmachine.com/2013/04/22/and…

The curse of journalism is the story, for it demands in its form an alpha and an omega, neatly bounding an arc of narrative. When we don't know we fill in blanks with predictions, presumptions, maybes, could be's. 7/

We don't know what those blips on screens are. End of story. But then there is no story. So the journalists and the braying jackasses on Fox News fill in the story with their imaginings. That ain't journalism. Or sadly, it is, and we need something new that is not journalism. 8/

Journalists should not be telling stories. They should be saying, Here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. And then they should go home and leave the story-telling to novelists, like Twain. 9/

Now I'm going to return to reading Twain's No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, a most mysterious book in which he tries to explain all this. He never finished the book & didn't send it to the printer. He knew his limits and the limits of stories. 10/

Speaking of UFO clickbait...