I'd like to chime in as one of the folks who was ardent in the defense of the possibility of the birdman and who turned out to be wrong.<p>It's a shame that this ended up being faked instead of real, but I would like to point out to the community something before we all start talking about how easy people are to dupe, how easy it is for people to ignore reality for something they believe, and how some folks were <i>right all along</i>.<p>The way the (original, I think?) thread went down was a mixture of claims that it was obviously fake, backed by some comments and notations basically of the variety of "It looks shooped, I can tell from some of the pixels."<p>There was absurd amounts of unsubstantiated criticism, and very little criticism based on anything other than the video.<p>There was not "this is fake, but technically feasible for these reasons."<p>There was not "this is fake, and technically infeasible for these reasons."<p>There was not "this is fake, and obviously infeasible for these reasons."<p>The handful of attempts that people made to explain why it was physically impossible (beyond the mere statement of "lol y u no physics education") oftentimes ignored the claimed evidence and circumstances of the act (e.g., asserted manual power instead of assisted flight) or tried to base it on some weird analogy using the natural world (e.g., a bird's weight scales thus-and-such a way) or just plain appealed to authority (e.g., in the whole history of human flight we've never gotten this to work).<p>There was an equally poor showing on the part of people arguing it was possible (I among them). Very few real numbers were pulled out, and more thorough analysis would've been appreciated.<p>But, at the end of it, here's the core narrative we need to question:<p>1. Person does something seemingly impossible.<p>2. HN says it isn't possible, can't be possible, <i>appealing solely at first to the video and the shooping</i>.<p>3. HN minority tries to reason that it might be possible, is met with bad analogy and analysis.<p>4. Person turns out to be fake, lots of sorrow and/or "We were right!"<p>Folks, we need to do a better job of 2 & 3. We can't just jump on things as impossible without doing the math, without doing the numbers. We need to be honest in our critiques, and distinguish between "impossible in general" and "impossible for this implementation".<p>We don't judge our code by some of the pixels--why do you want to judge engineering writ large this way?