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The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) h

The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely. Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. You don't need to be an Oxford research associate writing about overcoming bias to realise the most common explanation for the phenomena is clearly (Cc) other such reports are already circulating in the public consciousness, and people are very impressed by them. Neither spontaneity nor coordination is required to explain a sharp rise in sightings of saucer-shaped starships and little grey aliens after ships which flew like saucers and little grey aliens hogged the media for a decade, just like there isn't any conspiracy required to explain why people were a lot more likely to interact with spirits than be probed by 'greys' a few centuries back. (The great thing about "popular consciousness" explanations is they intersect with honest mistakes and delusions as well as big fat lies) If Nick's desire for stuff that's in the movies to be real is so obvious he neglects the existence of the actual movies in his reasoning, he should probably consider renaming his blog

ydbrurgsu 6y ago
I fully agree. Side note: this post is by Robin Hanson, not Nick Bostrom.
nathias 6y ago
Yes, there is also the very contextual nature of psychosis that always expresses a very local cultural content.
graderjs 6y ago
It's possible that your bias against believing this means your interpretation is a lot of bizarre takes dressed up as the only possible conclusions. What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank? More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that? That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high. I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx
- ArekDymalski 6y ago
  > I wonder why this topic triggers it? I think that this is one of those topics that is pefectly ready for inconclusive bike-shedding: easy to build an opinion and argue about it "safely" - without any risk of losing someone's face when proven wrong due to insufficient data. It's some kind of sport where after the match both sides gp home feeling superior to the other because there's no objective way to establish the winner.
  - graderjs 6y ago
    Totally with you on that. The point you make is the key where there's no risk for being wrong. You have no skin in the game you can be a armchair, in the stands commentator, who doesn't actually have to get any results, and you're not wearing it for any choices or for the accuracy of what you're saying. Combine that with ego and the desire to lord it over other people by pretending they're idiots and I think you have a large part of the explanation for how people interact about this. This dynamic is not confined to this topic obviously but I think it's kind of a tragedy because it would be interesting and great to see some real logical scientific investigation of this stuff you know from all different actors, just like it would to see real investigation of parapsychological phenomenon, but there's too much craziness, stigma and exactly what you said involved for that to happen easily I think. That to me is a tragedy and major missed opportunity for us humans to learn something to push forward our knowledge at the frontier of what we understand, in the place where science should really excel, and should really be able to be like a shield to go beyond our limitations of ego, group think and emotion... it's the exact place where in these topics it's the weakest. So the very things that we could understand more about that are so interesting it's like we've crippled ourselves from doing that because of our mass psychology and however these topics have been manipulated by whoever.
- ericmay 6y ago
  What’s the middle of “something definitely exists” and “nothing exists”? Seems like it would err on the side of “maybe something exists” which doesn’t quite feel like a middle ground. Replace UFOs with Sasquatch. “Sasquatch exists and here is the picture and Sasquatch tracks to prove it!” “You made that up. It’s a guy in a costume. Why can’t we find any single dead Sasquatch? Why are all the pictures and videos crappy?” “Why can’t you meet me in the middle and at least admit it’s possible that Sasquatch exists??” Personally I’m open-minded and find the topic of aliens quite interesting. But there isn’t a single ounce of convincing evidence and it would require a gigantic coverup with tons of complicit actors. There needs to be extraordinary evidence before anyone needs to agree to meet anywhere in the middle. Until then we should default toward it not existing. In other words, your null hypothesis is that it doesn’t exist. So far the evidence has failed to cause someone to reject that hypothesis.
tgflynn 6y ago
> Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. Fairies, ghosts and angels don't show up on radar or FLIR and the Inspector General of the DoD has never launched an investigation into how they have been handled by that department.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Are we talking about the three US military videos that surfaced in recent years? I've seen all of them clearly and thoroughly explained away. In one case, you could literally use the numbers on the recording and some middle-school level geometry skills to calculate that the tracked object is a bird. And it's quite easy to guess why these videos were released. They're technology demonstrators. The general public can think UFOs if they want, but what Chinese and Russian militaries saw was, "holy shit, US can auto-track a far-away bird from a jet fighter".
  - tgflynn 6y ago
    Mick West's explanation of the FLIR1 video (the one from the Nimitz incident), that it was an ordinary aircraft, makes zero sense because given the quantity and quality of situational awareness data available to the pilots who captured the video it would require an extraordinary degree of incompetence to make such a mistake. I'm no expert on naval technology but given my limited understanding of carrier strike group operations this was my intuitive belief from the first time I heard this theory. Since then a number of knowledgeable people have confirmed that this explanation makes practically no sense.
    - simonh 6y ago
      It doesn't take incompetence to make a mistake, any of us can make mistakes even in things we're highly competent in. Optical artefacts are particularly difficult to account for. Take Go Fast for example, they're highly competent experienced aviators, but they still very clearly completely misidentified what, in hindsight, is obviously a bird. Clearly if trained operators can make a mistake like that, other mistakes are possible, so you can't just discount the possibility as absurd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 I can easily see someone thinking an image is of a near object when it's actually a far object, and we know for a fact that highly trained operators can make terrible mistakes using complex tracking equipment.
015a 6y ago
I agree; especially when you combine a possibility like cognition-altering gas exposure (CO, etc), the brain can do some weird shit; connecting disparate strands of thought between movies you've seen, things you've heard, etc. When a fighter pilot says "both myself and my copilot saw it"... you're breathing the same air, right? Ate the same meal four hours ago? Touching the same control surfaces? There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny. I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel. So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.
- PopsiclePete 6y ago
  Go back in time a thousand years and tell people that one day man will fly faster than a bird and land on the moon. FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light. Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us. Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?
amalcon 6y ago
>But to explain most of these hardest cases mainly in terms of practical jokes seems just a bridge too far. Really, thousands of disconnected people all around the world playing the same big scary jokes for decades, and then almost never breaking down and laughing and crowing about their jokes even decades later? This is the justification for that. However, they don't "almost never break down and laugh and crow about their jokes". They do this all the time. It's just that when they do this, it moves from the category of "hardest-to-explain UFO cases" to the category of "known hoaxes". It's an obvious selection effect, not something that requires deeper explanation.
whimsicalism 6y ago
This is just another thing to add to my book of reasons the "neorationalist" community is just sophistry for the 21st century, in terms of both the rhetorical turns that it takes as well as sociologically what segment of society it appeals to.

ydbrurgsu 6y ago

I fully agree. Side note: this post is by Robin Hanson, not Nick Bostrom.

nathias 6y ago

Yes, there is also the very contextual nature of psychosis that always expresses a very local cultural content.

graderjs 6y ago

It's possible that your bias against believing this means your interpretation is a lot of bizarre takes dressed up as the only possible conclusions. What I don't get is the arrogance of every side about this subject. We have no answers. We have no understanding. The government seems to be about to admit as much. But the true believers are sure, and the true debunkers, yourself included, are sure. To me, you're both just tin foil hat flunkies clinging to your own special precious version of the coming apocalypse. Your own special cult. Why can't people be more: (Ca) open to nuance and ambiguity and comfortable with their not being a resolution right now, and (Cb) genuinely curious and accepting of other people's perspectives rather than so "sweaty fear sprung" to be full of conviction that everyone who doesn't swallow their brand of belief on the matter is clearly a crank? More specifically, in your case, you have an actual mirror case of crank-iness: you have a conspiracy for the creation of all the evidence, rather than a conspiracy for the suppression of it. I mean, don't you see that parallel? And aren't you a little suspicious of that? That's what I mean. I don't blame you specifically. Something about this topic seems to short-circuit everyone to leap logic and arrive directly at certainty. It's a big human blindspot. I wonder why this topic triggers it? Maybe because we don't have any answers, but the stakes, perhaps, are so high. I'm sorry but your casual debunking, dressed up as reasonableness, is no better than the crankiest of crank theories. Let's all do better, so... meet you somewhere in the middle. :) ;P xx

ArekDymalski 6y ago
> I wonder why this topic triggers it? I think that this is one of those topics that is pefectly ready for inconclusive bike-shedding: easy to build an opinion and argue about it "safely" - without any risk of losing someone's face when proven wrong due to insufficient data. It's some kind of sport where after the match both sides gp home feeling superior to the other because there's no objective way to establish the winner.
- graderjs 6y ago
  Totally with you on that. The point you make is the key where there's no risk for being wrong. You have no skin in the game you can be a armchair, in the stands commentator, who doesn't actually have to get any results, and you're not wearing it for any choices or for the accuracy of what you're saying. Combine that with ego and the desire to lord it over other people by pretending they're idiots and I think you have a large part of the explanation for how people interact about this. This dynamic is not confined to this topic obviously but I think it's kind of a tragedy because it would be interesting and great to see some real logical scientific investigation of this stuff you know from all different actors, just like it would to see real investigation of parapsychological phenomenon, but there's too much craziness, stigma and exactly what you said involved for that to happen easily I think. That to me is a tragedy and major missed opportunity for us humans to learn something to push forward our knowledge at the frontier of what we understand, in the place where science should really excel, and should really be able to be like a shield to go beyond our limitations of ego, group think and emotion... it's the exact place where in these topics it's the weakest. So the very things that we could understand more about that are so interesting it's like we've crippled ourselves from doing that because of our mass psychology and however these topics have been manipulated by whoever.
ericmay 6y ago
What’s the middle of “something definitely exists” and “nothing exists”? Seems like it would err on the side of “maybe something exists” which doesn’t quite feel like a middle ground. Replace UFOs with Sasquatch. “Sasquatch exists and here is the picture and Sasquatch tracks to prove it!” “You made that up. It’s a guy in a costume. Why can’t we find any single dead Sasquatch? Why are all the pictures and videos crappy?” “Why can’t you meet me in the middle and at least admit it’s possible that Sasquatch exists??” Personally I’m open-minded and find the topic of aliens quite interesting. But there isn’t a single ounce of convincing evidence and it would require a gigantic coverup with tons of complicit actors. There needs to be extraordinary evidence before anyone needs to agree to meet anywhere in the middle. Until then we should default toward it not existing. In other words, your null hypothesis is that it doesn’t exist. So far the evidence has failed to cause someone to reject that hypothesis.

tgflynn 6y ago

> Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. Fairies, ghosts and angels don't show up on radar or FLIR and the Inspector General of the DoD has never launched an investigation into how they have been handled by that department.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Are we talking about the three US military videos that surfaced in recent years? I've seen all of them clearly and thoroughly explained away. In one case, you could literally use the numbers on the recording and some middle-school level geometry skills to calculate that the tracked object is a bird. And it's quite easy to guess why these videos were released. They're technology demonstrators. The general public can think UFOs if they want, but what Chinese and Russian militaries saw was, "holy shit, US can auto-track a far-away bird from a jet fighter".
- tgflynn 6y ago
  Mick West's explanation of the FLIR1 video (the one from the Nimitz incident), that it was an ordinary aircraft, makes zero sense because given the quantity and quality of situational awareness data available to the pilots who captured the video it would require an extraordinary degree of incompetence to make such a mistake. I'm no expert on naval technology but given my limited understanding of carrier strike group operations this was my intuitive belief from the first time I heard this theory. Since then a number of knowledgeable people have confirmed that this explanation makes practically no sense.
  - simonh 6y ago
    It doesn't take incompetence to make a mistake, any of us can make mistakes even in things we're highly competent in. Optical artefacts are particularly difficult to account for. Take Go Fast for example, they're highly competent experienced aviators, but they still very clearly completely misidentified what, in hindsight, is obviously a bird. Clearly if trained operators can make a mistake like that, other mistakes are possible, so you can't just discount the possibility as absurd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8 I can easily see someone thinking an image is of a near object when it's actually a far object, and we know for a fact that highly trained operators can make terrible mistakes using complex tracking equipment.

015a 6y ago

I agree; especially when you combine a possibility like cognition-altering gas exposure (CO, etc), the brain can do some weird shit; connecting disparate strands of thought between movies you've seen, things you've heard, etc. When a fighter pilot says "both myself and my copilot saw it"... you're breathing the same air, right? Ate the same meal four hours ago? Touching the same control surfaces? There are certainly some reports that stand up beyond this level of scrutiny. I don't understand the assertion that "aliens are more likely than (a laundry list of other supernatural things)". The most significant point against modern day alien contact isn't really that "aliens don't exist"; that seems foolish to think. Its that space is insanely vast, and a civilization would need faster-than-light travel to travel across it in any decent amount of time; faster than light travel is roughly on the same level of "physically possible by our understanding of physics" as Time Travel or Dimensional Travel. So, its a stretch to think its aliens, but you might as well also believe it could be any of those other things. In fact, I could envision a far-out argument for time travel being more likely; if they're both pretty incomprehensible from a physics standpoint, maybe we flipped their improbability. Maybe time travel is actually more possible than FTL travel. And here's one absolute certainty; across the four dimensions, the dimensionally nearest form of advanced, sentient life is You, ten seconds from now.

PopsiclePete 6y ago
Go back in time a thousand years and tell people that one day man will fly faster than a bird and land on the moon. FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light. Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us. Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?

amalcon 6y ago

>But to explain most of these hardest cases mainly in terms of practical jokes seems just a bridge too far. Really, thousands of disconnected people all around the world playing the same big scary jokes for decades, and then almost never breaking down and laughing and crowing about their jokes even decades later? This is the justification for that. However, they don't "almost never break down and laugh and crow about their jokes". They do this all the time. It's just that when they do this, it moves from the category of "hardest-to-explain UFO cases" to the category of "known hoaxes". It's an obvious selection effect, not something that requires deeper explanation.

whimsicalism 6y ago

This is just another thing to add to my book of reasons the "neorationalist" community is just sophistry for the 21st century, in terms of both the rhetorical turns that it takes as well as sociologically what segment of society it appeals to.