3 ms·

Extraordinary claims require corresponding evidence - simple as that. There wasn't anything that isn't simpler to explain through some combination of grift and

Extraordinary claims require corresponding evidence - simple as that. There wasn't anything that isn't simpler to explain through some combination of grift and delusion. Edit: I am specifically talking about aliens, insinuation of aliens, hinting at aliens, waving one's hands vaguely at something that sounds like it might be aliens, and generally treating aliens as equally or nearly as probable as mundane explanations for various reports.

mach1ne 3y ago
I've always found that saying dumb. It's basically stating that this is the null hypothesis, and you have to have p = 0.001 to convince me otherwise. When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence". That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
  - mach1ne 3y ago
    Interstellar travel is possible even with the physics we know. A sub-light civilization could colonize the entirety of Milky Way in a million years or so. The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      I should say not feasible instead of not possible. And this million years number comes with some massive assumptions about societal stability, the possibility of mining resources from lifeless planets etc.
- varnaud 3y ago
  Your way of dealing with complex questions is also arbitrary. In today's economy of attention, grifters are very common and extraordinary claims like "I know for a fact that Aliens have made it to Earth and they have technologies beyond our current understanding of physics. Also there is a conspiracy to hide this fact." can rationally be ignored in the absence of irrefutable proof. At most it's entertaining to hear.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Null Hypothesis = Dull Hypothesis On our journey through life, most people develop a fairly good sense of prior probabilities and that manifests through excitement. Actual aliens? Exciting. People misinterpreting noisy information? Dull. Telephone game stories getting out of hand? Dull. People lying for clout? Dull. Prestigious people doing all of the above? Dull, dull, dull. Equal-weighting an arbitrary list of options is a terrible prior distribution that does not tap anyone's knowledge of how the world works. Weighting by excitement, however, does exactly this. To convincingly prove aliens you need to convincingly disprove the dull alternatives. It's easy to imagine extraordinary evidence that could do this -- but I don't see any extraordinary evidence here. I see a bunch of ordinary evidence and people who want to believe.
  - mach1ne 3y ago
    It’s nonsensical to claim that to prove something you have to disprove alternate explanations. In an information environment where confirmable facts are scarse, you get the clearest vision by operating on probability. And on black-swan-tier questions the ’wisdom of the crowd’ is worthless - too much noise caused by nobody willing to advocate the black swan event, and too little prior events for the crowd to be able to calibrate itself beyond this.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  Notwithstanding that p-values precisely can't tell you about the relative probabilities of different events (they measure the probability of data under a given hypothesis, rather than in favor of a specific alternative), you have it precisely backwards. In this case, we have anomalous observations, but we have a current-best-understanding of the physical universe that makes us skeptical of supernatural claims (a bucket into which I include magic star hopping aliens that only allow us glimpses of them jetting around our atmosphere). So either we have a strong prior that the data needs to overcome, or we have a sensible null position (e.g., UAPs are the result of natural phenomena or human technology - probably both) that would need to be overcome by strong evidence. It's still worth getting more specific and learning more about the bucket of things that get lumped together into "UAP", but that doesn't change the fact that I think people are completely justified in dismissing all the alien BS.
jjoonathan 3y ago
That's the core of it: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mistakes can happen without grift or delusion. A fighter pilot who spends an entire career training against fighter-sized opponents might honestly mistake a small nearby slow-moving drone for a fighter-sized distant fast-moving drone. A radar tech might see returns that fly away at unearthly speeds because that's how jamming works (create fake bait return, fly it away). But repeated, insistent refusal to engage with obvious dull alternative hypotheses? Yeah, that's delusion / grift.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  Right, that part was specifically about the inference that it "maybe possibly could be wink wink" aliens.
nprateem 3y ago
The the point is that by destimatising the subject they may actually be able to gather evidence.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  No sensible people should attach stigma to figuring out anomalous sensor reading or trying to classify unknown phenomena. Similarly, no sensible people immediately jump to AlIeNs as a plausible hypothesis, and that should continue to be the case unless and until the evidence actually starts to overcome the priors we have from our understanding of physics, sensor technology, optics, and psychology.
  - nprateem 3y ago
    Quite. And yet even in these comments there are people dismissing gathering any data as a waste of time.
swalsh 3y ago
It's infuriating. He talked to 40 people, some "very high level", which is ambigious sure but Grush himself was a Colonel equivlent when he was in the NGIA, but there is a significant amount of people inside the government who are directly telling Grusch we have this stuff. He gave the ISG all the evidence (documents etc) names, interviews etc. The ISG declared it an urgant concern (this is apparently seperate from the retaliation claims). He goes and gives a summary of this stuff to congress, and random normal people say "oh there's no evidence", but he clearly HAD IT, AND gave it to the ISG. Congress asked to see it, and have been denied. Why are they being denied if there's nothing? How can congress properly perform their function of oversight if they keep getting denied requests? What's frustrating is there's a sector of the government that seems happy to say "we haven't see any evidence, must be nothing" while at the same time the government is refusing to share the supposed evidence. I think in 2017 I would have been one of the skeptical people, but the more I watch this play out, it's cystal clear there is something and there is a group of people in our government who want it out there, and a group of people in our government who absolutely do not.
- celtoid 3y ago
  So either parts of the US government have been lying about for years about not having "alien" bodies and tech or parts of the US government are lying now about having "alien" bodies and tech. In five years, a "conspiracy theorist" will be defined as someone who refuses to believe the propaganda from on high about UFOs/UAPs.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  Evidence of what though? My problem is with the unfounded claims/implications/hype/grift that it might be aliens. There are lots of interesting nonmagical explanations for the reported phenomena, that we should absolutely pin down. These distinctions matter. The problem is that there's a whole conspiratorial ecosystem which has been thriving on the news/testimony.
  - swalsh 3y ago
    People use the word conspiracy to imply "obvious bullshit", but sometimes there are real conspiracies, and this might be one.
bnralt 3y ago
On top of this, we already know the vast majority of people making claims about UFOs (and paranormal activity in general) are cranks and grifters, and that “ufologists” are people with poor judgement that get fooled by these folks. You can book UFO tours where people will give you nightvision goggle and show you all the UFOs that are flying around you right now. Now one should be surprised that most people will simply brush off yet more claims like this unless there’s actually evidence there. There’s simply not enough time to run down every single crank rabbit hole.

mach1ne 3y ago

I've always found that saying dumb. It's basically stating that this is the null hypothesis, and you have to have p = 0.001 to convince me otherwise. When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence".

tsimionescu 3y ago
> When dealing with complex questions of which we have but datapoints, the probability of scenario A vs B moves in a linear scale, not according to arbitrary requirements of "extraordinary evidence". That may be true, but I the case of interstellar travel, we have mountains of solid evidence to prove it's not possible (essentially all of physics for the last 100 years or so), and some vague claims with 0 evidence claiming it's actually happening. To convince us that all that physics is wrong you have to bring some extraordinary evidence, not claims that you heard someone knows someone who saw something.
- mach1ne 3y ago
  Interstellar travel is possible even with the physics we know. A sub-light civilization could colonize the entirety of Milky Way in a million years or so. The question is what the probability is for an intelligent species to evolve per solar system, and the more complex questions of how long they would survive etc. We only have a single datapoint (us) which only gives us the knowledge that intelligent life can evolve, but no direction whatsoever as to its probability.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I should say not feasible instead of not possible. And this million years number comes with some massive assumptions about societal stability, the possibility of mining resources from lifeless planets etc.
varnaud 3y ago
Your way of dealing with complex questions is also arbitrary. In today's economy of attention, grifters are very common and extraordinary claims like "I know for a fact that Aliens have made it to Earth and they have technologies beyond our current understanding of physics. Also there is a conspiracy to hide this fact." can rationally be ignored in the absence of irrefutable proof. At most it's entertaining to hear.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Null Hypothesis = Dull Hypothesis On our journey through life, most people develop a fairly good sense of prior probabilities and that manifests through excitement. Actual aliens? Exciting. People misinterpreting noisy information? Dull. Telephone game stories getting out of hand? Dull. People lying for clout? Dull. Prestigious people doing all of the above? Dull, dull, dull. Equal-weighting an arbitrary list of options is a terrible prior distribution that does not tap anyone's knowledge of how the world works. Weighting by excitement, however, does exactly this. To convincingly prove aliens you need to convincingly disprove the dull alternatives. It's easy to imagine extraordinary evidence that could do this -- but I don't see any extraordinary evidence here. I see a bunch of ordinary evidence and people who want to believe.
- mach1ne 3y ago
  It’s nonsensical to claim that to prove something you have to disprove alternate explanations. In an information environment where confirmable facts are scarse, you get the clearest vision by operating on probability. And on black-swan-tier questions the ’wisdom of the crowd’ is worthless - too much noise caused by nobody willing to advocate the black swan event, and too little prior events for the crowd to be able to calibrate itself beyond this.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
Notwithstanding that p-values precisely can't tell you about the relative probabilities of different events (they measure the probability of data under a given hypothesis, rather than in favor of a specific alternative), you have it precisely backwards. In this case, we have anomalous observations, but we have a current-best-understanding of the physical universe that makes us skeptical of supernatural claims (a bucket into which I include magic star hopping aliens that only allow us glimpses of them jetting around our atmosphere). So either we have a strong prior that the data needs to overcome, or we have a sensible null position (e.g., UAPs are the result of natural phenomena or human technology - probably both) that would need to be overcome by strong evidence. It's still worth getting more specific and learning more about the bucket of things that get lumped together into "UAP", but that doesn't change the fact that I think people are completely justified in dismissing all the alien BS.

jjoonathan 3y ago

That's the core of it: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mistakes can happen without grift or delusion. A fighter pilot who spends an entire career training against fighter-sized opponents might honestly mistake a small nearby slow-moving drone for a fighter-sized distant fast-moving drone. A radar tech might see returns that fly away at unearthly speeds because that's how jamming works (create fake bait return, fly it away). But repeated, insistent refusal to engage with obvious dull alternative hypotheses? Yeah, that's delusion / grift.

empyrrhicist 3y ago
Right, that part was specifically about the inference that it "maybe possibly could be wink wink" aliens.

nprateem 3y ago

The the point is that by destimatising the subject they may actually be able to gather evidence.

empyrrhicist 3y ago
No sensible people should attach stigma to figuring out anomalous sensor reading or trying to classify unknown phenomena. Similarly, no sensible people immediately jump to AlIeNs as a plausible hypothesis, and that should continue to be the case unless and until the evidence actually starts to overcome the priors we have from our understanding of physics, sensor technology, optics, and psychology.
- nprateem 3y ago
  Quite. And yet even in these comments there are people dismissing gathering any data as a waste of time.

swalsh 3y ago

It's infuriating. He talked to 40 people, some "very high level", which is ambigious sure but Grush himself was a Colonel equivlent when he was in the NGIA, but there is a significant amount of people inside the government who are directly telling Grusch we have this stuff. He gave the ISG all the evidence (documents etc) names, interviews etc. The ISG declared it an urgant concern (this is apparently seperate from the retaliation claims). He goes and gives a summary of this stuff to congress, and random normal people say "oh there's no evidence", but he clearly HAD IT, AND gave it to the ISG. Congress asked to see it, and have been denied. Why are they being denied if there's nothing? How can congress properly perform their function of oversight if they keep getting denied requests? What's frustrating is there's a sector of the government that seems happy to say "we haven't see any evidence, must be nothing" while at the same time the government is refusing to share the supposed evidence. I think in 2017 I would have been one of the skeptical people, but the more I watch this play out, it's cystal clear there is something and there is a group of people in our government who want it out there, and a group of people in our government who absolutely do not.

celtoid 3y ago
So either parts of the US government have been lying about for years about not having "alien" bodies and tech or parts of the US government are lying now about having "alien" bodies and tech. In five years, a "conspiracy theorist" will be defined as someone who refuses to believe the propaganda from on high about UFOs/UAPs.
empyrrhicist 3y ago
Evidence of what though? My problem is with the unfounded claims/implications/hype/grift that it might be aliens. There are lots of interesting nonmagical explanations for the reported phenomena, that we should absolutely pin down. These distinctions matter. The problem is that there's a whole conspiratorial ecosystem which has been thriving on the news/testimony.
- swalsh 3y ago
  People use the word conspiracy to imply "obvious bullshit", but sometimes there are real conspiracies, and this might be one.

bnralt 3y ago

On top of this, we already know the vast majority of people making claims about UFOs (and paranormal activity in general) are cranks and grifters, and that “ufologists” are people with poor judgement that get fooled by these folks. You can book UFO tours where people will give you nightvision goggle and show you all the UFOs that are flying around you right now. Now one should be surprised that most people will simply brush off yet more claims like this unless there’s actually evidence there. There’s simply not enough time to run down every single crank rabbit hole.