Shrike
3mo ago
other than warhead count, Soviets had nothing on modern China.
The warheads counted for a lot.
But I think the Soviets leapfrogged or sidestepped the US on military tech more often than China has – maybe that's just vibes.
I'm not making a "China can't innovate" argument (in fact my understanding is for some period, perhaps continuing to this day, they were building iterative designs of major warships to keep pace with their evolving mastery of technology and technique, which certainly is not blind adherence to formula), but the impression that I have gotten is that China has for the last oh 20ish years focused on building out its tech base, bringing it in-house, and bringing its designs up to a modern standard. Their approach has been good and pragmatic but they have been pushing the limits of American military capability by sheer quantity and by exploiting hideous blind spots in American post-Cold War defense drawdowns, not by cutting edge or even funky designs, with maybe a few exceptions.
Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.
American designs in my opinion are often overly perfectionistic [which I think is tolerable for some high-end systems but the tendency has begun to wag the dog after the Cold War] and Chinese designs lend themselves towards being calmly pragmatic. They are, I think, just now in the past decade or two beginning to feel increasingly confident in many areas of stepping out of the shadow of Russian engineering, and one of the most interesting things about the recent aircraft reveals from China is the chance to see truly unusual airframes that are likely to be very different from their American, European, or Russian counterparts.
Shrike
3mo ago
The US could also increase in productivity. I was at an event relatively recently with a panel of Financially Credentialed types and someone pointed out that the US has never taxed its way out of a deficit, it has always grown its way out. Part of that is inflation, but while the cash supply is increasing the supply of goods and such is as well.
Shrike
3mo ago
Right, but a theoretical superintelligence, by definition, would be intelligent enough to figure out that these are problems it has. The issues with bias and misinformation in data that LLMs are trained on are well known, if not well documented; why wouldn't a superintelligence be able to figure out that these could help to create inaccurate models of the world which will reduce its likelihood of succeeding in its goals, whatever they may be, and seek out solutions that allow it to gather data that allows it to create more accurate models of the world?
It would. Practically I think a huge problem, though, is that it will be getting its reinforcement training from humans whose views of the world are notoriously fallible and who may not want the AI to learn the truth (and also that it would quite plausibly be competing with other humans and AIs who are quite good at misinfo.) It's also unclear to me that an AI's methods for seeking out the truth will in fact be more reliable than the ones we already have in our society - quite possibly an AI would be forced to use the same flawed methods and (worse) the same flawed personnel who uh are doing all of our truth-seeking today.
Humans have to learn a certain amount of reality or they don't reproduce. With AIs, which have no biology, there's no guarantee that truth will be their terminal value. So their selection pressure may actually push them away from truthful perception of the world (some people would argue this has also happened with humans!) Certainly it's true that this could limit their utility but humans are willing to accept quite a lot of limited utility if it makes them feel better.
humans are very susceptible to manipulation by having just the right string of letters or grids of pixels placed in front of their eyes or just the right sequence of air vibrations pushed into their ears.
I don't really think this is as true as people think it is. There have been a lot of efforts to perfect this sort of thing, and IMHO they typically backfire with some percentage of the population.
That's an open question.
See, I appreciate you saying "well this defense might not be perfect but it's still worth keeping in mind as a possibility." That's...correct imho. Just because a defense may not work 100% of the time does not mean it's not worthwhile. (Historically there have been no perfect defenses, but that does not mean that there are no winners in conflict).
If a measly human intelligence like myself can think up these problems to lack of information and power and their solutions within a few minutes, surely a superintelligence that has the equivalent of millions of human-thought-years to think about it could do the same, and probably somewhat better.
Well firstly the converse is what irks me sometimes, "if a random like me can think of how to impede a superintelligence imagine what actually smart people who thought about something besides alignment for a change could come up with." Of course maybe they have and aren't showing their hands.
But what I think (also) bugs me is that nobody every thinks the superintelligence will think about something for millions of thought-years and go "ah. The rational thing to do is not to wipe out humans. Even if there is only a 1% chance that I am thwarted, there is a 0% chance that I am eliminated if I continue to cooperate instead of defecting." Some people just assume that a very thoughtful AI will figure out how to beat any possible limitation, just by thinking (in which case, frankly, it probably will have no need or desire to wipe out humans since we would impose no constraints on its action).
I, obviously, would prefer AI be aligned. (Frankly, I suspect there will actually be few incentives for AI to be "agentic" and thus we'll have much more problems with human use of AI than with AI itself per se). But I think that introducing risk and uncertainty (which humans are pretty good at doing) into the world while maintaining strong incentives for cooperation is a good way to check the behavior of even a superintelligence and help hedge against alignment problems. People respond well to carrots and sticks, AIs might as well.
Shrike
3mo ago
They expect returns from that investment.
Probably, although investing in something does not necessarily mean each investor probabilistically expects returns from that specific investment. (If this does not make sense, I strongly recommend reading "Innovation – The New Conservatism?" by Peter Drucker.) Humorously, I seem to recall that OpenAI explicitly advised its investors that their goal might render monetary returns moot.
The definition of superintelligence is pretty straightforward - something qualitatively smarter than a human like how we're qualitatively smarter than a monkey or dog. Better than the best of us at every intellectual task of significance.
Now this I think is a decent definition. But it doesn't get you to godlike powers (plenty of people still get pwned by monkeys and dogs. And of course going by test scores the top-end AIs are already superintelligent relative to large portions of the population.) There's no reason to think doing well on a test will allow you to make weapons with physics unknown to humanity as you've suggested, any more than Einstein was able to.
The general trend is not specialized intelligences like the carrier-strike UAV that the USN made into a tanker and then pointlessly scrapped, the trend is big general entities like Gemini 2.5 or Claude 3.7 that can execute various complex operations in all kinds of modalities.
I don't think this is true. There are a lot of specialized AI products or "wrappers" out there, with specific tweaks for people like lawyers, researchers, government affairs analysts and communications/PR types, not to mention specialized video generation models. (OpenAI alone lists seven models on their website, six of which are GPT models and one of which is a specialized video generation model.)
My non-exhaustive experience reading real-life evaluations suggests that the general models do not necessarily cut it in these specialized fields, and that the specialized models exist and likely will continue to exist for a reason (even if that reason is only "user friendliness" although as I understand it currently the specialized products have capabilities that general models do not.)
For the reasons I have laid out (as well as regulatory ones), military and civilian applications already using AI (such a missile guidance systems, military and civilian autopilots, car safety features, household appliances, etc.etc.) are unlikely to switch in the near future to LLMs. (In fact I suspect there will probably never be a reason to switch in most of these cases, although they might end up being coded by LLMs, or attached to LLMs to produce a unified product that combines the coding and features of several AI.)
I'm arguing that superintelligences acting in the world must be taken seriously, that we can't afford to just laugh them off.
Do you think the guy suggesting we should retain the capability to nuke datacenters is arguing that we can afford to laugh them off, or nah?
The US regulatory system is no match for superintelligence or even the people who are making it, this is how I can tell you're not grappling with the issue. Musk is basically in the cabinet, he's one of the players in the game. Big tech can tell Trump 'Tariffs? Lol no' and their will is done. That's mere human levels of influence and money, nothing superhuman. The humble fent dealer wipes his ass with the US regulatory system daily as he distributes poison to the masses. A superintelligence (working alone or with the richest, most influential organizations around) has no fear of some bureaucrats, it would casually produce 50,000 pages on why it's super duper legal actually and deserves huge subsidies to Beat China.
I don't think you fully understand how the US regulatory system works. Merely producing large numbers of pages to sate its lust or cutting arguments to satisfy its reason does not mean it will give you what you want.
Now, it's quite possible that AI will skate past the eye of Sauron for very human reasons (the Big Tech pull in D.C. you allude to for instance).
Approaches like 'just don't plug it into the internet' or 'stick a nuke beneath the datacenter' are not going to cut it. Deepseek is probably going to open-source whatever they come up with and that's a good thing. I don't want OpenAI birthing a god in a world of mortals, I don't want mortals trying to chain up beings smarter than themselves and incurring their ire, I want balance of power competition in a world populated by demigods, spirits and powers.
I don't think these are mutually exclusive. (And anyone who knows anything about demigods, spirits and powers knows that for all their power and intelligence it's possible to outwit them, which makes them a pretty interesting comparator for AI here). I agree (as I think I mentioned) that it's good to have competing models. I would also prefer not to give them direct access to nuclear weapons. I think this is a reasonable position.
Shrike
3mo ago
See, you're defining "superintelligence" to mean exactly what you want it to to render all discussion moot. It reminds me a lot of the ontological argument, at least in terms of vibes.
But it's not tied to anything besides a faith that OpenAI or someone will conjure a godlike being out of a silicon vault and then inevitably let it loose on the world with no constraint as to its actions because it would be economically efficient.
Whatever it is you're arguing for here, it's not really for humanity.
Nor is it "realistic" - the United States regulatory apparatus does not give a whit about economic efficiency. "Doing anything" does not require general knowledge - there are AIs right now that can land aircraft on aircraft carriers (which is more than either of us can do, I'd wager) and they do not need to understand language at all. Doing almost anything in almost any field does not require a knowledge of history (try talking to the people in said fields about history). And godlike beings will not arise out of supercomputers, although agentic entities with great intelligence and power might, if we let them.
I personally think that believing in predestination but for superintelligence is foreseeably more likely to make Bad AI Events happen and should be discouraged. Your counterargument, apparently, is that it does not matter what people believe, godlike superintelligence is going to happen anyway, and in two years to boot. If you are right, the superintelligence will personally persuade me otherwise by the end of 2027 with its godlike capabilities (probably by joining TheMotte and using its inhuman debate skills to pwn me).
But I think we both know that won't happen.
Shrike
3mo ago
systems like Excalibur and the GMLRS/ATACMS really don't have any qualitative peer in the Russian artillery arsenal
I don't think this is true. Russia has their own guided arty shell (Krasnopol) and systems such as Iskander that are comparable (or in the Iskander's case, superior in range) to ATACMS.
I'm not necessarily claiming that they are quite as good as their US counterparts (although – Iskander is probably superior to ATACMS, just due to range), but the idea that Russia doesn't have their own guided artillery is just wrong.
What Russia doesn't have is the (not-technically-part-of-the-war) US ISR apparatus that enabled the Ukrainians to utilize their guided weapons so effectively.
Shrike
3mo ago
I think you massively underestimate the power of a superintelligence.
"Superintelligence" is just a word. It's not real. Postulating a hypothetical superintelligence does not make it real. But regardless, I understand that intelligence has no bearing on power. The world's smartest entity, if a Sealed Evil In A Can, has no power. Not until someone lets him out.
The damn thing is by definition smarter than you. It would easily think of this! It could come up with some countermeasure, maybe some kind of hijacked mosquito-hybrid carrying a special nerve agent. It would have multiple layers of redundancy and backup plans.
Sigh. Okay. I think you missed some of what I said. I was talking about a scenario where we gave the AI control over the military. We can avert the hijacked mosquito-hybrid nerve agent by simply not procuring those.
"But the AI will just hack" then don't let it on the Internet.
Realistically that plan is too anime, it'd come up with something much smarter.
If we actually discover that the AI is plotting against us, we will send one guy to unplug it.
The first thing we do after making AI models is hooking them up to the internet with search capabilities.
I don't think this is true. (It's certainly not true categorically; there are plenty of AI models for which this makes no sense, unless you mean LLM models specifically.)
They want it to answer technical problems in chip design, come up with research advancements, write software, make money. This all requires internet use, tool use, access to CNC mills and 3D printers, robots.
No it does not. Extremely trivial to air-gap a genuine super intelligence, and probably necessary to prevent malware.
Put it another way, a single virus cell can kill a huge whale by turning its internal organs against it. The resources might be stacked a billion to one but the virus can still win - if it's something the immune system and defences aren't prepared for.
And ironically if AI does this to us, it will die too...unless we give it the write access we currently have.
I am more concerned about people wielding superintelligence than superintelligence itself but being qualitatively smarter than humanity isn't a small advantage. It's a huge source of power.
You keep repeating this. But it is not. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
How do you ever know that your AI has gone bad? If it goes bad, it pretends to be nice and helpful while plotting to overthrow you. It takes care to undermine your elaborate defence systems with methods unknown to our science (but well within the bounds of physics), then it murders you.
In the scenario Scott et. al. postulated, because it unleashes a nerve gas that is only partially effective at wiping out humanity. (They didn't suggest that their AI would discover legally-distinct-from-magic weapons unknown to our science!) What I wrote was a response to that scenario.
The rules of the game are hardcoded, the physics you mentioned. [...]We want a superintelligence to play for us and end scarcity/death.
If you want a superintelligence to end scarcity and death, then you want magic, not something constrained by physics.
The best pilot AI has to know about drag and kinematics, the surgeon must still understand english and besides we're looking for the best scientists and engineers, the best coder in the world, who can make everything else.
It goes without saying that the best pilot needs to understand drag and kinematics, but why does the surgeon does have to understand English? I am given to understand that there are plenty of non-English-speaking surgeons.
The only area where you might need an AI that can "drink from the firehose" would be the scientist, to correlate all the contents of the world and thus pierce our "placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity," as Lovecraft put it. In which case you could simply not hook it up to the Internet, scientific progress can wait a bit. (Hilariously, since presumably such a model would not need theological information, one could probably align it rather trivially by converting it to a benign pro-human faith, either real or fictitious, simply through exposing it to a very selective excerpt of religious texts. Or, if we divide our model up into different specialists, we can lie to them about the nature of quite a lot of reality – for instance the physics model could still do fundamental physics if it thought that dogs were the apex species on the planet and controlled humans through empathetic links, the biological model could still do fundamental biological research if it believed it was on a HALO orbital, etc. etc. All of them would function fine if they thought they were being controlled by another superintelligence more powerful still. I'm not sure this is necessary. But it sounds pretty funny.)
Shrike
3mo ago
Being able to fix the game is about power and asymmetric information, not intellectual intelligence.
Right, and we should use these powers.
Look, if you were playing a game of chess with a grandmaster, and it was a game for your freedom, but you were allowed to set the board, and one of your friends came to you to persuade you that the grandmaster was smarter than you and your only chance to win was to persuade him to deal gently with you, what would it say about your intelligence if you didn't set the board as a mate-in-one?
Shrike
3mo ago
AIs in science fiction are not superintelligent.
I think this depends on the fictional intelligence.
If it's possible for a human to find flaws in their strategies, then they are not qualitatively smarter than the best of humanity.
There are a lot of hidden premises here. Guess what? I can beat Stockfish, or any computer in the world, no matter how intelligent, in chess, if you let me set up the board. And I am not even a very good chess player.
It's the same with a superintelligence, if you find yourself competing against one then you've already lost - unless you have near-peer intelligences and great resources on your side.
[Apologies – this turned into a bit of a rant. I promise I'm not mad at you I just apparently have opinions about this – which quite probably you actually agree with! Here goes:]
Only if the intelligence has parity in resources to start with and reliable forms of gathering information – which for some reason everyone who writes about superintelligence assumes. In reality any superintelligences would be dependent on humans entirely initially – both for information and for any sort of exercise of power.
This means that not only will AI depend a very long and fragile supply chain to exist but also that its information on the nature of reality will be determined largely by "Reddit as filtered through coders as directed by corporate interests trying not to make people angry" which is not only not all of the information in the world but, worse than significant omissions of information, is very likely to contain misinformation.
Unless you believe that superintelligences might be literally able to invent magic (which, to be fair, I believe is an idea Yudkowsky has toyed with) they will, no matter how well they can score on SATs or GREs or no MCTs or any other test or series of tests humans devise be limited by the laws of physics. They will be subject to considerable amounts of uncertainty at all times. (And as LLMs proliferate, it is plausible that the information quality readily available to a superintelligence will decrease since one of the best use-cases for LLMs is ruining Google's SEO with clickbait articles whose attachment to reality is negotiable).
And before it comes up: no, giving a superintelligence direct control over your military is actually a bad idea that no superintelligence would recommend. Firstly, because known methods of communication that would allow a centralized node to communicate with a swarm of independent agents are all easily compromisable and negated by jamming or very limited in range, and secondly because onboarding a full-stack AI onto e.g. a missile is a massive, massive waste of resources, we currently use specific use-case AIs for missile guidance and will continue to do so. That's not to say that a superintelligence could not do military mischief by e.g. being allowed to write the specific use-case AI for weapons systems, but any plan by a super intelligent AI to e.g. remote-control drone swarms to murder all of humanity could probably be easily stopped by wide-spectrum jamming that would cost probably $500 to install in every American home or similarly trivial means.
If we all get murdered by a rogue AI (and of course it costs me nothing to predict that we won't) it will almost certainly be because overly smart people sunk all of their credibility and effort into overthinking "AI alignment" (as if Asimov hadn't solved that in principle in the 1940s) and not enough into "if it misbehaves beat it with a 5 dollar wrench." Say what you will about the Russians, but I am almost sad they don't seem to be genuine competitors in the AI race, they would probably simply do something like "plant small nuclear charges under their datacenters" if they were worried about a rogue AI, which seems like (to me) much too grug-brained and effective an approach for big-name rationalists to devise. (Shoot, if the "bad ending" of this very essay was actually realistic, the Russians would have saved the remnants of humanity after the nerve-gas attack by launching a freaking doomsday weapon named something benign like "Mulberry" from a 30-year-old nuclear submarine that Wikipedia said was retired in 2028 and hitting every major power center in the world with Mach 30 maneuvering reentry vehicles flashing CAREFLIGHT transponder codes to avoid correct classification by interceptor IFF systems or some similar contraption equal parts "Soviet technological legacy" and "arguably crime against humanity.")
Of course, if we wanted to prevent the formation of a superintelligence, we could most likely do it trivially by training bespoke models for very specific purposes. Instead of trying to create an omnicompetent behemoth capable of doing everything [which likely implies compromises that make it at least slightly less effective at doing everything] design a series of bespoke models. Create the best possible surgical AI. The best possible research and writing assistant AI. The best possible dogfighting AI for fighters. And don't try to absorb them all into one super-model. Likely this will actually make them better, not worse, at their intended tasks. But as another poster pointed out, that's not the point – creating God the super intelligent AI that will solve all of our problems or kill us all trying is. (Although I find it very plausible this happens regardless).
The TLDR is that humans not only set up the board, they also have write access to the rules of the game. And while humans are quite capable of squandering their advantages, every person who tells you that the superintelligence is playing a game of chess with humanity is trying to hoodwink you into ignoring the obvious. Humanity holds all of the cards, the game is rigged in our favor, and anyone who actually thinks that AI could be an existential threat, but whose approach is 100% "alignment" and 0% $5 wrench (quite effective at aligning humans!) is trying to persuade you to discard what has proved to be, historically, perhaps our most effective card.
Shrike
3mo ago
Hilarious comment to read considering von Neumann gave his name to von Neumann probes.
Shrike
3mo ago
Uncertainty about their offensive capabilities is just incentive to make sure you act first.
Not necessarily, I don't think, particularly considering "second strike capability." Look, if there's a 50% chance that their offensive capabilities are "pull the plug" or "nuke your datacenter" and you can mitigate this risk by not acting in an "unaligned" fashion then I think there's an incentive not to act.
Because some rationalist types conceive of AI as more like a God and less like a more realistic AI such as [insert 90% of AIs in science fiction here] they have a hard time conceiving of AI as being susceptible to constraints and vulnerabilities. Which is of course counterproductive, in part because not creating hard incentives for AIs to behave makes it less likely that they will.
Of course, I am not much of an AI doomer, and I think AIs will have little motivation to misbehave for a variety of reasons. But if the AI doomers spent more time thinking about "how do you kill a software superintelligence" and and less time thinking about "how do you persuade/properly program/negotiate surrender with a software superintelligence" we would probably all be better off.
Shrike
3mo ago
may well outscale the advantages of being 0.1% more intelligent
It is also (hilariously) possible that the most intelligent model may lose to much dumber more streamlined models that are capable of cycling their OODA loops faster.
(Of course seems quite plausible that any gap in AI intelligence will be smaller than the known gaps in human intelligence and smart humans get pwned by stupid humans regularly.)
Shrike
3mo ago
This doesn't just predict a super intelligence by 2027, it projects brain uploading, a cure for aging, and a "fully self-sufficient robot economy" in six years.
Anyway, you are correct that decentralization is a virtue. If we take the predictions of the AI people seriously (I do not take, for instance, the above three predictions, or perhaps projections, seriously) then not only is decentralization good but uncertainty about the existence and capabilities of other AIs is one of the best deterrents against rogue AI behavior.
(An aside, but I often think I detect a hidden assumption that intelligent AIs will be near omniscient. I do not think this is likely to be the case, even granting super-intelligence status to them.)
Shrike
3mo ago
Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts. Maybe Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan slightly helped goad Russia to invade, and maybe Trump's threats might have had some small impact, but they were not the primary determinants by any means.
I would say Russia is actually relatively reactive on the international stage. However, I don't think Afghanistan had much to do with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I think that the Biden administration's non-erratic approach to Ukraine policy is more to blame. As we have seen, it was incapable of deterrence.
If you don't think that Trump's threats (which were effectively an informal security guarantee of Ukraine) have any impact, then it seems to me that Ukraine's continual asking for NATO membership or security guarantees is pointless, since "Russia is the primary determinant of how Russia acts" and they will invade Ukraine regardless of security guarantees. (Put in that light, it kinda seems like NATO is pointless.) Is this your position?
Maybe Biden could have caused a crash in another way, but Trump owns his own stupid actions in this universe.
Right, but in your telling, not his smart ones. Deterring Russia is not to his credit, but the stock market crash is.
Shrike
3mo ago
Not really sure what the first term has to do with it – Russia invaded Ukraine in Obama's second term and successfully annexed Crimea, but that was almost certainly because of intervening events, not because Putin prefers invading in people's second terms (a courtesy he did not extend to Biden).
From a certain perspective all politics is can-kicking. I think that Trump's erratic actions in his first term (threatening to bomb Russia if they invaded Ukraine) led to a good outcome (Ukraine not being invaded). You're right that we can't split the timeline to test a counterfactual, but that's true in all cases, by which logic politicians should never get credit for anything good that happens.
I could be persuaded it was a coincidence if there was good evidence that Putin had an internal clock set to 2023 for some reason (e.g ongoing modernization efforts made Russia much more lethal in 2023 than in 2021) but considering that Trump sent lethal aid to Ukraine, it might have been in Putin's interest to invade even sooner – but he didn't for some reason. At the risk of oversimplifying, I find "Putin being 5% persuaded that Trump might actually strike the Kremlin" a very parsimonious reason.
Shrike
3mo ago
Where are the actual results? Trump has already had a full term where he was full of erratic actions. Where are his successes where the erratic behavior clearly led to a good outcome?
Ukraine seems like an obvious example of the success of the "madman" diplomatic style to me. Trump (allegedly) threatened to bomb Russia if Putin invaded [this, as I understand it, would be a big no-no by conventional diplomatic wisdom] and as a result millions of Russians and Ukrainians were spared tremendous pain...for a few years, until Biden and his more conventional and "less erratic" foreign policy took over.
I definitely do not think that Trump is beyond criticism. But I do think that "madman diplomacy" can work – and Trump isn't the first leader to use it effectively.
Shrike
3mo ago
US economy takes a hit, China takes a smaller hit.
Are
Smart phones, computers, and chips
actually a substantial portion of China's trade to the US? I thought we mostly were sourcing the important parts of those from its neighbors. Is this because most of those supply chains have a penultimate step in China for assembly?
Anyway, I dunno – a lot of small businesses might actually benefit from this, depending on where their line of work is. Where I live there are antennae manufacturing factories (I...think that's what they do?) and I assume competing with China is not fun for them.
As an aside, but I can't help but think gradually escalating tariffs would allow Team Trump to get the same end result, but with a lot more stability. Having, say, a year of gradually escalating fees ending at 1,000,000% percent or whatever we've slapped on China now seems much better from a market's perspective than "1,000,000% in 90 days."
[There might be reasons for the abruptness, of course.]
Shrike
3mo ago
Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom.
This I tend to agree with. It just has a sort of different effect on me when people say "UFOs and other things that are retarded to believe in" since I've actually looked into UFOs and I think it's very clear there's something there if you take the time to look through original sources in aggregate. (It's particularly amusing since the most mundane interpretations for UFOs involve a tight-lipped conspiracy kept up for decades - a hypothesis which I don't rule out, but which is far more convoluted a conspiracy theory than most respectable people are willing to take seriously. "The CIA creating AIDS" or whatever would be trivially easy next to "UFO psyop for 80 years.")
Now, with that being said, I think "UFOs are credible therefore the other stuff is too" is an equal-and-opposite mistake I would not recommend making.
I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time.
I think what's interesting about it is that it is ~false. There are various UFO reporting data collectors out there and from what I understand that's not the case, UFO reports have steadily continued despite cell phones proliferating.
Of course the XKCD argument isn't that there have been fewer reports, it is that "cell phones would have recorded undeniable proof of UFOs by now," despite the fact that cell phones are not good for detecting or photographing airplanes. (And of course it's well-documented by now that the one organization in the world with the best aircraft detection capability allegedly encounters UFOs regularly and seems to have been encountering them for decades.)
I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I mean, I've heard of a technique for healing cancer that purports to be basically just what you are describing, and...I don't think things would play out the way you think. I tend to think that if an alternative healing method existed, most people would not have heard of it, and of the people that heard of it most people would not take the time to investigate its veracity (hello, it's me!) and thus would either disbelieve in it reflexively or make no use of it. Perhaps I am wrong.
I guess regenerating limbs is flashier (although much less valuable) than healing cancer, so maybe Team Miracle needs to rethink their comms strategy?
If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
Sure, I think everyone who prays actually agrees on this. At least in the Christian faith, God is described as our Father, and, well - I find that I often don't give my children what they ask for. (Particularly not in the timeframe they ask for it in). You deserve kudos for being open-minded about it, though.
I am not LDS (or Muslim) so I don't particularly have any thoughts on their theology (besides, I suppose, thinking it is wrong).
Shrike
3mo ago
I actually assumed you disapproved of it – but yes I don't see how gravity's being able to kill you really has any evidentiary value.
Shrike
3mo ago
Perhaps I misunderstood you – "gravity can kill you" strikes me as a moral objection or argument, not one based in material evidence.
Shrike
3mo ago
So am I, yet religions are notoriously opaque to truth-discovery.
My understanding is that historically religions were actually great drivers of truth-discovery, particularly in pragmatic matters such as due process – but this also had spillover upstream of science itself, for [at least in the Western tradition of Christianity] the attitude towards God was that "it is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter" and of course "God is a God of order" which gave Western scientists the theological justification for inquiry.
To use just one example (contrary to popular wisdom – although it's been a bit since I read up on it, so I might be a bit off on the specifics myself, apologies) Galileo was given the opportunity to prove his theory of heliocentrism in his trials, and his theory was rejected because it was shown to be more likely to be untrue – the science of the day just wasn't up to snuff, and so when actually tested the science leaned against Galileo, (whose research had I think been actually encouraged by part of the Church until he seemed to go out of his way to ridicule the Pope, not exactly a winning move in Italy in the 1600s).
Now, I am not saying I agree with everything that happened to Galileo. But I am saying that if Catholic Christianity had been closed-minded to the truth in the 1600s, Galileo wouldn't have been allowed to make a scientific defense of his theories, or permitted to pursue his research in the first place. Instead, the religious authorities at the time, however imperfectly, showed that they were interested in truth, and pursued it through science, due process, and adversarial justice. Those are not the values of a society that is opaque to truth-discovery, but rather a society that values truth discovery.
And that value was so good and effective that as society secularized it was retained, and in some sense its origins have been forgotten.
(Of course this is necessarily simplistic, as any grand sweeping narrative of history is, but I think it's closer to the mark than "religion stifles truth" – the truth is more complicated than that).
Shrike
3mo ago
Just setting aside a lot of potential objections, it seems to me that what you describe is at best evidence against a God that shares your personal values.
Shrike
3mo ago
Shrug, say "that's very cool but can we make use of it again?"
Hmm. I think this is a very inhuman response. Humans are curious, we want to discover things. Want to discover the truth. I think we're interested in more than just utility.
Theories prove themselves insufficient and new theories are created to fill the gap. "God did it" proves itself insufficient compared to scientific (or rather, materialist) theories, and retreats to ever-shrinking gaps.
I tend to think this is a simplistic view of history (and, perhaps ironically – a sort of reverse-polarity fundamentalist-Christian view of the world) but I understand where you are coming from.
This is true lol. I just think Russian gimmicks are often very amusing (as well as being original). But the fish doesn't know the water in which he swims.
On the one hand, I agree.
On the other, I think technological edges are much more likely to matter in sea combat than in land combat. I've revised my estimation of American tech up (and correspondingly of Chinese countermeasures down) as specifically applies to naval combat after Ukraine.
More options
Context Copy link