Shrike
4mo ago
Yes, absolutely, although I would expect such work to be integrated into the typical air defense network or bumped into a classified program (which might dovetail into all the rumors about SECRET UFO PROGRAMS – yes probably we don't want our enemies to know what we do and don't know about their classified programs). Setting up a public-facing program like BlueBook or Geipan makes more sense as a PR effort than a secret project to spy on enemy spy craft, and I think is a more parsimonious explanation, especially considering that, despite contemporary concerns, there almost certainly weren't Soviet spy aircraft buzzing our nuclear installations in the late 1940s but there were enough UFO reports that defense officials worried they would overwhelm defense channels.
If you follow the link-trail I threw out, though, you can see DNI Ratcliffe alleging that there are objects that
- Don't fit the profile of "advanced aerospace tech made by our enemies that we want to know more about," and
- are picked up on multiple sensors, including satellites, at the same time, which is interesting in the context of long-running rumors US satellites have detected objects entering the atmosphere from outer space.
We know, from declassified NRO documents, that the NRO's satellites have detected at least one small object that "did not match the visual signature of typical aircraft detections" and seemed to resemble the "tic-tac" UAP (although alternative possibilities are discussed and the sighting is considered "low confidence") and that the NRO's "Sentient" image processing software may have a "UAP detection" mode.
I don't think anyone should consider that a slam dunk for extraterrestrial life but I do think it's noteworthy that the intelligence community appears to have internal conversations around things like "can we use our image analysis program to look for UAPs."
Shrike
4mo ago
To be clear, my position isn't "do_something should agree that aliens exist." It is "if research into UFOs by other countries is a good reason to take UFOs seriously, then do_something should take UFOs seriously." Apologies if that was unclear; I was responding to a limited portion of your post, not endorsing OP's position. I think you can make an argument for taking UFOs seriously without leaping to the assumption that they are aliens.
And some of the may be say advanced aircraft operated by other country, interesting and useful natural phenomenon etc. (And there are cranks also in positions of power who will be confused by blurry dots)
Perhaps. The specific definition of UAP in US law, enacted by Congress, makes reference to "transmedium devices" which are defined as not immediately identifiable objects that are "observed to transition between space and the atmosphere, or between the atmosphere and bodies of water." It seems like if people in positions of power are seeing blurry dots, they are seeing them do some pretty unusual things. Or, as you allude to, there is a widespread conspiracy to make it seem that way (as has been suggested in The Motte in the past).
But this is ridiculously unlikely, only a bit above "angels as described in the Bible".
It's funny you should say that – the current claims by whistleblowers like Grusch et. al. (and what seems to be the current consensus of the "UFO community," if that loose conglomeration of individuals can be said to have such a consensus) looks much closer to "angels as described in the Bible" than it does to (say) "aliens as described in War of the Worlds or Footfall."
Shrike
4mo ago
Maybe even drop them some obviously fake documents about aliens captured by NSA or something.
Worth pointing out for the record that something that seems to be exactly this has in fact happened. At least twice.
Shrike
4mo ago
It seems like "picking a successor" is very low-hanging fruit that isn't very often picked in US politics. Or am I missing some good examples? Is there an argument that Reagan did that successfully with H.W., and then H.W. did that successfully with George W., as part of an intentional plan, or is that typically taken to be happenstance and situational maneuvering?
It seems like planning your successor, if you are a popular president, is a really easy and obvious thing to do. But I guess the issue is getting everyone else on board with that. There's a lot more demand for the Office of the Presidency than there is supply...
Shrike
4mo ago
This is a very interesting suggestion that I'd love to see get fleshed out more. It seems to me that it might suggest the root cause of what you call 'idpol preoccupation" isn't necessarily liberal/conservative ideology as much as real-world experience or a lack thereof, but perhaps you would take that in a different direction.
I wonder if Jonathan Haidt's work positing that liberals rely less on moral values involving respect for authority, ingroup/outgroup distinctions, and disgust might tie in here.
Shrike
4mo ago
Minor nitpick – at least going by GDP, Texas has a considerably larger economy than the Netherlands (2.4 trillion USD vs. 1 trillion, and headed towards 2 trillion ). Texas population is also considerably larger (30 million vs. 17 million) so it stands to reason.
On the substance of the proposals, I will be very interested in seeing how a lot of these go. I suspect that the currency one will be more useful for speculating in gold than for use as an actual currency, based on looking into the details of the proposal a while back (unless details change).
School choice might end up being the most impactful in the long run, particularly if it sets off a cascade and pushes other states to do the same. Could have considerable impacts on education.
Shrike
4mo ago
Was Russia collecting tax revenues from Crimea and other Ukrainian territories prior to Euromaidan?
If they pull off 20% or so of Ukraine, it will be a net win in both manpower (immediately, even if they lose 100K soldiers) and resources/finances (over a long enough timeline) for Russia. Presumably one has to balance that against notational losses from sanctions – I think it's too early to tell what the long-term impact of that will be (at least for someone of my questionable economic competence).
Having neutral Scandinavian states jump to NATO definitely is an L, but they have nowhere near the military potential of Ukraine.
It's definitely untrue to say that this has happened at no cost to the US; it is significantly depleted US/NATO's capabilities, although I think that probably counts as a W for the United States IF it can get its act together industrially, as a weakened Europe with an angry Russia at the door substantially increases US influence there (or should, anyway). It has also given Russia a lot of insight into some high-end NATO weaponry, but that knife cuts both ways.
(Important caveat that I think is under-appreciated by most people going on about how severe the impact of NATO contributions to Ukraine has been on Western war readiness: US doctrine is more air-centric than Russia's, so emptying out our artillery reserves is compensated for somewhat by the fact that we probably have tens of thousands of JDAMs still in reserve. Sure, we've given some to Ukraine, but they just can't use them enough to significantly deplete our stocks, I don't think.)
Shrike
4mo ago
My understanding is that it can sometimes be dicey to cross-compare happiness rates across countries due to different cultural understandings of happiness.
There are also...some important differences between European and American culture and geography. Just as a couple examples: my understanding is that part of the criticism of the Sexual Revolution (in the US) is that it expanded the sexual marketplace considerably in distortionary ways. But one would expect that this would be less of a factor in Europe due to national and language barriers that don't exist to nearly the same degree in the States. One would also expect Americans to be much better at committing suicide – it is worth asking if the decrease in European suicide rates is due to better lifesaving technology, just as the decrease in US shooting deaths is partially due to better medical practices. Of course, it's much harder to save someone who has OD'd than it is to save someone who has shot themselves in the brainstem, so suicidal Americans are, all else being equal, probably going to be more successful.
Setting all that aside, though, my superficial understanding is that Europe has always been further along the slippery slope than the United States (at least for certain metrics valued by the RETVRN crowd). I remember reading about a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dickens where the latter said that most British men weren't virgins on their wedding night (prostitution being widespread in England, or at least in major cities at the time). Poor Ralph (a transcendentalist who had had Puritan ethics hammered indelibly into his psyche) was shocked and appalled. It seems entirely plausible that
- Europe has always been more sexually libertine than the United States, and
- ergo, Europeans are better adjusted to a sexually libertine lifestyle than Americans at any historical point
This hypothesis is entirely consistent with sexual liberation being bad or with it being good or with it being a null value - it simply suggests that major cultural changes would 1) cause distress, and 2) that society would adjust to them over time. I think that both of those seem intuitively true.
Shrike
4mo ago
Interesting, although I am skeptical that the .223 is less lethal than a .45, and if the ".45 more dangerous than 9mm" debate had finally been concluded, I must have missed it. I definitely do not think that bullet diameter is the be-all end-all of firearm lethality (for instance, the 5.7mm proved very lethal during the Fort Hood shooting, but the perp survived 4 9mm rounds.)
I also would have thought the old timey criminals (at least in the cities, maybe not moonshiners and the like) would have been more likely to use a lower-powered cartridge like a .32 or a .380, say, 40 years ago, before the rise of the 9mm.
However I suppose it's possible that at the ranges most shootings happen, the 9mm and .223 tend to over-penetrate compared to the .45 or a magnum revolver.
Shrike
4mo ago
I wonder if Abbott is trying to go up to SCOTUS for Arizona v. U.S. round 2?
Shrike
4mo ago
Yeah, I suspect people really don't consider the degree to which illegal labor props up some low prices. I suspect that a lot of stuff (like house remodeling, landscape jobs, etc.) would undergo decent price spikes if someone snapped their fingers and relocated illegal immigrants back to their home countries – at least regionally. But a regional spike in something like meatpacking can raise prices nationwide.
Shrike
3mo ago
Child labor is an interesting consideration along these lines.
I seem to recall that union concerns (shrinking the size of the labor pool) was originally part of the motivation there as well, though.
Shrike
3mo ago
I'm also not sure that massive strikes against population centers would be nearly as common as predicted, at least once targeting was good enough to hit something smaller than "that city over there" (although I imagine it would depend on the exact scenario) but even at the height of the Cold War, there were just so many military targets to hit that maximizing for casualties instead of enemy military capability was arguably not the smartest play. Unfortunately a lot of military targets are colocated with large population centers.
But people read the "number of nuclear weapons" and forget that during the Cold War we were planning, at various points, of using those weapons on military targets, and not just bases, but ships, submarines, troop formations, and enemy aircraft – hence the development of nuclear-tipped torpedoes, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, and anti-ship missiles.
Fallout and radiation poisoning could be bad if someone deliberately tried to maximize it, but conventional nuclear weapons just aren't as dirty as people seem to think. People survived Hiroshima within a thousand feet of ground zero. The guy who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered from radiation poisoning...and lived to be 93.
Shrike
3mo ago
It's 100% true that Israel spies on the United States, but this is very normal (for example, the US was caught spying on Germany, and France is apparently notorious for running SIGINT collections at international military exercises) in international relations. FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.
And it's 100% not true that China or Taiwan isn't lobbying (Taiwan definitely does) or spying on it (China definitely does).
(A historical aside, but I am not sure anything Israel has done has been as consequential as the coordinated British effort, which included espionage, to get us into the World Wars. The Zimmerman note would never have come to light if it was not for British espionage on US diplomatic traffic.)
Shrike
2mo ago
One of the interesting things about MKULTRA is that it was revealed because a small cache of documents survived a document destruction order by the Director of the CIA. It seems to me we can logically infer the possibility (perhaps even the probability) of similarly audacious programs that have been successfully concealed simply because the relevant documents were successfully destroyed.
I agree with your point that government cover-ups can work, and obviously if some can work for some time it implies some can work permanently, or at least still can be working today. But I also think that leaks, frankly, are not that as damaging to the integrity of a cover-up as one might believe.
The problem is that from the outside leaks just look like random baseless rumor. There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times. The reason Watergate became a scandal was because the leaker respected the process and got the Times on his side. Amusingly, this is also the exact same reason that everyone is talking about UFOs right now: a small group of media-savvy people made a coordinated effort to get it into the Times. I was aware of the "Tic-Tac" incident long before the Times published it (partially via personal connections that alerted me when it "leaked" all the way into a niche publication) but it was not taken seriously by e.g. Congress until it was laundered into mainstream respectability.
You can sort-of map this on to MeToo. My hazy recollection at least was that part of the premise or background of the movement was that there were a number of predatory people, who were known to be predatory (this certainly, at a minimum, seems to be the case for Harvey Weinstein). It was quite literally an open secret that the guy was engaging in harassment at best and outright rape at worst. But until the open secret was laundered into a mainstream narrative Weinstein went unpunished. I am of course fingering the Times as the standard-bearer of this narrative, but I imagine many similar dramas have played out on smaller scales, even within a family.
Another conspiracy I am curious about is the drug-running out of Afghanistan. Rumors have reached me, both online and in-person, that US military aircraft were used to move large amounts of drugs out of Afghanistan during our occupation of the country. (Similar rumors sprung up and were even published regarding the Vietnam war.) I don't know if these rumors are true (I guess I'll believe them when I read them in the Times) but I frankly would be a bit surprised if anyone in the Times was aware of them, and very surprised if they were investigating such a story, even though I imagine they would concede it was possible. I am not sure I can exactly articulate why, but I think everyone has a sense of what I am saying. Somehow it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should come out now. Perhaps in 20 years, when it will be long too late to change anything that happened.
Which is part of what makes the timing of this lawsuit interesting. It's based on FOIA documents that were extracted from the bowels of the bureaucracy after a few decades. If the allegations are true (and I am not arguing that they are or aren't, I haven't even read the complaint) it seems like a very plausible outcome is a settlement and no jail time for people who negligently killed hundreds of people at random. But then again, that's exactly what happened on Iran Air 655: a settlement was paid, and nobody was disciplined, despite the fact that the missile was fired under verifiably faulty pretenses (I don't think there was a conspiracy here, just a very, very big mistake).
This is a little meandering, so let me come to a point. I think people believe that if there's a "leak," if a single person talks, then somehow magically the truth will out and we'll all read about it in the papers tomorrow. But that's not how these things work. I think it's something like a preference cascade, where the problem isn't what is true and what isn't. Rather, it is a coordination problem. And if the people in charge of the covert endeavor (whether it's Harvey Weinstein and his PR/legal team, or "the CIA," or the people in charge of ensuring that my medical and legal records remain confidential, or what have you) are better at coordinating than the leakers, the leakers can "leak" all they want, but it won't make its way into the collective consciousness whether that's of a single family or an entire nation. Or sometimes, even if it does make its way into the collective consciousness, it can be too awkward to openly acknowledge. You see this at the level of a family or community, but I think sometimes it happens at the national one as well.
I'd propose that when evaluating the plausibly of keeping something secret, then, we shouldn't evaluate the odds of one person blabbing. Rather, we should evaluate the coordination problem at play, and the incentive structures involved. I think that viewing things through this lens has some good explanatory power as to why some covert endeavors fail, some succeed, and many come out several decades later. After many years, the power balance in coordination shifts. Criminal underlings have less of a desire to protect their pals long after the statutes of limitations have expired; victims of abusers accumulate in number, grow in power, and begin to coordinate effectively; people in office lose their allies due to chance and time.
Shrike
2mo ago
Ironically sometimes that smoke is itself the product of a conspiracy. For instance, my understanding is that the KGB spread, uh, speculation that the United States created AIDS in a lab.
Shrike
2mo ago
I don't think the US Navy has to pay people off to conceal things; that happens routinely. However, I am skeptical that fudging paperwork translates over well into "OK guys we're gonna cover up the deaths of a few hundred people."
Shrike
2mo ago
Wouldn't it just be easier (and less fraught) to decrease the use of hormonal contraceptives? My understanding is that they tend to increase neuroticism and at least for some women decrease libido.
Shrike
2mo ago
I think the actual probable alternative to hormonal contraceptives is just...other contraceptives.
Not that I really think lots of sex and lots of unplanned pregnancies would be the end of the world – I'm fundamentally more of a "babies good" person, and I don't have any particular reason to want people to have abundant sexual access outside of marriage. But, realistically, I imagine that a random draconian ban of hormonal contraceptives tomorrow* would probably result in a slight uptick in babies and a large uptick in alternative methods of birth control. Copper IUDs, for instance, are much more effective than birth control pills, and other more temporary contraceptive methods are relatively reliable.
*to be quite clear, I'm not saying that would be a good idea. But perhaps a less bad idea than genetically modifying women.
Shrike
2mo ago
If I may –
I suspect (and he can tell me if I am wrong, or unhelpful) is that part of what Hlynka is consistently gesturing towards is that HBD, as a belief, is the sort of belief that a self-anointed ruling class finds helpful because of its Explanatory Power. It is constantly being used to explain why certain government or social programs don't "work."
For the average person this framework is probably not a helpful one compared to something along the lines of the color-blind individualism that I think he is partial to. (Setting aside the fact that good common sense is probably a better predictor than HBD when it comes to keeping one out of trouble, you don't have to believe in HBD to "believe in" FBI crime stats &ct.)
So I think Hlynka's consistent suspicion of people who beat the HBD drum is rooted in the intuition that people who reach for such explanation may be the sorts of people who see themselves as would-be Lords and Masters of humanity, who cannot fail but only be failed. If someone is reaching for HBD, is it because it actually helps them interact with those around them in a charitable and mutually beneficial way or because they're sculpting society inside of their head?
Shrike
2mo ago
It does seem like (unsurprisingly, I guess) a lot of people right and left converge on "the Problem with Society is [my pet "structural" peeve], not 'merely' [poor moral choices], and to solve it we will need [new sociological insights and methods] because [traditional cultural and legal incentives] are boring insufficient to the crisis we face."
Which I think is not dissimilar to how things were around 100 years ago, where the communists/fascists/socialists-of-the-chair all had remarkably similar ideas about what was to be done despite vehemently and violently disagreeing with one another.
Shrike
2mo ago
You're correct, I think, that truth doesn't necessarily imply specific policy recommendations. But there are truths and there are narratives and when people are advancing a narrative I think it's fair to interrogate the truth behind it. And I think the truth of the claim itself is arguably fairly boring to talk about, in a sense, for a few reasons:
- it's fundamentally predicated on scientific analysis that requires a certain amount of savvy to grok
- even if you can grok the analysis, most people lack the personal context to more-than-generally analyze the credibility of those doing the analysis
- talking about what to do if it was true is just much more interesting than debating whether or not it is true
You can see this in a lot of areas – for example, squabbling about if a specific theory of physics or quantum mechanics or the Drake Equation isn't nearly as interesting for most people (and much harder to do responsibly) than speculating about the impact of the implications.
Everyone should interested in whether HBD is true, trying to craft policy based on fundamental misunderstandings of reality is bad and anyone living under those policies should want the truth to be known.
Well perhaps trying to craft policy based on this stuff is what Hlynka objects to generally. That's what I was trying to get a sense of.
Shrike
2mo ago
The time and energy requirements needed for interstellar travel so high that any non-supernatural (i.e. angels or demons etc. instead of spirits) explanation for UFOs is prima facia false.
I mean, I get where you are coming from, but the main objection to interstellar travel isn't energy (you could do it with Voyager 1 amounts of energy) it's just time. Which humans have very anthropocentric ideas about that may not generalize to any other entities out there.
Most of the barriers on interstellar travel are barriers on human interstellar travel, that vanish if you have a relatively long time horizon and are fine sending GPT as your ambassador instead of a human. We could almost certainly send a (very small) spacecraft to another star in my lifetime via a starwisp if we really wanted to (and maybe we will!) Relatively fast nuclear-powered travel is also theoretically possible (it should be within the laws of physics, but obviously that's a huge engineering challenge!)
With slightly more advanced technology than we have now, it should be possible to send some sort of a small constructor (not grey goo, or anything crazy like that) that could construct larger devices. Iterate to even more advanced technology, and it could even construct lifeforms ("biologics") in artificial wombs, or, even if not from scratch, from frozen embryos.
Thus you could have a situation where there are little green/grey men crashing spaceships in New Mexico like all the most far-out theories claim without breaking any physical laws, or really any novel technology that humans haven't already considered and mathematically sketched out since the early Cold War.
Frankly, I think the weird reported behavior of some of the objects (e.g. instantaneous acceleration) is much more of a problem from a physics/materialist view in my mind than the problem of interstellar travel. And of course ironically is that we have much better reasons to believe there is something out there engaging in eye-wateringly fast acceleration within Earth's atmosphere than we do that it came here from Over There. So while I'm sympathetic to the "it makes more sense for it to be supernatural" approach, I really don't think interstellar travel is the barrier that some seem to think it is. It's just that interstellar travel might not look like Star Wars.
Shrike
2mo ago
In the scientific field, predictive power is generally taken as evidence of correctness. I think part of the reason that even some of the non-religious posters around here are so sympathetic to religion is because they recall all of the religious conservatives making directionally-accurate predictions about the results of political progressivism a decade or two ago. Perhaps they don't think it is correct, but they do see that it has insight.
I think part of the other reason (for the non-religious posters) is that they are familiar, either in their personal lives or via the field of social studies, with the fact that religion is very good for people. There's a whole host of research that shows this, and of course it is often apparent from observation as well. Does this mean religious claims are true? By itself, not necessarily – but, again, it seems to suggest insight.
And then of course there's the fact that more than a few of the posters on this board (including myself) are Christians, and there are probably some of other religious persuasions here as well, so it makes sense that they would treat religion as a serious topic, because they – like most people, including I suspect most rationalists – think that it is serious. Certainly it has serious influence.
Sure, this is fairly easy – the USA has run a number of investigations, most (in)famously Project BlueBook, back in the day. See also Project Grudge, Project Sign. There is a lot of controversy/smoke over what exactly the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was doing, but it certainly seems to have involved research into UFOs.
When it comes to an official announcement by a USA President about aliens, I don't have anything directly in this vein, but here's a former director of the CIA suggesting that UFOs might be "a different form of life" and the current and former Director of National Intelligence have suggested there is some form of advanced technology that does not have a prosaic origin being detected by US sensors. As far as Presidents go, Obama hasn't gone quite that far, but he does seem to take the issue seriously.
France has a very small official UFO group called GEIPAN.
The USSR had a UFO investigation unit during the Cold War. I think it's worth taking this with a grain of salt since from what I can tell the popular reporting on this is basely largely on hearsay, whereas in the United States there are a lot of now-declassified documents indicating at least some legitimate government interest (such as by e.g. Edgar Hoover). I believe there are also Soviet documents "smuggled out of Russia" after the Cold War ended, but I'm not sure how confident one should be in their legitimacy.
China seems to have a UFO investigation unit currently, although there is little known about it from what I have seen, and it seems plausible that it is doing it to keep up with the United States/get a handle on prosaic atmospheric clutter.
I don't think any of this makes the jump to "aliens" but it does suggest powerful and presumably rational actors take the issue of UFOs/UAP seriously, or have reasons to pretend to.
(I realize this is a very weird comment to drag one out of perpetually lurking, but, uh, in my defense it's not all that often that it's comparatively easy to make someone take anything seriously?)
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