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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29351 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split

Would you be OK with 80% Asian, 16% white (mostly Jewish) and 4% other if that's what meritocracy says? There are lots of people who scream meritocracy but then when it turns out they lose out to people even smarter than them they want to restrict things so that they stay on top. That's the true criteria for supporting meritocracy (assuming you're white here, I personally wouldn't mind 1% Asian, 99% white as long as those whites were some super race of 200IQ genetically modified geniuses, that's meritocracy and completely fair).

You are by far my favorite poster here

Wow, thank you for that, I genuinely appreciate it.

the class was 99% BurdensomeCount's

Ooo, back during university my degree was full of people who thought like me. Fun times no doubt, but we do have our faults and 99% BC concentration is well beyond safe limits.

The burden can only be so high.

LMAO

Ahaha love this interaction. I can't count such a heavy burden.

You are by far my favorite poster here, so if the class was 99% BurdensomeCount's, darling, I'd be OK with that

There's a country full of them that you can move to, if you like the idea so much.

This is news to me. Outside the most rarefied mathematics departments and associated spaces I've found that the BC density is basically negligible. I don't think there are any country sized structures with non-trivial levels of BC concentration.

You could settle in Vancouver, Canada, which is certainly 100% BC. Or you could build a Time Machine and travel 2025+ years into the past.

(Aside: if you’re in the UK, wouldn’t you be a BurdensomeEarl?)

(Aside: if you’re in the UK, wouldn’t you be a BurdensomeEarl?)

Indeed. However I've never liked the term Earl personally, I even prefer the Geman Graf to the Scandi Jarl which is where the term Earl comes from (coincidentally my favourite stationery comes from Graf-von-Faber-Castell - their new pen of the year though is very garish, normally they are much more refined). Count though is so much better, the french Comte is so much a nicer word to my ears.

Also, the term Count was used by the Byzantines to denote a military leader in command of two centuries, so 200 people (yes yes I know the Roman century had only 80 soldiers, what they neglect to mention is that a century typically also had 20 slaves associated with it to take care of the 80 fighting men). Coincidentally (or perhaps not so coincidentally), 1-in-200 is roughly how highly I value myself in the Great Human Hierarchy in comparison to the ordinary man...

So when you were using the first person plural here you were talking about mathematicians? I somehow doubt you'll be able to get enough of them together to conquer Ukraine.

Nah, over there I meant something different. That was more me and my ethnicity, but I am a very non-central member of my ethnicity and just because someone likes my style doesn't particularly mean they'll like being around people of my ethnicity and anyways you won't get the true BC experience with them. You're more likely to get (a facimile of) the experience with a mathematician but even then it won't be completely the same. For that your only option is to go with the OG...

I distinctly remember you saying we'd gave an even more enhanced BC experience from your coethnics, you're not exactly talking our ears off about math when you post here...

A pure meritocracy would be good, but it would be myopic to judge candidates for the American elite solely on academic performance.

I would add a judged (can be behind a curtain / audio recorded to avoid accusations of bias) debate segment - Westminster/Oxford Union style, not what passes for debate competitions in the US - to measure public speaking ability, bravado and charisma.

Then two essay questions, again judged by senior faculty. One on classical western civilization, sat in person, written in (fountain) pen, with substantial bonus points for answers in Latin or Greek. A second brief essay on philosophy (or rather ethics or logical thinking), in the mould of oxbridge philosophy entrance exam essays. This measures the ability to write, sorely lacking among many shape rotators.

I would also require a letter of approval from a sitting US senator, who (a) could have no financial relationship with anyone in the applicant’s immediate or extended family and (b) could nominate fewer than 50 students per year. This is also meritocratic in a way, since true meritocracy is familial rather than individual, and a well-connected family has enmeshed themselves in the fabric of American life well, which speaks to likely success in life.

You can add all the additional requirements that you want, provided you understand that they aren't any less subject to gamification than whatever is currently in place. So add a debate requirement and you get Oxford Union debate clubs replacing whatever other extracurricular is the hot thing to get into a good school. Give bonus points for answering in Greek and Latin and you get a bunch of kids taking Greek and Latin not because they want to but because you get bonus points. I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes. I mean, if you had two applicants to an engineering program with identical academic credentials, which one do you choose? The one who spends his spare time tinkering with radios and other electronic devices, or the one who can do integrals in his head but can't change a tire on his car? Who do you think actually wants to be an engineer and who is just doing it because it's a good job that will make his parents proud? You can't sort this out without a non-standardized personal interview.

I would also require a letter of approval from a sitting US senator, who (a) could have no financial relationship with anyone in the applicant’s immediate or extended family and (b) could nominate fewer than 50 students per year. This is also meritocratic in a way, since true meritocracy is familial rather than individual, and a well-connected family has enmeshed themselves in the fabric of American life well, which speaks to likely success in life.

There's already a college that requires this. Actually several colleges, though congressmen are also included and nominations are limited to ten apiece. They're the service academies, and they are extremely difficult to get into. Who gets these nominations has fuck all to do with how connected an applicant or his family is because you don't get them by knowing the Senator or whoever but by applying on their website, at which point someone from their office looks through the same paperwork admissions does. And what makes you think Senators even give a shit who gets into Harvard or wherever? Out of 100, 12 went there at all, and only 4 for undergrad. Anyway, this isn't England, and Senators don't give a shit about gatekeeping access to the "American elite". Do you really think John Fetterman is going to nominate the kind of prigs who can answer philosophical essay questions in ancient Greek?

So add a debate requirement and you get Oxford Union debate clubs replacing whatever other extracurricular is the hot thing to get into a good school. Give bonus points for answering in Greek and Latin and you get a bunch of kids taking Greek and Latin not because they want to but because you get bonus points.

Yeah, and all that stuff…would be good.

I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes.

I echo @Jiro's suspicion that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation because Harvard wanted and needed them to do poorly in the quest for racial balancing. One could make the opposite argument ex-ante, that kids from Tiger Mom cultures would be expected to have "better" personalities, as their greater likelihood in having experiences at being (multi-instrument) musicians, (multi-sport) athletes, multilingual, and exposure to different cultures gives them greater depth and worldliness than someone from a non-Tiger Mom culture who maybe plays one instrument or a sport or two, while speaking one language (maybe two if they're latino) and spends their increased spare time dicking around, browsing TikTok and Instagram.

And furthermore, alumni interviewers rated the personalities of Asian candidates similarly as they did white candidates. It was the admissions office, which often didn't meet the candidates, that would give Asians the worst personality scores among any racial group. Harvard's attempt at jiu-jitsuing their way out was to imply It Just So Happens it must be the case that Asians have worse essays and recommendations:

Alumni interviewers give Asian-Americans personal ratings comparable to those of whites. But the admissions office gives them the worst scores of any racial group, often without even meeting them, according to Professor Arcidiacono.

Harvard said that while admissions officers may not meet the applicants, they can judge their personal qualities based on factors like personal essays and letters of recommendation.

I suspect a large part of the reason that so many Asian kids did poorly in Harvard's personality evaluation is because so many of them came out of a Tiger Mom culture where their dad played by Vivek Ramaswamy gave them a list of things they needed to do to get into Harvard and made damn sure they spent every available moment of their childhood ticking off the boxes.

I suspect that 100% of the reason is that Harvard just didn't want many Asians. Even if you're correct, that doesn't mean that Asians would have done any better if they had avoided that. It just means that Harvard would have picked something else where Asians were different. And if Asians avoided that too, Harvard would have picked yet something else. Even if Asians were identical to whites in all measures, Harvard would have just said they had bad personality anyway, because you can't measure personality, so there'd be no way to prove that Harvard was wrong.

Going by PISA scores this is very doubtful how it would go under a genuine meritocracy

I'm sorry, but knowing your cultivated persona and giving you full credit, I'd assume that if meritocracy didn't include you, you would do all you could to subvert it.

Nah, as long as I have a passenger seat in the story of Humanity I'd be happy. Even now I realize I'll never be truly Great and have to content myself with merely being above the vast majority of people. I'm happy here and honestly would be happy working a 80th percentile pay job too if in return the low end scroungers got their just deserts (or rather, had their taxpayer funded desserts taken away). I'm not one to rebel against my superiors, that's more of a low human capital thing to do.

I'm not one to rebel against my superiors, that's more of a low human capital thing to do.

failed rebellions are this but successful ones are not. If the superiors are defeated in the only arena that really matters they were, evidently, not superior.

The French revolution led to the removal of the monarchy by the proles. Does this mean the proles were superior to the aristocrats?

Within twenty five years the house of Bourbon had been restored to the French throne. Does this mean the proles weren't really superior because the royal family had managed to regain power?

Since superiority/inferiority isn't something which changes at single generation level timescales we can't have the proles being superior first and then the royals, one of them were always superior, even though they both got defeated in the arena shortly after the other. So which is it?

Btw, the current Spanish Royal Family is descended from the House of Bourbon. The Spanish weren't able to permanently throw off their royals in the way the French were. So does that mean French proles were superior to the royals while Spanish proles were inferior? Even though both of the groups, being proles, have very little differentiating them?

Within twenty five years the house of Bourbon had been restored to the French throne.

What of it?

You do realize that the last Monarch of France (and the guy who effectively codified the current french model of government) was a Boneparte rather than a Bourbon don't you?

The house of Bourbon coming back was a dead cat bounce. The aristocracy IE the feudal bloodline rule way of life was dealt a mortal wound when the French monarchy fell it just took a couple of decades to bleed out in the West.

If you have a caveat for happiness that relies on a vast restructuring of society to punish people who are inferior to you then you have zero chance at happiness. Every child should learn that pinning your happiness on an external force punishing others is a fool's game anyway. You might as well say I'd be happy if all of my enemies died at my hands and their women submitted willingly to me. That's all it would take?

What's more, your obsession with race puts the lie to your belief in meritocracy. You wouldn't mind 1% 'Asian' if the 99% whites were 200 iq ubermensch? That is the same position as the one you are mocking - nobody has an issue with the idea of being ruled over by a pack of certified geniuses, they just don't believe the civilisation that is currently gooning it's way into extinction/the civilisation that couldn't figure out toilets in 2000 years is that. They think, quite rightly, that no matter how selfless and high minded anyone claims to be they will promote their in group first - and if that in group is defined ethnically meritocracy will be supplanted by racial spoils. Meritocracy by necessity requires a lack of curiosity about iq distribution, at least until it is managed by our ai overlords, because humans are not to be trusted.

My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.

How is it “fair” that 1950s Chinese communists who despised America, get to send their grandchildren to occupy (and profit from) the top 0.1% of prestige occupations in America, which is the patrimony of the very 1950s Americans they despised?

How is it fair that 1950s whites who had their country built at least partially on the backs of exploited Black labour (both slave and later, free) get to have their grandchildren benefit at the advantage of the descendants of those who were made to suffer as western Dalits just by dint of their skin colour?

If we're going by your rules rather than merit whites should be disbarred from prestige institutions entirely.

  • -11

Because that tale is ridiculous.

Black people are benefiting from it too right now, so where's the issue?

They are benefiting from it, but presumably less than their rightful due for the work they (were forced to) put in. Imagine I enslaved you to build a bridge in your city. At the end I let you go and when you complained that you have been exploited I said "you benefit from the bridge too now that it has been built". Nobody would seriously consider that as a justified response.

The real question is can you kidnap someone from some “shit hole” and put them in terrible conditions that on the margins help build society. Then do their descendants 160 years later get to claim some amount due? Isn’t the appropriate calculation for the descendant are there better off in your society or the “shit hole” from whence their forefather was stolen?

That is, I think the forefather had a clear claim to restitution. I think the current generation has actually benefited from slavery.

At the end I let you go and when you complained that you have been exploited I said "you benefit from the bridge too now that it has been built".

No, it's more like my great great great... grandchild was told that, after they became an equal under the law, and after an ever-expanding system of inequality correction was set up that specifically benefits them.

They contributed exactly nothing to the bridge and benefit from it exactly as much as the descendants of the people that enslaved me. So again, where's the issue?

King Cotton is not a very convincing story. Phillip Magness (sp?) did great work discrediting it and the 1619 project.

Now hold on, surely the counter is that some of them were Republic Chinese instead, who lost out to the Communists.

That's the counter to "not all whites benefited from the exploitation of Blacks, so you shouldn't bar all of them".

Yes, communists and their immediate descendants should be actively discriminated against unless they can demonstrate a full and genuine change of heart. Communism is the most destructive and dangerous ideology in the whole world and those too close to it should be kept from influence.

My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Hyperbole aside, how realistic a possibility is this?

It has actually happened multiple times in Australia, but that's more due to corruption than to test scores.

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/student-at-top-australian-university-claims-classes-taught-in-chinese/news-story/b0e21f920299c71a794aa5c2b58c86d5

At least by numbers, it's absolutely possible.

There's 37 universities in the top tier in China, which used to be known as project 985. It's super competitive to get into them, you need an extremely high score on the Gaokao national exam, which is like a series of AP/IB tests on crack. Top student basically devote their teen years to cramming for it. I don't know the precise score breakdown, but this comment: https://www.quora.com/In-China-what-percentage-of-students-get-admitted-to-tier-1-universities-and-how-hard-is-it says you need to be roughly in the top 1% of the general population to make it in there. This comment https://qr.ae/pYvrbd is in agreement, saying that 0.79% make it in there, which is 150,000 students per year.

By way of comparison, most ivy league schools are a little under 2000 students in each class. I'm not sure what you want to define as a top school, but let's say there's 20 of them each with 2000 students average. That's only 40,000 students in total. So you could easily fill every single spot at top American schools with Chinese kids, and it wouldn't even shrink the Chinese universities very much.

In the UK there's simply a cap on international places for many courses. I know the relationship between higher education and the state is different in the US, but I imagine there'd be some way to legally enforce that a certain % of places are reserved for domestic students. It's not something I see being hugely politically polarised either.

Only really for Medicine. For most other courses at non Oxbridge they prefer international students because of the much higher fees they pay.

The US can completely cripple Chinese youth talent by skimming off their top 20,000 scoring high school graduates each year and stapling a green card to their Ivy+ diplomas. This is probably the most effective weapon they have against the CCP. Sure it'll take like a decade and a half to have significant impact but when it does it'll by extremely good at keeping China down and let the US continue its hegemony.

There's the old joke: "Don't worry about China leapfrogging us technologically, our Chinese are smarter than their Chinese", it should be made a reality.

I think if we actually started doing that en masse, we'd end up with a lot of youths much more loyal to China than to the US, and in some cases outright agents of the CCP.

Sure, I'm sure you'll get some CCP agents. Just forbid them from working on sensitive things. The question is whether the damage the agents do to us will be more than the benefit we get from slicing away their highest potential humans each year and the damage that will do to them. Even it we pay them to literally sit at home playing video games for the rest of their lives it still benefits the US because now they aren't helping China.

Our current system gives us a lot of students more loyal to Hamas than to the US.

Both are bad methinks

A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values because these two qualities work in tandem with intelligence to produce meritorious results. I doubt Alex Berenson was the smartest person at Yale by testing, but his temperament enabled him to confront the establishment on COVID, making him more valuable than his peers. The reporter who pressed on the Epstein story, Julie Brown, is an old woman and attended Temple University, but for some reason was the only one of her journalistic peers to pursue something which many of them hid. Edward Snowden went to community college. Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered the grooming gang scandal, went to Durham University.

With every job there are moral decisions that require certain values and temperamental qualities. If these are lacking then there are huge civilizational costs. I don’t know if a Vivek Ramaswamy has these optimal qualities. I don’t know if Asian students are temperamentally or culturally disposed to risk their reputation to fight against a corrupt power structure or official. I would argue that their culture is too credential-oriented, results-oriented, and conformist for that. There should be more studies so that we are absolutely sure that “relatively new” immigrant groups have the inner qualities that are required for influential positions in society. Maybe the studies will show that Asian students are actually more likely to have these qualities, I have no idea, but I’m sure the SAT doesn’t measure them.

A real meritocracy would have to weigh SAT scores by temperament and cultural values

That is by definition not a meritocracy.

Not necessarily; it depends on your definition of merit.

By way of analogy (which sadly is no longer on the SAT), we can say highest-SAT-score-ism : meritocracy :: utilitarianism : consequentialism

Consequentialism says that one should act so that the consequences/outcomes of one’s actions are maximally good, but does not itself define what it means for an outcome to be “good”. Utilitarianism is one specific form of consequentialism in which “good” is defined as “utility (of all people in the world, e.g.)”

a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated abilities and merit

Merit:

a praiseworthy quality

character or conduct deserving reward, honor, or esteem

I would also argue that a demonstrably non-corrupt disposition would fall under ability’s “competence in doing something”.

This is just sophistry. The criteria for merit in an academic institution does not include culture and the like. Meritocracy in college admissions can include academic merit besides SAT scores, but it cannot include the criteria you are asking for.

It most certainly does, which is why basic liberal arts has always been part - even if only perfunctory - of any degree program.

The fundamental expectation of college has always been to produce a new gentry, which is why community involvement and a solid personality is still part of the admissions process. "Genius asshole who is hated by everyone but still has a career because he's just that brilliant" is much more common in fiction than reality. Even the shift to "meritocracy just means SAT scores, stop discriminating agains Asians" is fairly recent, and largely a consequence of the rapidly increasing social atomization of the modern era, and the rapid increase in credentialism.

Nothing in the definition of meritocracy says that the only merit to be considered is standardized test scores.

No, of course not. But temperament and cultural values are not part of academic merit, and therefore have no place in a meritocracy for academia.

Standardized test scores are also not really a part of academic merit, they are just a proxy for academic merit. The only actual metric for academic merit would be one that measures the extent to which someone produces actual academic results like innovating new historical approaches or proving a math theorem, etc.

Sure, that's certainly a fair criticism of standardized tests. But whatever their faults, they are at least trying to measure academic merit. "Does this person have good values" type questions are not.

At the undergraduate level, academic merit is about learning, not developing new stuff.

But that's true only if you think of academia as solely focused on raw intelligence -- and it isn't. Even restricting ourselves to traits that provide success in raw academic pursuits, it's totally necessary to evaluate someone's conscientiousness, grit, and mental stability. In fact, I would argue evaluating these things is the whole point of college, in addition to helping meritorious students learn something.

I know no shortage of incredibly smart people with high test scores who underachieve, in both academic and professional pursuits, because of low conscientiousness or mental health problems. Any definition of academic merit that doesn't account for them in some way is of little value.

You know that you sound exactly like the woke left when you're making excuses for why we shouldn't just use SAT scores in admitting people. It's the whole "Asians have bad personality" thing again. With a few rounds of find/replace we can turn your post into something only a highly woke left winger would agree with.

This is exactly why I think the term "woke right" has value. It perfectly describes the sort of person who'll make standard progressive arguments with one or two ethnicities swapped around.

See also people who are super hbd-based when it comes to explaining why black americans perform worse than white, but who immediately reinvent some form of systemic racism against whites when it comes to explaining the higher performances of asians/Jews (i.e. talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences").

Sure, for example it's easy to find Nazis who think that Jews aren't actually smarter than non-Jewish whites on average despite the overwhelming evidence for the fact that Jews actually are smarter than non-Jewish whites on average.

That said, I don't think talking about "rote learning" or "in-group preferences" of East Asians is necessarily the same phenomenon. With some commenters, it is, but not with all. There is a real phenomenon to be explained of why it is that East Asians are not more successful than whites despite testing higher on various measures of intelligence. Jews, clearly, are more successful than non-Jewish whites on average, so in their case there is no phenomenon to explain. The idea that standardized tests make East Asians seem smarter than they actually are in the real world seems like a plausible explanation to me. It's not necessarily just some systemic racism theory.

Are you familiar with the studies on why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs, and that the prevailing theories involve personality? Who is your favorite Asian comedian? Asians should be overrepresented among comedians because of their high IQ, unless, of course, there are personality differences and comedy revolves around challenging social convention in novel ways. If I were to say that certain African ancestry populations commit more crimes because they have a MAOA gene linked to aggression which then influences their temperament, would you consider me “woke left” because it doesn’t show up on an SAT?

If you believe in human biodiversity then it is reasonable to assume that different populations have different temperaments, because temperaments are simply general behavioral tendencies informed by genes x culture. East Asian conformist-collectivist culture, for instance, developed alongside rice cultivation and collective waterway management which induced different genes and cultural values than wheat cultures:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-44770-w

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014292121001318

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8371358/

This is a generally unexplored area. India is corrupt as hell, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that it is corrupt because the people there are corrupt. If the people are corrupt then this indicates temperamental or cultural value differences. Just from the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India

A study conducted by Transparency International in 2005 recorded that more than 62% of Indians had at some point or another paid a bribe to a public official to get a job done.[2][3] In 2008, another report showed that about 50% of Indians had first hand experience of paying bribes or using contacts to get services performed by public offices

In the absence of any good studies on this topic (or that I simply don’t know about them), for now I’ll trust my instincts for determining people that I think are trustworthy and virtuous. Someone like Tristan Harris has facial expressions, gestures, and intonation which immediately convey trust to me. I can feel that he genuinely feels for others, and it’s no surprise to me that he was our best whistleblower for social media algorithms despite most employees at FAANG being Asian. Patrick Bet David, Ramaswamy, and Siriam Krishnam… not so much.

Asian Comedian? Romesh Ranganathan fits the bill pretty well. The same reasons you give for why East Asians are less likely to be CEOs also apply to explain why high caste South Asians are more likely to be CEOs than whites, but the nativists don't then turn around and accept that as proof of their inferiority, even though they freely apply that logic to why East Asians are inferior.

Someone like Tristan Harris has facial expressions, gestures, and intonation which immediately convey trust to me.

Really? The first thing I thought of after seeing his oversized pointy ears and nose and those large round brown fully circular eyes was a partially shaved Macaque monkey, someone who's basically completely harmless. Now he's very intelligent based on the way he speaks, but I think you may be conflating intelligent + harmless for trustworthy which isn't the same thing. I don't get a trustworthiness reading either way (positive or negative) from the first few minutes of your linked clip beyond the fact that in the 5th minute he namedrops Marc Andreessen who is someone I'm positively predisposed to which makes me more likely to trust Tristan Harris.

I mean, normie upper middle class women are also underrepresented among successful comedians. Entirely possible this is just culture(no coincidence the first really successful woman comedian was Ellen, not exactly a proper lady).

I don't follow how pointing out to a difference between men and women lends itself to the argument "it's just culture".

There are successful women comedians- they’re just not proper ladies.

I guess you're not familiar with Phyllis Diller... or any number of others.

Entirely possible this is just culture(no coincidence the first really successful woman comedian was Ellen, not exactly a proper lady).

Carol Burnett and Joan Rivers both have her beat by decades. (Whoopi Goldberg also found massive success several years before Ellen did.)

Lucille Ball's zombie waves hello. Although she never did standup.

Right, I was sticking to standups. If we’re expanding it to women who got famous doing comedic acting, I’m sure there were others before Lucy. I’m not super familiar with the big stars of vaudeville and radio, but I imagine there were women among them. (Gracie Allen comes to mind.)

East Asians and South Asians are on opposite ends of the verbal IQ spectrum. For example, South Asians are overrepresented among comedians and in Hollywood, increasingly in journalism and literature too. The higher castes appear to have very high verbal IQ, as @BurdensomeCount suggests.

Speaking as an East Asian - in my experience our verbal abilities as a group are so strikingly poor that I sometimes wonder that people don't generally think that we are kinda dumb. All the more so since verbal intelligence is the most apparent form of intelligence; you generally aren't going to be able to judge someone's math skills in casual conversation. In the workplace, among friends, at school, I find it hard not to notice the general inability of otherwise competent Asians (including myself) to put together coherent, grammatical sentences on the fly like everyone else does. Sometimes one has the pleasure of meeting startlingly articulate people. They are never East Asian. I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian. Even writers I enjoy, like Dan Wang, turn out to be not great at speaking. On the other hand there are plenty of very articulate black public intellectuals, for instance (and I say that not in a condescending way).

Interesting thought, though I want to defend our East Asian's "verbal abilities" here.

First question, are we talking about East Asians or American East Asians?

If it's American East Asians, I think there are plenty of famous American East Asian comedians (Ronny Chieng, Troy Iwata, Jimmy Yang, Ali Wong) . And yes, I am using "famous comedians" as correlation for "verbal abilities".

If it's East Asians, then maybe more exposure to more East Asian media might show that there can't possibly be a lack of good writing or verbal spars in East Asia. We have Nisio Isin whose entire career spanning novels and manga is built on Japanese wordplay (notice how his pseudonym is a palindrome). Chinese couplets, especially the combative kind (where one writer challenges and another respond) are to me essentially proto-rap battles. But I especially adore the subversive ways Chinese netizens subvert censorship

Second question, are we talking about American humor / verbal abilities in English?

I think we have to take into account that maybe the humor is just different. I was born and grew up in an East Asian country until I'm 18 (albeit at an international school). But after nearly a decade in the US, I can't really enjoy the humor of my home country the same way when I watch their TV anymore. We definitely can't really say that there is lacking in "verbal abilities" when examining historical works or contemporary entertainment industries for countries like China/Japan/Korea. The professionals in those countries are definitely not out of work or love from their audiences (love Stephen Chow).

On the other hand, I do think East Asia's general culture of being deferential means less biting comedy and a general tendency to follow well-worn life paths (doctor/lawyer/engineer) means there are less going into the "chatty" careers (journalism, comedian, writers, youtubers).

I'm not sure I can name a single very articulate East Asian.

Francis Fukuyama and John Yoo come immediately to mind.

But (returning to the object-level) a genius verbal IQ is only meritorious if the person who has it also has prosocial genes and cultural values. As a thought experiment, we can imagine that a sociopath with a high verbal IQ can do a lot of damage to a country, and on the other end a person with a lot of empathy and a high verbal IQ can do a lot of good. The latter person is probably doing groundbreaking journalism, or explaining science to the masses, or taking corporations to court pro-bono, or is an incredible psychiatrist or Scott Alexander type. The former people are doing, I don’t know, political propaganda and “thank you for smoking” stuff and purposely not helping his psychoanalytic clients.

In between the extremes of “sociopath” and “the aunt you have who cried when looking at photos of refugees” (to pick a personal example) there’s probably an amount of prosociality which is greater than some quantity of IQ. I have no idea what the breakdown is, but thinking about it a little bit more, the emotional dimension to prosociality probably necessitates guilt. A person who is apt to feel guilt at their actions is more apt to behave prosocially, because guilt comes in regardless of external surveillance, and shame only comes in when there’s a risk of being caught. Although this wouldn’t explain Japan, which is presumably a shame culture, so maybe back to the drawing board…

I don't think you need to go back to the drawing board, I'd say you have nailed the prerequisite prosocial emotion of an honour culture and it necessarily works differently in a shame culture, where shame takes the top spot. It doesn't fully align, but honour cultures tend to privilege internal locus of control, while shame cultures privilege external locus of control.

But consider —

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200114-why-japan-is-so-successful-at-returning-lost-property

In a study comparing dropped phones and wallets in New York and Tokyo, 88% of phones “lost” by the researchers were handed into the police by Tokyo residents, compared to 6% of the ones “lost” in New York. Likewise, 80% of Tokyo wallets were handed in compared to 10% in New York

The study occurred in 2002, so before the surveillance state. The actions could not be purely motivated from the threat of social judgment. This seems to indicate that the Japanese internalize their shame/honor to such a high degree that it’s intrinsically motivated. But if shame can be so intrinsically motivated, then there are limited practical consequences to a guilt/shame distinction.

Cultural differences are real and meaningful, but in this case I wonder if the difference in honesty looks bigger due to a difference in norms about how to return lost property. Unless I were in a small town, handing a lost wallet in to the police probably wouldn't occur to me, and then it would likely be option two or three.

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Don't many comedians come from broken homes? Maybe Asians have less broken homes and don't feel the need to put themselves on the line in front of a crowd every week.

Quelle surprise, just as everyone remotely intelligent predicted, the SCOTUS case did nothing.

It worked on MIT though, they went down to like 5% black. Yale just needs some federal encouragement.

Harvard's law school made more of an effort to appear to comply as well, although they still seem to be discriminating.

The LSAT is a near-pure verbal IQ test, their options after the ruling were limited but I imagine it will still creep in more over time.

Logic games involve some non verbal thinking. I miss the lsats.

I heard they abolished the logic games?

They did? That’s disappointing. It’s been a long time since I took the LSAT.

Someone on Reddit said it was because it was impossible/unreasonably difficult for blind candidates.

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Logic games were the best part of the LSAT, distinguishing the truly smart from those who merely had very good reading comprehension. This is just the general miasma of enshittification seeping into where ever it can get to.

The test I took had a ridiculously hard logic game that I am convinced was an unscored test question. It wasn't hard in an absolute sense, I think most people with decent intelligence given infinite time could eventually solve all the questions. But it had way more rules than any of my practice questions. I think I got most of them right because I accurately recognized it as very time consuming and skipped the question section, then went back at the end. And I usually finish standardized tests with 50% of the time to spare, give or take 10%. So I basically spent 50% on this silly figurines on a bookshelf subset, and aced the logic section (but I still think I could have scored zero and gotten that score because I dont think that section counted).

Anyways, I agree that the logic games were a good part of the LSAT, much like analogies on the SAT. As is par for the course, modern DEI is bad for quality.

Logic games were easy and consistently the section where the better candidates were most likely to score 100%. Much like the GMAT, it’s the verbal section that captured the tails of the IQ range, as befits a test to determine who would be a good lawyer, rather than a good accountant. It’s actually hard to design g-loaded non-verbal tests that don’t merely devolve into tests of mathematical knowledge, which isn’t really the same thing. Reading comprehension and the word substitution questions (ie verbal IQ tests) are smarts, and it’s increasingly clear that the most successful people are luckier on the verbal IQ front than on the spatial one.

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Black people don't do much, if at all, better on the SAT than on the LSAT. Harvard undergrad made an explicit choice to continue discriminating enough to get a class that's 14% black, but their law school has not. This is an HLS thing, not a general law school thing: Yale Law school is clearly discriminating as hard as ever.

With Trump coming into office, won’t he now have ammunition for his justice dept to go after them? Will he? Maybe we need to send in the National Guard so that Ivy leagues will respect Civil Rights if whites and Asian students

On what basis? The ruling said they can’t nakedly discriminate against Asians on the basis of race, it didn’t demand that they only consider meritocracy (in any case they still clearly have legacies, athletes etc). If Harvard wants admission to be dependent upon some nebulous character assessment that is completely legal unless there is recorded evidence that the assessors involved openly and explicitly discriminate, which there certainly won’t be from now on.

To stop it congress would have to pass a law mandating (for example) that all colleges that receive federal funding must use solely x meritocratic test to determine admissions. I have my doubts that would pass in any event, regardless of what happens with the filibuster.

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok. its even more messed up because i'm pretty sure i've seen them make statements into the public record saying this was exactly what they were planning to do.

Disparate impact is very powerful in Title VII cases that govern employment issues (hence why justice can sue police departments for using IQ tests to hire cops). When it comes to colleges it’s more vague, because the ‘purpose’ of admitting a student isn’t clear (is it to have a diverse class, is it to create the most successful professionals, to produce the highest quality academics, to have a good time and make friends).

it feels weird because this the whole point of 'disparate impact' decisions from the courts in the past. apparently, some groups were coming up with proxies to derive their desired racial preferences instead of using explicit discrimination but now Harvard and other universities are doing exactly that and its magically ok.

No, this isn't the case. The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference. That would have been illegal without accepting "disparate impact" as being a violation in itself.

The Court of Appeals held that the Company had adopted the diploma and test requirements without any 'intention to discriminate against Negro employees.' 420 F.2d, at 1232. We do not suggest that either the District Court or the Court of Appeals erred in examining the employer's intent; but good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups and are unrelated to measuring job capability.](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Company/Opinion_of_the_Court)

The court in Griggs explicitly accepted that Duke Power was NOT using proxies to derive their desired racial preference

"If the court accepts that, than the court is a ass — a idiot."¹

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

The case should have fallen under the doctrine of noli meiere in cruro et dicere pluviam.

¹Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist.

The Wonderlic test was first written in 1939; Duke Power Co. only adopted it as a requirement on the same day they could no longer legally discriminate directly on the basis of race.

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

...So on the day the law said they could no longer screen by race, they stopped screening by race and started screening by IQ test. And this proves to you that they were still screening by race, because they... complied with the law to stop discriminating by race?

The fact that they explicitly discriminated by race as long as they could legally do so indicates mens rea; that they sought to exclude Black Americans for being Black Americans.

What screening method should they have switched to, in your view?

The same method they used to screen white people prior to the Civil Rights Act.

@The_Nybbler:

Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

That would have been somewhere in the vicinity of a plausible conclusion if, sometime between 1939 and 1964, Duke Power Co. had started requiring an IQ test for all applicants and stopped considering their race. The fact that they made the change not when the Wonderlic test was introduced, not when overt racial discrimination was becoming frowned upon, not when the Civil Rights Act passed Congress, but at the very last moment they thought they could get away with, points toward the grown-up equivalent of hovering one's finger 5 mm from someone's face while saying "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!".

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Ass or not, the court accepted it. Perhaps they felt Duke Power was not using the Wonderlic as a proxy for race, but had been using race as a proxy for what the Wonderlic measures.

What I would give to see the president of Harvard standing in the schoolhouse door to block qualified Asians from enrolling

Makes me wonder- if you just show up at university classes, what would happen?

This was the premise of the 1965 TV comedy Hank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_(1965_TV_series)

(This was one of my favorite shows that year.) (Yes, I'm old.)

Nothing. You are fundamentally misunderstanding what universities do. The classes themselves are borderline useless. You are paying in time and money for a credential, which they will deny you in this scenario.

So you’re saying that if I want to improve gaps in my math skills, I should just show up to university math classes and follow along?

That would work for a motivated individual with a decent amount of background. The real students will even happily let you do their homework for them further improving your skills even more!

Generally you can just show up and attend most classes. A lot of the time they even upload lectures online so you can go through them at your own pace as you wish. Very good way to learn a new topic you were always interested in (this is how I learned about optics).

If there's space for another person to sit and you give the professor a head's up that you wish to attend because of your interest in the material, he or she will likely be thrilled that you may very well be increasing the population of such attendees in the class by a factor of infinity.

In a big lecture? Almost certainly nothing, assuming you can get into the building without a student ID. In a small class? You’d probably get found out because your name wouldn’t be on the attendance sheet. But even then, I wouldn’t be surprised if a passionate instructor turned a blind eye out of respect for your dedication to learning for its own sake.

The reason why approximately no one does this is that you don’t get a diploma out of it at the end.

Some older people do this, it’s called ‘auditing’ officially but in practice if you email the professor and they’re not super famous they’re usually happy to just invite you as a guest, you get a visitor’s badge and then walk in. Until the post-9/11 security state and the rise of the ubiquitous security door pretty much every college lecture hall in the West was completely open and you could just walk in, as I understand it.

It is well past time to end the tax exempt status for these universities. If anything, I want to see a higher tax rate…

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

At MIT, black admissions dropped from 13% to 5%. This is still evidence of a significant thumb on the scale, but it's not nothing.

More accurately, some schools are openly defying SCOTUS, others not as much.

It’s like some kind of... “Massive Resistance”

I think bringing back standardized test score requirements also played a role

Hmm, what was the black percentage before they went test-optional (which was of course also pre-SFFA v. Harvard)?

Indepedent of the race split, we would also get a huge gender split which I find interesting. (And would we possibly get an overrepresentation of nonbinary individuals?)

Let's assume a complete meritocracy based on SAT scores. According to this, the admitted students in Yale have an average SAT score of 1540. Since we disregard anything else now though, it will probably be even higher. However, at the 1400–1600 SAT range we already have 6% women and 9% men. Since we know the tail end of the IQ distribution is longer for men, and 1540 is almost in the upper quartile of 1400 to 1600, we would probably get a distribution of less than 30% women.

As a side note, according to this the average SAT of someone putting "Another/ No Response" as gender is 1067 in comparison to 1029 for men and 1018 for women. Huh, I wonder why that is. Few explanations that come to my mind are politically correct.

Part of the answer is probably that being smart is correlated with thinking that being asked for your gender on a test is stupid and irrelevant. I'm not necessarily saying that it is stupid and irrelevant, but I could easily imagine the teenage me putting "Another / No Response" instead of "Male" on the question just because my attitude to the question would likely have been "Fuck you, why do you give a shit?". Also, some people might just put that answer as a joke. There are very many smart people who are annoyed by schooling and SAT tests and would enjoy giving the whole thing a middle finger.

Commenting here since it is the topmost reply.

Deleted by author

New year, same old tricks.

Mods: can you please undelete top level comments when this person deletes them?

We can conclude that there are a lot of white and Asian men who are not getting the academic degrees they would get in a meritocracy. Then the question becomes where do these men end up and how to invest in these sectors. Typically high status low paying jobs such as author, human rights lawyer, journalist, professor etc are being ethnically cleansed of white men while other elite institutions are having an under representation of white men. These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.

Men just in general have a lot of options that don’t depend on college available to them. Middle class Americans tend to discourage their daughters from military enlistment(reasonably in my view), and women don’t make it in the trades.

It’s no tragedy to be making bare six figures(that’s still what, top five percent) with a house and a family.

Men just in general have a lot of options that don’t depend on college available to them. Middle class Americans tend to discourage their daughters from military enlistment(reasonably in my view), and women don’t make it in the trades.

Well, women have a lot of options men don't have, such as merely existing and Meeting Someone who makes any financial concerns go away for them. College can aid in finding such a man, but it's hardly a necessary nor sufficient condition.

It’s no tragedy to be making bare six figures(that’s still what, top five percent) with a house and a family.

Chael Sonnen describes here the horrors of coming from a family where, in some years, his father barely made six figures.

Well, women have a lot of options men don't have, such as merely existing and Meeting Someone who makes any financial concerns go away for them.

Many men also have that option, it's just that, like the women in question, they have to be willing to have sex with women whom they are not very attracted to, or not attracted to at all. One of the most common types of drama stories from low-income communities, for example, is "I pay the bills of this guy I'm fucking and he doesn't even commit to me".

College can aid in finding such a man, but it's hardly a necessary nor sufficient condition.

While this is true, the most reliable path to becoming a homemaker for a secular ethnic majority woman is to study math homework in the engineering commons of your university and bring baking to thank that engineering student for being a much better teacher than your professors.

These men are probably not all giving up on life just because they didn't get into Yale.

My guess is that many of them go into professions with higher pay but lower status, skilled trades, HVAC, property and construction (all roles), B2B sales, corporate roles at medium to large companies that aren’t Fortune 500s with woke hiring programs, many go into tech.

Trades pay gets massively exaggerated- we get teacher money for the most part, except the guys who work 100 hour weeks.

That being said, teachers definitely make a living wage, and ‘living wage, plus dating opportunities with dumber than you women, plus the ability to live in a shitty neighborhood with no problems’ is an appealing pitch for more men than women by a long shot.

a shitty neighborhood with no problems

?

Tradesmen can live in a much lower rent neighborhood before for similar levels of crime concern than white collar workers making equivalent money.

An artifact of the audience, to live in a clean well ordered suburb in a southern or midwestern city is considered "shitty" by most of of the users here because it is naturally "lower status" than living in a condo in New York or LA. That the latter is far more likely encounter litteral shit/feces on the sidewalk than the former is just a fun bit of irony.

The difference between a "shitty" nieghborhood, and a shit nieghborhood.

I recall reading the observation on this forum and on Reddit that such suburban living combines all the disadvantages of urban and rural living. Maybe that’s what these users have in mind? The lack of walkable neighborhoods and third places, your neighbors being boorish and boring etc?

lack of walkable neighborhoods and third places

This is anti-rural slander / urbanist propaganda.

Our neighborhood is walkable, there's not really anywhere to walk to except nature trails and neighbors houses. There is a pub and two churches that many would consider their third places.

Wildlife is great too. https://imgur.com/a/bTanUVX

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A guy who has a 1500+ and doesn't get into Yale doesn't go into trades, he goes to U of either in his own state or with the state adjacent to his waiving out of state tuition. I know, I am such a person. I got rejected by Ivies and went on full ride to an out of state, state school. Then I got a full ride to a different law school.

I am in an industry without many H1Bs, but people a half or quarter std below me are exactly the sort of people the recent H1B kerfuffle was about. Maybe they merely got a half scholarship to engineering school and merely graduated with a 3.7 instead of a full ride and 3.9. Those Americans are perfectly capable of doing the job. I worked with them on many projects.

Not that such kids can't go into HVAC. But that is kinda silly long term. Unless you figure out how to run a business, HVAC blows out your back at 55 almost guaranteed. Then where are you?

They go to some other university and are later working professionals.

People are saying the trades but that's delusional. People who apply to Yale are going to go to a safety school, not drop out of college all together.

Nothing is fair except double-blind lottery by SAT cutoff. It would be interesting to see the student mix that creates, but it won't happen.

So do you believe the rest of the application like the motivation texts and maybe some smaller questions (depends on the university, it's been a little while since I used Common App) should not matter at all? Even though there can be tremendous differences personality-wise in students with equal SAT scores, and assuming we are aiming to train America's future elite in the top universities, those can have a significant effect?

For example leadership, agreeableness, emotional intelligence, and discipline come to mind. I would strongly prefer a disagreeable charismatic student getting the spot over someone who is essentially a drone and exclusively studying all day. Of course, those skills are barely quantifiable in general and probably hard to determine based on a thousand words, but it should be a good estimate already.

In other words, is "fair" referring to the fact that SAT correlates strongly with IQ and we just want the highest IQ individuals, which is a point I can see, or a moral judgment differentiating by what we could call "aptitude", in which case my text applies?

The problem with a lot of that stuff lends itself well to selecting for things that signify race, or wealth, or being a progressive. An essay about an experience that changed your life is going to naturally give off all kinds of demographic data. You going to a public school for the first time at age ten and meeting your first poor kid signals wealth. You volunteering overseas signals wealth. You doing church work signals conservative values and working for a nonprofit signals liberal values. It’s almost impossible that you can look very deep at stuff like that and not be able to know who the person is.

I agree with you that many of those characteristics could potentially be important. The disagreement is that obviously college admissions professors are unqualified, or even anti-qualified, to make such evaluations.

Modern SAT is too easy that a single silly oversight like filling in the wrong bubble for a question on the MATH section leads to you not getting 800, and then you're screwed. We need something like STEP Mathematics to truly distinguish the great from the merely very good.

I'd expect the winning distribution would be something like 70% Asian (of all types), 25% white and 5% other. Most importantly it would create volcanic eruption levels of seethe both on the left and the right.

I'd expect the winning distribution would be something like 70% Asian (of all types), 25% white and 5% other

Wouldn't that depend on where you set the cut-off?

Or Gaokao. The problem with making these tests harder is that you now need more tests than just reading, writing and mathematics. Do all college applicants have to be great at mathematics, no matter their major?

I can confirm that STEP is hard (I had to take it, had a bad time and barely squeezed in), but in general I'm not convinced that the Anglo-style maths exams are quite testing for the right of thing. Compared to what you get in other countries, in all of them the test-taker is bottlenecked on speed - if you are faced with a question where you do not immediately recognise the structure and have memorized a solution algorithm, it is always advantageous to skip it and jump to another one where you have rather than spend any time on problem-solving to create a strategy rather than recall it. Of course performance on such a test is correlated with intelligence to a fair extent (after all, you need to build a good mental data structure to pattern-match the problems and remember all the different solution algorithms, and to execute a possibly quite complex algorithm which might involve symbol-pushing or spatial imagination quickly), but it is correlated with discipline and commitment even more (since the person who sat down and drilled example questions will have a tremendous advantage), and in my view there is in fact a principal component contributing to "speed" that is independent of "intelligence", which naturally matters as well.

Now you could argue that testing for discipline and commitment over intelligence is actually the test working as intended and part of the required notion of "merit", and perhaps all of the above is me coping and seething because I'm a lazy and undisciplined bum and almost got humbled by this type of exam (I can't fully deny), but the question is if you really want to have something as life-changing as university admissions hinge on a metric that is so trainable and even attainable by coercion. Sure, you could say that it is good that the gifted-but-lazy kid is sidelined by the kid who, due to natural discipline, sat down for three hours every day of his last two years of school and practiced past SAT/STEP questions. What if the latter kid then is sidelined by the kid whose parents locked him up and made him practice the questions for every waking hour since he turned 12, not allowing him to socialise and withholding food if he slacks off? As college becomes more of a prerequisite for success and discipline-based exams become more of a prerequisite for college, the dominant strategy becomes something like the South Korean childhood on steroids. Sure, in the limit of everyone having to play along with this equilibrium strategy the test once again becomes the reflection of 60% discipline plus 30% intelligence plus X or whatever it was in a state of nature, but what is the cost to society?

(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)

(Then of course there are the more common objections that some last-minute transfers from other life paths, gifted-but-lazy types and "slow but deep thinkers" are in fact also beneficial for the intellectual ecosystem and need a path to admission, which is of course also more cope.)

I agree with all of this except the jab at “slow but deep thinkers”. I think that with regard to mathematical talent specifically, there really is a pool of talented/high-IQ individuals who punch below their weight in math competitions where speed is important, like the AMC and AIME. This is a shame, because the USAMO and IMO are much more “slow but deep”-loaded, but you can’t qualify for them unless you get past the AIME. The USAMTS (a proof-based exam taken over the course of multiple weeks) helps alleviate this disadvantage somewhat, but it still only helps you skip the AMC level; I wish there were a second round of USAMTS for skipping the AIME and advancing to USAMO.

To be completely fair, I think the absolute cream of the crop in mathematical talent are both fast and deep, and hence the current system of contests will correctly identify them. We are certainly not at risk of being unable to field a competitive IMO team, or of failing to identify those who are most likely to become HYPSM math faculty in a decade or so.

But the “second string” of talent tends to be underserved until their strengths shine through in late undergrad/early grad school—assuming they stick with math that long, which sadly many don’t because they incorrectly think (on the basis of math contests) that they’re not good enough for graduate-level math research.

The specific mechanism by which being “deep” helps with research is having a holistic understanding of how different concepts in math relate to one another, and having a greater ability to perceive similarities/analogies between disparate things, which is important when bringing techniques from vastly different subfields of mathematics to bear on unsolved problems; this happens all the time in number theory, for instance, and it’s also what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry. See also: the Langlands program.

“Fast but shallow” thinkers, on the other hand, are good at quickly pattern-matching problems to known solution techniques, which is also important: you won’t get anywhere in math without a well-developed, organized, and quickly-accessible stock of knowledge in your noodle. But they tend to be unable to generalize/extend/apply those techniques to very different domains.

Full disclosure: I was a “slow but deep” thinker with regard to math when I was in school and I may be just a little bit salty about my lackluster performance in time-constrained math contests.

what Grothendieck did when he revolutionized algebraic geometry

This brings back bad memories.

Full disclosure: I've always been a "fast but relatively superficial" thinker with regards to basically everything. As you can expect I did very well at Olympiads until the questions got to about IMO level, and yes my performance was better in earlier years of undergrad vs later (though still extremely good even in the later years).

"49%- speak a language other than English at home or as a first language"

Given an 11% international share that's genuinely pretty fucking weird.

Not that weird, plenty of citizens speak a different language at home (I'm one and I grew up with a bunch of others).

Given how many people are probably lying about being Hispanic, I'm pretty sure that a big chunk of that is lies.

Adding Asian and Hispanic numbers to International would get you over 50%, assuming they all claim to speak a language other than English at home. Sounds like the kind of thing that might net you extra Diversity Points on your application?

https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Stolen from an comment on reddit

This seemed like the most relevant and important part:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.

This sounds like science fiction right now, and somewhat crazy to even talk about it. That’s alright—we’ve been there before and we’re OK with being there again. We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care, while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment, is so important.

I think you meant this down lower, and not as a top level comment.

Oops.

Extant hominids, anyway. I don't think it affects the arguments over the Neanderthal or whether H. Habilis and H. Erectus are the same species.

Vegas VBIED and NJ Drone Crossover Event

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xglaXVtQcis?si=ysIxFOPjPZdtHVOG

Nothing is better than a good crossover episode and it appears that the latest twist in the Las Vegas Trump Hotel bombing continues from last years cliffhanger NJ Drones episode.

The Shawn Ryan Show (B list independent media podcast) released an episode today that was an interview with Sam Shoemate (D List Instagram account that highlights military corruption and malfeasance). Between Jan 29-30, Sam was contacted by someone alleging to be Matt Berg with an urgent request to pass along his info to Shawn Ryan, Pete Hegseth, and Fox News. Sam was in contact with the alleged Mr. Berg on signal and ultimately received an email claiming that Mr Berg was on the run, escaping to Mexico, and that the USG was hot on his trail and potentially trying to kill him. Fortunately for Mr Berg, he had a Vehicle Bourne Improvised Explosive Device (VBIED) which apparently had held them off. This email also made at least two explosive claims.

  • The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems. They were a “show of force” by China, tasked with SIGINT and ISR, similar to the spy balloons from a few years ago. Mr Berg alleges that the US and China are the only countries that have this tech and that its an extremely dangerous situation, for obvious reasons. The implications being that we both have this future-tech that presents a MAD scenario.
  • That the USG committed some war crimes in Afghanistan in 2019 where we bombed obvious civilian targets and then covered it up. There is some link to the CIA, DEA, and DOD and the US covered this up and got away scott free. There are lots of other details about this but this is the jist of it.

Its unclear to me which of the two claims were the bigger deal to Mr Berg. He’s obviously distressed about the China drones, but he spends a lot of time on the war crimes as well.

Back to the story – Sam, the recipient of the email, writes this off as an unverifiable crackpot and sits on it. Until the news breaks on Jan 2 that Mr Berg blew himself up under very strange circumstances at a Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. It appears from what I am seeing right now that the mainstream media and Las Vegas sheriff has confirmed that email that Shawn Ryan published is from Matt Livelsberger. Even if they didn’t, there are plenty of details that made this seem to be extremely likely.

I think we can table the war crimes issues for the moment and just focus on the China drones.

This email, in an of itself, certainly doesn’t prove anything about the origins of the drones, but it certainly is a curious claim. Mr Bergs military MOS would potentially put him in a position to be read in on advanced US drone programs. There are a number of people in the independent media world who have made the case that the USG has been running black physics programs and cracked gravity 70 years ago. People usually respond to this with ridicule and note that something like this could never be kept secret. Personally, I just add this to the growing list of leakers and dot connectors that indicate that the UAP phenomenon is at least in part, terrestrial black projects that have access to what we would otherwise call science fiction technology.

If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table. What other energy sources would be able to explain UAPs the size of small cars that fly with anti-gravity drives. Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy. This would also explain why the USG changed their stance on this topic in the last 5-10 years. China has caught up with whatever we’ve been doing for a long time.

What do you all think of this? Hoax? Crazy person? Legit whistleblower? There are ton of threads to pull here. Is Mr Berg even dead? Did he fake his death in order to get a big spotlight on this?

The idea that the huge uptick in UFO sightings in the last ~5 years is due to china catching up to the US in whatever this secret "antigravity" propulsion system is holds some water with me. Something has definitely been happening. To quote the email:

What we have been seeing with "drones" is the operational use of gravitic propulsion systems powered aircraft by most recently China in the east coast, but throughout history, the US.

There have been a lot of military sightings of UFOs in the last five years and it really appears like they really are a mystery to the military, or at least the military people who see them. Among people who assume the craft are terrestrial (they obviously are) the prevailing theory has been that they are American tech being used on unknowing American military assets, both as a test of the capabilities and perhaps as a show of force with an "FYI that's us" note quietly slipped to the Chinese. I think that might explain some (most notable the USS Nimitz Tic Tacs), but not all the encounters, and I think that there's an American-centric bias that precludes a lot of people considering they might be somebody else's tech.

This is a particularly crazy example, and is exactly what I'd expect a chinese show of force of drones with secret propulsion tech to look like: https://www.twz.com/43561/mysterious-drone-swarms-over-navy-destroyers-off-california-went-on-for-weeks

I don’t think so. The military isn’t going to let it out of the bag that they’re testing new technology. It would be silly in an age of global communication to say “hey, everybody, these aren’t UFOs. They’re super top secret military technology that we’re testing and calibrating our detection systems to recognize. Stop asking if it’s Spock.” And it’s also not inconceivable that military people might pretend to the public that they don’t know what’s going on. The lack of these things appearing anywhere other than US naval bases is rather odd, as it would seem like if I wanted to scare American military people, I’d want to go as deep into American territory and be over the most valuable military bases (which are probably Air Force and Space Force, not Navy). Furthermore, if they aren’t ours, I think our tolerance for them buzzing about our assets is probably pretty low, even if we didn’t shoot one down, we’d likely have a drone or two of our own pushing these things away.

Anti gravity seems a bit far fetched. It’s overkill for the purpose of getting these things airborne. If such a thing exists, it’s likely several million dollars a drone. There are dozens of these things. That’s not including fuel or power cells to support it.

The military isn’t going to let it out of the bag that they’re testing new technology.

I mostly agree, very risky to reveal new military tech before it's fully tested. But I personally think these are mature technologies being used in a show of force, not prototypes being tested.

The lack of these things appearing anywhere other than US naval bases is rather odd

They have appeared in very many places; the article I linked is about them appearing out to sea off the coast of California. That is a very difficult place to deploy anything, especially for American adversaries. It sends a very strong message about naval capability and threat.

I think our tolerance for them buzzing about our assets is probably pretty low, even if we didn’t shoot one down, we’d likely have a drone or two of our own pushing these things away.

The article I link talks about the ships trying to shoot them down. Did you read it?

Anti gravity seems a bit far fetched.

Don't get too fixated on "antigravity" as meaning anything technically specific. "Novel propulsion system" is probably how you should think of it.

The idea that the huge uptick in UFO sightings in the last ~5 years is due to china catching up to the US in whatever this secret "antigravity" propulsion system is holds some water with me.

The contrary question is this – why were their UFO flaps well before China was a military power at all? "China sending antigravity drones over the White House as a show of force" tracks, but in 1952? I think the contrary position is that sometimes there are UFO flaps, and if there are other things (US government testing, lots of drone use, balloons/drones as a use-of-force/recon assets) happening at the same time, they get mixed in with the reporting.

(With that being said, though, it kinda seems like Mr. Berg may have been [intentionally?] pattern-matching with a specific "'leak'" alleging Chinese reverse-engineered antigravity tech that came out on the world's only reliable website back in 2023. I don't think I buy it, but certainly that would make neat narrative work of both the "Chinese antigravity drones" and the Cold War flaps.)

"UFO" in the traditional sense (ostensibly alien spacecraft) has been used as a disinformation tactic since the late 40s. It worked at Roswell (which was, in fact, a crashed secret American balloon) so it got rolled into the strategies used to cover up secret military projects. I'm making up these percentages, but I'd say 75% of UFO sightings are totally banal misidentifications, 10% of them are outright fakes, 9% of them are unknown-to-the-public aircraft or other tech, and 1% are legitimately weird shit that nobody understands.

This may be a very long-winded way of saying "I agree with you," but I suppose we'll see:

I agree that UFOs are or have been used to cover other sensitive programs, but if you read US released government correspondence from the 1940s, it seems that there was a bottom-up aspect to this (coming through reporting channels, including official ones) and legitimate concern in official circles. For instance, in a July 1947 FBI memo (post-Roswell), we learn that General Schulgen reached out to the FBI to take initial reports of UFOs from citizens. Mr. Fitch, writing the memo for D.M. Ladd, head of the FBI's counterintelligence division, says that he was told by Schulgen that research was underway to see if UFOs were celestial objects, mechanical objects, or hysteria, possibly spread by "individuals of Communist sympathies". Fitch adds his personal note, saying that a lot of the alleged sightings are pranks and that it would, essentially, accomplish nothing to sic the Bureau on this.

There are several handwritten notes on the memo. One of them, possibly from Clyde Tolson, reads "I think we should do this." The other, believed to be from Hoover himself (although I can't read handwriting so I can't personally vouch for that) concurs, but says that "before agreeing...we must insist upon full access to discs recovered...in the ?? case the Army grabbed it & would not let us share[?] it for cursory examination"

Possibly the US disinformation apparatus is so advanced that it creates breadcrumbs in private documents that aren't likely to be released until after the death of the authors, but that seems unlikely to me. More likely is that J. Edgar Hoover was having the wool pulled over his eyes by General Schulgen. But Schulgen wrote a memo in October of 1947 (again, post-Roswell) expressing concern that the flying saucers were real – and were Soviet. He articulated the characteristics of flying saucers as seen by observers and requested technical data on the characteristics of a flying disk. He was particularly interested in the possibility that the disks had an ancestry in the Horten designs developed for Nazi Germany during World War Two and mentions a report indicating the Russians were "planning to build a fleet of 1,8000 Horten VIII (six engine pusher) type flying wing aircraft" (needless to say, the Russians never did this).

Now, interestingly (and to your point) a fake version of this document was circulated that was altered to play up a potential extraterrestrial explanation and downplay or remove the Russian angle – make of that what you will. But it seems clear that if there was an alien psyop shortly after Roswell then not only did Schulgen not get the memo but he didn't even get the intended message about the flying saucers being aliens.

But the evidence I've seen suggests strongly that, in the 1940s, either USAF general staff were hoisted by their own disinformation petard, or they were legitimately concerned about the reported characteristics of "flying discs" and the geopolitical implications. I think it's more likely that there were reported genuinely anomalous UFO phenomena, which were reported during the Second World War and in years prior. In fact there's some surviving evidence from alleged Italian government correspondence that not only were they sighted in the 1930s, but one crashed in Italy in 1933; unfortunately I am not familiar enough with things like "the norms of Italian government telegrams in the 1930s" to have a strong opinion about this. To the extent that it's a US/USAF psyop (which I agree is more than 0%) I suspect they are piggybacking on an existing, genuine phenomena (which may not be "real" but was real enough to be a genuine cause for concern).

very interesting, thanks.

Knowing nothing about this but your comment, it occurs to me that a combination of compartmentalization and Shulgen just being a kooky general could be sufficient. But also, you are right, there is a lot of unexplained weirdness that is insufficiently captured by "it's just disinfo."

Yeah, sufficient compartmentalization can lead to very weird results (and I think does explain some of the weirdness we see around the UFO topic). But on the other hand, at a certain point it's much easier for me to believe that the weirdness around UFOs is because they're "real" than some 18D chess by omnicompetent Air Force counterintelligence nerds. Particularly when the military – which has a direct financial incentive to tell Congress that everyone and their mother is some sort of a threat – settles on something like "well okay sure fine UAP are 'real' and we don't know what they are but it's probably not a big deal."

That is the claim made by the guy who blew up the cybertruck, not a claim made by OP.

For what it's worth:

I was told several years ago by someone I trust that there is a US military aircraft that has an alternative propulsion system that allows it to disable it's conventional engines and cruise at speed totally "dark", no heat signatures and no noise, and that the method of propulsion involved something like applying a significant electrical charge to the leading and trailling edges of the aircraft. I know this guy had a job in the military that would have exposed him to this information in the course of his work, and he was a smart, level headed person.

I've always been interested in secret government projects, especially planes, and the coincidental evidence I've dug up over the years seems to point to electro-gravitics or something similar being a well-developed and classified technology.

I'm leaning towards the drone thing being true.

Incidentally, while we're talking about it, I think that some of the most high-profile UFO sightings of the past and also recently (most notably the USS Nimitz "tic tac" videos) are this technology: https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/bluefire-main/bluefire/particle-beams-and-saucer-dreams/

Publicly acknowledged (though in a different scope) here: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2019/07/19/pentagon-scientists-are-making-talking-plasma-laser-balls-for-use-as-non-lethal-weapons/

Check out this video that discusses how an early versions of this tech is potentially used on the B2.

B2 chapter about 30 min in.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTEWLSTyUic?si=qczONxEQgg6XfIiP

I'm going to check this out, thanks for posting. FWIW I once straight-up asked a B-2 engineer in a casual setting about this, and he denied it. But perhaps he misunderstood, or was doing his job.

Bingo.

Applying a significant electrical charge to leading and trailing edges of a wing can get you silent thrust, but it's not antigravity, it's just a form of ion thruster that uses the atmosphere itself as reaction mass:

https://hackaday.com/2016/07/13/expanding-horizons-with-the-ion-propelled-lifter/

And it's hard to make useful, because the catch is that you'd need about a million times more thust if you even wanted to lift your own power supply rather than be tethered to it. I suppose maybe you could combine the idea with beamed power, but you'd still need line-of-sight to a powerful ground station, and regardless your craft wouldn't resemble an airplane so much as a spiderweb.

You'll notice I didn't use the word "antigravity" in my post, and in general I think the posters here missing the forest for that specific tree and getting a little fixated on it as a literal term.

I think that the tech being public in a more rudimentary form makes it much more likely that it exists in a more capable form on classified projects.

The thing that sticks out to me about the 'gravitic drive' drone claim is just... why?

The claim that it's China is fine in and of itself, though it could be any number of other actors who have a motive. It's the claim that these specific drones have super-special high-tech propulsion.

Even if you believe this is a secret technology hidden by both the US and PRC governments, and thus the US 'has' the tech, the US civilian sector does not, and that's where you start getting into a risk-vs-reward of how it's not just a risk if the US government captures an drone to steal the tech, but if anyone else in the US happens to knock down a drone to steal the tech. Which, given the characterization of many of the actual drones, would totally be possible with... a non-gravitic drive drone.

Moreover, the gravity drive claim is totally unnecessary because, again, other drones. You don't need a special high-tech Chinese drone to fly over sites and do a show of force to insinuate what you could do if you wanted. You could use a low, commercial-off-the-shelf Chinese drone, like they do in Ukraine. Not only would this be far cheaper, it's also be far safer (negating risk of tech loss) and increase your attribution defense (if only the PRC could do a grivitic drone, it lowers down the possible culprits).

The gravitic drive claim is an element that weakens rather than strengthens whatever other points might be had. Literally removing it entirely would make the China claims more credible, since it adds on additional credibility requirements (that the PRC could use secret tech in such a way, and that the PRC would use secret tech in such a way) for no real benefit.

Two things:

  1. The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.

  2. The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"

The email clearly says that the US already has the technology, and that China only recently attained it. So no risk of the US knocking down a drone and stealing the tech.

No.

Unlike a strategy game, technology is not universally shared across a country the moment any part of the country gets access to it. If [insert technology here] is a highly-sensitive, advanced, and secret technology, it means that technology is not being used in the commercial sector. If it was being used commercially, it (a) wouldn't be a secret, and (b) wouldn't a monopoly possession for long. Everyone would be aware of it and stealing it immediately and incorporating it itself, unless you start inventing unobtanium requirements to allow a monopolgy.

If the drones are a state secret- regardless of whether they are an American state secret as well or not- then any risk of anyone in the US knocking down the drone is a risk of the American corporate sector stealing the tech, regardless of whether some other US government lab had something similar already.

The entire point of the "show of force" in this case would be a demonstration that China has this novel propulsion system and can successfully deploy it over the US. "Why drop nukes on Japan, it would so much cheaper to just drop conventional bombs?"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's a bad demonstration concept for such a point. For a demonstration to work, it needs to be clearly identified as a demonstration as opposed to something more banal and normal, and it needs to be clearly attributed to someone in particular.

The drone swarms were not a self-evident demonstration of technological capability because unknown drone incursions can be done by literally anyone with the budget for commercial off the shelf drones. There is no technological need for 'gravity drive' drones. Somone may have been yesteryear years old when they learned that governments have a hard time tracking such things, but it's been discussed for over a decade at this point. This wasn't even the first media cycle about unknown drones over locations.

Nor are the drone swarms self-evidently Chinese in origin. Precisely because the drones are in the technological capacity of any commercial UAS producer, the drones would need to signal a characteristic / capacity that only the intended signaller could do. Otherwise, anyone could claim credit, or mis-attribute. While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities. In fact, more immediate suspects- not yet disproven either- include Russia, due to the far more proximal and relevant deterrence issue of the Ukrainian arms issues of the time.

If the Chinese wanted to send an unambiguous, exclusive signal that they had a unique capability able to reach the US, they could literally just upload a video of it on TikTok.

Instead, the attribution of the Chinese plan hinges on... the credibility of a hostile and possibly mentally unwell dude.

Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").

Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.

While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.

You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.

You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.

Your first (threat of non-gov entities getting the tech) is a good one, though imo not conclusive. Perhaps they made the bet that no one would shoot one down? Perhaps something about the tech makes them particularly hard to shoot down (this would align with the email's bit about "fly one over the white house").

This is inventing justifications to rationalize continuing to assume the conclusion that there is a novel tech-based reasoning, as opposed for considering alternative hypothesis that don't require the assumption in the first place.

Simply as a matter of risk-management, there is no reason to have secret test flights within the continental US in risk of other actors the first place.

Re your second: No, China could simply send a private communication to the US saying "FYI the thing that's about to happen over NJ is us", do something with the drones that would require the spooky tech (e.g. depending on what the tech actually is it could be to fly one into controlled airspace without being detected, to do otherwise impossible maneuvers, etc) and voila, effective show of force. You have to remember that we are not the intended audience, the US government is. This played out over and over during the cold war, there is lots of precedent for it.

Again, this is a bad signaling scheme. If the US government rather than the US public were the intended audience, the demonstration would have been in places for special US government attention rather than US population attention.

Note, also, that you are interjecting new theories that the originator didn't claim to support the originator's theory. The dude who killed himself did not claim China sent a private communication, and he happened to (somehow) be privy to it. Instead, we are evolving the conspiracy theory where the guy not only had knowledge of secret technology, but also had access to secret lines of communication between the American and Chinese governments, while his means of knowing either weren't important enough for his suicide note.

Again- Drones intruding in places they are not supposed to be is not new, novel, nor does it require exceptional technology. A super-secret-high-tech drone that acts within the spectrum of commercial-off-the-shelf drones is indistinguishable to a government from the typical variances (benign and malign) of commercial-off-the-shelf drones. What made last quarter's drone reports notable wasn't the mechanics of them happening, but the unusual amount of media attention about them from three different media news cycles, none of which were from the same impetus (or which claimed novel technologies).

If the goal is to have a secret-awareness with only the US government of a new super-capable Chinese UAV, however, there is much simpler- and safer- locations to do so. Namely, Guam in the Pacific (a critical US strategic site for any US-China conflict), or any US carrier group in the Pacific. Not only would these have far greater signalling potential of military penetration capabilities, but they'd have the benefits of securing Chinese technology capabilities/limits by hiding from the Americans what the Chinese 'equivalent' can/cannot do.

Instead, what happened returns to the point that there is no clear public signal, despite having allegedly been done in public places for signaling purposes, revealing no obvious new technological capability despite significant public demonstrations, with no clear attribution beyond the requisite assumption of one of various potential actors.

While unique technology could be a signal, there is no evidence that a unique technology was used, because everything that has been verified is well within conventional COTS capabilities.

You emphatically do not know this. We know there were classified congressional briefings about the drones, so there is clearly information about these drones that is not public. It seems pretty obvious that if there were evidence of a classified technology being used, the government would prefer to keep that from the public.

This is reversing the burden of proof to assume secret evidence to assume a conclusion.

'The drone is made of classified technology' is just one of many basis for a classified briefing. Other reasons include not knowing the technology of the drones and wanting to keep that limitation secret, knowing the technology of the drones but the means of knowing being secret, whether drones and/or purpetrators have been identified/caught being secret regardless of technology secrecy, the briefings revealing the secret capabilities or vulnerabilities of air defense capabilities in north america best kept secret lest copy-cat terrorists want to emulate, etc. etc. etc. The evidence of classified information is not proof of evidence of the conspiracy of the hour- if the contents of classified briefingers were so easily determinable, there would be no use.

Until evidence is provided, there is no evidence. If you simply want to quibble over the semantic need for 'that we know of,' sure, but the premise remains the same: until you have evidence that a unique technology was used, you do not have evidence that a unique technology was used.

Similarly- and by extension- in the absence of evidence by the departed that the claimed unique technology exists, he has not provided evidence to back his claim. A claim is not evidence any more than an accusation is proof.

You are right that the only evidence that we have that the drones were chinese is this one potentially mentally unwell guy. My point is simply that that theory does seem to fit all of the available facts and is possible.

The potentially mentally unwell guy provided no facts not explained by commercial off the shelf technology and his own probable mental state that made suicide on new years eve seem like a compelling message strategy.

On the other hand, there is no available facts indicating gravitic drives, novel technologies, or sudden changes in Chinese threat campaigns to start flying top-secret world-super-power-only technologies over some American metropolitan areas in a country with over a million lawful drones and who knows how many more unregistered drones.

Meanwhile: “The FBI said there is no evidence linking the Las Vegas attack to the New Orleans incident, noting only coincidental use of rental cars, Airbnbs, and military service.”

And you know, the fact that the two attacks happened at almost the exact same time. This all stinks like hell.

TO BE FAIR, New Year's Day is the one day that you would expect people to inadvertently coordinate violent action. But how close were the attacks, are we talking hours or minutes?

I think about 7 and a half hours

The crazy person explanation doesn't really require any extra steps or additional information. He may well have believed that he needed to get this information to Pete Hegseth and that he was staving off the feds by carrying explosives in a rented Cybertruck if he'd had a bad break with reality. I think the simple crazy person explanation more or less puts a bow on a lot of questions along the lines of, "why the hell would he do X?" that I'd had about the choice of hotel, choice of Cybertruck, incompetent bombmaking, and so on. The answers are all that his reasoning had broken from reality and could not reasonably be expected to remain consistent from one moment to the next.

If the US has gravitic secret technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?

In the 1970s Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program because he was keen on the upcoming development of stealth bombers. Republicans hammered him for being weak on defence and eventually reinstated it... Anyway, if the US had an incredible gamechanging technology like this, they wouldn't be spending so much on conventional aircraft. There would be signals and portents.

Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)

There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.

These weapons do have very large political constituencies. But the F-35 alone is supposed to cost over $2 trillion in lifecycle costs. Then there's NGAD and the B-21. NGAD was so expensive they're trying to cut it up and repackage it as a family of systems, that'll probably balloon costs out even further.

In the new report to lawmakers, GAO said the Defense Department now plans to fly the F-35 through 2088, 11 years longer than services most recently anticipated.

2088 is already an insanely long time. I doubt it'll be flying in 2060 in any serious combat role. But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up? Unmanned aviation is the future but surely gravitic propulsion (maybe opening up casual spaceflight/suborbital bombing runs) would render traditional aerospace obsolete.

But surely you wouldn't make such a big bet on a plane if you have technology this promising coming up?

You'd absolutely make this big of a bet even if you knew the planes were barely functional dogshit, especially if you were betting with other people's money and had an incredibly comfortable job lined up with the manufacturer that will be paid for by the bet you just made.

The B-21 almost certainly employs classified "novel propulsion systems", just like the B-2 did.

If the US has unmanned fighter technology, why are they buying all these F-35s?

Pilot mafia. Top Gun Maverick is a great film, that's what USAF officers want to be doing. They don't want nerds sitting at a desk stealing their glory.

Hahaha, pilot mafia throttling the antigravity program so they can still buzz the control tower is...not one of the craziest theories I've seen.

(The truth is though that I don't think unmanned aircraft are yet in a position to replace manned aircraft, and I'm not sure they will be able to fully barring, basically, AGI.)

I'm not singling you out here because I hear this a lot and I wonder... what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot? The pilot can't do damage-control on the plane mid-flight. They don't pick out targets, the sensors achieve lock on. They're not tactically superior, that's been proven with dogfighting simulations even between equally performing jets. It's all fly-by-wire these days, their muscles aren't necessary.

I guess a human might be better at the ethics of 'do we bomb this truck or not, given how close it is to civilians?' But again humans have high variance and it's not clear that this is so.

what is it that pilots do that an AI can't that compensates for the training expense and kinematics costs of having a pilot?

Here is what I think the answer is: recognizing jamming and adapting immediately to new uncatalogued threats or situations. You're correct that at this point modern fighters are basically fusing a human with "AI" so the question of what can humans do better anyway? is a very valid one.

Modern jamming is extremely good. It's hard for human pilots to tell when they are being jammed. [Edit: or at least that's the point of modern jamming/EW/deception programs such a NEMESIS as I understand it, but, to be clear I've never been in a position to personally test this, so take all of this with a grain of salt, bearing in mind that I just read about this stuff for fun.] In fact I think there is a decent chance that it's over for the radar-only bros in the Next Big War, both because of jamming and because using your radar makes you a big ole' target. (F-22 hardest hit!) But I think a human has at least a chance to recognize and understand that he is being jammed even if his fancy computer and his radar does not. That's not really true if you just have the fancy computer and the radar: if the 200 radar targets that appear on your screen suddenly already passed your hardware and software's anti-jamming features, your computer is going to think they are real. A pilot will know that they aren't. Now, as AI gets better and better, this will be less of a problem - maybe you can do deep learning on jamming, maybe you can put Claude in the cockpit and he would realize the 200 targets are fake.

TLDR; we already have AI in the cockpit now and it can almost certainly get fooled by modern jamming/ECM, it's good to have another set of eyeballs in the cockpit.

Secondly, new threats or situations. You touched on this a bit inasmuch as a human might be able to parse an ambiguous ethical situation better than an AI (although I agree, high variance) but consider a situation where the trained tactics fail. Let's take a hypothetical: air war with China, four planes leave the carrier, one comes back. It turns out that towed decoys aren't effective against the latest Chinese air-to-air missile, and the only reason one guy came back was because he goofed up the decoy deployment like an idiot and ended up maneuvering radically to survive the engagement. Now if you had had AIs, none of the planes would have come back. And, worse, you would have had no idea what happened to them, because you were operating on a mission and in an environment without any communication ability over the combat zone. (This is something else that is nice about pilots: they eject from the plane, and they float, so you can recover them a bit more easily than you can a black box at the bottom of the sea).

Now you have to tell all of your pilots "don't deploy decoys, you're going to have to make some very specific maneuvers to defeat the Chinese A2A missile threats." Said and done. And if you have ~AGI computers, you can tell them the same thing too. But if you have anything a bit dumber, you're going to have to rewrite their software on the fly to defeat the new threat. And it's going to suck if all of your software engineers aren't on the boat. (It would also suck if your adversaries got a hold of your codebase, or reverse-engineered it with their own AI, and used it to instruct their AI fighters on how to pwn your AI fighters every single time. Not exactly possible with high-variance humans!)

TLDR; it's not good to have new functionality gated behind civilian software engineers stateside during a time of war. (To be fair, I think the Pentagon recognizes this and is working on in-housing more coders.)

Now, imho, none of this means that AI is useless or that drone aircraft are useless in a peer war. But I suspect that this (and the fighter mafia) is why you're seeing things like the "unmanned wingman" approach being adopted (and not only in the States). The "unmanned wingman" approach basically lets you build aircraft with cutting edge AI and launch them right into combat, but because you aren't taking pilots out of the loop entirely, you'll still retain the flexibility and benefits of having an actual human person in the combat environment.

Maybe that won't be necessary - maybe everything will all go according to plan. But I don't think the AI is quite there yet.

Interesting points. In the back of my mind I was thinking that maybe AI aircraft would be more tactically flexible since you can change up their training in a quick update though I can see how it would also be bad if you had software leaks. But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.

Also one hopes that they'd put visual cameras on the plane. They already do I think, F-35 pilots have AR that lets them see through the plane I believe.

Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.

But the F-35 software has already been leaked to China half a dozen times, they even have gotten some Chinese made parts into the supply chain.

YEP! And an additional concern is that if you had any backdoors in a an AI aircraft to enable it to be remotely controlled, it would be vulnerable to a cyberattack...that could impact 100% of the airborne fleet at once. But I'd be surprised if (on the flip side) we put a fleet of drone aircraft up that couldn't be manned remotely, in case the AI went wonky for whatever reason.

Even then, I still expect that the unmanned aircraft's advantages in price, quality and scale would be enormous. It wouldn't be 4 fighters going out on that mission, you could have 12 or 16 because training fighter pilots is inherently costly and slow. You would have smaller, faster and more agile aircraft, without human limitations. Whatever crazy dodging a human could do, the machine would easily surpass in terms of g-forces. Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

Well, this sounds good, but it's worth considering a few things:

  1. I am open to correction on this, but airframes and associated costs, not pilots, are the constraining factor in aviation. (Easy sanity check: do squadrons have more pilots than airframes? Yes. Do airframes require more maintenance and downtime? Also yes ...probably, Air Force guys gotta hit the golf course I guess...) Removing pilots doesn't remove the logistics footprint, and it doesn't make aircraft dramatically cheaper, which is the pain point. Fighter aircraft are sexy and lots of people want to fly them. I agree that in a high-attrition war training pilots could be a bottleneck, but even then we're likely also hitting aircraft production bottlenecks. If all of our aircraft get shot down, we will still have spare pilots left over. Now, at the point where we start getting robotic logistics, I agree that those advantages start to scale.
  2. Humans don't actually weigh all that much relative to an aircraft. The F-35 is 29,300 pounds empty and nearly 66,000 at max takeoff. Figure 200 pounds for a human operator, 200 pounds for an ejection seat, however much else you want for life support – even if you estimate a human adds a whole ton to the equation, you're looking at, what, 6% dry weight and 3% fully loaded weight? Sure, every little bit counts. I'm just saying it's probably not a miracle.
  3. It's true that robots won't black out from high-G maneuvers, and this will give them an edge. But it's also true that pilots are capable of doing things that they aren't supposed to do, like "flying the aircraft in such a way to do warp the airframe." There are structural limitations to these things, and human pilots are very capable of surpassing them (much to the chagrin of everyone else in the logistical chain.) Removing pilots from the aircraft won't magically make them capable of doing sick dogfighting skills; they still have worry about things like "will this snap my wings off." This, incidentally, raises another point in favor of human pilots – robots presumably will not violate NATOPS to gain an important advantage in a dogfight.
  4. Missiles (which are basically AI-enabled suicide drones) already surpass manned fighter aircraft in terms of ability to pull Gs, but manned fighter aircraft are still capable of defeating them kinematically. Replacing pilots with computers won't likely change this, either.
  5. The expensive parts of an aircraft aren't things like "the ejection seat," it's things like the radar or extremely bespoke metallurgy research for high-performance engines that presumably a purely unnamed force will still need to procure.

Each fighter would have the crushing reflexes of a machine and that ruthless, ultra-honed AlphaGo edge of having spent a trillion hours in simulation evolving superior kills.

Sure. My concern about this is in part because I don't think it will produce high variance. If you make your machines really deterministic, then I think outcomes become more binary, which means you have less opportunities for feedback if those outcomes are binary in a way that you don't like. Machines are extremely predictable and this is not necessarily a good thing. [And if you read the stuff about AI beating pilots in a dogfight it was, IIRC, because it was willing to take head-on gun shots, which aren't preferred by human pilots because it's risky to be nose-on to another fighter aircraft for collision-avoidance purposes. That's interesting – and particularly very relevant, for what is expected to be a small portion of future air combat – but if they've tested them without a human in the loop in a complex "realistic" air combat scenario I haven't heard. Doesn't mean it hasn't happened, though!]

The other thing – and honestly, this might be more relevant than the technical capabilities – is that there will be political resistance to outsourcing decision-making entirely to a machine. At what point do you want a machine to be making decisions about whether to shoot an aircraft with a civilian transponder? Even if machines can make those decisions, people will feel more comfortable knowing the important decisions are being made by someone who can be held accountable (and also that a software glitch won't result in all aircraft with civilian transponders being targeted.)

One of the concerns I have about any program that is predicated on being able to communicate with base is that that may be risky or prohibited in a future hostile air environment. This applies to loyal wingman programs and to any sort of drone that's supposed to be able to call back home. This is an entire tangent I could make a lot of ill-informed speculation on. But the TLDR is that if you think you might operate in an environment where you can't call home and there are certain decisions you think your pilots might need to make that you don't want drones to have to make, you'll be needing pilots.

(To be fair, in real life the pilots would typically get ground control sign-off on these sorts of decisions if possible. But if your plan is to let ground control make important decisions, imho you're looking at a fancy remotely-piloted aircraft. And I think that's the direction we are going, at least in part – humans make important engagement decisions, the loyal wingmen will carry them out.)

You could afford to lose those jets on risky missions - even suicide missions if you decided the gains were worth it.

Yep! That's the point of stuff like the loyal wingman program, the jets are "attritable." Same with the optionally-manned aircraft, where you can remove pilots if you assess the mission is very risky. And I think this is a good idea: it hedges bets against weaknesses in AI while opening the door to utilizing them to their fullest potential. I'm not anti-drone, I just don't think the AI is ready for the quantum leap that removing humans from the picture entirely would represent, and it might never be entirely barring AGI-like capabilities.

Previously I said that I didn't think unmanned aircraft were ready to replace manned aircraft, but let me add a bit more nuance – I do think that unmanned aircraft are ready to supplement manned aircraft. I think moving to a world where perhaps we have fewer manned fighters makes sense in the future, possibly now. I think loyal wingman programs are, at a minimum, worth experimenting with. Perhaps in a future generation, we'll be able to take humans out of anything resembling fighter aircraft and move them back to manned control centers, perhaps flying or perhaps on the ground (or perhaps we'll replace aircraft with munitions entirely – there's a point where cheap enough cruise and ballistic missiles make a lot of aircraft pointless). My guess (again, as per loyal wingman) is that we'll see pilots moved back from the frontlines of air combat where possible. I suspect part of the move to this will be precipitated or accelerated, not by AI technology, but by laser technology. New technology may end up making fighter aircraft as we know them obsolete as a class in the future.

But unless we're able to incorporate a pretty intelligent AI into an aircraft, I think that replacing aircraft with AI will look a lot more like "replacing all aircraft with missiles" – which, again, may make sense at a certain point. But it will probably mean that the aircraft we will be employing – again, barring ~AGI – won't be a 1:1 replacement for the capabilities of modern fighters, they will be employed in a different way. Maybe we'll see manned fighter aircraft retained for politically sensitive things like air policing missions, but not for relatively straightforward (and risky!) tasks such as deep penetration strikes on set targets.

If you're curious enough about this I can try to run down an actual pilot of my acquaintance and ask him for his thoughts on our exchange.

More comments

Why does the Air Force still use B-52s when the B-2 exists? Because it would be too expensive to use a two billion dollar bleeding-edge technology top of the line stealth aircraft for every single job.

That's exactly what the F-35 was supposed to be, only it turned into another super-expensive fighter which needs the F-15 EX to handle more everyday missions...

I don't really believe that gravity can just be beaten. I'm pretty sure this is a hoax, psy-op, misunderstanding or such.

And with that said - why can't those mystery drones just use boring old rotors, jets or rocket thrusters to fly? What exactly makes people believe in some fantastical negation of gravity here?

And yes, this is me asking for a spoonfeed because I don't want to wade through a million words of crazy talk.

To spoon-feed you:

  1. The fantastical negation of gravity claim in this instance comes about because of the word "antigravity" in the email, which as far as I am concerned could mean anything that looks like "antigravity" in the movies (and of course there's still the whole question of "was this guy sane" and "did this guy even send this email"?)

  2. This pattern-matches to weird UAP that have been interfering with US Navy flights off of the coast. People's minds start to think "antigravity" because the reported characteristics of the drones are "long-duration, high altitude, supersonic speeds" and their designs are not aerodynamic, but "antigravity propulsion" isn't part of the reported characteristics of those objects – "no visible means of propulsion" is.

But you don't need to believe in "antigravity" to believe that those UAP are real, and you don't need to believe the email mentioning "antigravity" is anything other than somebody making stuff up to believe in...well, antigravity. It's just pattern-matching.

From a certain point of view, helicopters and airplanes are antigravity machines.

My wife, upon telling her very excitedly about all of this: "antigravity is just flying, we already have that."

I don’t really believe that gravity can just be beaten.

The universe lets you do some very strange things, if you’re able to pay the appropriate cost.

Where appropriate is usually somewhere in between prohibitive and practically impossible.

Did he have any evidence? I would think if you were going to blow yourself up to reveal some information you would bring the receipts. Just reads like typical schizo stuff including the paranoia of people trying to kill him. Given the incompetence of his explosive device I think we should have a low estimate of his credibility. And after all that the entity you want entrusted with it is Fox News?

Sergeant Livelsberger...had written in a notes app on his phone that the country was “headed toward collapse.”

“This was not a terrorist attack,” the note said. “It was a wake-up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/03/us/las-vegas-tesla-explosion-soldier-ptsd-notes.html

Or he was intentionally making an explosive that would not cause a lot of damage but get a lot of media attention.

This email, in an of itself, certainly doesn’t prove anything about the origins of the drones, but it certainly is a curious claim. Mr Bergs military MOS would potentially put him in a position to be read in on advanced US drone programs. There are a number of people in the independent media world who have made the case that the USG has been running black physics programs and cracked gravity 70 years ago. People usually respond to this with ridicule and note that something like this could never be kept secret. Personally, I just add this to the growing list of leakers and dot connectors that indicate that the UAP phenomenon is at least in part, terrestrial black projects that have access to what we would otherwise call science fiction technology.

I am personally acquainted with a former special ops soldier with PTSD from committing war crimes in Afghanistan who makes identical claims about UFOs and science fiction technology, although he believes the USG obtained this stuff from aliens in exchange for 'letting them eat us like squirrels'. It's possible that this explains increasing obesity rates through the government fattening us up for the grey aliens to serve at the golden corral in a flying saucer. But the more likely hypothesis is that special ops soldiers have very high rates of PTSD and believe all sorts of strange things, perhaps by using psychedelics as a coping mechanism.

PTSD doesn't make you believe in aliens.

No, but treating it with shrooms and LSD might.

Okay let's start with schizophrenia. Well known disease, somewhat understood etiology and biological mechanisms. Makes people believe weird shit, be psychotic. Relatively easy.

Then gets harder. Schizotypal personality disorder. Weird people....with magical thinking? Makes people believe weird shit. Maybe look kinda psychotic but not actually be psychotic? Might have schizophrenia as a complication. Okay that's kinda complicated. People in military have it? Well no probably not, it would be hard to get through basic but maybe?

What if it seems more personality driven - are SJWs psychotic? Religious people? Some people will say they are absolutely untethered from reality and psychotic and believing weird shit. Plenty people will say "no this is the state of the world."

Okay then so what if you are traumatized, you are looking for answers or your world view is knocked over. You try and fill it with something and find something online. Pizzagate, SJ, UAPs, whatever.

Maybe then you're kinda psychotic (well....a little delusional) but you don't have hallucinations or negative symptoms. Now other people think you have weird beliefs (but others don't!).

Or you end up with straight up schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder because of stress/trauma or resulting substance abuse.

Special forces guys get pretty intense psychological assessments when they join and periodically during their service. So presumably he didn’t have any really obvious psychosis disorders in his youth or during his service.

Schizophrenia and other typical psychotic disorders most commonly manifest in young adulthood but can occur later randomly or because of some medical or substance induced insult - or acute stress.

True psychosis doesn't need to be the cause here - consider born again Christian or woke/anti-woke converts. Can have really really strongly held beliefs that others may feel are not reality based.

A veteran can also seek solace from their experiences and trauma and end up with odd or way too strongly anchored beliefs, even without something that meets formal diagnostic criteria.

Guy may have met criteria for major depression with psychotic features but based off the information available so far he doesn't really "look" like that.

What if you got the PTSD from being abducted and experimented on?

No, but there is definitely a correlation because it makes you hyper vigilant, and hyper vigilance plus a constantly gaslighting establishment and stock standard pareidolia makes you more prone to conspiracies and significantly less likely to trust authorities. Of the guys from my old support group who I still keep in touch with, every single one of them has brought up the uap thing except the guy who still thinks the establishment are lizard people harvesting adrenochrome. And I'm no different, I've believed plenty of crazy shit.

he believes the USG obtained this stuff from aliens in exchange for 'letting them eat us like squirrels'.

Did the aliens have a book titled To Serve Man?

No, there was actually just some dust on the cover.

The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems.

No. Pulse detonation I'd believe. Nuclear I'd believe. Antimatter I'd be dubious about, but the stuff you'd need to fuel it isn't impossible to hide. Gravitic, no. Not even if you count "total conversion via black hole" as "gravitic"; an accelerator big enough to make one of those is too big to hide, and if they'd been in use for decades one of them would have gone boom (with a force greater than every nuclear weapon on Earth put together).

Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy.

I'm sorry, if you're talking about straight-up antigravity, they're not obvious to me.

If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table.

I'm sorry, but somebody's been filling your head with nonsense.

Zero-point energy is not a type of energy. It's just any energy that can't be extracted, and thus is part of the effective "zero point" of your scale. "Extracting zero-point energy" literally means "extracting energy that can't be extracted", which is by definition impossible - either you can extract it or you can't.

Any time somebody talks about "zero-point energy" as a power source, that's an immediate "this guy has been suckered by pseudoscience".

I won’t pretend to have any technical background. But I’d speculate that decades of black physics carried out by the USG would have dangerous implications along the lines of thermonuclear weapons or worse. If only for the fact that small drones with no heat/em/noise emissions would make conventional weapons even more dangerous. That’s the profile of many of the drone sightings.

Thanks for engaging. I’m always fascinated with the intensely negative reaction certain groups of people have with this topic.

It seems clear at this point that there is some phenomenon that the UAP people are observing and documenting, be it the nj drones, tic tac, gofast/gimble, pilots, whistleblowers, or any of the other stories we’ve heard for quite a while now. Government developed weapons or surveillance platforms seem like a fairly reasonable assumption here.

It seems clear at this point that there is some phenomenon that the UAP people are observing and documenting, be it the nj drones, tic tac, gofast/gimble, pilots, whistleblowers, or any of the other stories we’ve heard for quite a while now. Government developed weapons or surveillance platforms seem like a fairly reasonable assumption here.

Oh yes, obviously. My personal assumption is "Chinese balloon drones intended to gather intelligence". I'm only sceptical of the "and therefore it's aliens or Clarketech!" explanation.

Hey, maybe they were fueled by red mercury.

Now you're reminding me of this little gem.

There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.

Of course, that isn't technically anti-gravity in the sense that there's no spacetime manipulation, but they would function like "antigravity" does in the movies (and wouldn't get picked up by e.g. LIGO). The released email doesn't go into specifics, so it's hard to tell if it's antigravity or "antigravity."

The war crimes claims seem at least somewhat founded, which in my mind enhances the credibility of the report, but OTOH if the guy had a break with reality he might mix fact with fiction. Or maybe he was upset about the war crimes and decided to mix it in with the UAP stuff he had read about on the news or 4chan, knowing that would get the war crimes story more traction.

There are a couple of pretty boring "anti-gravity" explanations that don't violate "the laws of physics," - I don't think negative mass does, but more prosaically propulsion utilizing the Meissner effect is quite possible.

There's something hinky going on in that article.

I don't think the superconducting plates can "know" that they are on the outside of a sphere, and therefore direct their force outwards. Sure, they can know the difference between inside (insulated from the Earth's magnetic field) and outside (exposed to it), but that asymmetry breaks once you turn off the top half of the sphere and attempt to create lift: instead of changing from a full sphere (top half pushing up, bottom half pushing down, net zero force) to a half sphere (top half missing, bottom half pushing up, net upwards force) as the article claims, it has changed into a hemisphere (top flat surface pushing down, bottom curved surface pushing up, net zero force).

You definitely might be right about the article, but I'm not following your analysis (probably a me problem!)

Perhaps a simpler objection: He is proposing a perpetual motion machine.

An ideal superconductor does not require any energy input. Our superconductors need energy-intensive cooling setups, but that's just a quirk of our technology and environment. If you could produce lift with the mere presence of superconductors (in a hemispherical shape), then you could lift something for free, drop it to generate energy, and repeat forever with no inputs.

The standard model of physics doesn't allow for perpetual motion machines, therefore it doesn't allow for his proposed machine.

But he's not proposing lifting anything for free - he's proposing power in using beamed power, right?

The power goes in, then...? The only power expenditure he laid out is cooling the material. That deals with the inefficiency in our technology, but it is still generating free energy at its heart.

Assuming the combination of very high cooling power, an enhanced magnetic field, and a lightning-fast computer to control the superconducting plates, this system can go from hover to high subsonic speeds and stop and turn at 90-degree angles. But crossing the transonic barrier and dealing with a bow shock wave requires a very different type of technology like plasma actuators that we will save for another time.

I read three power expenditures:

  1. Very high cooling power
  2. An enhanced magnetic field [I think he's just describing using the superconductors to create magnetic fields by running current through the superconductors, this...isn't controversial, I don't think?]
  3. A lightning-fast computer

The Meisner effect occurs at the time the superconductor is cooled. So there's no perpetual motion... but also not more than a momentary thrust.

I mean, actual negative mass might be physical. But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

The first link seems very dubious in a lot of ways. You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect. I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions; tacking is a thing (although not as much of a thing as in water), but a sphere has no keel to tack with. When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".

NB: I say that antimatter production wouldn't be impossible to hide because a purpose-built antimatter-making accelerator (which would be far more efficient than current accelerators) wouldn't actually need to be all that big, and because the van Allen belts have antimatter in them which could possibly be tapped without being world news.

You can't just strengthen the Earth's magnetic field - at least, not without an attractive force that cancels out the repulsion from the Meissner effect.

Right – the article postulates charged superconductors to repel the magnetic field as needed. (It specifically doesn't postulate room-temperature superconductors, which I find interesting. I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?)

I also don't see a way that this could be used to thrust a sphere in arbitrary directions

Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?

When I see "spherical craft" I think "balloon", and when I see "balloon moving very fast as seen by something moving very fast" I think "you misjudged its distance from you".

And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?

I'd be surprised if the US government was mining antimatter in the Van Allen belts and storing it in Area 51, but not if they had stumbled on a room-temp superconductor. Maybe I'm out of touch?

These are both fairly plausible. We're not that far from a room-temperature superconductor; there are materials currently thought to do it under diamond-anvil-cell pressure, and then it's just a matter of engineering to build something that can sustain that pressure while letting current in (i.e. fabricating large diamonds enclosing the stuff while doping part of it enough to conduct). And that's worst-case; there might be something better. As for antimatter, I'm not sure you can get high enough with balloons, but military orbital launches aren't that rare.

I'd be somewhat surprised by either, but there's no obvious reason either'd be a Can't Happen.

Presumably you could just thrust against the magnetic field at an angle, yeah?

Nope. Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed. Ferromagnets pull in the opposite direction.

As I noted, tacking is a thing; you can sail in (almost) any direction despite the fixed wind direction at any given time, because you can use a boat's keel to prevent movement in one direction (sideways) while allowing it in another (forward/back). But a sphere specifically can't do this, because it's symmetrical; it offers the same drag in all directions. Also, now that I think of it, the ability to tack into the wind is also reliant on being able to angle the sails, and I don't think you could do that here.

And when you see "balloon holding still in 120 knot winds" what do you think?

Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).

military orbital launches aren't that rare.

Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!

Meissner effect always pushes from stronger field to weaker field, and at any point on the Earth's surface that direction is fixed.

Okay. But (and bear with me, it's a long time since I've been in college physics) – you can use magnetic fields for both suspension and propulsion – this is how maglevs work, using linear induction motors – right? The difference here would be that Earth's gravity field isn't an alternating set of magnetic polar forces, but but if you were activating electromagnets on different ends of a sphere, wouldn't that generate linear motion just the same?

I guess this wouldn't technically only be using the Meissner effect. But then again, granting you can pump enough power remotely to a bundle of superconductors to keep it afloat (which maybe we shouldn't grant, for several reasons, but I like pushing these ideas to see how far they will go) perhaps it might be simpler to turn to ionic thrust, which another poster mentioned.

Tether(s). Or engine(s), I suppose, although technically that would make it an airship and not a balloon. Again, though, you really want ground-crew observations to rule out optical illusions regarding movement (even then there are still some possible ones).

Presumably it would be the engines, as the lil guys were clocked going supersonic. (Graves doesn't specify, but I assume he's making that judgment off of radar data and not Mk 1 eyeball observation.)

Oh, sure, there are ways and means to thrust. Like I said at the start, I'd totally believe pulse detonation and nuclear-thermal jets (for the latter, basically take a jet engine - turboprop, turbofan, turbojet, ramjet - and replace the combustion chamber heating the air with a small air-cooled nuclear reactor; now you have a jet that doesn't need refueling for months). They built one of the latter in the Cold War (Project Pluto).

Ion thrusters and magsails should be physically plausible, too, although I'd assign lower probability simply because TTBOMK they've got inferior performance to more-conventional propulsion (in atmosphere, at least; space is a whole different kettle of fish).

The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.

The reason "sphere" makes me think "balloon" is because balloons are one of the few cases where spherical shape makes sense, although I suppose if you wanted to troll people you might choose a suboptimal shape to confuse.

There are some interesting drone designs ("SpICED" and "ZeRONE") that are propelled balloons that greatly resemble the reported "metallic orbs," and from what I understand (besides using the spherical balloon shape because they are balloons) they use the spherical balloon shape because it gives them a lot of maneuverability when fitted with thrusters. But it seems like these are mostly designed for indoor use, although I wouldn't be surprised if designs along those lines are responsible for more-than-zero "UAP" sightings.

Come to think of it, this is a great use for the X-37!

It was definitely doing something up there for 900+ days, but the antimatter mining thing is probably not it. There are only ten kilowatt hours worth of antimatter in the entire van allen belts.

Yeah, I don't literally think the X-37 is mining antimatter. But if you were trying to mine antimatter in the Van Allen belts, the X-37 would be the platform to do it.

Of course if it was me, I would mine antimatter from bananas under the cover of being a zoo.

But the basic research needed just isn't there, and it would seem pretty hard to hide a facility better-equipped for fundamental physics experiments than the civilian ones.

This is the core claim, that the USG has sequestered an elite cadre of physicists and kept their discoveries under wraps. One observation in favor of this claim: the dearth of fundamental breakthroughs in physics for the past fifty years.

I think Eric Weinstein alluded to certain branches of physics possibly being forbidden by the government due to their potential weaponisation.

You don't just need to sequester the physicists; you need to sequester their equipment, too. Notice the sheer scale of facilities used for fundamental physics work these days; you're not hiding a 500-kilometre synchrotron. And a lot of the facilities that are built aren't even in the USA.

The necessary co-ordination to keep this straight quickly approaches Illuminati-complete.

That assumes that you need to smash particles together at higher and higher energies to test your hypotheses.

If you're on the hunt for gravitons and antigravitons, would that even be part of the research? Can gravitons even collide?

If you're starting fresh with an unexplored branch of physics you'll not have gotten to the point where testing hypotheses is so far along the curve of diminishing returns that the next advancement requires billions of dollars of capital. The first particle accelerator had a diameter of 4.5 inches. The first one that managed to split an atom was about 2 meters wide.

What of all the secretive Space Force X-37B missions? If you're looking for graviton signals it would be helpful to be in an environment where there are fewer of them.

Perhaps there is some physics research that doesn't require a 500 kilometre synchrotron.

Sure, but in a lot of cases this leads to "random scientists not part of the conspiracy could find it". Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA. And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

Secret engineering projects are substantially easier to conceal than secret basic science, due to basic science being universal and thus independently discoverable.

And yet, history is replete with nations making fundamental scientific discoveries before anyone else and using those to their advantage militarily before their competitors catch up. One way we know that this has happened in the US is that a scientist makes a breakthrough that could be militarily useful, that breakthrough is then immediately classified, and then other scientists are briefed in and conduct classified research and development based on the breakthrough. That can give you a significant first mover advantage because everyone else is still at the starting line, waiting to discover the fundamental breakthrough, and you're racing forward.

Also the entire premise of this situation is that it wasn't successfully concealed and China now has it as well.

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Again, many of the facilities that are built aren't in the USA.

Playing devil's advocate here- are any of them built in countries that aren't core western allies(NATO+ANZAC+Japan+SK)?

And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

I don't think you really need to make that conspiracy isomorphic to the illuminati. The heredity of intelligence and other mental characteristics is nakedly obvious to everyone who even takes a cursory look, but research on the topic has been pretty effectively suppressed without the need for any kind of HBD illuminati.

And if your conspiracy includes all high-quality scientists everywhere (e.g. the Science Adventure series of VNs), your conspiracy is isomorphic to the Illuminati.

Given the collective institutional support for transgenderism and the failure to call out the absurd state of the science behind it, I'd say either it's not isomorphic to the Illuminati, or the Illuminati must exist.

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Note- you need to sequester their equipment, and you need to get the skilled technicians turning wrenches to put it together to keep their mouths shut. Veteran and/or skilled trades circles would be abuzz with rumors of secret hidden technology- what we actually see is engineering school dropouts who find out their hair isn't weird enough for the ancient aliens grifting circuit.

Reading the first half of your post it seemed like a message from a mentally ill person. Learning that he later killed himself in a car bomb did not increase my assessment of his sanity.

I tend to find schizophrenic or similarly disordered modes of thinking very recognizable, so it's always weird to me when other people see them and don't immediately realize what's going on. You also have to consider the base rates here: mental illness is much more common than the number of people who know about "secret physics-revolutionizing propulsion systems" level information, or indeed information considerably less earth-shattering than that. And what percentage of people who know about the latter would react by messaging an obscure Instagram account, mixing in unrelated stuff about war crimes, and then bombing themselves in front of Trump Tower?

I can understand your POV, but perhaps consider that there is more to this than a 300 word half a post that was written a bit tongue-in-cheek.

To your last point, some spec ops whistleblower contacting various military/spec ops independent journalists before putting on an impossible-to-ignore fireworks show sounds reasonable to me. How else would it go?

The thing is that most of these theories cannot help but run right into “movie physics” — things actual physicists and engineers generally know to be implausible if not to violate known physical laws. And they’re always discovered by people with almost zero known domain expertise (which makes sense as they seem to be making rather elementary mistakes) and so shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the stuff they’re talking about or have access to information about these systems. It’s like the cook thinks he’s found a super secret beoring warp drive. No, that’s not how classified information works even in civilian stuff. If I’m not actually working on the project I don’t have access to anything.

By contacting more journalists, including more prominent ones. By providing evidence such as documentation (sure it's plausible that he didn't manage to copy any - but if someone like him knew about it there should be a huge number of people in a position to leak it). By providing specifics about how exactly he learned about it, some of which could lead to collaborating evidence. Not by combining it with other grievances ranging from war crimes to personal issues and generic stuff about how the country is "headed towards collapse". That's a common tendency with delusions/lies/exaggerations, where something that should be a huge deal is treated as a side note because the chain of causation doesn't begin with learning about it but with his general state of mind manufacturing it. (See also: MeToo accusations that treat claims like "committed rape" as secondary to "was a bad boyfriend who hurt my feelings".) Not by committing suicide at all: mentally healthy people rarely commit suicide and it's a bad way to leak information compared to just staying alive and telling people all the specifics of what he learned and when/why he learned it.

Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.

I am embarrassed that the responses here so far are giving this any credence at all. It's always nice to be reminded of how wrong I must be about areas I know little about given that when people comment on my areas, they're often confidently hilariously wrong.

Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.

It’s almost as dumb as that sci-fi movie with Cillian Murphy that came out two years ago. That one about an entire city being built in the New Mexico desert for physicists to construct a world-ending super weapon in complete and total secrecy. How a film with such a ridiculous premise could win so many Oscars is beyond me.

The one that remained a secret for a few years, rather than a few decades?

The reason it was only a few years was because Truman decided to drop two of them on Japan and announce it to the entire world. If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades. You’d probably have a handful of scientists leak about it over the years, but the government and skeptics would declare those scientists to be obvious schitzos and bullshit artists. The “adults in the room” would industriously gaslight everyone about how the weaponization of fusion is scientifically preposterous.

If the US government had decided it was in their strategic interest to not use them on Japan and keep it a secret, it could have very well been decades.

No, it wouldn't have been. the science was already public. That's how the US government became aware of it in the first place. Scientists were studying radiation since Curie discovered it, and they would have continued to do so, within America or without it. In fairly short order, they would have broken the science wide open.

Sure, if you’re a physicist you might quietly believe that there’s something fishy about the denial. Plenty of virologists found the claim that COVID was a natural phenomenon fishy, but they mostly kept their mouths shut and went with the party line. The ones that didn’t were mocked and their work was suppressed. John Q. Public who’s a machinist in Iowa would just believe what he’s told.

It remained secret until it was unavoidably revealed because its result needed to be used and was impossible to hide.

We know that other secret military planes have remained secret for decades before being revealed.

Nuclear fission was published in a journal four years before the Manhattan project was started. Szilard described a fission chain reaction in a patent six years before the project. The fundamental building blocks for the atomic bomb were publicly known, accepted physics already - where are the accepted fundamental building blocks of antigravity technology?

“The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe” by Scott M. Tyson, self-published and universally shunned.

I was his friend for nearly a decade. The man was a materials scientist and helped solve cosmic ray errors in satellite electronics. Whip-smart but distractible, he was looking for a funder who wouldn’t look at his proposed experiments and think “oh God, another perpetual motion nut.”

His theories start from the concept that we got gravity wrong: instead of masses having gravity, he believes it’s more accurate to say gravities have mass. From there, he explains the Casimir effect, propulsionless motion, and free energy, but doesn’t mention in the book the possibility of gravity bombs more terrible than the Tsar Bomba.

Indeed, there's plenty of crackpots with all kinds of theories. The key difference with fission bombs is that fission itself was already published in Nature years before the Manhattan project began. Fission was emphatically not a crackpot theory.

Plate tectonics and continental drift were very explicitly a crackpot theory for quite a while, even though a lot of the evidence had actually been shared already. Sometimes the individual crackpots are right and the entire rest of the field is wrong - just ask Alfred Wegener (assuming you have a Ouija board on hand).

I don't really know much about the history of plate tectonics. Wikipedia says:

His hypothesis was not accepted by mainstream geology until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics.[4][5]

So it sounds like there was some more evidence that was required for everything to really fit together (heh).

Of course crackpots can sometimes be right. However, the hard part is to figure out a priori which crackpots are right. Since I haven't taken physics since college and I don't have the time to comprehensively evaluate every crackpot physics claim I come across, going with the base rate of ~0% seems to be the most reasonable approach.

The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny

Do you know who Ning Li is? Mike McCullough? Both of those people might be/have been full of it/wrong, but their work wasn't exactly secret (until it was, anyway). If Ning Li made an anti-gravity breakthrough, you probably read about it on Wired before it went into a special access program.

But secondly, I don't think what you're describing is as far-fetched as you might thing. Apparently, during the late unpleasantness (World War Two), the Soviets and perhaps others deduced that the United States was working on nuclear weapons specifically because we stopped publishing on nuclear weapons research.

Any future classified research into fundamental physics would need to be more than suppressed, it would need to be overlaid with a misleading theory that was nevertheless embraced by most scientific gatekeepers, and the actual line of research or any breakthroughs would need to be kept carefully out of the realm of respectable science by ridicule and gatekeeping. And I don't think this would be as hard as it sounds: in the United States, the research world is very beholden to the US government, and universities did lots of classified and sometimes shady research on behalf of the US government. I'm not sure it would be hard to keep the lid on something, for a while, particularly if you had an alternative hypothesis that was unfalsifiable or elusive but made the math work (I'm looking at you, dark matter!)

String theory and dark matter being scientific dead ends but great cover stories for gravitics? I love it.

It's particularly interesting when you realize that the implications of (e.g.) quantized inertia are something similar to "gravetics."

Unfortunately I don't have the credentials to evaluate the relative merits of string theory and dark matter in a way that's particularly persuasive, but I do think that they (or at least dark matter, I know even less about string theory) are the sort of wild goose chase you'd want to send everyone on if you were trying to cover up physics breakthroughs. "Just build another multi-billion dollar supercollider, maybe you'll find dark matter THIS time!"

I have no training in physics, but just considering what an odd duck dark matter seems to be, my guess would be that a different theory is developed to explain it and gains consensus by 2100. I'd say I have confidence in this because dark matter exists to balance equations, but I've heard that enough of Einstein's "I just threw this in to make the numbers add up" things have turned out to be empirically verifiable to give me a certain faith that the math is on to something.

Eh, there's like two posters further down giving it some amount of credence. We've had bigger threads about the Tic Tac at the time, and my sense was that the vast majority do not buy either the UFO or the classified scifi tech theory. It's just less exciting to argue the same thing over and over again when the evidence for the theories is always of the same shape (US military whistleblower full of red flags, blurry or unclear video, lots of reported sightings surely must mean they can't all be wrong, friend-of-a-friend who is very smart and has access believes it), especially when the UFO/scifi believers aren't really anyone's outgroup.

(Though with the Tic Tac, I did actually have a favourite classified scifi tech sort of theory: US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings. Intended audience was China and/or funding agencies. Efficacy demonstrated by showing that even muggle US military were completely overwhelmed by it.)

Kind of related, I lean strongly towards the skeptical side, and found in support this video showing that one of those famous videos of supposedly impossible aircraft maneuvering and looking weird actually corresponds pretty well to being a perfectly normal jet aircraft being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera that we're looking at the raw feed of.

US skunkworks developed a way to dazzle integrated sensor systems with coherent false readings.

The US government [almost certainly] developed a way to generate plasma balls using a particle beam and tested it at Groom Lake back in the day as an electronic warfare weapon. This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.

I think there's something to the UFO weirdness (in part because of how the US security state moves around it) but my best guess for a "prosaic" explanation for the Tic-Tac is laser holography deployed from a submarine (recall the pilots mention a water disturbance). Since plasmas can reflect radar waves, this would be a great electronic warfare asset that would also be visible with the naked eye.

Probably in unrelated news, the US Navy started putting lasers on their submarine masts a few years ago.

Seconded, see the latter bit of my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/1322/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/283449?context=8#context

Great minds!

So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.

Either way, even if we commit to the proton beam story, I don't quite buy it. Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard. There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.

Putting the focal point at a distance of hundreds of meters or even some kilometers from the emitter, rather than centimeters, would get you plasma foci that are either extremely stretched/washed out in the direction of the beam (especially considering atmospheric scattering and everything, the energy density at the focus will not be terribly different from the energy density a meter up or down the beam from it), or you would require massive emitters (so the incoming beams converge at a wide angle), which I doubt they would place at sea and would be very far beyond civilian technology levels for any sort of coherent beam, or you would require multiple distributed emitters with perfect stabilisation to have a strongly lit up intersection point of beams that are individually too weak to induce plasma, which I could maybe believe on land (but then military anti-air beam weapons would be much further along than they appear to be) but not on sea.

Based on this line of thought and the circumstance that the Tic Tac video had obvious and much-commented-on camera effects (features/"hair" that seemed to track sensor orientation rather than that of the putative object in the real world), I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR. Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes) can be just as easily chalked up to either metaphorical water-muddying by involved military (like, what if your superior orders you to add this detail when talking to the press?) or the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).

So is it lasers or proton beams? Those two are not the same.

Correct, but either can produce a plasma field in the atmosphere.

Beams are directional - they occupy an area in space that looks like a (decaying, if they are getting absorbed) half-line, not like a point, and accordingly getting them to pump a lot of energy into a compact volume that is not continuous with the emitter is going to be very hard.

That's the thing about proton beams - the accelerated particles will lose velocity and at a certain point they will release their remaining energy. If you're using the proton beam for cancer treatment, it releases that energy into the cancer cells. If you aim it at the sky, it will create an ionized patch of plasma. Tom Mahood goes into the numbers here.

There have been some attempts to do this for scifi display tech by having a wide beam converging at a removed focal point and relying on some discontinuous physics (plasma phase transition) around it, but those are still at a "tabletop" rather than a "sector of airspace" scale, they come out blurry even at those short ranges, and the energy requirements are already so high that it needs to be pulsed, resulting in the plasma (that constantly pops in and out of existence) being very noisy.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of tech I'm thinking of. Look, if you're telling me you don't think this sort of tech was sufficient to create a Tic-Tac event, I am not going to argue with you! I'm not convinced that it was responsible. I just find it interesting that the tech exists, if even in a modest form, and that the US military has been doing research on particle beams and radar decoys for decades (and thus might be ahead of civilian technology in this area) and that they started putting lasers on submarines at a time which would make sense if the Tic-Tac was an IOC/prototype test. Am I convinced? No. Do I think it makes a certain amount of sense? Sure.

I'm leaning towards much weaker energetic interference upon the sensor itself, something perhaps more akin to virtual retinal displays for FLIR.

I think this makes sense, but wouldn't account for the eyewitness reports unless there was something visible to the naked eye. (Obviously ECM could account for the radar detection.)

Any reports of "water disturbance" (of which we were not given any visual, even though we should assume that the US military records plenty of visible-light video everywhere it goes)

Fravor, the pilot who reported the water disturbance, wasn't able to capture any footage of the Tic Tac as I understand it. That was captured by a subsequent jet.

To expand on this a bit, I'll add that I don't think this is a good assumption, nor do I think it tracks how the military uses its sensors. The military prefers IR sensors, and the Tic-Tac footage was from an ATFLIR pod (YMMV on whether this counts as visible-light). But as far as I know, the F-18 has no feature to continuously record all of its surroundings. The ATFLIR pod would need to be pointed at a specific target (in this case, the Tic-Tac), and not all aircraft carry ATFLIR pods, nor does the ATFLIR pod necessarily always function. I believe the F-18 also has a "gun camera" that captures, essentially, the view of the HUD - very far from a 360 degree recording, and I do not know if those are even routinely turned on. Likewise for any other in-cockpit cameras, cell phone cameras, etc. In short, as far as I know, there's no particular reason to believe that any given event would be captured visually on any equipment besides the HUD camera by a Navy fighter unless it was especially equipped with a reconnaissance/sensor pod. And to catch something in the HUD, you'd need to "pull it into the HUD" (point your aircraft at it) and have the HUD recorder on.

the usual psychological tendency to hallucinate additional detail in disturbing situations experienced in a group (you're scared; the people next to you are scared; what is everyone scared of? Isn't the water looking kind of funny today?).

From what I've seen of the accounts, the water was what Fravor noticed first - then the Tic-Tac. I doubt the adrenaline kicked in just from seeing an ocean disturbance. But as long as we're postulating extra details manifesting from stress, I'd say that cuts towards the "plasma holography" theory, as one could just as easily assume that the pilot's brain "filled in" a blobby shape with solid details, and then contaminated other aircrew's perceptions by describing it, causing them to report the same thing. Not saying I think this is what happened, but I think it's more parsimonious an explanation than Fravor stress-hallucinating an ambiguous water feature.

This is why you might have heard of Bob Lazar.

This is the biggest cope I have ever heard about Lazar, he doesn't even address all his proven lies and fabrications about his own personal history.

I dunno if you read the linked article, but it goes into depth about Lazar's many and varied lies.

I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection. The US military probably isn't hiding super-iphones. Gravity manipulation certainly isn't in their wheelhouse.

I figure the whole 'military technology is so far advanced!' thing is only in areas where the military has far more of an interest than civilian scientists, like radar stealth/detection.

I agree with you, but "antigravity" is very much one of those things where the military has a definite if apparently pointless interest, to the point that you can read about its exploits (or lack thereof) on Wikipedia – which now also mentions the Las Vegas bombing.

I think that during the Cold War various agencies threw cash at a variety of off-the-wall projects. If there was a Road Not Taken lying around for bizarre experimentation to detect, it doesn't seem insane to think they might have found it. However, conversely, just because the US military/CIA researched something during the Cold War doesn't mean it was real. If someone had written an op-ed to say that beating Communism required imagining a dozen impossible things before breakfast, you can bet the CIA, DIA, and J. Edgar Hoover would have all had their best and brightest in a pilot program within the month.

If it's real, then it would likely be a fancy sounding name for something more mundane than sci-fi anti-gravity.


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