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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
I've not seen anyone talk about it but his statement that aliens are likely on Earth domesticating humanity to keep us from expanding further is insane and calls into question how his reasoning skills have developed over the years. Religious nutjobbery is one thing, but embracing alien conspiracies shows a broken mind.
I was surprised by this claim (my very loose knowledge of Robin Hanson hasn't flagged him up as insane), so I went to check it out. For anyone else lacking the context on this, here's what Hanson said (which I think magicalkittycat has represented faithfully):
Hanson links to a post where he expands on his position on UFOs. It's an interesting read. I think "insane" is a fair characterisation. In the first paragraph, we get:
Not a great start. It's frustrating that he doesn't bother distinguishing between whether he means "UFO-as-unidentified-flying-object" vs "UFO-as-alien-craft", which is absolutely load-bearing. It's the difference between "yes, obviously" and "you are lying to me".
I don't understand what's gone wrong in Hanson's brain here.
There is no possible content of a US military report that would make me go "What the Hell?", because "this report is false" is always a plausible hypothesis. It wouldn't make me go "What the Hell?" if I learned a military report were mistaken or a deliberate lie. So anything that has a higher WTF factor than a wrong report cannot possibly make me go "What the Hell?", because the report-is-mistaken hypothesis would defeat it!
It baffles me that he does this, right underneath his floating website banner which declares: "Overcoming Bias".
It gets worse:
... what? No, they don't.
"That is" isn't supposed to allow you to link two entirely different things! "Our best theories predict unicorns; that is, they predict universal gravitation". This isn't science; this isn't anything.
...
I expected the rest of the article to contain some kind of evidence for aliens, at least in Hanson's view. Instead, he performs an annoying series of shell games (including, I expect, on himself) to flip the burden of proof away from himself. Then, once he's confused himself and his readers enough to make it seem like he might have some kind of reasonable position, he constructs a ridiculously elaborate theory of exactly what type of aliens probably exist. It has the same kind of attitude as a stupidly written Sherlock Holmes deduction sequence ("there is chalk on your sleeve, therefore it must be chalk from the Prussian ambassador's club, therefore the ambassador's wife's diamond necklace is a fake!") or a lazy deist/specific-god equivocation ("there appears to be generic evidence for some kind of creator, therefore it is exactly my one specific god and my holy text is correct").
I agree with him on the meta level of "don't be ashamed to examine things just because people label them 'conspiracy theories'"; that's stupid. But the balance of probability on UFOs/UAPs is that they're natural, terrestrial phenomena. If aliens exist -- which I think is plausible -- they almost certainly exist much too far away to interact with us. (I'm pretty sure his version of panspermia, where a rock from a neighbouring system happens to hit not only the Solar System but Earth specifically, is insanely improbable -- even leaving aside questions like "could even a tardigrade survive the catastrophe of a massive meteoric impact?" I could be wrong about this, though.)
This is a shame. I've almost certainly read a bunch of Robin Hanson stuff in the past, and have probably trusted him as an expert in some capacity or other. I think this article from him is pretty disqualifying. This is egregious nonsense, and I'm glad mkc brought it up.
I am saying all this because I'm an alien participating in the cover-up, obviously.
I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
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This is a sneaky little issue that a lot of alien proponents try to use as an argument but it doesn't really work.
It goes generally along the lines of
The first two steps are fine. We exist and are life, therefore life can exist.
But other life is likely is not a great conclusion because we're looking in on ourselves. The observation "we exist and therefore life can exist" is true whether life is 1/100,000 planets, 1/100million planets, or 1/100^googolplex planets. Life could be so rare that it exists in one of every 1000 universes in a greater multiverse, and it would look the same with "we exist" in all those scenarios.
Space may be unfathomably big, but some things can also be unfathomably rare. Same way I'm sure there's a bunch of genetic disorders that could in theory happen but the chances are so rare (because they would require multiple precise mutations all at once) that to even get a coin flip chance would take a thousand times the entire lifespan of humanity. They're making an irresponsible leap in logic by assuming that "we exist = other life is so common it should interact with us"
But Robin Hanson isn't the only other atheist I've known who has turned into a UFO believer and I think there's a reason for this. Belief in aliens fulfill the human compulsion for a greater mystery and greater meaning in a similar way belief in religion does. And the arguments for them follow similar strained paths.
Consider for instance the other main issue of UFO theories, that their technology and ability to hide just happens to adapt and evolve in sync with our ability to discover them so they're always hazy and just out of peripheral vision ala Bigfoot or the Mothman and there doesn't seem to be much reason here. Isn't that very similar to how God stopped doing a bunch of blatant and undeniable miracles the second cameras were invented? The dragon in my garage works for both oddly enough.
Post-camera miracle claims are a dime a dozen; you can choose to believe that they aren’t sufficient evidence but they are there.
Similarly ufo reports are basically the same thing even with improving technology.
I know they are, same people still claim to be abducted from time to time. The issue is that despite having the prove things really well machine in everyone's hands now, God, Aliens, Ghosts, Bigfoot, and every other similar preexisting cryptid esque being have seemed to simultaneously decided to scale how back how blatantly they're willing to expose themselves.
Now it's possible to conjure up some explanation where they want to be widely known about but not widely proven for some reason. Like hell maybe they exist in some metaphysical Tinker Bell like form where they gain power from belief in them that dissolves with knowledge or something, but interesting coincidence so much of the interesting stuff all happens to work in this way.
The Catholic church verifies miracles on a regular basis and provides evidence using modern technology. You may think this evidence is insufficient to prove a miracle(because you need to accept the existence of God), but it hasn't stopped happening. Improving medical technology has not ended miraculous healings. Many holy relics are at least not provable as false.
The same can be said, by the way, for UFOs. Cell phone videos of the sorts of things that UFOs would claim would turn up on cell phone videos are in fact turning up.
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Its entirely fair to disagree with the alien theories - I dont have enough confidence in anything anthropic to change my behaviour, much less to put it on a list like that - but I think you make it sound much worse than it is. This is not a typical aliens conspiracy theory, it doesnt turn on "sightings", and not really more "out there" than related work like eg Bostrom on the Fermi paradox.
In line with above... that is one way you can do anthropics. Im not sure "the likelihood of life can get arbitrarily low, because I can always posit greater non-interacting multiverses" is really on so much more solid ground than what youre critising with it. All of anthropics is weird, and we shouldnt point and laugh at one because its weird in a way that reminds us of a popular conspiracy theory.
You're making a logical error. @magicalkittycat isn't saying this as a fact; it's being used to show that "therefore other life is likely" does not necessarily follow from "therefore life can exist". It's a disproof of a simple fallacious argument.
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