This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What does the Motte think about UFOs/UAPs? I ask because there was a relatively big instance of "disclosure" today within the UFO community. A former senior US intelligence figure (who allegedly had enough high level classifications to report directly to the president) has apparently stated to Congress and journalists that the US has recovered "non-human technology."
From the article:
I figure that most people in this community are good rationalists and dismiss UFOs/UAPs/"non-human intelligences" out of hand. Does this kind of evidence change your mind at all? What would?
For those who, like me, think this (in conjunction with the massive amount of other evidence for UFOs/UAPs/etc.) is fairly good evidence that this phenomenon is real, what might be the social and political implications of this? It's kind of hard for me to imagine anything changing our current political stalemate and trajectory, and I can definitely imagine a situation where the US completely admits to the existence of "non-human intelligences" only for the story to be overtaken the next day when Trump says something allegedly racist, or whatever. And unless reverse-engineered non-human technology starts seeping into consumer electronics or something, it's hard to see it affecting people that much on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, it's hard to imagine news that could be more important.
I've raised this issue before and gotten a bombardment of scepticism. The issue is that people set base rates too low and then use that to explain why they won't accept evidence that would raise their base rate. Cameras? We have decades of recordings from radar and military jets! We have 'Foo Fighters' from WW2, we have the Wow signal.
And why should the base rate for alien civilizations be so low? We really don't know what we're dealing with - we are not an ancient civilization. We haven't reached the highest levels of technological attainment. Our understanding of the universe is very limited. What is 'dark' matter and energy (95% of the universe's matter/energy)? How does gravity work with the rest of physics? We don't have stellar-scale particle accelerators or superintelligences, we don't even have controlled fusion.
We don't have the knowledge necessary to model advanced civilizations. Would they be building Dyson Spheres en masse or are Dyson Spheres pleb-tier megastructures? Are there far better ways to acquire resources that we just don't know about? Would this have some relation to dark matter and dark energy, which make stars look rather small and ineffectual?
Even based upon what we do know, interstellar travel is trivial for a powerful civilization. According to wikipedia it would only take half a million years for Von Neumann probes to proliferate throughout the galaxy at 0.1c. Even if there are 10x more unexpected difficulties, 5 million years is peanuts. If we remove the 'UFO's definitely aren't aliens' firewall, then we get to solve the Great Silence mystery as well.
Sure, the 1561 sighting could be some combination of 'a very unusual sundog' and excessive religiosity. Radar does have glitches. People get drunk and make mistakes. Fakes are not unknown. But what couldn't be explained away in such a fashion? Everything short of a gigantic Independence Day style battleship! If there are any extraterrestrials that use even a modicum of subtlety, this approach would miss them. We need a more targeted, precise epistemology (without all the people who airily pronounce that interstellar travel is extremely unlikely, they've disqualified themselves).
Furthermore, I dislike the attitude of the skeptics. CuriousCA goes on about how highly credentialed experts in the field are fabulists (or some proportion of them). Wouldn't this wipe out Newton or Galileo? Our understanding of the universe improves when a small number of experts disagree with the crowd. Most critically, we advance by assessing evidence, not smearing people as quacks if they dare swim against the current. The people best equipped to assess evidence are those at the National Reconnaisance Office like Grusch or 'I founded eight biotech companies' tier biologists as in the last time this came up. I reckon we'd have a lot more such whistleblowers without the universal derision field for the whole topic, as with HBD or other matters.
We have radar, pilot testimony, aircraft cameras, testimony from high-ranking officials (from many different nations). What more is needed apart from little green men waddling around on the White House Lawn? If that is what you need to update, going from 0.0001 to 1 in a moment, then you're not a good rationalist.
If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?
I will accept a recording on par with amateurish Youtube mockumentaries and somebody with a name and no known history of crankery credibly committing to lose reputation should it be revealed as fake. Have any previous bullshitters been socially annihilated?
None conclusive or even suggestive enough to interpret as anything other than pareidolia. Too many cases eventually revealed as nothingburgers to not suspect the rest are the same.
I've replied to this again and again: because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle. No, saying «you don't get to assert such a low prior, gotta be a mistake in the math somewhere» doesn't cut it if you haven't got a more rigorous one. I have not yet received any response on this point. I believe there straight up is no other life in the Universe because life does not work period. This of course also neatly solves – or dissolves – the Fermi «paradox».
No matter how little we know, we know that this behavior over decades is ridiculous for what we know about civilizations in general but consistent with human delusions.
Obviously by the same token they'd have been able to evade all our observations, even those conducted by the US Air Force of today – not to mention decades ago, when Americans had tech on par with modern Iran; it'd be really dumb if they kept upgrading stealth to keep up with our recent meteoric progress but no faster. Clumsily getting caught in barely legible records is pretty poor for a spacefaring civilization. Unless they're screwing with us I guess.
Or not with us but with our digital successors. Maybe ASI will decode those perplexing behaviors and respond appropriately.
This is a fully general argument against anything. Nobody gets annihilated for lying on a huge scale!
Have we swept 200 billion galaxies for life? We barely even have a probe outside our solar system. We do not know what we are looking at, we cannot even categorize 95% of the content. 'For all we know' is totally and completely worthless. Blind children do not get to pontificate on the world of art, they've never even experienced it.
Common sense says that if life works on Earth, it can work elsewhere too. Hanson has a more advanced theory on the basis that we emerged quite early as a civilization, compared to all the times when earth-based life might emerge - this implies that advanced civilizations will make it hard for civilizations to emerge later. Besides, you haven't checked 200 billion galaxies, you have no idea what's there.
The burden of proof weighs overwhelmingly more heavily on your claim than mine! I say that there may be alien life somewhere that has come here (based upon various observations) but that we don't know enough to be sure of anything. You say there is no life at all in the entire universe except here without a shred of evidence.
We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.
We know nothing about civilizations in general, especially not advanced civilizations. With a sample size of one, we can't differentiate between civilizations in general and human civilization. All we know is that something is part of a civilization, they have some kind of energy-processing, manufacturing, knowledge base. Defining a civilization is different to understanding them.
The phenomena we're talking about here has never been stealthy in that we're not capable of seeing it. These things are perfectly visible, we just can't interact with them since they shoot around at immense speeds.
Edit: for the recording you can have the Nimitz clips and the testimony of Commander Fravor
What I'm reading @DaseindustriesLtd as saying is that, if you do the math, life should be extraordinarily rare. That is, abiogenesis should happen statistically never, and the only reason that we happen to be in a place where life exists, out of all the places in the cosmos, is because we are ourselves the product of that nigh impossibly rare thing.
This cannot have been on the basis of an analysis of the narrow segment of the cosmos that we have been able to see, such an evaluation would have to have been based on an analysis of what life is like and of the preconditions for that to exist.
Well, we don't really know how life came into existence either. It happened over 3 billion years ago! We can't know what the conditions were back then that resulted in life, so how can we rule it to be statistically impossible? The math is just made-up numbers.
But testimonies of American military are evidence about reality?
I think we've found our fundamental disagreement. I take this to be no more evidence than claims of some peculiar Indian sect about the conspiracy of Naga People – complete with grainy photos. It has pretty much zero weight in comparison to priors from natural sciences. And our uncertainty about American sanity or honesty absolutely dwarfs our uncertainty about relevant scientific conjectures.
The US military is routinely insane and dishonest but they're not sufficiently skilled at keeping secrets to get away with this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link