I was considering posting about this, but didn’t see the point.
Preventing people who don’t know enough to generate this alternate hypothesis from invalidly updating towards “aliens are real”, maybe? Might have a significant formative effect on e. g. people who’d only started buying into the whole “rationality” thing, and don’t have priors against aliens strong enough to keep dismissing the hypothesis even in light of what may look like overwhelming evidence.
I don’t see rationality as being generally undermined by the UFO subject. My impression has always been that the most prominent figures in the dialog are skeptics. The subject ends up being a fun study of how ordinary people can be wrong and how authors sometimes lie. Among woo theories, I think it’s the one that is most compatible with science.
I don’t think a person can be a rationalist if they’ve never had an encounter with delusion and seen that it’s escapable. Until having that experience, it’s hard to really have faith in dialog or investigation.
Preventing people who don’t know enough to generate this alternate hypothesis from invalidly updating towards “aliens are real”, maybe? Might have a significant formative effect on e. g. people who’d only started buying into the whole “rationality” thing, and don’t have priors against aliens strong enough to keep dismissing the hypothesis even in light of what may look like overwhelming evidence.
I don’t see rationality as being generally undermined by the UFO subject. My impression has always been that the most prominent figures in the dialog are skeptics. The subject ends up being a fun study of how ordinary people can be wrong and how authors sometimes lie. Among woo theories, I think it’s the one that is most compatible with science.
I don’t think a person can be a rationalist if they’ve never had an encounter with delusion and seen that it’s escapable. Until having that experience, it’s hard to really have faith in dialog or investigation.