Pieces of vehicles given general stealthy attitude imply capped technology. With sufficiently robust alien psychology, this could mean a Dune regime, in which case aliens would need to go out of hiding or less deniably start derailing human AGI projects. Alternatively, there is a non-corrigible anti-foom alien pivotal process AGI watchdog that keeps the tech below some level, which could itself be superintelligent but specialized for this bounded task instead of doing world optimization. In this case the pieces of vehicles are from the aliens in its care, not indicative of its tech level but indicative of its tech-capping influence, and its interventions against human AGI projects could be much more subtle.
Given that all data on this so far is nonsense, and there is almost certainly nothing we can usefully do about it if true, the pragmatic stance is to ignore until the data improves much further.
Anthropics arguments seem to support this: we can observe only those parts of the universe where we a) first—or b) grabby aliens are not destroying everything.
I think we need to just scrap everything we think we “know” about anthropics and grabby aliens and lightcone-tiling AGI if this is true. The Aristotelian epistemology that has led us to those “conclusions” are obviously garbage, if it turns out that no, high-tech aliens with seemingly capped technology are here and they’re not doing anything to us. Confirmed UFO craft would be an absurd, catastrophic indictment of the standard LessWrong worldview and our overconfidence in these sorts of arguments.
Yeah, I really strongly agree with this. If high-tech aliens have been in contact with Earth for some significant time, the general public weren’t aware, and we aren’t all dead? “Halt and Catch Fire” moment for sure (wanted to make that a link to where I learned that phrase in The Sequences but I couldn’t find it by search. Did I confabulate??)
Pieces of vehicles given general stealthy attitude imply capped technology. With sufficiently robust alien psychology, this could mean a Dune regime, in which case aliens would need to go out of hiding or less deniably start derailing human AGI projects. Alternatively, there is a non-corrigible anti-foom alien pivotal process AGI watchdog that keeps the tech below some level, which could itself be superintelligent but specialized for this bounded task instead of doing world optimization. In this case the pieces of vehicles are from the aliens in its care, not indicative of its tech level but indicative of its tech-capping influence, and its interventions against human AGI projects could be much more subtle.
Given that all data on this so far is nonsense, and there is almost certainly nothing we can usefully do about it if true, the pragmatic stance is to ignore until the data improves much further.
Anthropics arguments seem to support this: we can observe only those parts of the universe where we a) first—or b) grabby aliens are not destroying everything.
I think we need to just scrap everything we think we “know” about anthropics and grabby aliens and lightcone-tiling AGI if this is true. The Aristotelian epistemology that has led us to those “conclusions” are obviously garbage, if it turns out that no, high-tech aliens with seemingly capped technology are here and they’re not doing anything to us. Confirmed UFO craft would be an absurd, catastrophic indictment of the standard LessWrong worldview and our overconfidence in these sorts of arguments.
Yeah, I really strongly agree with this. If high-tech aliens have been in contact with Earth for some significant time, the general public weren’t aware, and we aren’t all dead? “Halt and Catch Fire” moment for sure (wanted to make that a link to where I learned that phrase in The Sequences but I couldn’t find it by search. Did I confabulate??)
(“Halt, Melt, and Catch Fire” is in a few posts in the Coming of Age sequence)