Call me gullible, but this article is flabbergasting. I do not understand how to update on its contents, because nothing I can think of let’s this information fit into my world model, no matter what hypothesis I try to come up with about the behavior of the sources/etc.
Perhaps this is genuine whistleblowing, but not on what they make it sound like? Suppose there’s something being covered up that Grusch et al. want to expose, but describing what it is plainly is inconvenient for one reason or another. So they coordinate around the wacky UFO story, with the goal being to point people in the rough direction of what they want looked at.
My priors are still for all of this being bullshit; some psyop or a psychotic break that snowballed or none of these articles corresponding to reality at all. But if there really is a large number of intelligence officials earnestly coming forward with this, “UFOs are aliens” still seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be what it’s about.
My guess was that some people involved in foreign craft recovery and reverse engineering programs (we know that these exist) want their programs to be exposed to more oversight, because they’re currently too closed off to be cost-effective or useful, or because they’re being badly mismanaged in some other way.
So they’re telling congress, and maybe Grusch, that it’s an alien craft recovery and reverse engineering program, because in the current climate that’s going to get it done quicker. I think there might be some new legal protection for UAP reports too. It’s possible that there is no other legal avenue to get this looked at. I was considering posting about this, but didn’t see the point. What do you want to do, prevent them from getting more oversight?
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.
But if there really is a large number of intelligence officials earnestly coming forward with this
Yea, according to Michael Shellenberger’s reporting on this, multiple “high-ranking intelligence officials, former intelligence officials, or individuals who we could verify were involved in U.S. government UAP efforts for three or more decades each” have come forward to vouch for Grusch’s core claims.
Perhaps this is genuine whistleblowing, but not on what they make it sound like? Suppose there’s something being covered up that Grusch et al. want to expose, but describing what it is plainly is inconvenient for one reason or another. So they coordinate around the wacky UFO story, with the goal being to point people in the rough direction of what they want looked at.
I can come up with a hypothesis about the behaviour of the sources: the drones you send to observe and explore a planet might be disposable. (Eg we’ve left rovers behind on Mars because it’s not worth the effort to retrieve them from the gravity well.) Although if the even-wilder rumours about bio-alien corpses are true, that one fails too.
But the broader picture: that there are high-tech aliens out there who we haven’t observed doing things like building Dyson spheres or tiling the universe with computronium? They’re millions of years ahead of us and somehow didn’t either progress to building mega-tech or to AI apocalypse? They’re not millions of years ahead of us and there’s some insane coincidence where two intelligent species emerged on different planets at the same time but also there are no older civs that already grabbed their lightcone? I’m as boggled as you.
I’m kind of hoping this whole thing is a hoax or deliberate disinformation operation or something because I have absolutely no idea what to think about the alternative. But after the amount of leaks about UAPs over the last few years, I’m at at least 10% that there are literal alien spacecraft visiting our planet.
I don’t know much about astronomy. But is it possible a more advanced alien civ has colonized much of the galaxy, but we haven’t seen them because they anticipated the tech we would be using to make astronomical observations and know how to cloak from it?
I feel like it’s very easy to miss signals from advanced civilizations because there is so much noise in the universe. There are also a lot of practical concerns with colonizing large swathes of space. A Von Neumann probe is very risky because it can “get cancer” and replicate out of control.
If high-tech aliens did visit us, it would not seem inconceivable that the drones they would send might contain (or are able to produce prior to landing) robotic exploration units based on some form of nanotechnology that we might mistake for biology and more specifically, for pilots. A very advanced robot need not look like a robot.
I also do not find it too worrisome that we do not see Dyson spheres or a universe converted into computronium. It is possible that the engineering obstacles towards either goal are more formidable than the back-of-the-envelope assessments that originated these concepts suggest and that even the grabbiest of aliens do not execute such programs. Maybe even very advanced civilizations convert only a small part of their local system’s mass into civilized matter, just like our biosphere has only converted a small part of Earth, despite billions of years of trying to reproduce as much as possible. These are things where people probably overestimate the amount of information we can wring out of the Fermi paradox.
However, a sizable number of recovered craft would suggest that there is a population of craft in the solar system suffering from some rate of attrition. If so, where would they be coming from? A steady supply line maintained over at least several light years? Or a factory somewhere in the system?
I’ll be intrigued if evidence at least the verifiability of the Snowden files comes along, not before.
Call me gullible, but this article is flabbergasting. I do not understand how to update on its contents, because nothing I can think of let’s this information fit into my world model, no matter what hypothesis I try to come up with about the behavior of the sources/etc.
Perhaps this is genuine whistleblowing, but not on what they make it sound like? Suppose there’s something being covered up that Grusch et al. want to expose, but describing what it is plainly is inconvenient for one reason or another. So they coordinate around the wacky UFO story, with the goal being to point people in the rough direction of what they want looked at.
My priors are still for all of this being bullshit; some psyop or a psychotic break that snowballed or none of these articles corresponding to reality at all. But if there really is a large number of intelligence officials earnestly coming forward with this, “UFOs are aliens” still seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be what it’s about.
My guess was that some people involved in foreign craft recovery and reverse engineering programs (we know that these exist) want their programs to be exposed to more oversight, because they’re currently too closed off to be cost-effective or useful, or because they’re being badly mismanaged in some other way.
So they’re telling congress, and maybe Grusch, that it’s an alien craft recovery and reverse engineering program, because in the current climate that’s going to get it done quicker. I think there might be some new legal protection for UAP reports too. It’s possible that there is no other legal avenue to get this looked at.
I was considering posting about this, but didn’t see the point. What do you want to do, prevent them from getting more oversight?
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.
Yea, according to Michael Shellenberger’s reporting on this, multiple “high-ranking intelligence officials, former intelligence officials, or individuals who we could verify were involved in U.S. government UAP efforts for three or more decades each” have come forward to vouch for Grusch’s core claims.
Interesting theory. Definitely a possibility.
On the plus side, the allegations seem to be specific enough to push Congress into actually dealing with them and investigating.
I can come up with a hypothesis about the behaviour of the sources: the drones you send to observe and explore a planet might be disposable. (Eg we’ve left rovers behind on Mars because it’s not worth the effort to retrieve them from the gravity well.) Although if the even-wilder rumours about bio-alien corpses are true, that one fails too.
But the broader picture: that there are high-tech aliens out there who we haven’t observed doing things like building Dyson spheres or tiling the universe with computronium? They’re millions of years ahead of us and somehow didn’t either progress to building mega-tech or to AI apocalypse? They’re not millions of years ahead of us and there’s some insane coincidence where two intelligent species emerged on different planets at the same time but also there are no older civs that already grabbed their lightcone? I’m as boggled as you.
I’m kind of hoping this whole thing is a hoax or deliberate disinformation operation or something because I have absolutely no idea what to think about the alternative. But after the amount of leaks about UAPs over the last few years, I’m at at least 10% that there are literal alien spacecraft visiting our planet.
The world contains a huge number of cameras, and a lot of credulous people.
If you search for any weird blip you can’t explain, you find a lot of them.
The “UFO” videos are all different sizes and characteristics.
If you think most of the videos have a non-aliens explanation, the number of videos offers almost no evidence.
I don’t know much about astronomy. But is it possible a more advanced alien civ has colonized much of the galaxy, but we haven’t seen them because they anticipated the tech we would be using to make astronomical observations and know how to cloak from it?
Possible yes, but if all advanced civs are highly prioritising stealth, that implies some version of the Dark Forest theory, which is terrifying.
I feel like it’s very easy to miss signals from advanced civilizations because there is so much noise in the universe. There are also a lot of practical concerns with colonizing large swathes of space. A Von Neumann probe is very risky because it can “get cancer” and replicate out of control.
There are probably highly effective anti-cancer methods which have a modest performance overhead.
If high-tech aliens did visit us, it would not seem inconceivable that the drones they would send might contain (or are able to produce prior to landing) robotic exploration units based on some form of nanotechnology that we might mistake for biology and more specifically, for pilots. A very advanced robot need not look like a robot.
I also do not find it too worrisome that we do not see Dyson spheres or a universe converted into computronium. It is possible that the engineering obstacles towards either goal are more formidable than the back-of-the-envelope assessments that originated these concepts suggest and that even the grabbiest of aliens do not execute such programs. Maybe even very advanced civilizations convert only a small part of their local system’s mass into civilized matter, just like our biosphere has only converted a small part of Earth, despite billions of years of trying to reproduce as much as possible. These are things where people probably overestimate the amount of information we can wring out of the Fermi paradox.
However, a sizable number of recovered craft would suggest that there is a population of craft in the solar system suffering from some rate of attrition. If so, where would they be coming from? A steady supply line maintained over at least several light years? Or a factory somewhere in the system?
I’ll be intrigued if evidence at least the verifiability of the Snowden files comes along, not before.