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UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

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Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#131

Post by mjburgess »

mrfusion wrote: post #103
mjburgess wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't ignore them. It may be clearer to write all probabilities above as being conditioned on "our best knowledge of the universe". P(All intelligent life is organic | Our best knowldge) =~ 1 Who knows the actual P(All intelligent life is organic). My point is that OP seems profoundly ignorant of "the facts of the matter" as our best theories describe them. Such facts make D-AnythingOtherThanAliens vastly more lik…

I like your thinking but this still bothers me: > P(All intelligent life is organic | Our best knowldge) =~ 1 Even looking at ourselves, we are somewhat close to AI and it’s a reasonable belief that we’ll have something smarter than us within a few decades. Why are non organic aliens so unlikely to you?

I equally think P(Inorganic AI) is also vanishing low.

What the ad companies have been selling, and researchers peacocking, isn't "AI".

It's a system of manipulating electrical abacus beads to follow patterns of interest to human observers. Has very little to do with building systems that have relevant intrinsic properties.

A digital computer does not weight more in virtue of simulating weight. A simulation is just an ape moving a bead along a wire to aid in its thinking. Simulations are cognitive games that enable us to reason more clearly.

Nothing obtains any properties in virute of being a computer. A computer is just a type of gaming we are playing with another physical system.

Intelligence is an instrinic property of really-existing physical systems; largely having to do with the ability to physical adapt on small time scales (ie., the brain grows differently in response to bodily-environmental dynamics). And on large time-scales (ie., evolution provides for the "right material" over >billion years via adaption -- which is an organic process).

Only organic material has demonstrated the relevant short-time and long-time properties for intelligence.

Games with electrical switches are apt to fool an ape looking at an LCD screen into thinking "there really is a virtual world in there!". But there isnt: it's an illusion. The LCD screen only appears to show it because we have rigged the beads to disturb the liquid crystal of the screen so as to present this illusion.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#133

Post by Sacho »

graderjs wrote: post #99
ericmay wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the middle of “something definitely exists” and “nothing exists”? Seems like it would err on the side of “maybe something exists” which doesn’t quite feel like a middle ground. Replace UFOs with Sasquatch. “Sasquatch exists and here is the picture and Sasquatch tracks to prove it!” “You made that up. It’s a guy in a costume. Why can’t we find any single dead Sasquatch? Why are all the pictures and videos crapp…

I think we should all be engaging in this topic critically and openly. With curiosity rather than certainty, when none exists. I think we should not be so casual or strident in just dismissing or discounting other human beings personal experiences. Especially when there are so many people with stories. These humans are valuable, and their stories are valuable. We shouldn't dismiss that, or disrespect them. But also,…

No way. Modern research has demonstrated how unstructured and unscientific our reasoning is, easy to fool and game, falling prey to a plethora of biases. If anything, rejecting your own and other people's personal experience should be the default, because the information we gather when not taking the utmost care to calibrate our instruments is pretty much garbage. A quick example of this would be how unreliable eyewitness testimony is in trials, but of course the sightings of various unproven phenomena(sasquatch, loch ness monster, etc) are also a great example of our "personal experience" being put to the test and found to be useless.

To me, it's more plausible to believe that the world we "experience" practically does not exist, and our memories and perceptions very rarely match reality, than to concede that these particular collective personal experiences amount to evidence of anything.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#134

Post by ncmncm »

See, this is why it is always so hard to take these rationalist arguments seriously. They assume their own competence, at the same time as pretending not to.

The most likely alternative is obviously E: something we (personally) don't know. That doesn't depend on time travel, extra dimensions, or aliens.

It's not a clear majority, > 0.5. But to fail to mention it amounts to a big hole in the argument.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#136

Post by choxi »

_ph_ wrote: post #55

The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 Not only has the quality of cameras increased increadibly in the last decades, especially thanks to modern digital cameras, but in the last 10 years, most of us are carrying a quite good camera in their pocket all of the time. This would easily allow for documenting any strange phenomena. And that this…

Phone cameras have improved in resolution but their optical zoom hasn't gotten much better. The Chelyabinsk meteor is easy to see without any zoom because of the contrail and glow from burning in the atmosphere, but the UFOs that people claim to see don't leave any signatures. They're often reported as just shapes moving in strange ways or balls of light. The few witness testimonies I've seen often estimate the size of the UFO being smaller than a commercial airliner, I believe David Fravor said the Tic Tac was about the size of an F-18 hornet. If they also move as fast and erratically as people often claim, it's not that surprising there isn't more photographic evidence.

And there actually are quite a few photos and videos captured of UFO phenomenon, but they get posted on obscure areas of social media and never make mainstream news. The videos are often debunked as weather balloons, flairs, or something else prosaic. In some cases the debunking theory is confirmed because e.g. we can confirm that skydivers with flairs were in the same region as the video was taken. In most cases it's just a video of a small object in the sky and there's no way to confirm what it is.

Re: NORAD, Jacques Vallee claimed in a Joe Rogan interview that (either the ARTCC or NORAD) do see thousands of objects on radar every month that get classified as "uncorrelated targets" and are ignored because they don't show any inbound trajectory toward the US.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#137

Post by Eupolemos »

_ph_ wrote: post #55

The discussion is basically answered by this short picture: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1374167754404630528 Not only has the quality of cameras increased increadibly in the last decades, especially thanks to modern digital cameras, but in the last 10 years, most of us are carrying a quite good camera in their pocket all of the time. This would easily allow for documenting any strange phenomena. And that this…

Not really.

A lot of the cases have always been hoaxes or ignorance. Slow moving lights in the skies photographed by exited "believers".

The few remaining good cases are difficult to document. First of all, go out and take a picture of a bird. You get just one chance and it must be flying fast. Your result will not be very good. This our baseline.

Now look at the Nimitz incident. They measured a move of stationary at 80k feet to 80 feet in less than a second - something like 1200g, IIRC. 1200g is a downright silly number.

Now just take a good picture of this /s

The best current theory IMO is that this is done my manipulating/creating geodesic lines. This will create "gravity lensing" (like Einstein crosses) further blurring the craft.

Anyone serious but curios should take a look at uaptheory.com - it is good work on display by someone who understands physics and relativity.

We won't get a good picture because they move ridiculously fast.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#138

Post by rnd0 »

williamstein wrote: post #117
Mizza wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds nice, but is it true? Weren't the Vikings, later Normen, far less advanced than the places they raided? They absorbed the technology, the land and culture and used it to conquer and form what is present-day England. Maybe we'll beat the aliens with our savagery.

Or diseases.

Why not? It worked in War Of The Worlds

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#139

Post by piyh »

mjburgess wrote: post #131
mrfusion wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your thinking but this still bothers me: > P(All intelligent life is organic | Our best knowldge) =~ 1 Even looking at ourselves, we are somewhat close to AI and it’s a reasonable belief that we’ll have something smarter than us within a few decades. Why are non organic aliens so unlikely to you?

I equally think P(Inorganic AI) is also vanishing low. What the ad companies have been selling, and researchers peacocking, isn't "AI". It's a system of manipulating electrical abacus beads to follow patterns of interest to human observers. Has very little to do with building systems that have relevant intrinsic properties. A digital computer does not weight more in virtue of simulating weight. A simulation is just a…

There is a virtual world in there though. There's rules, objects, processes and people to talk to. There can both fooled apes and a nested world to explore. Occasionally we take something out the simulation and interface it into the real world, or physically replicate the best virtual iteration.

It might be low probability based on today's knowledge, but given that it's an option, that compute and algorithmic progress will continue to increase for the foreseeable future, those odds will continue to rise. The technosphere is the next abstraction that evolution will take place in and we've only had 50 years to get to know it. Give it 1000 years of civilization surviving and I can guarantee non-organic "life" will surpass all expectations.

Re: UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

#140

Post by thwarted »

dragonelite wrote: post #58
DrBazza wrote: post #7

UFOs exist. Alien spaceships do not. Occam's Razor. Also, having the technology to fly light years through interstellar space, means that you should surely be able to construct a craft that doesn't crash on Earth (Roswell), or waste your time flying for years to dip into the atmosphere, do a little light show and fly off, or harassing a farmer in the middle of nowhere vs landing in Central Park. The gimbal video and…

UFO stuff seems mostly driven by the west, wouldn't be surprised if it was just a psy-ops. To get some more defense funding for the space force. If you can generate almost infinite energy to cross deep space to probe some humans I'm not sure I would take such an alien race serious. It would be more like how global factions on earth fight over resources, so I subscribe more to the Dark forest view of things. If they r…

If you can generate almost infinite energy, what would you gain by invading earth vs, say, consuming resources from an uninhabited planet? Earth makes up a small amount of the mass in our solar system.

But the inverse is also just as likely (fantastical): if you can generate almost infinite amounts of energy, what else is there to do other than troll rando life forms (farmers)?

Both cases do have one thing in common: humans sure do think highly of themselves and the one, small planet they inhabit.

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