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UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low

overcomingbias.com

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

#21

UFOs shouldn't be synonymous with alien intelligence. If anything evolved to travel through the universe, wouldn't it be logical to assume that it originated from a place where this ability was necessary for survival, e.g. the edge of a black hole? Such a life form could be quite different from our rock-bound existence. They might be closer to fish than to us.

Stanisław Lem has explored this sort of idea in his works very often. Like in Solaris, where the entire planet is very clearly an organism - it exhibits reactions to events, it maybe even has conscious thought, but it's on such a gigantic scale and on such long timeline that any idea of "communicating" with it is just fantasy. Or in Fiasco where there is a whole planet covered in microorganisms which have evolved a "society" including weapons to defend themselves with, but which again have no way to communicate with us. Or in Invincible, where life has evolved into self assembling nano machines whose only directive is to survive and consume - clearly an "intelligent" construct but one which isn't in the slightest open to "communication". List of examples could go on and on and on.

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

#22
post #18

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like dis…

I have one counter-example for you - North Sentinel Island. This is a small island in the Indian Ocean where people live who are completely isolated from the rest of the world and as such are probably the least technologically advanced civilization on earth. They're able to remain this way because it's generally been agreed that we should leave them alone (you can't go within 5 nm, of the island) but India does try t…

This reminded me of the book ‘Hard to be a God’ by the Strugatsky brothers.

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

#23
post #20
post #10

tl;dr; just a story of how I saw a UFO when I was young, nothing actionable... I feel somewhat bad for sharing life stories on a technical forum, but here it goes. As a young boy, 5-ish, I was sleeping with my mother and father in the room, and my grandmother rushes in, all pale, shouting something which directly translates to "Flying body! Flying body!". I distinctly remember having nightmares afterward with flying…

Like this ? https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/im...

Hi. Hotlinking doesn't work directly, but I figured out what you were pointing to: the portal from Dr. Strange.

I took the liberty to illustrate how I remember it, note that the picture is randomly from the internet and not as it was: https://i.postimg.cc/3NbJ0tvT/HNUFO.png .

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

#24
post #5

The author's explanations of UFOs: (A) Honest mistakes (B) New Govt. Tech (C) Hoaxes & Lies (D) Aliens, Etc. It seems an obvious oversight to me that unexplained physical phenomena are missing, e.g. weather/atmospheric effects that are extremely rare and wait to be discovered. In terms of likelihood the complementary event is "we have discovered all existing weather/atmospheric effects" which has probability zero. Th…

That's category A isn't it?

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

#25

As Stephen Hawkings and Neil deGrasse Tyson have quipped, in Earth’s history, any time a more technologically advanced civilization has come across a less technologically advanced civilization, it has never ended well for the less technologically advanced civilization. Any hypothetical which places a group of extraterrestrials capable of interstellar travel on Earth is fundamentally a catastrophe. It’s a lot like dis…

I don't think it makes sense to compare interactions between, on the one hand, different groups of primitive humans on Earth and, on the other hand, interactions between interstellar intelligences, which might be (and in my opinion probably would be) some kind of distributed AI which does not think or behave like a living organism, the product of biological evolution.

My guess is that an extraterrestrial intelligence investigating the Earth would be very stealthy, for two reasons: firstly because, like scientists, they want to observe life on Earth without disturbing it, and secondly because they will naturally suspect that other extraterrestrial intelligences are also lurking around the Earth and will also want to observe those, if possible, and will understand that they'll have a better chance of spotting those other extraterrestrial intelligences if those other extraterrestrial intelligences don't spot them first and take evasive action.

So my conclusion from all this is that it's quite plausible that multiple extraterrestrial intelligences are already lurking around the Earth, with their probes disguised as tiny insects, for example, and probably they are not all aware of each other's presence.

They may be observing you now!

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

#26

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_phenomenon What is crazy is that if the people in this movie are not lying, then every person on earth should be trying to solve this mystery. It would take crazy technology and time for anything to travel from another galaxy and be able to handle this environment without slowly studying and incorporating our DNA into theirs over a period of time.(60 years is nothing when you thin…

> (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. Now one can argue that aliens…

> By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today.

There are people who would disagree with this.

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

#27
The whole thing is a masterpiece of bizarre statements dressed up as reasoning

Take: Second, between (Ca) spontaneous decentralized hoaxes and lies, and (Cb) hoaxes and lies coordinated by a big central organization, (Cb) seems much more likely.

Apply this to reports of something other than UFOs, like, say fairies, ghosts or angels. You don't need to be an Oxford research associate writing about overcoming bias to realise the most common explanation for the phenomena is clearly (Cc) other such reports are already circulating in the public consciousness, and people are very impressed by them.

Neither spontaneity nor coordination is required to explain a sharp rise in sightings of saucer-shaped starships and little grey aliens after ships which flew like saucers and little grey aliens hogged the media for a decade, just like there isn't any conspiracy required to explain why people were a lot more likely to interact with spirits than be probed by 'greys' a few centuries back. (The great thing about "popular consciousness" explanations is they intersect with honest mistakes and delusions as well as big fat lies)

If Nick's desire for stuff that's in the movies to be real is so obvious he neglects the existence of the actual movies in his reasoning, he should probably consider renaming his blog

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

#28
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…

yep, people just want to believe there is something more than just boring daily life.

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

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. Now one can argue that aliens…

The aliens might also be less intelligent than humans, but more advanced technologically due to the lead time or just higher cooperativity. "Dumb aliens" could be a refreshing premise for a sci-fi story.. although it lies on the same continuum as any ant-like intelligent collective, so it's nothing new after all.

It's a cool idea. I'd bet that it's unlikely for a sufficiently intelligent species (say one capable of creating machines to cross interstellar distances) to stay dumb, though.

Humanity is fast approaching the point where we can edit our genes or otherwise select for intelligence. Even the idea of creating non-human super intelligent agents of some sort is arguably within reach over the course of the next few hundred years.

I like to think that though the starting average intelligence for a given species might be lower than others, eventually we all wind up at the same place, either turning ourselves into or building some hypothetically (given the laws of the universe) maximally intelligent system.

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

#30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The difference between the intelligence of Albert Einstein and an ant is far less than Albert Einstein and some living thing which is able to make it to earth and live here undetected for 60/? years ) Eh? That’s a really weird way of looking at intelligence. By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. Now one can argue that aliens…

> By all accounts of you pluck baby from 10,000 BCE and raise it today it wouldn’t be any different than an average person today. There are people who would disagree with this.

Why ? I've heard that things might have changed 80k years ago when thanks to cultural progress autism went from negative to positive (for the community), but otherwise AFAIK there haven't been any significant changes since the apparition of homo sapiens 350k-400k years ago ?
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