gfodor

Certainly but the point is that anyone commenting on it in a way that deceptively avoids mentioning this fact is pretty clearly bad faith.

Because I follow these people on Twitter and have seen their histrionics and hypocrisy on the regular.

Sure it matters. It doesn’t mean you ultimately would judge it appropriate, but take any scenario where violent rap lyrics are used and revoke a person’s ability to know they are quoting a song and it will be interpreted wildly differently.

I mean, if someone says something like that and they’re conjuring it up directly or they’re quoting a piece of art, I think that’s obviously relevant to interpreting it. Without taking a position on how severe to interpret it, it’s plainly obvious this important detail is glossed over and ignored and the media coverage of this is desperately trying to leave readers walking away thinking this was a more direct straightforward statement not subject to interpretation of how much to take it at face value.

You'd never guess that this was a Tupac quote by the media coverage and wave after wave of forced outrage. The whole thing is so embarassing.

People don't wear those all day. A scenario where people have cameras on their face all day yields a totally different kind of ability to capture serendipitious moments, etc. That's not to say this value proposition is high enough to warrant it, or that we should expect this technology to actually succeed mass adoption, but it is not the same value proposition as what you're talking about.

They should be here to ensure we don’t do anything that could hurt anyone not on Earth’s surface.

The problem is these stories while inconsistent in the ways you mention are also inexplicably consistent in other ways.

Imagine we have another small population of moderately more technologically advanced hominids right here on Earth. Say they want to fool us and make us think they are ET. Imagine they have technology we we have, like VR, drugs, and some we don’t like novel high energy hydroelectrodynamic atmospheric propulsion.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and if you experienced it, you would probably find yourself hallucinating details like the ones you mentioned to make it fit into some kind of coherent picture based on the technology and even physics you know.

That doesn’t make any sense to me. I would never risk anything someone told me would move my consciousness into another machine since I would have no way to know a priori if the person on the other side would still be me. Ergo I think civilizations probably just take on the precautionary principle and maintain their minimal biological form to ensure a fully linked chain of confidence they will preserve their own consciousness, but that’s the threshold and they virtualize everything else like their incoming qualia.

Light speed can’t be overcome and virtual reality can be made so you optimize for minimizing latency between minds and expanding into space strictly for scientific purposes or safety reasons. (Ie, to probe it for knowledge and danger.)

No, I made a GPT that does, if you search for Intraterrestrial Hypothesis. I’m gonna write an essay though.

UAPDA and recent testimony to Congress, combined with the steady progression of destagmatization, whistleblower protection, etc.

Correct - but also sufficiently alien that you should consider a scenario where we have a sibling species here on Earth with us.

You already called the same people crude. I’m calling them irrational. If one is an “insult” so is the other.

I mean I thought this too but this is the one area, particularly under recent events, that I think it’s reasonable to start trying to come up with good non-prosaic explanations. You’ll probably find an increasingly surprising number of people talking and thinking about this in a serious way, because events seem to be pointing to something that isn’t just smoke and mirrors the entire way down. It’s smoke and mirrors to be sure in many ways. But it’s sufficiently uniquely weird that it is looking increasingly likely there is a significant non-prosaic thing going on here.

Figure out what physics says about the physical footprint of say 10 million small hominids who want to remain alive but live life entirely in virtual reality pods. I think you’ll conclude that from first principles you can say very well hidden, have a sustained existence as long as you fix the population, if you solve the engineering problems of situating your hardware in a void in the ground. Particularly if you know a priori you only need to do it for a few millennia.

Presumably if we're dealing with a non-human intelligence that does not want to be identified then we're in the challenging situation of this being closer to an adversarial war than a natural phenomena. So, while absence of evidence doesn't prove anything about that being the case, absence of evidence would be expected if it was: if human civilization developed ubiquitious high-res sensing tech, then you'd expect the adversary to respond in kind.

In other words, if they're real, and they're trying to hide, then the fact we all have iPhones hasn't yielded more evidence doesn't prove anything, because if it was us, we'd change our tactics to avoid being detected by those things. As we do in war. It's very important to notice I'm not saying this tells us that is what is going on - we have to build up our priors in other ways to decide if that's true - but what I'm saying is that the claim that we all have cameras and yet not more UFO videos has absolutely zero epistemological effect, since it's smuggling in the assumption these objects are behaving like a natural phenomenon that will maintain their visible presence in spite of our own technological advancement. That's obviously not what one would expect if it's actually non-human intelligence.

Small humanoid sibling species living in VR pods adapted physically initially for subterranean life but eventually artifically selected for sensory override VR pods. (Hence the large eyes, grey skin, no reproductive organs, absorbitve digestion, and so on.)

Lots of people in this thread are speculating about the plausibility of an ET hypothesis, which is far more nutty than what I wrote here. What I wrote here is unorthodox, but an ET hypothesis comparatively is absurd, particularly if you are going to entertain that based on the existing evidence. The existing evidence would not imply ET as much as another Earth species interacting with us. It also can imply that people are crazy or lying, of course, but I'm talking within the realm where we are going to speculate about ET.

The hypothesis is this all happened 10-20k years ago, and they virtualized their society into VR. They somehow managed to eliminate enough of the evidence of their development phase on the surface to the point where we have no conclusive evidence. There is glancing evidence that there were advanced civilizations quite a bit earlier than we thought.

Yeah I mean ultimately I can put forward falsifiable tests for most of these. My hypothesis is they are in a large void under one of the oceans, in physical pods. They don't eat solid food, but absorb a liquid diet. They probably do produce a heat signature, if we looked. I don't have a good explanation for the relative lack of evidence of their surface phase, but we do have some evidence that timelines around technological civilization are very off base. For your last point, I think most of them are not physically able to travel to the surface at all, and any instance of crashed manned UAPs (which imo, are no longer manned at all) may have explanations of the kind you state. But that's all been eliminated now - I would be surprised to find out we have any surface visitations by anything other than things which absolutely must be manned. (Of which I can speculate, but the null set is a possibility.)

beats me. some people have emotional reactions to hypotheses around the UAP phenomenon. it's not that surprising given the implications of if it is due to non-human intelligence, but it's annoying that speculative theorizing about this is treated the way it is compared to other mysteries.

People make claims here all the time without evidence and don't get downvoted. How absurd.

It’s actually a false dilemma. They’re real, but they’re non-human Earthlings living here in an environment we haven’t yet discovered or stumbled upon is the option few talk about, fits the full body of evidence better than any other explanation, and would prove most everyone wrong in different ways. So I bet that is what is going on.

Edit: it’s always funny that I get downvoted for just writing a theory out that is a pretty good one, as though you’re supposed to downvote people for this kind of post. People get really upset by this subject.

My theory is they are real but they’re not aliens. They are another hominid species who live here on Earth. My explanation is actually pretty good if you condition on the assumption that they are real - if you do that, ET is very unlikely comparatively. I can kind of explain everything you see in various ways, some hard to vary, some not.

Kirkpatrick has misrepresented things in the past. His whole thing is very suspicious and weird. I wouldn’t put too much weight on what he is saying here.

at this point it reads like the kind of thing you'd hear when you're being told what will happen if you exit a protection racket

we'll be ok, just let us use our computers

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

I think we spend a lot more time now, on average, struggling through higher levels of Maslow's hierarchy. I think this will accelerate: much of the struggles of my children will be primarily about self-actualization and finding meaning in life. Parents today are worrying abou 'the last war' in many ways, like how are they going to afford college or pay the mortgage, when the real challenge for children in a world of AGI will be purpose and meaning - something parents have largely not had to think too hard about comparatively, since much meaning in life can come from the succeeding over the struggle to simply get by.

In general as people get older they become able to see things that are getting worse, since they have a wider frame of reference, and have a hard time seeing things that are getting better, because they imagine the past was better than it was. The result, in many cases, is an articulation of a very nuanced explanation for why the present sucks, but often to me I read it as just a self-rationalization. The truth is, a lot of stuff is amazing now that was far worse in the past.

A lot of the things people are making now are being driven by young people. Young people have an ignorance about the past, so miss some of the lessons, but they also lack the cynicism which prevents revisiting things that people have determined "don't work" in the past.

I generally see tech as a large ecosystem which is in fact progressively improving, with minor setbacks that often do echo the same setbacks in the past. The error is to pattern match too strongly on these setback patterns as though they contain some kind of timeless wisdom. If there's any industry where past performance isn't indicative of future results, it's technology. (Which is and of itself, is a process of knowledge discovery at its core.) My general approach to thinking about this is I grow older is to guard against the kind of cynicism I see in so many of my peers. Yes, it means I will be wrong on things where the cynic turns out to be right. But given the pull of cynicism, I suspect more likely I will remain cynical in many places I shouldn't be anyway, so I'd rather focus on being right in the places where the cynic is wrong by forcing myself to remain optimistic and give the young the benefit of the doubt.

This also has the added benefit of making the process of working on things more fun in general - not just because it leads to actually making stuff (cynicism demotivates this) and it also leads to being surrounded by peers who are optimistic and interested in continuing to make stuff (being surrounded by cynics is generally miserable, and breeds cynicism.) A few years ago, I found myself in a broad peer group of technologists who were deep into the abyss of cynicism, and made a conscious decision to just sever myself from these networks because this kind of negativity was becoming my dominant mode of thinking about technology. I've done some of my best work since then and much of it has probably come about due to the fact that I dove into it due to the counterfactual level of optimism I had due to this one decision.