While I have published essays on the topic, and argued in defence of a high UFO p(aliens) at meetups and on Twitter for 16 years (...), this represents my first attempt at convincing LessWrong that the EA/rationality community has been embarrassingly negligent, in light of commitment to neglected, significant, and tractable cause areas, in investigating perhaps the most famous and least surprising conspiracy theory in our culture (...), a compounding epistemic error comparable to Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, with all the brazen confidence of his author, chronically failing to update on faintly screaming evidence that a highly manipulative, highly intelligent, highly rational Lord Voldemort was actually responsible for a magical conspiracy.
I'm open minded to the idea, but this piece is not persuasive to me.
It lays out many complicated inferences, doesn't really explain or justify them, and uses quite flowery language. Makes me think maybe you are trolling?
At least in my case, if you wanted to convince me, you should pick the top 3 observations you think are hardest to explain without evoking aliens and present them and the surrounding evidence as clearly as you can, without making a lot of extra inferences.
Like you say the point of the piece is convincing people about UFOs, but then start off the piece saying.
Given that UFOs are obviously alien
But I think most people on lesswrong would already radically change their mind about a whole slew of things if they were convinced Aliens were actively monitoring and interfering with stuff on earth.
1The piece represents my best explanation of what is going on (contra the taboo on UFO theory mentioned by Robin Hanson here https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/when-the-tabooed-taboohtml). Without those complicated inferences, you'll be as confused as Scott Alexander analysing the Miracle of Fatima (the 200-foot "sun" disc two miles above the crowd, the selectively visible Marian and Angel of Peace apparitions, the psychedelic colours, the radiation poisoning, the Oneness with God experience); he even notices the UFO angle, but can't pursue it any further because he can't think of any reason why aliens would signal-boost Catholicism. This is often the case with the superficially familiar (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky objecting that aliens would use small nanotech rather than large visible spaceships, when they use small nanotech) and why they miss the overall puzzle without putting even a week's effort into looking closer. Or, put more c/rudely, I'm more interested in persuading rats at the level of their usual sticking points (unreasonable priors for alien proximity etc) than at the level of "Yeah obviously dinosaurs are real, go read a book (here's some suggestions if you're a creationist)."
I link to many more than three observations!
My substantive arguments are that UFOs are well-documented cross-culturally and across millennia, consistent in physical effects, phenomenology etc down to tiny details (like the interactions of their EM fields with car engines - do you want me to go into that in detail?), and demonstrate advanced engineering (like relativistic accelerations). What substance did you have in mind?
Going into detail about any of it. Including sources of evidence which are actually discussed and integrated into your argument rather than a few scattered links which it is very unlikely any readers will click through because it is not clear what of relevance is behind them. Making fewer claims, or expanding the post 10x without introducing claims.
1We do not see their Dyson swarms or similar because our galaxy is <1% visible.
Didn't follow. If they're doing dyson swarms, why wouldn't the dyson swarms be everywhere by now.
GPT slightly messed up the paragraph order reconstructing from screens of a deleted EA Forums post. Anecdotally, the most common counterargument I've encountered in orthodox Rat circles is "Why don't we see them?" because they didn't know our galaxy was mostly invisible. (This is the usual level of counterargument and why my post is a bit "C'mon, you're better than this, Joe Rogan has done more homework here" dunky.) They might not be doing Dyson swarms (as we're massively overconfident about what alien colonisation would look like based on flimsy assumptions that could be wrong e.g. EMs, how early relativistic travel comes in the tech tree, totally unknown game-theoretic/political landscape), but if they are, they could have a galactic empire of Dyson swarms beyond the observational horizon of the Orion Arm. (We're in the Outer Rim.)
Due to anthropics, we do not find ourselves under the thumb of a grabby civ that destroys life-bearing panspermia sibling planets to make way for a hyperspace bypass, but rather a non-grabby civ that demonstrates at least some consideration (quarantine, wildlife preserve, integration into a mature ecosystem) for emerging sapients.
Kind of an old idea. Authur C. Clark's old scifi book "Childhood's End" has that as a premise (though in his case the aliens were our visual model for devils -- wings, tails, horns, redish complexion...)
Probably because even the ancient aliens guy with the hair (read: the Bayes-uninitiated, the epistemically lenient etc) intuits that it would be extremely unlikely for ancient gods and UFO aliens to be unrelated. The astronomers of the Air Force's old Project Blue Book converged on the same solution space. Lovecraft was early once again!
See Mick West (https://www.youtube.com/@MickWest) for detailed debunkings of videos claiming to be evidence of alien UFOs.
There are some problems with UFOs:
- History interpretation is not clear cut. There is a lot of things that can be explained with hallucinogenics, like mushrooms being a staple in the communion of early days christianity.
- Rare earth theory keeps adding more and more constraints. There is a lot that we don't know about the cosmos and quite frequently previous assumptions about astrophysics are invalidated by new observations
- UFOs are one of the favorite psyops to hide the existence of global mind control tech and advanced VR tech
- The hidden bias: we went from anthropocentric to heliocentric, but maybe the truth is in the middle. Meaning that there might be quantum properties exploited by biology that only happen in our corner of the universe.
- There is a class of flying objects that exploits tech just for the purpose of "awing", very useful in global cognitive war.
The problem with LessWrong and conspiracies is that LW relies on rationatily and epistemology. But when you have an adversary well equipped to drown the 1% truth in distracting narratives, corrupting evidence, planting fake testimonies, there isn't much of a rational conversation to be had. Weaponization of plausible deniability, the failure of Occam's razor are real issues with no solution that I know of.
UFO ancient aliens (p >99%) are probably your gods, and this is knowable with study and thought.
Recommended: Would UFO Aliens Be Our Gods? by Robin Hanson, Are DMT Entities and UFOs Connected? by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, Essays on UFOs and Related Conjectures by Magnus Vinding, The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know by Scott Alexander, If UFOs are alien beings, are they just doing mood affiliation in visiting us? by Tyler Cowen, The Physics of UAP by Kevin Knuth, For Lecture About Flying Saucers by Hermann Oberth, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers by Jacques Vallée, Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis by Paul R. Hill, UAP Disclosure Act by Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds.
Given that UFOs are obviously alien, we should rethink many background assumptions about the future, rethink cause prioritisation (at the least, grow the Effective Altruism: Aliens group into an ecosystem comparable to the AI safety community), and start the long and tedious process of convincing relevant decisionmakers and high-leverage institutions (including EAs) that UFOs are alien, which, much like AI risk debates earlier this century, is difficult due to snarky ignorance, status penalties, and bad priors. We should also rethink community norms in light of such a comprehensive failure to notice that UFOs are alien.
I am claiming to be something like the world’s foremost UFO expert (outside, one assumes, the AEC-originating legacy programs, and other read-in USAPs, with access to recovered craft and reverse-engineered Alien Reproduction Vehicles), in terms of epistemics, polymathy, and specialist domain knowledge in physics and meteorology.
While I have published essays on the topic, and argued in defence of a high UFO p(aliens) at meetups and on Twitter for 16 years (with several rat/adjacents updating to >80%, and making bets), this represents my first attempt at convincing LessWrong that the EA/rationality community has been embarrassingly negligent, in light of commitment to neglected, significant, and tractable cause areas, in investigating perhaps the most famous and least surprising conspiracy theory in our culture (that UFOs are alien à la Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and elements of the US Government and/or the aliens are partially successfully covering it up à la Stargate and The X Files), a compounding epistemic error comparable to Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, with all the brazen confidence of his author, chronically failing to update on faintly screaming evidence that a highly manipulative, highly intelligent, highly rational Lord Voldemort was actually responsible for a magical conspiracy.
Their first contact protocol, which could be summarised as babysitting and bootstrapping a civilisation of monkey neighbours into a tolerable handoff, is ethical, sensible, scalable, sustainable, and overdetermined, implicit in game theoretic equilibria (sterilising sapient species or “accidentally” accelerating their dooms as they emerge is universally Unfriendly), superior knowledge (e.g. open individualism), and the simple fact that you can’t really get complex civilisations that successfully coordinate against replicator dynamics, manage internal frictions, and develop stable cosmic monopolies without ethics (sufficiently complex and non-totalising to allow extensive autonomy and suffering) and responsible first contact protocols honed by millions of years of experience. (The reptoids might have been a particularly difficult admission.)
The Fermi paradox is dissolved. Aliens are here, as we expected. Due to observational selection effects, we tautologically awaken under the Culture of non-grabby aliens, answering the anecdotally common if anthropics-blind question as to why they haven’t eaten our sun. We see them, producing evidence quantitatively and qualitatively superior to natural atmospheric phenomena (that are not attempting to be stealthy like UFOs) like ball lightnings and the Hessdalen lights, including multi-sensor radar and sonar measurements, mass eyewitness reports including observations by meteorologists with theodolites, and video and photographic evidence, corroborating in ways that any Bayesian should find extremely persuasive; 3 × 10^6 volts per meter EM fields > ugh fields. We do not see their Dyson swarms or similar because our galaxy is <1% visible.
Given pseudopanspermia, I assign the bulk of probability mass to an intragalactic federation of panspermia siblings (operating under the policy of a first mover civ, tentatively the DMT Mantids and their artificial human–Mantid hybrids, the Greys) originating from a common nebulaic nursery that seeded Earth (and possibly Mars) with life. They reached every system in our galaxy with a von Neumann–like colonisation wave of relativistic craft (with observed accelerations that extrapolate to galactic transit in two weeks’ subjective time), setting up infrastructure here (like the oceanic motherships releasing saucers, cigars, and the usual small orb platforms with utility foglet-like capabilities) at least thousands of years ago. They maintained biosquishy dominance for many reasons, including functionalist materialists being broadly wrong about digital AI, cogsci, and reality generally (with biosquishies being Turing-incomputable, unsimulable hypercomputers). Life is common in the multiverse because intelligent life is the replicative mechanism of universes via quantum tunnelling or artificial black holes, an extension of Smolin’s evolutionary cosmology that possibly solves fine-tuning and is consistent with recent James Webb Space Telescope observations and my preferred post-Everettian physical theory, a modified form of Zurek’s quantum Darwinism.
Finding ourselves under the first contact protocol of the Milky Way’s dominant power might be socially surprising, but should not be considered epistemically surprising. It is the kind of thing that you should expect from first principles, and the kind of thing that is easy to infer with sufficient familiarity with the corpus of supernatural encounters material and knowledge of physics (which neatly explains how their technology “magically” reactivates stalled gasoline but not diesel car engines 1 in 10 times, or how they produce the phenomenology of being ripped out of your body into the light at the end of the tunnel/DMT-like Oneness with God experiences of pure infinite love, and the like). Once you finally locate the correct hypothesis, and I believe I have located the correct hypothesis, everything clicks into place, beyond denial or horror or cold uggies.
Their primary interface surface is “playing” gods e.g. the glowing maiden apparitions and flying circular shields of the Roman prodigy lists, Bronze Age vimanas, and Biblical angels (from the flying wheels of Ezekiel to the angel and fake Mary apparitions of Fatima), maintaining apex status over a social species (and thanks to the Machiavellian intelligence attractor, what emerging sapient species won’t be a social species?) via their monopoly on sacred spectacle and superior knowledge of how humans work (having scanned our entire CNS).
Their psyops are smart, reactive, and contextual, maintaining strategic ambiguity, flooding the noosphere with misinformation, and enabling smaller experiments e.g. seeing how a supercooperator memeplex as load-bearing as Christianity adjusts to God being an alien from Kobol, how Americans respond to the idea of non-humans like Bigfoot living by them all this time, how Europeans responded to the concept of a “third category” of physically small but high-status fairies with their own complex taboos after stabilising morally revolutionary Christianity with angel-Jesus apparitions, normalising extraterrestrials the century we go to space, and seeing how humans respond to higher non-human intelligences and vast asymmetries in general. They seed and scaffold our institutions, boost cooperation, help us with our control problems, provide safety nets against Molochian traps, nudge us away from entropic attractors like nihilism and atheism and towards desired value lock-ins, and influence us long term in the vein of The Culture’s interventions in Inversions.
They prefer not to handover technology or rule directly—a soft form of the Prime Directive—but have tipped boards via high-leverage social interventions and do demonstrate willingness to intervene in frontier technology and catastrophic or existential risks (e.g. disabling and enabling ICBMs). Things like leaving abandoned UFOs outside Five Eyes airbases should probably be interpreted as deliberate handoffs to Five Eyes at the expense of other human polities or tech trees.
UFO ancient aliens are your gods. (Well, my pagan if Promethean God and starry-eyed Ishta-deva is Charlize Theron, who I think is far more interesting and spectacular.) Let’s talk about it.