All of ChristianKl's Comments + Replies

The big websites make more money by selling ads directly than by selling them over a federated system. If you pay the New York Times directly for your ads and the New York Times writes a story that annoys you, you can call the New York Times to complain. On the other hand, if the New York Times wouldn't sell ads directly but instead use some federated ad system, ad buyers couldn't do that.

We currently don't really have bands you have their own homepage where you can listen to the music of the band and the band makes money with selling ads. 

There's Apple News+ that gives you one paid subscription and then allows you to access a bunch of otherwise-paywalled websites. 

I like the dynamic of how the reacts make it easier to give positive feedback. 

When reading the recent UAP betting threat, I feel like I would want to have a react to congratulate people for taking their beliefs seriously enough to bet. 

If you would also have added links, I would have added the "nice, scholarship"-react.

1cubefox7h
Fixed! (Video reviews, so unfortunately there is no Ctrl-F to find the relevant part.)

Meta question: If you think there is a 1 in 1000 chance that you are wrong

I don't think that credence is well thought of that way. Attempts to change my mind might change my credence even if they don't change it to me thinking that a natural origin would be the most likely. 

I don't trust Seymour Hersh's anonymous sources more than 70/30, even when The New Yorker publishes his pieces.   

My own beliefs don't rest on a single piece. I don't think that anyone should hold credence that is as high as mine just because they read this article. ... (read more)

The WIV did not do any work on Coronaviruses under BSL4. They did gain-of-function experiments under BSL2 and BSL3. 

What are some of the real-world consequences to this?

It seems that Fauci and Collins already saw the writing on the wall when the Republicans got the majority in Congress and decided to end their careers. That means they can't be fired for it. 

After misleading the public in the Iraqi WMD case, there was some accounting in the media and an attempt to improve structures to avoid getting lied to by authorities. It's possible that our media institutions aren't completely lost and will do some accounting of why they failed to inform us. 

 only one would involve investigators missing something?

Investigators always miss something and we are likely going to find more information in the future. 

That doesn't change the fact that we have overwhelming evidence.

If you look at the article in Public, it makes the case: We know that the people at the WIV put a Furin cleavage side via gain-of-function modification into a Coronaviruses and we know that they did their research without the safety precautions that you would need and we know that one of the first patients was one of the people wo... (read more)

I think the framing of focusing on public servants is one about obscuring responsibility for people on forums like this who went along with the disinformation campaign to suppress the lab leak theory. 

That depends on whether users value privacy and might be scared about a device that has deep access or whether users have no problem with that.

When Apple spends its marketing dollars on speaking about how it should be scary when a device has access they might convince customers. 

The word "disappointing" suggests that the action taken to suppress widespread concern (like overruling the intelligence analysts) are bad. Why wouldn't you want to blame those who are responsible for the disappointing state of affairs?

It's a polarizing topic and some people seem to be emotionally attached to lab leak denial. 

2Zack Sargent1d
Some people are invested emotionally, politically, and career-ally in said denial. I am curious how many of them will have the humility to admit they were wrong. Sadly, this has become my only metric for the quality of public servants: Can they admit it when they are wrong? Do they offer to change, or do they just blame others for their failures? I assume none of them have this capacity until I see it. The "lab leak" story will offer an opportunity for us to observe a large number of public servants either admit their mistakes ... or not.

Don't confuse the headline with the resolution criteria.

The resolution criteria is:

This question will resolve as Yes if, between June 1, 2021 to January 1, 2030, 4 credible media sources report that non-human extra-terrestrial technology has been discovered in the solar system (within Neptune's orbit). This may pertain to current claims of UFOs/UAP, events between June 1, 2021 and January 1, 2030, or discoveries of archaelogical evidence (defunct or non-operational technology, found on earth or in the solar system).

The fine print is:

for this question, cred

... (read more)

Googling for "must not be allowed to surpass the human spirit"  and Palantir finds no hits. 

2Lichdar2d
He discussed it here: https://youtu.be/Ufm85wHJk5A?list=PLQk-vCAGvjtcMI77ChZ-SPP--cx6BWBWm [https://youtu.be/Ufm85wHJk5A?list=PLQk-vCAGvjtcMI77ChZ-SPP--cx6BWBWm]

I bet that if an AI is observing your eye movements, which includes a lot of info on not only where you look but also in what ways you are thinking and your emotional reactions and state, plus your other movements and reactions, also it hears everything you say, even without you intending to tell it anything directly, and you’ll probably want to be helping.

One point made during the presentation is that they are big on privacy, by which they mean that your eye movements are private and apps can't just access them.

All accounts agree that Apple has essentiall

... (read more)
1Caspar Oesterheld1d
>All accounts agree that Apple has essentially solved issues with fit and comfort. Besides the 30min point, is it really true that all accounts agree on that? I definitely remember reading in at least two reports something along the lines of, "clearly you can't use this for hours, because it's too heavy". Sorry for not giving a source!
2Zvi1d
If Apple is going to hide eye movements from apps, that sounds very much like an alignment tax situation - a headset that doesn't do this is going to get a lot of capabilities advantages, so Apple will need to stay far ahead on other fronts continuously to overcome that.

It's easy to explain why people who hold beliefs for signaling purposes don't want to bet on those beliefs. It interferes with getting status points by exposing bullshit. 

Rather, I'm saying probability theory points at a correct way to reason for ideal agents, which humans can try to approximate.

Probability theory does not do that. It does not make your reasoning robust against unknown unknowns. 

In this case, I think there's already more than enough evidence available for an ideal agent to conclude from a cursory inspection that the observed evidence is not well-explained by actual aliens.

From my perspective it doesn't look like there is an explanation that well-explains the available evidence. That goes both for alien... (read more)

If someone explicitely writes into their consent forms "my participation was entirely voluntary" and the participation isn't voluntary it might be easier to attack the person running the trial later. 

The standard way to run medical trial is to focus on people that are "normal". That usually means that people in clinical trials don't take other drugs that have side effects. From a clinical trial standpoint taking hormones is taking a drug with a lot of side effects that relatively few people in the population take. 

The average clinical trial does not recruit an amount of trans participants to measure effects on those and running clinical trials is already expensive enough the way it is currently. That's extra true if you want to distinguish between... (read more)

There are free money scams where someone transfers money from stolen credit cards. 

One way might be to agree to pay $1000 dollar and then "accidentally" transfer $2000 (from a stolen credit card) and then ask the person to transfer $1000 dollar back to another bank account. 

I think RatsWrongAboutUAP did offer to pay in crypto which removes the option for these kinds of frauds. Otherwise, just avoiding transferring any money even if someone overpays you is also a good heuristic. 

Instead, effectively there is a single Dial of Destiny Progress, based on the extent our civilization places restrictions, requires permissions and places strangleholds on human activity, from AI to energy to housing and beyond.

If you have that model, how do you square the fact that Marc Andreessen is a NIMBY?

I think a good model of what Marc is doing is that he positions himself as a thought leader in a way that's benefitial for getting startups to come to him and getting LPs to give him money. 

If he would argue for AI regulation that might give LPs ... (read more)

Why would the terms as written dissuade people from betting? 

3Dagon3d
I don't doubt that there will be offers, I doubt bet will be made.  My best guess is the OP will fail to find a payment method that works, or will come up with a disagreement about terms that they use to justify backing out. I look forward to seeing what happens.  It's a GREAT example of the legible, written proposal seeming (and being) great, and the practical human part being rather suspect.  

 What's that from?

Fauci, Farrar, and a bunch of other people had a conference call after Andersen wrote his email that the COVID genome seems inconsistent with evolutionary theory. 

Afterward, Farrar speaks more with Fauci and Farrar writes an email to Tedros who heads the WHO to propose how to move forward. That's one of the bullet points from that email. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/timeline-the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/ gives you a lot of details about what happened in that week.

Farrar also has a good chapter in his book January 2021... (read more)

This is the kind of question that ChatGPT can answer really well. 

As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court.

Not doing something to push an advantage is not automatically de-escalation. They didn't push Ruth Bader Ginsburg to resign for similar reasons they aren't doing it with Dianne Feinstein. The principle seems to be something along the lines of "it should be every politician's right to decide when they have to resign because they are too old or ill". While that isn't escalation I also don't see that as deescalation. political

Point one: is the judiciary independent of t

... (read more)
0dr_s3d
I'm not from the US so never realised that DAs could get apparently replaced with the administration. Sorry for the mistake. This seems to me like a typical case of a race to the bottom. Yes, most attempts to control disinformation kind of suck, but disinformation is still a thing; propaganda through social media has been deployed at scale and used, often precisely by the right wing, at least in its more "mercenary" form (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). Let's not forget that other nuggets of wisdom that were (not particularly successfully) suppressed included "COVID is not real" or "ivermectin cures COVID", stuff that actively could and surely did get people killed. And many of these were explicitly manipulated for political purposes, in fact Trump was part and parcel in polarizing the issue and thus crippling the US' first response to COVID simply because it allowed him to score easy points. Twitter and Facebook made a fortune off enabling automated propaganda in the first place. This is kind of like the AI situation: we may have been better off without altogether, but then companies went and created it anyway, and at some point someone tried to recover some lost ground by forcing them to try and align their product. I don't think the methods have been successful, if you ask me the one thing Trump was ever right about is that Twitter is editorializing. My approach though would be "just force Twitter to be transparent about its algorithms and ban using anything that personalises content". Just give me chronological timelines and good search tools. What's that from? I honestly don't know if Twitter/Facebook corrections here were necessarily the main factor. And anyone saying "this claim is not backed by any scientific authority/peer reviewed paper" would have been technically correct. The problem was simply whether the scientists themselves were fair; non-experts might mistrust them based on reasonable priors that they may be biased by the considerations mentioned abo

Are you suggesting that you currently have a double digit percentage that there's clear evidence of some form of nonhuman intelligence in the next five years (which would warrent the 5:1 odds)?

6Mitchell_Porter3d
Not at all. But for a credible bet, I have to have some chance of paying out my losses. On the basis of lifetime earnings so far, even $500K is really pushing it. Promising to pay millions if I lose is not credible. 

When it comes to solution criteria, it might be useful to have a Metaculus question. Metaculus questions have a good track record of being resolved in a fair matter. 

3Archimedes2d
This is the most similar question that I could find that already exists. https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7384/alien-tech-in-solar-system-before-2030/ [https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7384/alien-tech-in-solar-system-before-2030/]

The OP takes Hungary and Turkey as examples of countries that went through the problematic transition. Vox has a long article on Hungary and it doesn't speak about thugs being used in a significant way. As far as my memories goes that wasn't the case in Turkey either.

When governments coordinate with corporations they don't need to surveil everyone themselves. If you look at China, they give the corporations a lot of responsibility to monitor their users to keep their internet licenses. 

France is censoring Rumble. The "tiktok"-ban bill would have been ... (read more)

China builds a lot more buildings than they need, because the metrics around house buildings are easy to measure and the local committees goodhard around building a lot of things whether they are needed or not. 

If you care about the numbers, why should I do the searching for them?

In any case, they are irrelevant to the argument about authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is about abuse of power coming from authority and protestors don't have power. 

Death due to protestors and protests in general are bad, but they are a different kind of danger than abuse of government power. 

1Radford Neal4d
I don't think you can separate these phenomena like this.  Thugs who aren't official police can intimidate political opponents of the government, and then not be prosecuted by the government.  Thugs can cause chaos that somehow goes away when an organization or community stops opposing the government, or pays money to associates of the thugs, with the government again not prosecuting the thugs for extortion.  In fact, I find it hard to imagine a democratic government becoming authoritarian without it employing some extra-governmental coercion of this sort.  Without it, it would be too easy for opponents of the government to organize, since governments (especially in the early stage of authoritarianism) have limited surveillance resources (though maybe that is changing with technology). By the way, protests are not bad in general - only the violent or otherwise illegal (by democratic standards) ones.

Publically, AOC demanding that the Biden administration should engage in authoritarian behaviour provides very little use when she doesn't think that Biden will actually engage in those behavior while at the same time eroding the standards. If a future Trump administration will call for ignoring court orders, you can count on Fox News to air AOC's pronouncements that it's an acceptable tactic. 

Even when your ethical system says that sometimes it's worthwhile to break rules because of utilitarian concerns, that doesn't make cases where you call for rul... (read more)

3dr_s4d
Three points. Point one: is the judiciary independent of the executive or not? Because it's not the government who's prosecuting Trump, it's the judiciary. They might feel safer doing so under a Democrat president of course but that's not the same thing. Point two: the scale and severity if crimes is different. Clinton apparently stored emails on an unproperly secured server. Trump took secret documents at home, stored them in unsecured boxes, was repeatedly nicely asked to return them, lied that he had already, and showed the documents to his friends in order to brag like some twelve years old boy particularly proud of his porn stash. I don't think things would have reached the point of indictment if he'd been a bit more compliant when things were still in the "asking nicely" stage. But at one point, an example must be made, or we're just saying laws don't exist at all. Point three: there might be a bit of a "getting Al Capone for tax evasion" thing going on admittedly because I think the real escalation that Trump is suffering retaliation for, the thing where he truly broke precedent to a ridiculous extent and that everyone rightfully doesn't want to repeat ever again but that's apparently hard to nail him down for is his little 6 January stunt. Messing with peaceful transition of power that way is a big no-no, and while he wasn't literally leading the mob he clearly did enough to purposefully inflame the situation instead of defusing it. I'd bet if he didn't do that the judiciary would be less fixated on prosecuting him. As for an example of Democrats not pushing their advantage like the GOP: the Supreme Court. They had a chance to strategize when Obama was still President to hold control of it but didn't do it, Trump packed it with friendly judges at every occasion, and now despite suggestions about how to retaliate against that existing they didn't really do anything, despite this unelected organ having a disproportionate decisional power (which honestly fr

https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-dishwasher-sense-the-dirtiness-of-the-dishes

Stalin wasn't a populist either. He got to power because of how he interact with other elites and not because he had popular support.

Being a populist is not required to be authoritarian. In an important sense it's even worse if a leader uses authoritarian powers to pursue political projects that are widely unpopular than if the leader does what the majority of the population works. 

And Germany is, due to their heavy censorship, worse at resisting fascist ideology than anyone with free speech, because you can't actually have those arguments in public.

The number of things you can't argue in Germany is tiny. You can't argue that there was no holocaust but that's not central to any ideological debate. Censorship is not preventing ideological debates in Germany.

Other rich people are there, which is good for networking.

I think a good portion of your argument hinges on whether this kind of networking is overall positive-sum for the economy or whether it's zero-sum or negative-sum. 

Do you agree that this is a major crux?

1bhauth4d
My argument only relies on rich people having reasons of some sort for living in expensive areas that aren't economically justified from a global perspective. But I would say that social networking between rich people is a net negative on the margin because it crowds out more objectively considered deals, and leads to more collusion and trading of eg board seats.

The rules-based order works on following the law consistently and not when it suits you. 

If it was between breaking procedure to spy on someone illegally and letting a nuke detonate in NYC

But that's not how real-world policy decisions look like. The OP did point to Turkey and the Kurds. Fighting Kurdish terrorism is a valid interest of the Turkish state but the means they use to do so are problematic and it's precisely the fact that they use illegitimate means that makes it sensible to describe the behavior as authoritarian. 

You don't know though

... (read more)
7dr_s4d
Hmm, this gets actually so complicated IMO that it might deserve its own post. Whether you take a deontological or utilitarian approach, "always follow the law" is almost never the actual policy you'll get out of your ethical system, even though obviously "break the law whenever you feel like you know better" is also bad (the same way in which naive utilitarianism such as "defect whenever you think it's for the greater good" is bad). We might call it Antigone's Dilemma, since this tension between law abiding and personal virtue was pretty much the core theme of that tragedy and its heroine's arc. I do agree that in general normalizing too many authoritarian-ish behaviours is bad, and it's especially bad when it comes from enough sides that the only thing all the political spectrum has in common is this sense of mild annoyance with procedure and rules, as if they were just a formality that hinders real action. When no one believes in the laws, the laws are bound to eventually fail. However that doesn't mean that it's unreasonable to not believe in the laws either; a State holds together by virtue of its citizens all sharing some kind of political and philosophical bedrock that they can use to cooperate and sort through conflicts without resorting to violence. Peaceful transition of power and graceful defeat are only possible if both sides agree that the other winning is still a much less bad fate than the chaos that would ensue from a violent conflict. It seems to me like, rightly or wrongly (more likely the latter, since people always severely underestimate what war actually means), this belief is coming apart in many countries, including the US, and on both sides of the aisle - which turns inevitably into a feedback loop. If the other side is willing to do anything to beat me, I have to step up my game or my defeat is guaranteed. Overall, in this sense, I still think in the US it's the GOP that is pushing the accelerator pedal, and though there are people on the l

AI policy, strategy, and governance involves working with government officials within the political system. This will be very different if the relevant officials are fascists, who are selected for loyalty rather than competence.

The way you tell the story suggests that loyalty to the left is very important to prevent the political right from getting power. This dynamic means that people who sit in powerful chairs are more selected due to loyalty than competence.

The narrative of the importance of fighting fascism led to a media landscape where loyalty to lef... (read more)

There are reasons why Trump couldn't do a successful coup even if he wanted to. He didn't have the loyalty.

It seems that Trump's strategy to get more loyalty for the next time was to use claims that the election was stolen as a loyalty test.

The other candidates are just going to hire the traditional Republican establishment in a similar way that Trump did in his first term. 

He said that people told them were the craft were but he had no direct proof of them. I don't see a reason to assume that there were Congressman better informed than him. 

2mako yass5d
I'm learning that presidents are explicitly excluded from the category of congressmembers.

The issue it applies to matters, and this is a situation where there's a conflict between duties

You can argue that there's a conflict between duties in nearly every political conflict. If you take fighting terrorism, you can easily argue that there's a duty of the state to do so. That doesn't allow the state to do everything it wants in that goal.

In general, when it comes to new powers of the executive, once they are established in one case they are going to be used in other cases as well. 

she's inviting the POTUS to back her up (which doesn't mean he

... (read more)
-2dr_s5d
Sure, but I'm sure most people would draw a line there too. If it was between breaking procedure to spy on someone illegally and letting a nuke detonate in NYC, well... You don't know though that simply making a rhetoric statement that she knows won't be followed up equates actually doing it if she was the POTUS. Many radicals on either side are more bark than bite, because barking is a very effective way of writing checks no one expects you to cash. In fact, that's one decent source of hope concerning the fascist problem too (though one shouldn't rely on it, obviously). To a point, "radical asks outrageous thing, moderate concedes more reasonable one" is a kind of role play that is part and parcel of politics. Whether knowingly or not, if they're in a healthy equilibrium, both roles serve a useful function.
-1dr_s5d
I mean, the presenter does his best to show this as the worst thing ever but it's really nothing that serious. The issue it applies to matters, and this is a situation where there's a conflict between duties; there's the letter of the law and there's the moral duty of care towards citizens. If you believe a grossly incompetent judiciary has ruled wrongly on a matter of healthcare, and following the ruling might endanger and harm the citizens, then her position, while still fairly radical, makes sense, and isn't a symptom in itself of a greater push towards authoritarianism. While I don't think a minority should impose its will on a majority, I'm a lot more lenient when, like in this case, all someone is saying is "yeah, the State is trying to impose unreasonable limits on us about things that wouldn't involve anyone else, don't enforce that". That's not authoritarianism, if anything her position is funnily enough starkly libertarian on this, though she's inviting the POTUS to back her up (which doesn't mean he will, nor I think she would be so naive as to expect that her words would be enough to make him do it). To be clear, I think sometimes the meta and the object level get mixed up (sometimes in bad faith) in political discourse, and this is one of those cases where I think you can't avoid an opinion on the object level, not just the meta level. The executive shouldn't generally override the judiciary, but if the judiciary is being unreasonably oppressive and authoritarian and the executive is the only organ with the power to stop it at that moment, then letting legality get in the way of that is missing the spirit for the letter. Similarly, if you did really have strong evidence that an election was rigged to the point that the wrong President was elected, I think storming the Capital would be quite an appropriate reaction! I think the events of Jan 6 2021 were ridiculous and shameless simply because I believe in that occasion, specifically, there was no riggi

AOC explicitly called for the executive branch to ignore the judicial branch because the judicial branch lacks the power to enforce laws. Calling for the government to ignore the courts is pretty far in the direction of dictatorship. 

8dr_s5d
I don't know the episode you're referencing, but my general point was less "it's ludicrous to imagine a dictatorship built around the current left's principles" and more "it's ludicrous to imagine the current left mustering enough support to enact any kind of successful coup".

We do have the account from Harry Reid, who did decide to publicize that he thinks Lockheed Martin had the crafts and the military didn't want to give him the clearance to see them.

It's worthwhile to note that Harry Reid did not share that information this way before he retired. There's a massive stereotype against taking UFO's seriously and sharing such information was bad politics. 

2mako yass5d
Does he say thought they had crafts? There's a line [https://archive.is/ZZAlr#selection-3135.65-3135.145] where he says he was never sure.

I'd instead call for a simultaneous disclosure of superpower military R&D from all sides

When calling for action then it's worth thinking about possible next steps. I don't see possible next steps for simultaneous disclosure of superpower military R&D from all sides.

I haven't seen any civilians, including on LW, actually weigh the cost of assymetric disclosure of US military R&D, which this would probably require?

I do believe that it's good to empower whistleblowers. If certain secrets are very important to a country then it should be able to co... (read more)

3mako yass6d
Yes, if this has truly never reached congress. Kinda under the impression that some congress members (especially presidents) have probably seen it, and for whatever reason, once they knew, all of these people decided not to publicize it. And that could just keep happening.
2mako yass6d
This might not be possible until the danger of arms-races in agentic AI has become more obvious. I'm not familiar enough with the nuclear situation to say whether it's feasible today, but it probably will be at some point in the near future. It seems probable to me that monitoring has, over the past 40 years, become a lot cheaper and more feasible than our geopolitical institutions recognize. Increases in mutual transparency may have to come in train with assurances that the balance of power will be preserved in light of whatever's discovered. Geopolitical pluralism may turn out to depend on mutual uncertainty about who would win a war. With increases in transparency, there's a risk that this veil falls away, which is good for the victor, but so terrible for everyone else, that the veil must not be threatened without such assurances.

I just tried to explain some part of my understanding of how new psycho- and social technologies are generated, and what conclusions I draw from that.

I think the problem is that some techniques that are created that way work while others don't. 

When using techniques we care about whether those we use work. I personally do think that updating on evidence is important and if your goal is technique creation then it matters. 

I personally think that making something a "licensed technique" is often a way to create an environment where updating on evide... (read more)

I think that public pressure has an effect on Congress and the depth to which it investigates issues. 

Congressmen who drive such inquiries care about what their voters and the media think about them pursuing it. 

1dr_s6d
I'm not in the US so this doesn't really apply to me, but in general, insofar as public pressure goes, there's probably a dozen more important issues to spend that political capital on than UFOs. Again, I'll consider it important if there's ever any independent evidence that this is a thing. Absent that, I accept the risk that I may indeed be ignoring the most important and perfect cover-up in history, but my bet is still solidly on it being a nothingburger.

Coworkers of people with schizophrenia usually pick up on it. The reporters did interview a bunch of people that David Grusch knew and they all spoke highly of him. When schizophrenics make reports the official institutions usually don't see their reports as "urgent and credible".

Right now the important distinction is "Is there an explanation that warrants further investigation" or "Is there no explanation that warrants further investigation". It's not "Are there aliens or not".

1dr_s6d
From the point of view of a decision maker in the government, sure, I agree. From my viewpoint it makes little difference; if it's just some random crazy guy, it's not worth explaining, and if it's a conspiracy of some sort to forge this information for NatSec purposes, then odds are the committee would end up bending over to it or being fooled as well. Either way, I'm not going to know anything for sure until there's some actual disclosure of some actual things that can't be explained in any other ways than aliens or an equally extraordinary phenomenon. Until then, it's a non-issue for me; it's neither actionable nor verifiable, so ignoring it makes perfect sense.

The stated goal of the current reporting is to get the Congress to investigate the charges. It's not to convince people of aliens.

I think Michio Kaku frames it well. "Now the burden of proof has shifted." Now is the time to demand answer from the pentagon and Congress.

Michio Kaku is a crackpot who used to be a physicist decades ago, so pay no attention to whatever he says these days. See the latest Scott Aaronson's piece.

The stated goal of the current reporting is to get the Congress to investigate the charges. It's not to convince people of aliens.

I am not sure what your point is. If there are no aliens, there is nothing to report. If there are aliens, what matters is the proof that is not words.

Plenty of "insiders" sometimes spout complete nonsense in order to get some time in the limelight. 

The sources of Michael Shellenberger were not willing to have their names revealed. Even if you think that's the motivation for David Grusch it does not explain the other sources. 

3drethelin6d
Plenty of people love to be anonymous trolls.  In addition, having information from anonymous sources casts doubt on whether those sources exist at all, or are credible individuals rather than trolls 
5dr_s6d
It doesn't really matter, any motivations from "someone wants to cause chaos" to "someone is literally crazy" to "the CIA is playing an elaborate distraction game as part of some other plan" are by definition more plausible than something like alien crafts traversing interstellar space unobserved and coming to spy on us and nothing else. Anything that only involves humans and doesn't require new undiscovered laws of physics to be realistic wins the Bayes lottery by orders of magnitude.
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