As for Bigfoot: while I don't believe it exists, I think Its wrong way to think of it as avoiding cameras. The more reasonable explanation is that cameras avoid the places where it could possibly live. Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, and similar Apemen are almost always reported to live in remote wilderness, and specifically the North of USA, Canada, Russia, China, and of course the Himalayas. It seems like we should be able to spot them, until you realize that the northern wilderness belt that stretches from Alaska to Greenland, and then around Eurasia and back to Alaska is astonishingly big, and almost completely empty of humans. We are talking about a strip of wilderness that has about the same surface area as the Moon, and the possible population of Bigfeet would likely be smaller than the population of chimps in Africa. If every researcher interested in finding Bigfoot went to explore the Big North with all the state of the art equipment they could carry, and they spread evenly to cover maximum area, they would not only not find Bigfoot, but not find each other, due to enormous distances through impassable woodland and mountains.
I would even argue that Bigfoot being more bigfooty; a primitive yet sapient and inteligent hominid, perhabs some late descendant of the gigantopithecus, is more plausible than it being say a sloth, because it seems to make honest attempts to avoid humans. If it was a mere sloth, or an ape oof the same intellectual capacity as a chimp, it would be found far easier.
While existence of Bigoot is extremely unlikely, If it were real, I would rather assume they are a tribal species of essentially very hairy humans who avoid us the same way some Sentinel tribes do.
I would also take issue with the "mundane" part. What does that even mean? Any explanation that is good enough to cover all UFO cases with their myriad of physics-defying feats, is in itself a proof of supertechnology which should also be under the bet.
For example, an explanation that the supposed UFOs are really experimental military aircraft would simply mean that the military possesses technology that is effectively "magic" compared to the civilian aircraft technology. If you witness a flying object that can push Mach 10 effortlessly and takes instant turns without any inertia, does it matter if this is an alien craft or human military craft? It still should belong on the list.
Leftovers of an ancient civilization
Archaeologist here: you'd want to really, really narrow down on what you mean here, otherwise we will clean your pockets pretty easily. Since about 2016, new discoveries of ancient civilizations, predating the most reasonable estimates crop up like mushrooms.
My estimate is that we will have several proofs pushing the the origins of civilization at least 10k years backwards, if not more, in the very near future, likely along the vectors of:
- Gobeli Tepe and other Turkish/Anatolian ruins being significantly older than we thought.
- The Sphinx and some of the Egyptian stuff being significantly older than we thought.
- ruins in Indonesia that have a good chance to be proven older than all of the above.
- Pacific Connection (Australian Aboriginal People and some Sth American tribes being related) being confirmed, thus pushing the colonization of America at least 12k years further back, via boat no less.
- evidence that copper, iron and tin were smelted significantly earlier than we assumed.
In other words; current established estimate is that civilization as we know it is at best around 12k years old, and did not really kick off for real until 6k BCE. But we keep finding evidence that pushes that back at least to 25k BCE. We also keep finding evidence that both neanderthals and denisovians split much earlier than we thought, were much more numerous, and survived longer than assumed, so it is completely possible that there was a proto-civilisation 20k years before Sumer even existed, and that, conceivably, you could have Neanderthal humans witness it (or possibly participate?)
we know that involuntary sexual celibacy is psychologically harmful, and socially disruptive. If porn can damped the effects of involuntary celibacy and sexual frustration (which include, but are not limited to: rape, sexual harassment, social radicalization, and co-relates with acts of terrorism or public shootings etc )then it is almost certainly a net positive.
One strong argument in favor of porn is that almost nobody alive gets as much sex as they actually want; vast majority gets less than they want, minority gets too much, and without some kind of extreme social engineering this cannot be solved.
Porn is the closest thing to a "bandaid solution" to that problem. Sexless or severely undersexed people can achieve an illusion of sex life with porn. Yes, porn is addictive and can an be psychologically harmful, but involuntary celibacy is definitely severely harmful, and we cannot solve it any other way.
The underlying issue here is that the supply of sex, quality of sex, supply of quality partners and the logistics of all the above cannot meet the popular demand. It would require the number of highly libidinous attractive partners to be equal or exceeding the number of adults that desire sex. Until we somehow achieve Sexual Post-Scarcity (how? Sex-bots? VR sex? Massively orgiastic global swinger culture?) then porn is unavoidable.
Good sex with an attractive partner is an extremely scarce resource. In fact, any sex, even crappy one, is scarce, and far, far below popular demand. Porn is a necessary plug. It provides a better form of sexual release than pornless masturbation.
So in that regard, it is obvious that porn is more beneficial than harmful, since the alternative to porn for many is effectively celibacy, which has plenty of harmful psychological and social effects, including violence (sexual and otherwise).
Im confused by this post. It might be that I lack the necessary knowledge or reading apprehension, but the post seems to dance around the actual SELF-improvement (AI improving itself, Theseus Ship Style), and refocuses on improvement iteration (AI creating another AI).
Consider a human example. In the last few years, I learned Rationalist and Mnemonic techniques to self-improve my thinking. I also fathered a child, raised it, and taught it basic rationalist and mnemonic tricks, making it an independent and only vaguely aligned agent potentially more powerful than I am.
The post seems to focus on the latter option.
is if it turns out that advanced narrow-AIs manage to generate more utility than humans know what to do with initially.
I find it not just likely but borderline certain. Ubiquitous, explicitly below-human narrow AI has a tremendous potential that we act blind to, focusing on superhuman AI. Creating superhuman, self-improving AGI, while extremely dangerous, is also an extremely hard problem (in the same realm as dry nanotech or FTL travel). Meanwhile, creating brick-dumb but ubiquitous narrow AI and then mass producing it to saturation is easy. It could be done today, its just a matter of market forces and logistics.
It might very well be the case that once the number of narrow-AI systems, devices and drones passes certain threshold (say, it becomes as ubiquitous, cheap and accessible as cars, but not yes as much as smartphones) we would enter a weaker form of post-scarcity and have no need to create AI gods.
I also noticed that there is an inverse cultural relationship between the belief in magic, witchcraft, spirits/fair folk etc and the belief in UFOs. Which makes me think aliens simply fill the Post-Enlightment gap in the legendarium for cultures that want to pretend they are "too reasonable" to beleive in magic, but open to a belief in "sci fi" myths; ie: Fair Folk kidnapping folk - nah, Aliens kidnapping folk - yah.