I would much rather have a 12 month time horizon. Evidence could take a while to filter out. Other than that I'd accept.
Up a fair amount so far; largest losses have been on meme markets https://manifold.markets/DeanValentine
A large part of your evidence is that "far-right" parties, like the Sweden democrats, are growing. But ~none of the western parties you mention are running on an explicitly anti-democratic platform, which was a fairly unifying feature of the worst dictatorships throughout history. "Marine Le Pen is a fascist and will start democratic backsliding if she wins" is a pretty odd assumption to just leave unsubstantiated.
Disagree with this and might write up a more thorough response than the one I have in a bit, but for now, here are some manifold markets around this topic area:
Incomprehensible messages are a failure mode that indicates insufficiently advanced capabilities. Ambiguity doesn't help with that message, to the current or to the successor civ.
You do not understand what I am saying. The message is not for us and so our inability to interpret the message is irrelevant. Ambiguity and in general the small amount of relevant information is an important security property that helps ensure the aliens do not convey more than they mean to.
My personal confidence of "no aliens" is so high it rounds to 100%.
I would be willing to send you 100$ in advance, on a promise that you'll pay me 100,000 if it turns out definitively that these UFOs are built by nonhumans.
I will accept under the following conditions:
The message behind the inclinations may merely be incomprehensible for us. If I were an alien civ anticipating these humans to one day become something much more intelligent, and I wanted to tell them not to harshly expand without endangering myself, one strategy to take would be to just say "I'm here" in the form of airspace trinkets with the expectation that the successor civ fills in the blanks on priors. To tell them a whole lot more about myself wouldn't be prudent until I had an idea of what their intentions were.
See the several paragraphs inside the last quotation. According to the article, they haven't actually gotten anywhere with reverse engineering these things.
One quote:
The sources said they suspected that the Chinese and Russians had also retrieved craft, but they did not know for certain.
A civilian NASA official would definitely not know about this. It's being treated as a very important military secret.
Schizophrenia would render you unable to keep your job in the vast majority of the armed forces, and so might explain single individuals in very rare cases, but not entire groups of people around that one person confirming their stories.
Call me gullible, but this article is flabbergasting. I do not understand how to update on its contents, because nothing I can think of let's this information fit into my world model, no matter what hypothesis I try to come up with about the behavior of the sources/etc.
...When I first met Vassar, it was a random encounter in an experimental group call organized by some small-brand rationalist. He talked for about an hour, and automatically became the center of conversation, I typed notes as fast as I could, thinking, “if this stuff is true it changes everything; it’s the [crux] of my life.” (It true, but I did not realize it immediately.) Randomly, another person found the link, came in and said, “hi”. [Vassar] said “hi”, she said “hi” again, apparently for humor. [Vassar] said something terse I forget “well if this is wha
Some other sources are reporting on this now: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/06/whistleblower-ufo-alien-tech-spacecraft
The best modeling suggests aliens are at least hundreds of millions of light-years away...
As Robin Hanson himself notes: "That's assuming independent origins. Things that have a common origin would find themselves closer in space and time." See also: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/ufos-what-the-hellhtml
It just does not seem like something that the U.S. government would be willing to do. When we want to feed an enemy a mix of information and disinformation, we do it by using a double agent, not by publishing genuine classified info about our capabilities in the media with an asterisk that it's alien technology. The intel bureaucracy would not OK something both this stupid and unusual/complicated.
A steelman might be that, since they didn't actually publish the tech, this is an elaborate and historically funny scam to make UAF personnel in other countries b...
Sure, but suppose you have a flying saucer that you would like to be able to use for some missions. If you release a fragment of the flying saucer and say "it's aliens guys", this maybe means that when other people see a flying saucer later they don't know it's you.
Press X to doubt. First, the details on flying saucer fragments have not been disclosed (as far as we know), so this strategy was not attempted. Second, though this is not a knockdown argument given that we're dealing with the U.S. government, it would be an incredibly dumb strategy to build ...
Obviously he thinks the chances are lower than 1% that this is true, if he's willing to bet at 99% odds.
I think we need to just scrap everything we think we "know" about anthropics and grabby aliens and lightcone-tiling AGI if this is true. The Aristotelian epistemology that has led us to those "conclusions" are obviously garbage, if it turns out that no, high-tech aliens with seemingly capped technology are here and they're not doing anything to us. Confirmed UFO craft would be an absurd, catastrophic indictment of the standard LessWrong worldview and our overconfidence in these sorts of arguments.
He gave an extremely roundabout answer to that question, and the reporter did not follow up on it, which makes me think it was either a misleading cut or he was caught up in the interview. He doesn't mention this would-be much stronger evidence in the original article either.
Obviously the idea that the government has alien bodies is ridiculous and if he doesn't walk that back later it's definitely a hoax.
Given a specific video, it can be hard to tell whether it's an aircraft with a surprising capability, or a fake video, or a sensor issue.
According to the article, the evidence comes not in the form of video or sensor data, but in recovered portions of or whole aircraft.
Saw some today demonstrating what I like to call the "Kirkegaard fallacy", in response to the Debrief article making the rounds.
People who have one obscure or weird belief tend to be unusually open minded and thus have other weird beliefs. Sometimes this is because they enter a feedback loop where they discover some established opinion is likely wrong, and then discount perceived evidence for all other established opinions.
This is a predictable state of affairs regardless of the nonconsensus belief, so the fact that a person currently talking to you about e.g. UFOs entertains other off-brand ideas like parapsychology or afterlives is not good evidence that the other nonconsensus opinion in particular is false.
When you say "there would be nothing that is a central example of an "alien" or an "alien tech"", do you mean, "no such evidence probably exists", or "you wouldn't be able to identify tech too advanced to be made by present humans?" I agree with the former but not the latter.
"Rich people" already give the lions share to anti malaria charities, just as virtually all of Earth's economic surplus (for now, pre-AGI) comes from fairly-high-IQ people doing functionally prosocial things. The question is not "is standard EA behavior better than good embryo selection" - effective altruism exists because there are enough altruistic intelligent people around to be EAs - but how good existing methods are, and what runway we have to use them.
Yeah, so, looking at econometrics, I was completely misled. Aside from Russia, the fall of communism went about as great as I imagine most people might have expected it would.
The superintelligence could build its own factories, but that would require more time, more action in real world that people might notice, the factory might require some unusual components or raw materials in unusual quantities; some components might even require their own specialized factory, etc.
People who consider this a serious difficulty are living on a way more competent planet than mine. Even if RearAdmiralAI needed to build new factories or procure exotic materials to defeat humans in a martial conflict, who do you expect to notice or raise the alarm? No monkeys are losing their status in this story until the very end.
I'm going to pull this and then repost with more data. While I am anticommunist and anti-authoritarian, most of the QoL indicators were very underwhelming given my priors and I'd like to know more about why.
It's probably morally imperative that all parents who have the financial means to do this do it.
I think the more basic question is: why has open source software even gotten to the point that it has? Actually running a startup or a software company is really tough. To do it competently requires (as a starting point) constantly swallowing lots of bitter lessons about what your customers actually care about vs. what is technically interesting. Why expect open source software developers to do all of that hard work for free?
This reminds me of stories (maybe exaggerated) about how Microsoft became internally terrified of GPLv3 and Linux in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Either post your NASDAQ 100 futures contracts or stop fronting near-term slow takeoff probabilities above ~10%.
The most common refrain I hear against the possibility of widespread voter fraud is that demographers and pollsters would catch such malfeasance, but in practice when pollsters see a discrepancy between voting results and polls they seem to just assume the polls were biased. Is there a better reason besides "the FBI seems pretty competent"?
A small colony of humans is a genuinely tiny waste of paperclips. I am slightly more worried about the possibility that the acausal trade equilibrium cashes out to the AGI treating us badly because some aliens in a foreign Everett branch have some bizarre religious/moral opinions about the lives we ought to lead, than I am about being turned into squiggles.
It is unnecessary to postulate that CEOs and governments will be "overthrown" by rogue AI. Board members in the future will insist that their company appoint an AI to run the company because they think they'll get better returns that way. Congressmen will use them to manage their campaigns and draft their laws. Heads of state will use them to manage their militaries and police agencies. If someone objects that their AI is really unreliable or doesn't look like it shares their values, someone else on the board will say "But $NFGM is doing the same thing; we...
Now is the time to write to your congressman and (may allah forgive me for uttering this term) "signal boost" about actually effective AI regulation strategies - retroactive funding for hitting interpretability milestones, good liability rules surrounding accidents, funding for long term safety research. Use whatever contacts you have, this week. Congress is writing these rules now and we may not have another chance to affect them.
One starts to wonder how many completely qualitatively different worlds and ideologies are out there right now in the minds of schizophrenics, cultists, politicians and homeless people, each totalizing and completely enrapturing in their own way, all ultimately batshit insane.
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