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But is it necessarily unlikely that they would be screwing with us if they existed? That's something I don't like about the bigfoot comparison, it's obviously laughable that large apes are evading camera detection at every turn, but with aliens, presumably it would be trivial to do so. We know that they would have the means, so that only leaves the reasoning to do this. I also don't necessarily agree with the assumption that our commercial sensor tech is good enough to detect hypothetical aliens. Try filming a drone from a distance with your phone. It will look surprisingly unclear. Modern cameras are obviously more than adequate to film a bigfoot but I don't think so for aliens-the sky is big etc. 

What I didn't get from your post is how the prosaic sensor anomalies/atmospheric oddities and statistical artifacts etc lends itself to explaining the much more zany claims that are now coming out of intelligence and intelligence connected people. It doesn't seem to explain someone claiming there are actual recovered bodies/craft, at all. My take on that is the psyops/disinfo angle you wrote off becomes much more likely. 

So Grusch is another one of these Pentagon UAP investigatory program guys, which means he is claiming people have come to him from the compartmentalised Special Access Programs claiming they have recovered craft. That is important because unless he is saying somewhere he personally witnessed these craft, it is perfectly possible he fully believes his claim and is telling the truth in that yes, someone has come to him with these claims. Unfortunately I suspect whoever these first hand sources are will be shrouded entirely in classified red tape. I agree at this point a sophisticated and extensively planned hoax/disinfo operation is becoming increasingly likely and if I was totally sceptical I think that would be the best explanation. However, I don't intuitively think aliens/non human intelligence is highly unlikely because I don't trust my or others ability to model possible behaviours. For instance, the idea that this is all clearly nonsense because super advanced aliens wouldn't have malfunctioning/rudimentary craft at all- it could be that it is simply a form of interaction/manipulation. 

The best evidence that addresses both your claims would probably come from the military, since they have both state of the art sensors+ reliable witnesses. The recent surge in UFO coverage is almost all related to branches of the military (mostly Navy?) so the simple explanation is, it's classified to varying degrees. My understanding is that there is the publicly released stuff which is somewhat underwhelming, then some evidence Congress and the like has seen during briefings, and then probably more hush hush stuff above that for non civilians. The members of Congress who were briefed seem to have continued making noise on the topic so presumably there is more convincing evidence not yet public. 

I have no idea where Hanson got those figures from, but from your post it seems like you would be able to rule most civilian sightings out anyway because there is no such thing as a perfectly reliable human witness, and to date camera and sensor quality available to the average person is actually pretty poor (especially compared to government/military hardware).

I should have clarified a bit, I was using the term 'military industrial complex' to try to narrow in on the much more technocratic underbelly of the American Defence/Intelligence community or private contractors. I don't have any special knowledge of the area so forgive me, but essentially DARPA and the like or any agency with a large black budget. 

Whatever they are doing does not need to have any connection to whatever the public facing government says in press briefings. It is perfectly possible that right now a priority for some of these agencies is funding a massive AI project, while the WH laughs off AI safety-that is how classified projects work. It illustrates the problem a bit actually, in that the entire system is set up to cover things up for national defence, in which case, having a dialogue about AI Risk is virtually impossible. 

Why is there so little mention of the potential role of the military industrial complex in developing AGI rather than a public AI lab? The money is available, the will, the history (ARPANET was the precursor to the internet). I am vaguely aware there isn't much to suggest the MIC is on the cutting edge of AI-but there wouldn't be if it were all black budget projects. If that is the case, it presumably implies a very difficult situation because the broader alignment community would have no idea when crucial thresholds were being crossed. 

Disclaimer: I myself am a newer user from last year.

I think trying to change downvoting norms and behaviours could help a lot here and save you some workload on the moderation end. Generally, poor quality posters will leave if you ignore and downvote them. Recently, there has been an uptick in these posts and of the ones I have seen many are upvoted and engaged with. To me, that says users here are too hesitant to downvote. Of course, that raises the question of how to do that and if doing so is undesirable because it will broadly repel many new users some of whom will not be "bad". Overall though I think encouraging existing users to downvote should help keep the well-kept garden. 

No, that was just a joke Lex was making. I don't know the exact timestamps but in most of the instances where he was questioned on his own positions or estimations on the situation Lex seemed uncomfortable to me, including the alien civilisation example. At one point I recall actually switching to the video and Lex had his head in his hands, which body language wise seems pretty universally a desperate pose. 

There were definitely parts where I thought Lex seemed uncomfortable, not just limited to specific concepts but when questions got turned around a bit towards what he thought. Lex started podcasting very much in the Joe Rogan sphere of influence, to the extent that I think he uses a similar style, which is very open and lets the other person speak/have a platform but is perhaps at the cost of being a bit wishy-washy. Nevertheless it's a huge podcast with a lot of reach. 

This is why I don't place much confidence in projections about how the population will be affected by TAI from people like Sam Altman either. You have to consider they are very likely to be completely out of touch with the average person and so have absolutely terrible intuitions about how they respond to anything, let alone forecasting long term implications for them stemming from TAI. If you get some normal people together and make sure they take the proposition of TAI and everything it entails seriously, (such as widespread joblessness), I suspect you would encounter a lot more fear/apprehension around the kind of behaviours and ways of living that is going to produce. 

I think what stands out to me the most is big tech/big money now getting involved seriously. That has a lot of potential for acceleration just because of funding implications. I frequent some financial/stock websites and have noticed AI become not just a major buzzword, but even some sentiments along the lines of 'AI could boost productivity and offset a potential recession in the near future'. The rapid release of LLM models seems to have jump started public interest in AI, what remains to be seen is what the nature of that interest manifests as. I am personally unsure if it will mostly be caution and regulation, panic, or the opposite. The way things are nowadays I guess there will be a significant fraction of the public completely happy with accelerating AI capabilities and angry at anyone who disagrees.

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