Example of what resolution in my favor might look like: In 5 years time we are looking back and saying "Damn, I cant believe some ufos were actually demons this whole time. Wild"
In general, what I'm trying to bet on is the world and rationalist community experiencing some significant ontological shock. If the community stops, melts, and catches fire, I win the bet.
Oh yeah, that would be fantastic! And it might happen, just probably not in the area of physics foundations. I looked over my posts and comments over the last 12 years or so, and there hasn't been anything remotely close to what you are describing, as far as I can tell.
Sounds like you cranked up the gain on your sensorial amplifiers, while suppressing the signal, so all you pick up is noise. A familiar phenomenon if you tune your car radio to an empty frequency. What you end up getting is the internal noise sources, which, not surprisingly, can manifest as patterns the sensors are attuned to, like noises, shapes, colors.
People in general are pretty good at understanding 1 to 1 matching for finite sets, and have to readjust their intuition for infinite sets. Thus first thing to help them break their intuition is going through the logic of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel After someone realizes the universe is not what they expected it to be, you help them build a better intuition. If you are lucky, you get to the Cantor's diagonalization argument. Mind you, the argument requires a certain level of intelligence, it is just completely beyond some people.
we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example)
Out of curiosity, while the math/CS background makes sense what kind of physics background do you expect to be important and why?
Sort of. It depends on whether every random instance has useful approximate patterns. I do not know the answer. One of my linked posts points at how order can be found in complete randomness.
This made me think!
- Literal aliens
I assume you mean the central example, some indisputably organic entities arriving from another star system on something indisputably like a "spacecraft"
- Magic/spiritual/paranormal/psychic phenomenon
Hmm, I don't even know how to identify something like that.
- Time travel
Yeah, I'd bet against that one, no problem. If time travel turns out to be a real thing, the last 100 years of physics are a lie.
- Leftovers of an ancient civilization / Some other unknown non-human advanced civilization on earth
That is less unlikely than the rest, actually. It does not violate my priors against recognizable life forms unrelated to Earth's.
- Some other explanation that's of this level of "very weird"
- Explicitly excluding merely hyper-advanced human tech
- I forfeit any and all potential "gotcha" cases.
Yeah, that makes sense for a bet.
- Determination of resolution to be up to you.
- I reserve the right to appeal to the LW community. [I will not abuse this right]
definitely quite reasonable.
- I Send you $X Immediately, You pay out $200*X if I win
- I want a 5 year time horizon.
while sensible, it does make me think that even for $10 I'd be (very unlikely but potentially) out $2000 if I lose. I guess my reptile brain shouts nooo! That's too much. Or, well, rather hisses than shouts.
What you are gesturing at is how to identify an embedded agent in "the real world", as far as I can tell. Then you keep asking deeper questions, like "what are these laws of physics".
So, let's start from the basic assumptions, let me know if they make sense to you.
Assumption: there is a universe of which we are a small part (hence "embedded agency"). Basically "something exists".
Assumption: from the point of view of Laplace's demon, we are identifiable and persistent features of the world, not Boltzmann brains.
Note that at this point we have not assumed the existence of "time" or any other familiar abstraction in our mental map. Just "externally identifiable structures".
Also note that the world might be a completely random instance of whatever. A bunch of rocks. You can even find loose patterns in white noise if you look hard enough. I wrote a couple of posts about it some years ago:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aCuahwMSvbAsToK22/physics-has-laws-the-universe-might-not
Now, if we assume that this world contains something externally identifiable as "agents", it implies another very strong assumption: internal predictability. This is usually glossed over, but this point is crucial, and restricts possible worlds quite a bit. Again, it is a very very very strong constraint. The world must be such that some relevant large scale features of it can be found inside an incredibly tiny part of it. I do not necessarily mean "spatially tiny". We have not assumed the existence of space yet. Just that there are small subsets of the whole thing that have identifiable (at least to a Laplace demon) features of the whole thing.
Now, given this assumption, you can talk about the world being usefully lossily compressible, to an extremely large degree. "Usefully" here means that the compressed image of the world can fit into an agent and can be traced to be "used" by the agent. Actually the meaning of "usefully" and "used" is a separate can of worms deserving much more than a couple of sentences.
Now, at this point we got "physical laws": the distillation of the compression algorithm that fits into the agent. For some agents (bacteria) it is "identify sugar gradients and eat your way up the gradient". For others it is "quantum field theory that predicts the mass of the Higgs boson, given what we can measure".
This is a crucial point. The world does not come with "matter" and "laws" separately. Physical laws are agent-size distillations of the world, and they are compatible but not unique, and depend on the agent.
To recap, the chain of reasoning about the world goes like this: Something exists -> we exist in this "something" -> for us to persist the "something" must be compressible -> these compression algorithms are physical laws (and sometimes moral laws, or legal laws).
So when you say "brains exist as reifications of brains." what you probably mean is "the world is predictable from the inside".
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.
The mental moves of directly rounding down to "my priors against aliens are high" -> "no aliens" -> "no need to do anything" is bad as if enough people hold it we won't get more evidence.
Extraordinary clams require extraordinary evidence. Words are not extraordinary evidence, they are just words. Sworn testimonies, documents, blurry images... They are not extraordinary evidence.
Until and unless something like this surfaces:
"here is a sketch of the propulsion system they used, and this is all totally new and revolutionary" or
"here is a radiation shielding material that is leaps and bounds ahead of our material science" or
"here is a sample of their tissues, it converts energy into matter in ways we never conceived of"
I will keep calling BS on just words.
Consider that not everyone shares your view that the Singularity is happening soon, or that it will be better if delayed.