Some fun quotes:
“Even if society comes to accept UFOs more as a legitimate topic of
investigation, elites will make very sure that the people who have so
far championed this cause will not get more respect.”
“However, if the attacker is far weaker, like a toddler attacking an
adult, the usual response is to signal one’s strength by easily
deflecting the attack, with little harm to either side. And in the
reports I’ve read, this seems to be the usual reaction of UFOs to human
attack: easy deflection. Which seems to signal their awareness,
intelligence, abilities, and status stance. Maybe they sometimes let us
seem them just so they can dis us in this way.”
Response to rational and measured criticism in the comments:
“Your response style, lecturing me about basics, illustrates my status
point. People feel free to treat anyone who isn’t on board with
full-skeptical like children in need of a lecture.”
Only goes on to show how their notion of “status” is unfalsifiable and means whatever the hell they want it to mean.
Dude is a professor at George Mason who published books. Stop pretending you're “low status” when you're just being contrarian and/or wrong.
FYI: the whole thing reads so much better if you read it in a badly
faked Texas accent.
In the meantime I like that you can break this down quite easily into
three parts, from top to bottom.
-1.
Social signalling implies (as always for Hanson), that anyone should
be suspicious of whether it’s unreasonable to challenge conventional
wisdom. The ahistoricity of his account of “ancient” legal systems
aside, this is a perfectly reasonable argument to make. Whether it’s so
closely tied to his hobby-horse can be left aside.
-2.
As a mildly elite academic, I can directly feel the status hit. If
UFOs have an exotic intelligent cause, then we as a species have a lot
less freedom than we thought to direct our destiny. And our governments,
elites, and academics can do less to protect or inform us.
Well that’s fun being the contrarian. But the funner part is
that there’s already a wealth of academic and military scepticism in the
public domain that refutes or attempts to refute the childish version of
UFO-denialism that Hanson appears to hold. Hanson thinks the only people
who make an effort to “debunk” UFO phenomena are popular articles he
read in New Scientist or whatever, so he’s very clever for pointing out
that they have vested interests in doing so.
-3.
Well this part can be summarised as, “whether I’m joking or not, you
can’t tell, and I have a bunch of people on all sides ready to back me
up in the comments arguing that I’m not a crank or that my crankery is
reasonable and they’ll all buy my books”
> > If UFOs have an exotic intelligent cause, then we as a species have a lot less freedom than we thought to direct our destiny. And our governments, elites, and academics can do less to protect or inform us.
This idea -- that the more challenging, in whatever way, an epistemic decision is, the less relevance considered, informed assessments of it are -- (notably, an idea which, it seems to me, is a pretty ubiquitous motive for conspiratorial thinking broadly) always reminds me of the debates martial arts cranks would have against combat sports in the 90s. "Yeah, you can throw me around like a sack of potatoes whenever you want, but you haven't trained for eye gouges so I'd kill you in three seconds on the street." You know -- as if the additional challenges of street fighting make general martial competence irrelevant.
Perhaps significantly, it's also a sentiment that seems to motivate a lot of the MIRI-style fundraising. "Sure, by all external standards and assessments, we haven't the foggiest clue what we're doing. But the risks we've proposed by introducing arbitrarily large numbers into a muddle of Bayesian reasoning are so large..."
Also it's not like, say, the "Area 51 is home for weird UFO shit" discourse isn't highly preferable to "Area 51 is where the Pentagon throws billions of taxpayer dollars on military contractors for drone R&D" for the powers-that-be.
And this shit has the same problem as AI, where some use it to mean
certaintypes of computer programs (or mechanical turks), and others ise
it to mean human like (or more) machine intelligences (AGI).
Cranks love to not make the distinction between the two clear. It
helps when you can switch between ‘I think I saw somthing I couldnt
explain in the sky’ and ‘I saw aliens’ at will.
Some fun quotes:
“Even if society comes to accept UFOs more as a legitimate topic of investigation, elites will make very sure that the people who have so far championed this cause will not get more respect.”
“However, if the attacker is far weaker, like a toddler attacking an adult, the usual response is to signal one’s strength by easily deflecting the attack, with little harm to either side. And in the reports I’ve read, this seems to be the usual reaction of UFOs to human attack: easy deflection. Which seems to signal their awareness, intelligence, abilities, and status stance. Maybe they sometimes let us seem them just so they can dis us in this way.”
Response to rational and measured criticism in the comments:
“Your response style, lecturing me about basics, illustrates my status point. People feel free to treat anyone who isn’t on board with full-skeptical like children in need of a lecture.”
FYI: the whole thing reads so much better if you read it in a badly faked Texas accent.
In the meantime I like that you can break this down quite easily into three parts, from top to bottom.
-1.
Social signalling implies (as always for Hanson), that anyone should be suspicious of whether it’s unreasonable to challenge conventional wisdom. The ahistoricity of his account of “ancient” legal systems aside, this is a perfectly reasonable argument to make. Whether it’s so closely tied to his hobby-horse can be left aside.
-2.
Well that’s fun being the contrarian. But the funner part is that there’s already a wealth of academic and military scepticism in the public domain that refutes or attempts to refute the childish version of UFO-denialism that Hanson appears to hold. Hanson thinks the only people who make an effort to “debunk” UFO phenomena are popular articles he read in New Scientist or whatever, so he’s very clever for pointing out that they have vested interests in doing so.
-3.
Well this part can be summarised as, “whether I’m joking or not, you can’t tell, and I have a bunch of people on all sides ready to back me up in the comments arguing that I’m not a crank or that my crankery is reasonable and they’ll all buy my books”
Noisiest goddamn coverup in human history apparently. My Twitter TL was all UFOs for a few weeks there.
And this shit has the same problem as AI, where some use it to mean certaintypes of computer programs (or mechanical turks), and others ise it to mean human like (or more) machine intelligences (AGI).
Cranks love to not make the distinction between the two clear. It helps when you can switch between ‘I think I saw somthing I couldnt explain in the sky’ and ‘I saw aliens’ at will.
imagine publicly falling for the most obvious DoD psyop in history
the X Files was a documentary don’t @ me
This isn’t about the band Hanson?
Oh, it’s Overcoming Bias. I saw a right-winger on Twitter praise it just now.
Why can’t he say what he believes in 10 words?