Yes good point. They might be doing this to set up a situation where they tell us to not build Dyson spheres. If we accept that aliens are visiting us and observe that the universe is otherwise in a natural state we might infer that the aliens don’t want us to disturb this state outside of our solar system.
James_Miller
Karma: 14,374
I am unaware if Hanson has written about this. Panspermia could happen by the first replicators happening in space perhaps on comets and then spreading to planets. As Hanson has pointed out, if life is extremely rare it is strange that life would originate on earth when there are almost certainly super-earths on which you would think life would be much more likely to develop. A solution to this paradox is that life did develop on such an Eden and then spread to earth billions of years ago from a star system that is now far away. Our sun might have been very close to the other star system when life spread, or indeed in the same system at the time.
You have anticipated Robin Hanson’s argument. He believes that the only way that the aliens would be able to avoid having some splinter group changing the universe in obvious ways would be if they had a very stable and authoritarian leadership.
Yes, and it could also be that I was so excited that the great Sam Altman might agree with me on an issue I greatly care about that I read something into what he said that wasn’t there.
Do you remember my saying that the issue was as important as AGI and him agreeing with my statement?
Were you in discussion room 1 to hear the question I asked of Altman about UFOs? If not, you don’t have a basis to say “at no point”.
My claims mostly relate to what Sam Altman said, in response to my question, in discussion room 1 after Altman’s official talk had ended. Why are you so confident that I have said false things about what he stated? Gwern was, I believe, just referring to what Altman said in his official talk. You should have a very high standard of proof before you accuse someone of saying “pretty false things”.
I think people irrationally reject evidence that aliens are UFOs. Pilots have reported that they feared disclosing what they had seen UFOs do because no one would believe them. Ironically, If my version of what Altman said is true, we have a case here where I’m being falsely accused of spreading false information for accurately reporting that a hyper-high status person thinks UFOs are likely aliens. Something about UFOs causes normally rational people to jump to the conclusion that anyone offering evidence for the alien hypothesis is either lying, deluded, or a fool.
I believe he did in discussion Room 1 in response to my question. This occurred after his formal talk was over.
Thanks. Hanson, as best I recall, gave the 1/1000 Bayesian prior of aliens visiting us.
The US military claims that on multiple occasions they have observed ships do things well beyond our capacities. There are cases where a drone is seen by multiple people and recorded by multiple systems flying in ways well beyond our current technology to the point where it is more likely the drones are aliens than something built by SpaceX or the Chinese. The aliens are not hiding, they are making it extremely obvious that they are here, it is just that we are mostly ignoring the evidence. The aliens seem to have a preference for hanging around militaries and militaries have a habit of classifying everything of interest. I don’t understand why the aliens don’t reshape the universe building things like Dyson spheres, but perhaps the aliens are like human environmentalists who like to keep everything in its natural state. Hanson’s theory is that life is extremely rare in the universe but panspermia might be true. Consequently, even though our galaxy might be the only galaxy in 1 billion light years to have any life, our galaxy might have two advanced civilizations, and it would make sense that if the other civ is more than a million years in advance of us they would send ships to watch us. Panspermia makes the Bayesian prior of aliens visiting us, even given that the universe can’t have too much advanced life or we would see evidence of it, not all that low, perhaps 1⁄1,000. I don’t know why they don’t use language to communicate with us, but it might be like humans sending deep sea probes to watch squids. I think the purpose of the UFOs might be for the aliens to be showing us that they are not a threat. If, say, we encounter the alien’s home planet in ten thousands years and are technologically equal to the aliens because both of us have solved science, the aliens can say, “obviously we could have wiped you out when you were primitive, so the fact that we didn’t is evidence we probably don’t now mean you harm.”
The second.
It wasn’t recorded. Actually I was the one who asked the question in the room discussion. The evidence that UFOs seen by the military are aliens is fairly strong. I’ve done three podcasts on the topic included one with Robin Hanson. See https://soundcloud.com/user-519115521
Sam Altman also said that the government admitted that UFOs are real. After the talk in the “room” discussions Sam expressed agreement that UFOs being aliens are potentially as important as AGI, but did not feel this was an issue he had time to work on.
No, but the goal wouldn’t be to change someone’s mind. It would be to get them to stop bugging you.
Unlikely. The Davidson Institute does not get asked to recruit such children, and they would be the easiest pathway to such recruitment in the US.
Make thousands of clones of John von Neumann. Yes, first we will have to get some of his DNA and we will have to figure out exactly how to clone humans. But the payoff, at least over a 30-year-time scale, seems much bigger than anything else proposed. On a less ambitious but related front, identify profoundly gifted kids between, say, 8-16 and offer them free expert tutoring in return for some of that tutoring being about the importance and challenges of AI safety. The Davidson Institute would be a good place to start to look for such kids.
Explain to your family that to properly evaluate homeopathy your entire family needs to understand statistics. Give your parents some books on statistics and whenever they bug you to do something about homeopathy ask how much progress they have made with the stats books. Start numerous conversations with your parents about statistics and work statistics into all the conversations they have with you. When they want to watch TV suggest instead they watch a YouTube stats video. Eventually, work out a truce.
I don’t think I’m a mouth-breather.
I have found that sleeping with tape over my mouth improves my sleep quality. I know this sounds crazy, but if you do a quick Internet search you will find support for the practice.
While the decision to remove might have been correct, clearly Altman placed some value on people like us learning about his views and might have appreciated your efforts to inform more such people about this thinking in a way that’s opaque to the traditional media.