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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

The really interesting thing to me is how recently those experiments were conducted. I find it somewhat mind-boggling that the US still searched for witches in the 1980s.

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I'm actually OK with this: 1. truly insignificant portion of government spending 2. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to investigate truly bizarre phenomena 3. keeps "muscle memory" for HOW to conduct research outside of the known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

https://www.google.com/search?q=problems+with+peer+review

If intelligence gathering, and the reports produced by such were analyzed and critiqued with the same rigor as the 'known-to-be-flawed peer-review system', you'd be horrified at what your tax dollars are being spent on.

I doubt it. My tax dollars are already spent on lots of things that are known to be actively harmful, not just "low probability of ROI". For example, any 'critical theory' university program.

What's wrong with critical theory? How are your tax dollars funding the study of it?

To be clear, I didn't claim anything wrong with critical theory, but rather the university programs that focus on it. I'm not sure if it's causation or correlation, but the programs that focus on critical theory tend to promote an ideology that is racist and sexist (literally; they advocate openly for discrimination on the bases of race and sex). At public universities (and even private universities, to a lesser extent), these programs are funded by tax dollars.

I guess the people handing out the money are laymen unable to discern science that lies outside the mainstream from crack-pot theories.

Governments probably want to fund all kinds of weird research in fear of missing out on the next atom bomb. But there was a long and rich history of rigorous science leading up the the development of the atom bomb. I imagine the same is true about the development of ICBMs ect.

ICBMs emerged extremely fast after the V2. It has a lot more in common with this parapsychology research than with nuclear fission.

The Trinity test was 2.5 years after the first man-made self sustaining nuclear reaction and 12 years after the idea of a nuclear chain reaction was first proposed. The R-7 ICBM first flew 13 years after the V2. I'd say nuclear fission developed a lot faster than ICBMs.

I'd peg the beginning of the research that jostmey mentioned at the discovery of radioactivity. The science was already well-underway when research reactors were being built.

Rocketry was already well-underway when the V2 flew.

Ok. In that case, it took 49 years from the discovery of radioactivity to the production of the atomic bomb. It took 60 years from the development of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation to the production of the ICBM. Nuclear science still advanced significantly faster than rocket science.

In some ways, ICBMs are literally connected with parapsychology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)

> known-to-be-flawed academic peer review system

That something is flawed does not mean it is useless.

You can find the fully unmoderated preprint forum at vixra.org and the results speak for themselves.

Just because something is useful doesn't mean it is finding all of the useful results.

The benefits of black budgets and zero public pressure for measuring ROI.

They probably invented some ridiculous justification about "not being able to disprove the unknown" and that every abstract hypothetical threat we can invent should be taken seriously, something something Ruskies.

Probably most of the investigations were conducted by shell companies owned by sisters-in-law etc. Just another way for TLA assholes to line their own pockets.

This. The Pentagon buried a McKinsey study detailing out $125 billion in waste with almost no pushback from the public and then comes a proposal for an additional $300 billion budget increase with no effort to optimize existing processes. Going to the cloud and modernizing technology will only solve some of the problems, the rest are non-technical (bureaucratic).

For the reference https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/pentagon-burie...

Just to put things into perspective, if pentagon optimizes it's spending and saves $125 Billion, all public colleges can be tuition free and government will still have ~$62 Billion left. [1]

Side note: Public colleges can also be made tuition free if government scraps financial aid programs that it has (~$69 Billion) and directly pays for all students that go to public colleges. [1]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/heres-e...

In theory, but in practice that money would never be used that way in the US of course.

The public college thing will never happen -- no state will ever shut off a faucet for federal funds.

The point is to give you an understanding of the scale of the money we're talking about, not necessarily as a concrete policy proposal.

Does that include the cost of retrofitting the colleges to handle the increased demand?

There certainly will be some increased demand, but it can be easily controlled by just simply taking top X% of performers, where X% makes as many students as particular university is capable of handling.

Even now, when public colleges are not tuition free, any decent university still has limited capacity. You need to have certain level of performance to be accepted, not just money.

There was also an economic strategy at play. Both sides were willing to start programs to counter each other, even if those programs seemed silly. Neither side wanted to be caught out if silly suddenly became practical. But the americans knew they had more money. If you could trick the other side into researching a dead end, that's a win. That's dollars/rubles wasted. So you might maintain research programs that you know are ridiculous because you know the other side will continue theirs too. It is one of the few cold war games that one side might actually win.

The pinnacles of this were probably the Buran and F-15 programs. US builds a Space Shuttle so the USSR needs one too... just in case the US decides to activate Shuttle's military features. Buran flies a couple times and is shelved as impractical. Net result: Billions on rubles not spent on other missiles/rocket programs. Conversely, the Americans convinced themselves that the Mig-25 was an epic superfighter. It wasn't. Billions were poured into F-15 development to counter a threat that didn't exist, billions that might have been spent on anything else. Net result: while the F-15 went on to be a great fighter, the USSR remained ahead in high-speed interceptors for two decades.

The CIA are an old hand at using "you can't prove a negative" against laypeople in order to manipulate them. After years of cooperation with international inspectors, Iran saw this first hand when the CIA produced a report thousands of pages long which ended with "We found no evidence suggesting any continuation of a weapons program... but that doesn't guarantee there isn't a super secret one hidden 500 miles underground somewhere." and the media reported it as "CIA confirms underground Iranian nuke program."

>> still searched for witches in the 1980s.

There are more practical and down-to-earth reasons why they would want to monitor witches. Another gate, the heavens gate UFO cult, caught the FBI's attention when they all killed themselves in 1997. That caused the FBI to start monitoring some scifi and UFO groups. I don't knock the FBI for wanting to maintain broad institutional knowledge. If that means paying for people to be experts on witchcraft ... if they had experts on UFO cults in the 1980s maybe they could have prevented heavens gate.

>I find it somewhat mind-boggling that the US still searched for witches in the 1980s.

Our military commander in chief at the time was literally an Alzheimers riddled septuagenarian, guided on policy decisions by a personal astrologer. Nothing from the '80 surprises me.

Who would that be exactly? - Someone who doesn't want to go down a Wikipedia black hole trying to answer this question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan

A society that never invests in research into anything that in hindsight was obviously silly, is also going to miss out on a bunch of things that looked unpromising but actually paid off in a big way. I'm glad NASA investigated the reactionless drive recently, even though I was pretty sure it would come to nothing. We need more willingness to finance far-out research projects, not less.

>I find it somewhat mind-boggling that the US still searched for witches in the 1980s.

"Mr. President... we cannot allow... a witchcraft gap!"

But seriously, I assume these programs were used for money laundering or misdirecting funds for serious black projects or something.

This seems overly dismissive. I think if you had intelligence that the soviets were researching this, and they were, you would more or less have to also. Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today and that we can dismiss what may be a way to access non-local information.

Worse, the uber-skeptic position has been hurt in recent years, not the least of which with the military releasing incredible footage of the very same UFO experiences that have been dismissed by skeptics:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/politics/unidentified-aircraf...

Also, small nitpick, but a witch hunt was a political move against women, not an honest attempt to find real witches. Societies with witch burnings were overly patriarchal and witch threats existed to keep women in line.

I think if you had intelligence that the soviets were researching this, and they were [...]

I know essentially nothing about this topic but from what I read due to this post the Soviets were not actually researching this, it was just a translation error.

[...] you would more or less have to also.

If your enemy wastes resources on something that is hopeless you don't counter by also wasting your resources on the same thing.

Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today [...]

We may not have a good understanding of human consciousness but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics and human consciousness can not sidestep the laws of physics.

I don't know how such footage changed anything, there have been alleged alien space ship sightings for a long time, some easily explained, some remaining unexplained. What do a couple more examples change? There are no alien space ships roaming Earth's sky.

According to Wikipedia that was at best one motivation among several and neither a particularly early nor leading one. Anyway, I only used the term witches to make the comment more catchy, I did not want to imply that what they were looking for was the same or similar to witchcraft witches allegedly made use of.

> We may not have a good understanding of human consciousness but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics and human consciousness can not sidestep the laws of physics.

The laws of physics havn't been completely decided. The arrogance of this post is enraging.

I never claimed that we figured out all the laws of nature but we certainly know a lot about them. And among the things we know are limits on things we may not have discovered. If there was, for example, a yet undiscovered fifth force, then it would have to have tiny effects because otherwise we would have noticed it in past experiments. There is no chance we would have missed anything that could enable remote viewing or something along that line.

>There is no chance

Stating anything without doubt is the definition of hubris.

Are you worrying what you will do if the sun does not rise again tomorrow? I guess technically it is not certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, but for all practical purposes the sun will without [any relevant amount of] doubt rise again tomorrow.

The laws of physics, when it applies to the energy scale of human brains, is nearly completely understood. You might want to read this:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/09/23/the-laws...

>but we have a pretty good understanding of fundamental physics

You're not being serious, right?

Of course am I serious, what is your objection?

Explains the whole "Witch Hunt" thing I guess..

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