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Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

What if that's exactly the effect that the source of the phenomenon is trying to achieve ?

When you tease a kitten with a laser pointer, the beam dot is moving in ways kitten-brain-physics can't comprehend and has to read as a lifeform. Why would you you so confuse a poor critter?

The answer "it's very funny" should not be ruled out.

I'm not convinced the cat is confused into thinking it's a life form, though there is perhaps some confusion due to the non-material nature of the dot. My cat knows that I control the laser and complains to me if I turn it off too soon.

> the beam dot is moving in ways kitten-brain-physics can't comprehend and has to read as a lifeform

It is a lifeform—a lifeform with a laser pointer teasing a cat.

My dad would joke about making a Q&A book called "The Fundamentalist's Guide to Science". On each left page would be a good question, like, "Why is the sky blue?" or "Why are there stars at night?" On each right page you'd see, "Because God wants it that way."

Ultimately, an "explanation" that can explain any set of data is useless. I will grant, given the state of the world, "Because God is fucking with us," is an emotionally satisfying one. But ultimately it's just as unhelpful as "Because God wants it that way" from a scientific perspective.

The truth doesn't care whether you like it or not or whether you find it "helpful". We can't really ever exclude the possibility that we're merely playthings for beings far more advanced than ourselves. Usually we don't need to assume that such things exist to explain our observations but if we do encounter observations that don't fit our models of reality we do need to consider other possibilities.

What "truth" means is exactly the question here, so you can't use it as an answer like that.

There's a world full of natural phenomena which we perceive dimly. We try to create linguistic structures that explain it. A proposed change to that linguistic structure, like "Fairies are real," can only be more or less helpful in explaining the world we observe.

As George Box said, "All models are wrong; some models are useful." We should always be open to possibility. I am equally open to Bigfoot, UFOs, ESP, vampires, fairies, Santa, and Thor as explanations for phenomena. Which is to say that they are historically bad explanations that can never be disproven, but which have been demonstrably unhelpful in explaining the world.

You can disprove all those things. You just have to find "the real thing" that gives rise to the evidence people talk about, and say, "see it's not X, it's Y". X disproved. But it's a bit dishonest to lump all together. UFOs we have thousands of witnesses, and radar data. Santa we don't have as many witnesses or data.

If we find some Bigfoot like civilization living underground, but that's different to how we think of Bigfoot, we've "explained" Bigfoot and disproven "the wrong version" of Bigfoot.

If Thor lands on Earth and say, "I'm back," but says, "btw my name is "Bor". We've disproved "Thor". If we discover people with some disease which makes them live indoors, drink lymph fluid and live for hundreds of years, we've disproved "vampires" but explained the stories around that.

At the level of speculation we're operating at, these things can be argued both ways. It's not truth that brings you down on one side or another, it's your preference. You're blind to that.

You can't disprove those things. People who believe in ghosts or fairies or angels or gods always beliefs plus claims of evidence. You can disprove some part of the evidence, but they'll always have another bit of evidence where there's not enough data to prove anything one way or the other.

It's the same deal with space aliens visiting Earth. The evidentiary basis for that is no stronger than that for aliens. You're correct that it's preference that leads some to favor aliens over angels, etc. But that's all it is.

so they'll believe them. You can disprove/prove it but you just won't convince them: the certainters on either side. The situation you describe is different to proof, it's more subjective, more to do with resistance.

It's an exact mirror of the practice you see of people who don't want to believe in aliens visiting Earth, inventing new ways to avoid the evidence, whether it's sensor data, witnesses whatever.

"The evidentiary basis for that (fairies and ghosts) is no stronger than that for aliens."

That's an objective sounding statement, but it's just your interpretation and preference. By what standard? If we had hundreds of thousands of people around the world saying they'd been raped / kidnapped by a gang of roaming miscreants dressed up as pirates, and these people had missing time, missing clothes, and then we had the EU maritime agency come out and say, "We've captured what seem to be swarms of pirate ships on radar". Would you still not believe them?

I forget the math behind it; and could be totally wrong but I think for every additional caveat you add to a hypothesis to make it fit the data post hoc, it cuts the odds of your new hypothesis in half.

No, not quite. It depends on your prior assumptions. Basically imagine that you have these preconceptions

  Possibility                      Prior probability 
  No aliens                        0.55
  Aliens at the perceptual limit   0.1
  Completely invisible aliens      0.2
  Obviously visible aliens         0.15

Now the math is simple. You cross out the impossible: obviously visible aliens. Then you need to get the remaining options to sum to 1 again. This is done by dividing by the total.

  Possibility                      Posterior probability 
  No aliens                        0.55 / 0.85
  Aliens at the perceptual limit   0.1 / 0.85
  Completely invisible aliens      0.2 / 0.85
  Obviously visible aliens         0

Now you may wonder where the prior probabilities come from. Well they are simply your best guesses based on reasoning and thinking, before having looked at the data. For instance they may be informed by your knowledge of physics and how easy it is to make things invisible. And they may be informed by extrapolating human psychology onto aliens (see the other response about a human playing with a cat using a laser pointer). You may consider the precedent of bacteria existing all around us for a very long time without detection.

To be honest, I'm stealing from here: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/11868 (The cost of making excuses)

Which if I understand; would go like this on explaining UFOs:

Naive Approach:

P(ALIENS) = 50% p(~ALIENS) = 50%

Time elapses and I find some new evidence that looks like this:

P(Evidence | ALIENS) = 30% P(Evidence | ~ALIENS) = 90%

Which gives my hypothesis (Its Aliens) a posterior probability of 25% => (50% X 30%)/(50% X 30% + 50% X 90%).

I want it to be aliens so I say that they're conducting studies on us which juices P(Evidence | ALIENS && Studying Us) = 100%. But because I have no evidence to back that up, the odds are no better than 50/50; and I have to drop the prior of my new hypothesis (UFOs are Aliens who Study us) to 25% (50% X 50%). This nets out a new posterior probability of around 27%.

P(ALIENS AND They Study Us) = 25% p(~ALIENS) = 75%

P(Evidence | ALIENS & They Study Us) = 100% P(Evidence | ~ALIENS) = 90%

I'm new to Bayesian logic and am still shaky with it, so there could totally be glaring errors I'm overlooking, but as I understand it that's what I was trying to get across - Every new caveat you add to explain away a poor data fit shouldn't juice your odds.

If anyone wonders why our approaches look so different, it's because I assumed ideal evidence that cleanly disproved one hypothesis without affecting any of the others. I did choose the list of hypotheses to ensure that was (approximately) valid.

Why would they? What if you're overthinking it?

Why do human scientists force mice to find their way through strange mazes ?

You've basically re-invented capricious elves and pixies.

It's an exercise in medievalist superstition dressed up in a cheap sci-fi veneer. Waste of time.

Wait until you dig into the lore on capricious elves and pixies and realise that it overlaps UFO lore in the kinds of weirdness it contains, despite being recorded by people separated by centuries, continents, and cultures.

Exactly. "The Phenomena" is sort of all encompassing. I think that's an interesting thread that's come out recently. Jeremy Corbell advances the idea (not the first to, tho) that things like ghosts, consciousness, the multiverse and ETs are all connected.

In some sense it's easily dismissed as "trivially lumping together all things we don't understand" and calling it "quantum". But on another level there does seem to be overlap: in types of experiences, places they happen, and other things I don't know about.

When I built mazes for gene knockout mice, we did it for addiction/pain research. The mazes themselves are really cool. You get to program all these little doors and sequences. Come for the research, stay for the fun.

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