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Comment by zarmin | Hacker News Reader

Explain why

Because if your Bayesian prior on being "tracked by supernatural entities that caused [your] car and appliances to malfunction" is distinguishable from zero then your mental faculties are open to question unless you can produce evidence for it. And there is no reproducible evidence for any supernatural phenomenon, let alone one as dramatic as this.

Even more, supernatural stuff does not exist. Period. There might be natural stuff which we did not yet discover or which we do not understand properly, but there is no supernatural stuff.

To be fair, there could be supernatural stuff, i.e. stuff whose behavior is not constrained by any discernible natural law. There just isn't any evidence that such stuff actually exists in our universe. All of the "evidence" for supernatural phenomena can be more readily explained by people making mistakes, sensory illusions, cognitive biases, or just flat-out making shit up.

What would it even mean to have evidence of something supernatural? Wouldn't having evidence (an observation?) make it no longer supernatural (above the natural)?

I guess that depends on your definition of the word "natural". But one of the notable characteristics of nature as it actually exists in our universe is that its behavior is governed by discernible laws with very low Kolmogorov complexity. This is what makes science possible. But the universe doesn't have to be that way. Harry-Potter-stye magic could exist in principle, and that would be different enough from nature-as-we-know-it to deserve a different label despite the fact that magic would, in such a world, be "natural".

I suggest checking out Dean Radin's Real Magic. I'm in the middle of it now, and it seems persuasive in the affirmative.

It tries to use the scientific method to objectively determine if "real" magic (supernatural, psi, etc) exists.

I'll give long odds against.

There is countless experiential evidence.

https://www.narcap.de/dokumente/COMETA-Report-englisch.pdf

https://www.narcap.org/blog/narcaptr20

UFOs are not supernatural. Of course there are UFOs. The only question is whether any of them are extraterrestrial (which would be extraordinary, but still not supernatural).

(And BTW, the readiness with which UFO advocates conflate "UFO", "extraterrestrial" and "supernatural", all of which are completely distinct from one another, is indicative of the generally sloppy thinking that goes on in that community.)

> then your mental faculties are open to question unless you can produce evidence for it

Why?

Because if you believe extraordinary things without evidence then your thinking is not constrained by objective reality. That is the definition of being delusional.

It's the other way around, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. At the very least - name a plausible physical phenomenon that allows FTL?

Alcubierre drive or an Einstein-Rosen bridge immediately come to mind.

Yeah but no. Both require impossible things to happen and thus both are mathematical exercise only. These two are why I said "physical phenomenon".

They require things far outside or current technological ability; both are grounded in our understanding of physics. Yes, it's possible they are forever outside our ability, but that makes them improbable but not impossible.

No, I mean they require things that are absolutely imaginary and exist only in the realm of numbers. There's zero proof of anything like "negative energy", for example. And E-R bridges are impassable - anything that would try would get stuck and/or crushed. This is not about engineering ability - both theories are artifacts of the imperfection of our understanding of physics and math, nothing more.

Two centuries ago we argued whether heavier than air objects could fly, or if machines could reach the moon.

I think it's hubris to think our current models of the universe are the rules of the universe; and that our technological ability could not be eclipsed by further millennia of study.

Sure, but it's much worse to take a math exercise without any connection to reality and claim that it means aliens might be visiting us.

You asked about plausible FTL technology, and I provided examples.

I asked about a plausible physical phenomenon - something that can be seen and measured in the real world. You will never measure a passable E-R bridge or Alcubierre drive because it's purely mathematical exercise, it has zero possibility/probability of being engineered into existence as it relies on things that straight-up can never exist. I'm not saying FTL is impossible but it's definitely not going to be either of these - our universe would be totally broken and self-destruct if these were possible.

Without technology, you'll never see mechanical engines powered by chemical energy, either.

Neither option I gave requires impossible technology, only improbable and unlikely technology.

I don't think FTL is such a barrier if you accept that general relativity isn't a perfect model, even by current known standards.

He asserts things to be true without evidence

So did John Snow. Then he stopped cholera.

John Snow had evidence, and a hypothesis that could be tested, but no one took it seriously. That's a lot more than UFO believers have.

>That's a lot more than UFO believers have.

UFO 'believers' have - since very recently - videos released by the US military in which they say 'detections of this object were confirmed by multiple sensor platforms' and 'we cannot identify this object and have no speculation as to its origin' or whatever the exact wording is.

You know what I mean, the 'tic-tac' video. The narrative provided with that video confirms that the object/objects were detected by multiple types of sensor (visual, infrared, radar) and by multiple sensor platforms (aerial radar, aerial infrared, ship-based radar) and that the detections correlated.

With those releases the the UFO landscape changed, to wit, the US military is now a 'UFO believer.'

The thing is, none of that is evidence of alien spacecraft. The tic-tac videos are interesting, but i've seen plenty of rational explanations offered for them[0], and as far as I can tell the whole alien narrative around them was fabricated by sites like thedrive.com, who then later reported that the government (far from being 'ufo believers') found these craft to be purely terrestrial drones, likely from China[1,2].

You're free to ignore all of that and assume it's aliens but doing so is just superstition, not reason.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_UFO_videos#Potential_...

[1]https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/drone-swarms-that-hara...

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701319

To the US military a UFO is an unidentifid flying object. To UFO conspiracy theorists and the like they are alien ships.

Stating you don't know what an object in the sky is , is a completely reasonable thing to do.

Making the claim they are alien ships without any proof is not

What did he believe without evidence? Cholera?

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