I swear the UFO is coming any minute | Hacker News Reader

I swear the UFO is coming any minute

experimental-history.com

192 pointsAriarule58 comments

I have always like C. P. Cavafy's famous poem about this, Waiting for the Barbarians, because of what it emphasizes about why people want these things to be true. Doom is an abdication of responsibility.

https://simonsarris.com/h/barbarians

Thanks for this!

Thank you, that was great.

(And what a beautiful little page - click the white spots on the map in the header, more trees and houses spring up)

“Now, there's this about cynicism, Sergeant. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.”

~ Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold

I have associated "Waiting for the Barbarians" with people who think they know better showing up somewhere to conquer. I guess that could also be UFOs.

A related literary work, at least depending on how you think about 'related' with regard to literature/poetry: Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee.

One of the more recent "the UFO is coming" events were those people that sold their houses and traveled around in RVs because they thought the rapture was happening on a specific date... or at least that was the message. Turns out most of them just sort of liked the idea of selling their houses and traveling around in RVs.

Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. It's one of the few publications I read religiously.

This is the first I've heard of it but I was very impressed. Multiple outbound links captured my attention.

Experimental History makes me look at my own writing and go "This is all so mid".

Surprisingly many things seem to be spoiled by the "too many of the people being studied were actually other researchers trying to study the same thing" (or even more commonly, students being taught about the thing).

I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.

There's a common joke that defines psychology as the scientific discipline studying the undergraduate psychology students. That is obviously due to the fact that a lot of research subjects are found where it's easiest to find them - right on campus, and a lot of people who have time and desire to participate in studies (instead of, you know, working) are the students themselves.

I heard there’s a requirement to participate in the studies if you’re in some psychology undergrads.

I was required when I took (two) undergraduate psychology classes. Also, when I was in grad school I did a few, because they paid (I think) £5 per - which was, in the days of £1 Green King pints and no outside income, well worth pursuing.

I took 101 at San Jose State and had to participate in a study as part of the curriculum. It was pretty cool. I went to the NASA Ames research center and did a study of seeing how well people could predict an object being exactly on the side of them. It was small spheres that came at you then went out of view and you clicked a butten when you thought they were exactly on your side. The tech was the most interesting, 90's era VR run on a Silicon Graphics reality engine. We has Iris boxes in the computer art lab but this thing was a much bigger...

I don't know about the others referenced in the article or what else you might be referring to, but that wasn't the case with When Prophesy Fails or the Stanford Prison Experiment though. That was more or less fraud. The researchers put their thumb on the scale significantly.

Oh yeah. I'm not saying that's the only way things can go off the rails. But with regard to "When Prophesy Fails" specifically, TFA says:

"A new paper finds a different story in the archives of the lead author, Leon Festinger. Up to half of the attendees at cult meetings may have been undercover researchers. One of them became a leader in the cult and encouraged other members to make statements that would look good in the book."

Unless I recall incorrectly, they were undercover researchers in Festinger's employ. Not that many researchers happened to converge on the same very small, obscure cult.

But perhaps I misinterpreted you? I took the impression from your comment you thought several groups of researchers were stepping on each other's toes, but reading it back, I see that you didn't explicitly say that. So perhaps I read that in.

Interestingly banning a far right party in Germany failed at the constitutional court a few years back with one of the arguments being too many party members were actually paid informants of the authorities and thus it wasn't reliably possible to distinguish what the party did on its own vs what the authorities caused. I think many people concluded that the party finances were mostly kept stable by these informants, so the easiest way to get rid of them would be to drastically reduce that.

I buy the emotional appeal of “please let the UFO show up and dissolve all our problems.” But even if non human intelligence is real (it’s not impossible), turning that into “doom” is mostly a choice: it offloads agency and absolves us from the seat.

To me 'boredom' is the sneakier driver :) A lot of “I want it to be aliens” reads less like evidence-following and more like novelty-hunger: reality feels stale, so we reach for a plot twist big enough to make everything mean something again. That impulse is exciting, but it’s also how you end up treating catastrophe (or salvation) as entertainment instead of responsibility.

The world is boring, and you are responsible. Live with it.

"Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow... we must get a winner one day."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJQ18S6aag

> A blogger named Croissanthology re-ran the study with nearly 10x as many participants (446 vs. 45 in the original). The effect did not replicate. No replication is perfect, but no original study is either. And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

This should not be used in court today, but I do believe there is also a big component of cultural antibodies developing over time - and thus the study can't be replicated by definition.

In 1975 a sober high-quality source suddenly writing bait "BREAKING: politician SLAMMED diplomat on issue" would register as interesting. Now, people are constantly drowning in information presented that way.

I often ponder why Carl Sagan never added another book to his famous reading list for students, as it makes a fairly reasonable argument that most populist movements are essentially interchangeable =3

"The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (Eric Hoffer, 1951)

https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movemen...

I don't think this list is as famous as you assume it to be. The only "Carl Sagan reading list" I managed to find [0] is apparently his personal TODO note (books he plans to read, but haven't at the moment of writing). Which obviously isn't the same thing as "his famous reading list for students".

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/get-inspired-by-carl-sagan-s-am...

Even today, people still discuss Carl Sagan and his Astronomy 490 course structure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pc3IuVNuO0

The articles posted UFO cult study reference is part of the reading list. =3

"On Liberty" (John Stuart Mill, 1859)

https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod, )

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...

This should be at the top of everyone's reading list. It was the blueprint for the CIA's regime change agenda, led too MKUltra/Mockingbird and is still required reading for most Terrorism studies classes.

For the DCA noise complaints, a household (probably the same one as 2015) submitted 19000 complaints in 2016. That's 52 times a day or 3-4 per waking hour.

Reminds me of this stat from the NYT: in 2022, “Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City […] involved just 327 people”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre...

> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.

Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.

You can never know if/when an unraveling event will occur.

A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.

A related concept in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that a complex system (or some mysterious adversary) is coming to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to mysterious reasons though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying. Without sufficient info and intelligence, the mind will try to transform complex problems that it cannot fully grasp into simple concepts that it can understand and that you can react to and communicate with your tribe (that they can also understand).

A UFO may be a metaphor for a powerful, mysterious, hidden adversary whose capabilities you do not understand. In any case, the correct response is to prepare, hide and flee.

Ha mate you are on the UFO, and whats coming is your understanding that YOU are flying through the universe trying to get somewhere, not waiting for it to come to you!

> so what we remember is not exactly what we saw.

Yet there are savants with nearly perfect recall which has been tested multiple times. I strongly doubt there is a single model for memory or even a single mechanism for forming memories and as a result personal understandings of it poorly generalize across any random section of the population.

99.9% of people understood that sentence to be correct, in the spirit in which it was written. Yet there are people who don't, but we still wouldn't say the sentence is false.

> but we still wouldn't say the sentence is false.

Yes "we" do. It's false. It's false not because it's a lie but because it's very poorly worded and under specified. Inside of a work attempting to communicate a highly specific idea it's a genuine mistake. It invites ambiguity and misunderstanding.

> 99.9% of people

Good for them. What's the point here? Are you attempting to bully me by suggesting I'm not part of your crowd?

> in the spirit in which it was written.

Uh huh. And what spirit are you writing in?

I was attempting to say you're uselessly pedantic, but apparently subtlety didn't work.

Take your judgement somewhere else. No one asked for them. You're being rude, bullying, and arrogant. Which is worse than "useless."

I would rather, all day, deal with "useless pedantry" than deal with your kind of attitude. You are the worse type of person that vistis hacker news. Perhaps a different forum would suit your, uh, "needs," a little better.

That's a coincidence, I thought the exact same of you.

this was a pleasant blog post to read, i enjoyed the jiggling cat

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/

It's interesting that the proliferation of cell phone cameras has not improved the quality of UFO reports much.

Nor has the availability of automatic UFO-spotting cameras.[1] They pick up drones, flocks of birds, and the International Space Station. But no good UFO shots.

LINEAR and GEODSS, which find near-earth objects and satellites using a pair of large telescopes at each site, have been running for decades, somehow don't seem to be picking up UFOs.

[1] https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance

the post isn’t about UFOs :)

Ceci n'est pas un UFO :)

IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.

Super interesting to see the original research challenged.

Seems applicable to AGI

I don't know about AGI, but these models are automating a lot of work.

I think but do not know that we'll have higher level work that sits atop it.

I don't know if/when we won't be needed to orchestrate that work.

I'm worried that if we don't have open source models that are up to par with the work-automating models that we'll have a rosy future. One of my biggest fears right now is big capital owning all the big models and infra. And that one day, they'll own all the labor.

I share your worry, and I would say that the AGI scare is definitely instrumental to the outcome you’re describing. It’s a narrative that serves the goal of large capital, with the hope of a side of regulatory capture too.

That was my opinion before the boat left the shore. We needed an open source boat that we could control.

Now, however, I don't think that we have that option. Pretty much everyone in tech was coerced to board a single boat of commercial AI.

My concern is what happens if it hits an iceberg. It's not like we can go back to pre-LLMs now.

In the cult, straight up "waiting for it", and by "it", haha, let's just say, AGI.

If all those studies are falsified, maybe the OP blog post is too. At least the studies have extensive research and review. It's always interesting that people give more credence to the most recent person to speak, often the 'debunker'.

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