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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

You have missed a case:

0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.

An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.

#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.

An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.

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Hear me out: There are tiny people who are invisible, and independently, there is a mushroom which makes humans hallucinate tiny people. The hallucinations are different than the ones which actually exist.

(continuing this incredibly silly game for fun)

If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.

Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.

(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)

They're also impossible to smell without the mushroom... which gets us neatly into Carl Sagan's "Invisible Dragon in my Garage" analogy.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WCQWgnoqGbA

The empirical solution would be to administer the mushroom to people who are not equipped to correctly predict how an actual tiny person would physically interact with certain situations (idk maybe something involving surface tension and liquids of different viscuousities) and instruct them to report their observations. This would then either demonstrate that the tiny people do not obey the laws of physics or that they follow the subject's imagined laws of physics and are therefore hallucinations.

Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.

There's a simpler first step: give the mushroom to people who don't know to expect tiny people, and see if they report tiny people

I think that "something that makes it so humans ignore them" is functionally equivalent to psychic powers, no?

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