he takes a couple pages to explain why he know that sightings of UFOs aren’t alien because he can simply infer how superintelligent beings will operate + how advanced their technology is. he then undercuts his point by saying that he’s very uncertain about both of those things, but wraps it up nicely with an excessively wordy speech about how making big bets on your beliefs is the responsible way to be a thought leader. bravo
Broke: “There’s no way UFOs are aliens duh”
Woke: “P/S/B: UFOs are almost certainly not aliens, and this is knowable with study and thought. … the aliens would have harvested the Solar System for matter and energy … they could literally just rewrite our brains … the supervast majority of probable alien intellects … GPT-4 … covid … the way experts and authorities would do it in a saner world, by betting $150,000 … My present worldview is a grim one … I’m no superintelligent alien myself … on Earth, of course, it falls to me instead … Kids, don’t try this at home … since this counterparty is an unknown they paid their money in advance … UFOs are held in disrepute … maybe because blah blah Prime Directive or whatever … not something we generated as a convergent instrumental strategy by blind forward reasoning … namely religion … posing as Yeshua does not represent an optimal alien strategy … being only clever as Eliezer thinking for five minute … “Skeptics” will of course claim that all the Dreams are just psychosomatic … the mysterious Being of Light who appears in dreams … no recording the millionth binary digit of pi in 1000 BCE … I conclude that UFOs are not a minimally interventionist, doubt-leaving strategy which maximizes the status of any particular or general aliens in the eyes of humanity.”
(P.S. What does P/S/B mean?)
I should probably also say: Kids, don’t try this at home ($150K bets at 150:1 odds) unless you have read the literature on expert overconfidence, and tested your own calibration repeatedly.
I heard Yud got some ribs removed so he could “test his own calibration”
Noob here. Finding the aesthetics of LW interesting. White, serif fonts… purity, beautiful rational authority.
I forget how it used to look, but the current design falls into the Wikipedia uncanny valley for me, most likely on purpose
