Working to reduce extreme suffering for all sentient beings.
Author of Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications; Reasoned Politics; & Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics.
Co-founder (with Tobias Baumann) of the Center for Reducing Suffering (CRS).
I feel like this post gets it backwards and tries to find reasons why it’s reasonable to take UFOs seriously instead of arriving at that conclusion after careful deliberation.
The starting point of the post is that there are sufficient grounds for curiosity in light of existing reports/evidence. So to be clear, the initial and main motivation I present for taking UFOs seriously is that evidence, which I claim crosses the bar for “worthy of taking a closer look”.
I admit that the connection UFO <-> extraterrestrial intelligence is more immediate than in other cases, but I think that ignores the priors.
FWIW, I’ve written some posts related to priors, outlining some reasons why I don’t think they should be that low:
Can we confidently dismiss the existence of near aliens? Probabilities and implications
Particularly this section
See also Hanson’s post “On UFOs-As-Aliens Priors” and these comments by Jacob Cannell.
Also I’m very unconvinced by and skeptical about underlining the credibility of the “serious” UFO discourse by providing a list of prominent people engaged with it; I’m positive you can do similarly impressive lists for exactly the sort of discourse of paranormal phenomena you’re trying to distinguish from.
This seems to misunderstand what I tried to do with that list. The point is not simply to list some prominent people, but rather to give examples of, and direct readers to, the content of the serious UFO discourse. That is, my hope is not that readers will just look at that list of people and find it impressive or so, but instead that readers will check out the content of what these people have said: the data they provide, how they reason, and so on.
Sure, it is in itself somewhat interesting that a physicist like Daniel Coumbe has researched the topic and written a book about it, but what is far more interesting is the actual content of that book. So too for the books written by J. Allen Hynek.
Also, is it really true that you can find nuclear launch officers (or the like) who have claimed that some other paranormal phenomenon interfered with their nuclear weapons (or a similarly consequential system)?
For one, eye-witness reports of UFOs have in many cases been corroborated by radar evidence, which to my knowledge has not happened in the case of any claimed miracles. (See e.g. this playlist, the 1952 Washington DC incident, the 1986 Brazil incident, and Coumbe, 2022.)
Second, the eye-witnesses are in many cases trained pilots who describe going through a fairly rational process of hypothesis testing, like “first I thought it might be a balloon, then that was ruled out by x maneuver”, “then I thought of y conventional hypothesis, but that was ruled out by z”. And the witnesses generally don’t have any interest in UFOs, and they often report finding it difficult to believe what they saw.
Third, there are a number of cases where different pilots report seeing the same object from different angles (e.g. Dietrich and Fravor from different jets).
Thanks for asking :)
Some background notes that may be relevant: When I first heard about the UFO topic in a more serious way (I think when Sam Harris first talked about it, ~2017-2018?), I searched for debunkings and came upon Mick West’s debunking videos. I found them convincing and in effect I dismissed the topic for years, feeling vindicated in my pre-existing position of total dismissal toward the topic (until I read Hanson’s post “My awkward inference” in late April 2023 and decided to take a deeper look, as described at the outset of this post).
Second, West has made various debunking videos that are IMO clearly on point, in the sense of successfully explaining some allegedly anomalous footage in mundane terms. Such debunkings are helpful and represent one of the ways in which his presence in the discussion is valuable, IMO.
Third, I’ve heard various interviews with Mick West, including with people who have different perspectives than him, and in those interviews he tends to come across as a lot more open-minded and cautious than how he comes across in his debunking videos, where he often seems (to me) more animated by motivated reasoning (like: “It must be this thing”). This is perhaps not surprising, since a debunking video sort of does have a preconceived aim, namely to debunk, which is not quite the same as neutrally analyzing. (West himself seems to make some related concessions here.) So seeing him in such interviews and conversations can IMO help give a more balanced sense of Mick West’s thinking (and also of how he’s a lot more friendly and good-natured than how he can come across in places like Twitter, but maybe that’s a truism at this point :).
Moving on to the more substantive side of things. One problem, in my view, is that West sometimes gives explanations that don’t seem consistent with the evidence that surrounds the footage in question, which is sometimes more noteworthy. For example, in the Nimitz case, he attempts to debunk the FLIR footage (shot by Chad Underwood), but even if that debunking were successful, he seems to have no plausible explanation for the data reported by pilots such as Alex Dietrich and David Fravor (two of the four pilots who saw the “tic-tac” object directly), or radar experts such as Kevin Day and Gary Voorhis. I think it would be convenient if we could just close our eyes and ears and ignore what these people have reported, but that doesn’t seem to me like good epistemic practice (even though it makes sense to be skeptical, of course).
The same goes for the so-called Gimbal video (which, FWIW, I don’t have any particular take on myself). For instance, he seems to ignore that one of the pilots says “There’s a whole fleet of them, look on the SA [Situational Awareness; a kind of display that monitors surroundings, AFAIU]”. That would at least seem to pose a problem for his proposed explanation of the footage. (For some additional criticism/another perspective on Gimbal in particular, see e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.08773)
In general, I think West is valuable for the broader discussion, but I don’t think his commentary gives us reason to dismiss the subject (as I once did). I think there’s good reason to take a closer look at the evidence, and I would encourage people to do so (I suspect that this is the biggest bottleneck preventing people from taking the issue seriously: actually looking at the evidence).
FWIW, I don’t see that piece as making a case against panpsychism, but rather against something like “pansufferingism” or “pansentienceism”. In my view, these arguments against the ontological prevalence of suffering are compatible with the panpsychist view that (extremely simple) consciousness / “phenomenality” is ontologically prevalent (cf. this old post on “Thinking of consciousness as waves”).
The following list of reports may or may not be helpful to include in the ‘Further reading’ section, but I don’t think that’s for me to decide since it’s collected by me and published on my blog: https://magnusvinding.com/2023/06/11/what-credible-ufo-evidence/
A similar critique has been made in Friederich & Wenmackers’ article “The future of intelligence in the Universe: A call for humility”, specifically in the section “Why FAST and UNDYING civilizations may not be LOUD”.
Yeah, it would make sense to include it. :) As I wrote “Robin Hanson has many big ideas”, and since the previous section was already about signaling and status, I just mentioned some other examples here instead. Prediction markets could have been another one (though it’s included in futarchy).
Thus it is not at all true that that we ignore the possibility of many quiet civs.
But that’s not the claim of the quoted text, which is explicitly about quiet expansionist aliens (e.g. expanding as far and wide as loud expansionist ones). The model does seem to ignore those (and such quiet expansionists might have no borders detectable by us).
Thanks, and thanks for the question! :)
It’s indeed not obvious what I mean when I write “a smoothed-out line between the estimated growth rate at the respective years listed along the x-axis”. It’s neither the annual growth rate in that particular year in isolation (which is subject to significant fluctuations), nor the annual average growth rate from the previously listed year to the next listed year (which would generally not be a good estimate for the latter year).
Instead, it’s an estimated underlying growth rate at that year based on the growth rates in the (more) closely adjacent years. I can see that the value I estimated for 2021 was 2.65 percent, the average growth rate from 2015-2022 (according to the data from The World Bank). One could also have chosen, say, 2020-2022, which would yield an estimate of 2.01 percent, but that’s arguably too low an estimate given the corona recession.
I think this is an important point. In general terms, it seems worth keeping in mind that option value also entails option disvalue (e.g. the option of losing control and giving rise to a worst-case future).
Regarding long reflection in particular, I notice that the quotes above seem to mostly mention it in a positive light, yet its feasibility and desirability can also be separately criticized, as I’ve tried to do elsewhere:
First, there are reasons to doubt that a condition of long reflection is feasible or even desirable, given that it would seem to require strong limits to voluntary actions that diverge from the ideal of reflection. To think that we can choose to create a condition of long reflection may be an instance of the illusion of control. Human civilization is likely to develop according to its immediate interests, and seems unlikely to ever be steered via a common process of reflection.
Second, even if we were to secure a condition of long reflection, there is no guarantee that humanity would ultimately be able to reach a sufficient level of agreement regarding the right path forward — after all, it is conceivable that a long reflection could go awfully wrong, and that bad values could win out due to poor execution or malevolent agents hijacking the process.
The limited feasibility of a long reflection suggests that there is no substitute for reflecting now. Failing to clarify and act on our values from this point onward carries a serious risk of pursuing a suboptimal path that we may not be able to reverse later. The resources we spend pursuing a long reflection (which seems unlikely to ever occur) are resources not spent on addressing issues that might be more important and more time-sensitive, such as steering away from worst-case outcomes.
Thanks for your question, Péter :)
There’s not a specific plan, though there is a vague plan to create an audio version at some point. One challenge is that the book is full of in-text citations, which in some places makes the book difficult to narrate (and it also means that it’s not easy to create a listenable version with software). You’re welcome to give it a try if you want, though I should note that narration can be more difficult than one might expect (e.g. even professional narrators often make a lot of mistakes that then need to be corrected).
Thanks for your comment, Michael :)
I should reiterate that my note above is rather speculative, and I really haven’t thought much about this stuff.
1: Yes, I believe that’s what inflation theories generally entail.
2: I agree, it doesn’t follow that they’re short-lived.
In each pocket universe, couldn’t targeting its far future be best (assuming risk neutral expected value-maximizing utilitarianism)? And then the same would hold across pocket universes.
I guess it could be; I suppose it depends both on the empirical “details” and one’s decision theory.
Regarding options a and b, a third option could be:
c: There is an ensemble of finitely many pocket universes wherein new pocket universes emerge in an unbounded manner for eternity, where there will always be a vast predominance of (finitely many) younger pocket universes. (Note that this need not imply that any individual pocket universe is eternal, let alone that any pocket universe can support the existence of value entities for eternity.) In this scenario, for any summation between two points in “global time” across the totality of the multiverse, earlier “pocket-universe moments” will vastly dominate. That might be an argument in favor of extreme neartermism (in that kind of scenario).
But, of course, we don’t know whether we are in such a scenario — indeed, one could argue that we have strong anthropic evidence suggesting that we are not — and it seems that common-sense heuristics would in any case speak against giving much weight to these kinds of speculative considerations (though admittedly such heuristics also push somewhat against a strong long-term focus).
These are cached arguments that are irrelevant to this particular post and/or properly disclaimed within the post.
I don’t agree that these points are properly disclaimed in the post. I think the post gives an imbalanced impression of the discussion and potential biases around these issues, and I think that impression is worth balancing out, even if presenting a balanced impression wasn’t the point of the post.
The asks from this post aren’t already in the water supply of this community; everyone reading EA Forum has, by contrast, already encountered the recommendation to take animal welfare more seriously.
I don’t think this remark relates so closely to my comment. My comment wasn’t about a mere “recommendation to take animal welfare more seriously”, but rather about biases that may influence us when it comes to evaluations of arguments regarding the moral status of, for example, speciesism and veganism, as well as about the practical feasibility of veganism. It’s not my impression that considerations about such potential biases, and the arguments and research that relate to them (this paper being another example of such research), are familiar to everyone reading the EA Forum.
I have the same impression with respect to philosophical arguments against speciesism (which generally have far stronger implications than just a recommendation to take animal welfare more seriously). For example, it’s not my impression that everyone reading the EA Forum is familiar with the argument from species overlap. Indeed, it seems to me that this argument and its implications are generally underappreciated even among most animal advocates.
I agree that vegan advocacy is often biased and insufficiently informed. That being said, I think similar points apply with comparable, if not greater, strength in the “opposite” direction, and I think we end up with an unduly incomplete perspective on the broader discussion around this issue if we only (or almost only) focus on the biases of vegan advocacy alone.
For example, in terms of identifying reasonable moral views (which, depending on one’s meta-ethical view, isn’t necessarily a matter of truth-seeking, but perhaps at least a matter of being “plausible-view-seeking”), it seems that there are strong anthropocentric and speciesist biases that work against a fair evaluation of the arguments against speciesism, and which likewise work against a fair evaluation of the moral status of veganism (e.g. from an impartial sentiocentric perspective).
Similarly, with respect to the feasibility of veganism, it seems that factors such as personal inconvenience and perceived stigma against vegans plausibly give rise to biases (in many people) toward overstating the difficulties and hazards of veganism (as also briefly acknowledged in the OP: “I’m sure many people do overestimate the difficulties of veganism”).
Relatedly, with respect to the section “What do EA vegan advocates need to do?”, I agree with the recommendation to “Take responsibility for the nutritional education of vegans you create”. But by extension, an impartial sentiocentric perspective (and even just moderately impartial ones) would also endorse an analogous recommendation like “Take responsibility for the harm that you directly cause to, or fail to prevent for, non-human animals”. It seems important not to exclude that aspect of our moral responsibility, and indeed to explicitly include it, as inconvenient as it admittedly is.
The view obviously does have “implausible” implications, if that means “implications that conflict with what seems obvious to most people at first glance”.
I don’t think what Knutsson means by “plausible” is “what seems obvious to most people at first glance”. I also don’t think that’s a particularly common or plausible use of the term “plausible”. (Some examples of where “plausible” and “what seems obvious to most people at first glance” plausibly come apart include what most people in the past might at first glance have considered obvious about the moral status of human slavery, as well as what most people today might at first glance say about the moral status of farming and killing non-human animals.)
Few people agree that “pleasure” and “happiness” are totally worthless in themselves.
Note that Knutsson does not deny that pleasure and happiness are worthwhile in the sense of being better for a person than unpleasure and unhappiness (cf. “What about making individuals happier? Yes, we should do that.”). Nor does he deny that certain experiences can benefit existing beings (e.g. by satisfying certain needs). What he argues against is instead that pleasure and experiential happiness are something “above” or “on the other side of” a completely undisturbed state.
As for the claim about “few people” (and setting aside that majority opinion is hardly a good standard for plausibility, as I suspect you’d agree), it’s not clear that this “few people” claim is empirically accurate, especially if it concerns the idea that pleasure isn’t something “above” a completely undisturbed state. The following is an apropos quote:
The intuition that the badness of suffering doesn’t compare to the supposed badness of inanimate matter (as non-pleasure) seems very common, and the same goes for the view that contentment is what matters, not pleasure-intensity [cf. Gloor, 2017, sec. 2.1]. There are nearly 1.5 billion Buddhists and Hindus, and while Buddhism is less explicit and less consequentialist than negative utilitarianism, the basic (though not uniform) Buddhist view on how pleasure and suffering are being valued is very similar to negative utilitarianism; Hinduism contains some similar views. Ancient Western philosophers such as Epicurus and some Stoics proposed definitions of “happiness” in terms of the absence of suffering.
(On Buddhism and Epicureanism, see e.g. Breyer, 2015; Sherman, 2017; and the recent review of minimalist views of wellbeing by Teo Ajantaival.)
The reason this matters is that EA frequently decides to make decisions, including funding decisions, based on these ridiculously uncertain estimates. You yourself are advocating for this in your article.
I think that misrepresents what I write and “advocate” in the essay. Among various other qualifications, I write the following (emphases added):
I should also clarify that the decision-related implications that I here speculate on are not meant as anything like decisive or overriding considerations. Rather, I think they would mostly count as weak to modest considerations in our assessments of how to act, all things considered.
My claims about how I think these would be “weak to modest considerations in our assessments of how to act” are not predicated on the exact manner in which I represent my beliefs: I’d say the same regardless of whether I’m speaking in purely qualitative terms or in terms of ranges of probabilities.
In summary, people should either start stating their uncertainty explicitly, or they should start saying “I don’t know”.
FWIW, I do state uncertainty multiple times, except in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. A few examples:
This essay contains a lot of speculation and loose probability estimates. It would be tiresome if I constantly repeated caveats like “this is extremely speculative” and “this is just a very loose estimate that I am highly uncertain about”. So rather than making this essay unreadable with constant such remarks, I instead say it once from the outset: many of the claims I make here are rather speculative and they mostly do not imply a high level of confidence. … I hope that readers will keep this key qualification in mind.
As with all the numbers I give in this essay, the following are just rough numbers that I am not adamant about defending …
Of course, this is a rather crude and preliminary analysis.
Thanks! :)
Assigning a single number to such a prior, as if it means anything, seems utterly absurd.
I don’t agree that it’s meaningless or absurd. A straightforward meaning of the number is “my subjective probability estimate if I had to put a number on it” — and I’d agree that one shouldn’t take it for more than that.
I also don’t think it’s useless, since numbers like these can at least help give a very rough quantitative representation of beliefs (as imperfectly estimated from the inside), which can in turn allow subjective ballpark updates based on explicit calculations. I agree that such simple estimates and calculations should not necessarily be given much weight, let alone dictate our thinking, but I still think they can provide some useful information and provoke further thought. I think they can add to purely qualitative reasoning, even if there are more refined quantitative approaches that are better still.
You give a prior of 1 in a hundred that aliens have a presence on earth. Where did this number come from?
It was in large part based on the considerations reviewed in the section “I. An extremely low prior in near aliens”. The following sub-section provides a summary with some attempted sanity checks and qualifications (in addition to the general qualifications made at the outset):
All-things-considered probability estimates: Priors on near aliens
Where do all these considerations leave us? In my view, they overall suggest a fairly ignorant prior. Specifically, in light of the (interrelated) panspermia, pseudo-panspermia, and large-scale Goldilocks hypotheses, as well as the possibility of near aliens originating from another galaxy, I might assign something like a 10 percent prior probability to the existence of at least one advanced alien civilization that could have reached us by now if it had decided to. (Note that I am here using the word “civilization” in a rather liberal sense; for example, a distributed web of highly advanced probes would count as a civilization in this context.) Furthermore, I might assign a probability not too far from that — maybe around 1 percent — to the possibility that any such civilization currently has a presence around Earth (again, as a prior).
Why do I have something like a 10 percent prior on there being an alien presence around Earth conditional on the existence of at least one advanced alien civilization that could have reached us? In short, the main reason is the info gain motive that I explore at greater length below. Moreover, as a sanity check on this conditional probability, we can ask how likely it is that humanity would send and maintain probes around other life-supporting planets assuming that we became technologically capable of doing this; roughly 10 percent seems quite sane to me.
At an intuitive level, I would agree with critics who object that a ~1 percent prior probability in any kind of alien presence around Earth seems extremely high. However, on reflection, I think the basic premises that get me to this estimate look quite reasonable, namely the two conjunctive 10-percent probabilities in “the existence of at least one advanced alien civilization that could have reached us by now if it had decided to” and “an alien presence around Earth conditional on the existence of at least one advanced alien civilization that could have reached us”.
Note also that there are others who seem to defend considerably higher priors regarding near aliens (see e.g. these comments by Jacob Cannell; I agree with some of the points Cannell makes, though I would frame them in more uncertain and probabilistic terms).
I can see how substantially lower priors than mine could be defensible, even a few orders of magnitude lower, depending on how one weighs the relevant arguments. Yet I have a hard time seeing how one could defend an extremely low prior that practically rules out the existence of near aliens. (Robin Hanson has likewise argued against an extremely low prior in near aliens.)
Thanks for your comment and for the links :)
I’d agree that there’s no compelling video evidence in the sense of it being remotely conclusive; it’s possible that it’s all mundane. But it seems to me that some of the footage is sufficiently puzzling/sufficiently unclear so as to be worthy of investigation, and that it provides some (further) reason to take this issue seriously. I agree that the reports, including reports involving radar evidence, are more noteworthy in terms of existing evidence.
Regarding the Aguadilla 2013 footage: perhaps this can be explained in conventional terms, but the aspiring analysts on metabunk seem to deny that the object went into the water and moved in the water, which seems wrong to me (of course, I acknowledge that it can be difficult to interpret and make sense of footage like this). A contrasting analysis, which also includes some anomalous radar evidence, can be found in Coumbe, 2022, ch. 5.
On the 2010 NYC footage: You could be right, it’s possible that they are tethered balloons (although the patterns of movement don’t seem to me consistent with that; e.g. even after the distances between the three objects increase, they still seem to move together in “fixed” unison). I also find it worth noting that Carolina Londono from New York comments the following (edit: I include this comment only as very weak evidence, of course, but FWIW, I’m fairly confident that I’ve identified this person and I’m trying to authenticate the comment; it’s also worth noting that the comment is consistent with many other UFO reports, especially the part about the objects accelerating away near-instantaneously at the end):