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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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Not good enough evidence. If alien ships actually got close enough to earth to observe, they would quickly notice that you annihilate each other based on minor differences in your makeup, realize that they are far more different, and then decide it's in their best interest to leave immediately before they are detected.
Just trust me on this one.
Nothing that travels from one star to another has cause to be scared of us. If they're worried about future war, they'd just wipe us out, and in any case wouldn't do fancy acrobatics with their exterior lights on.
People do weird things to animals in order to find out what will happen. Not only are those things incomprehensible to the animals, the rationale for the details of lot of them wouldn't make sense to most people, either because the explanation is technical or because it's a badly thought out experiment.
On the non-scientific side, I don't think an insect can make sense of getting caught in a cup and dumped out a window.
It's at least plausible that aliens want to study relatively undisturbed human societies-- how a particular intelligent species behaves could still be very hard to predict, even for aliens capable of space travel. It's not that they'd be afraid of us, it's that we're interesting enough without adding in reactions to aliens.
I have heard it suggested, in jest, that abduction and anal-probing of humans found alone on rural roads is a sign that even societies sufficiently advanced to travel between solar systems still can't figure out how to efficiently allocate research grant money.
"Stop! We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us." One of my favourite Simpsons quotes.
Also, this
I like the HHGTTG explanation: They're just idiots like Zaphod pranking us.
I don't believe it. I just like it.
How can you reason about the motives of alien interstellar travelers? Maybe traveling to earth to freak out the humans is just some kind of alien prank, like cow-tipping. Maybe they get some aesthetic satisfaction from fancy aerial acrobatics.
You're now not only assuming aliens, but also assuming aliens with a peculiar psychology. Parsimony is dropping fast.
How can you reason about the motives of alien interstellar travelers? Maybe they've been poking holes in my socks and interfering with my TV reception.
Before attempting to demonstrate the logical falsity of an informally-stated claim, I recommend testing to see if it can be reasonably interpreted as:
a. metaphor
b. hyperbole
c. approximate
...and determine if the resultant interpretation is reasonable.
simplicio is correct, here - parsimony is dropping fast. I wager that's what Eliezer Yudkowsky was saying.