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Someone spending their precious time going through someone's history to decrease their near-meaningless number as much as they possibly can is already losing. I hear about this happening so infrequently, and it's so totally inconsequential, that I don't think it merits thinking up/making changes to anything.
Fine, with our current knowledge knowledge of physics the Alien trick would be almost impossible. But shouldn't we rather estimate the probability that future physicists would discover something radically new? And isn't this proposition significantly harder to estimate? Making your secondary evidence less strong?
"You asked elsewhere why you are getting downvotes, and the brief answer is that you are dramatically over-weighing the strength of the relevant evidence."
That's why I said that my belief was not of much interest :) The topic of this thread really shouldn't be about my belief. It would be just as interesting as discussing the aesthetic merits of my left little toe.
Beliefs don't exist outside of people (and other animals). If we want to talk about beliefs, we have to point inside at least one person's head.
If people down vote out of a prior idea that alien visits just don't happen, then it seems a bit like prejudging. What i present here is huge amounts of evidence from government military studies, and people who hasn't studied the case starts by downvoting? How is that not prejudging?
In your original post, you just presented Youtube videos. People here have very low expectations for videos about aliens on Youtube. If you'd linked to just that Blue Book report first then I bet people would've been much more receptive to what you have to say.
They already did it! You just say "whatever" to their effort.
You mean in the History channel documentary and other videos on Youtube, or something else? I don't usually like consuming knowledge in documentary form because it's 1. slower than reading and 2. much easier to make emotion-based/nonsensical arguments without your audience noticing. Perhaps you could provide us with a summary of what happened when people tested Giles' explanations? If there's good text-based discussion you can link to us then I'd also be interested in that.
You forgot swamp gas.
What you just did is suggest a series of hypothesis as to what could explain the evidence. That is a part of the scientific method, but it is not all of the scientific method. The scientific method also includes testing the various hypothesis against the evidence, for each and every case. You forgot to do that.
If you want that to happen then you're going to need to do it yourself. Nobody else here is interested enough in this subject.
The relevance is at best superficial as far as I can tell. Please don't turn Holden's point into a fully general counterargument against surprising expected utility calculations.
This is an expected utility calculation that involves a small probability of a large payoff with large margins of error. Here's what I take as the essence of Holden's post: "an estimate with little enough estimate error can almost be taken literally, while an estimate with large enough estimate error ends ought to be almost ignored." I have very little confidence in both my and Academian's estimate of which candidates winning will actually turn out to be better overall, and what the monetary value of each winning over their alternatives would actually be. Obama may seem to align with my values slightly more than Romney, but an office as powerful as the President of the US has many small, complex effects on many people's quality of life, and we could all easily be wrong.
In response to
Voting is like donating thousands of dollars to charity
But they weren't. Trivialists certainly do assert that is true, and so is
A trivialist would insist that "Trivialists argue ) is false" is true. Believing that you're arguing something isn't quite the same as arguing something, but I wanted to point out that under trivialism, trivialists think they're arguing for and against all propositions simultaneously.
In response to
Things philosophers have debated
Trivialists think "Trivialists think trivialism is false" is true.
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All protestations to the opposite aside, I very much doubt that karma is generally viewed as "near-meaningless". It is the main avenue of feedback and affirmation in what is often viewed as a rather intimidating environment (by newcomers especially).
As for those spending time with retributive downvoting, how do you know that they do not gain more satisfaction out of that than, say, watching the new BSG webisodes, using their "precious time". From Will_Newsome to Wei_Dai, I've seen even some veterans explain the importance they ascribe to karma. Would you laugh it off if your karma score were reduced to 0 by one guy with a few sockpuppets?
It's the only quantifiable metric in this social game. There even is a "top contributers" meta game on the sidebar. Of course all that makes it en vogue to pretend not to care, similar to wealthy people acting as if money weren't worth talking about.
If you truly don't care, good for you.
On individual comments and posts, the karma system is valuable for telling you if you're being stupid or not, and I appreciate it for that. The total karma score is (how long you've been on LW) * (how often you post) * (how much people like what you say); it says something like "how much you contribute to this site", which I find much less interesting, and I personally don't care if it's accurate.
I am, in fact, accusing people who downvote all posts by one person as using their time incorrectly; there are so many other things they could be doing that would make them happier and better-off, including nothing at all, that there's not much excuse for going through with it.
If my karma were reduced to zero, I would continue carrying on as I do now, commenting on this and that, and my karma would from then on be a positive number I don't pay attention to. A phlegmatic disposition has its advantages.