Would slightly better remote work tech lead to a complete overturn of the world labor market?
Does the complete overturn of the world labor market strike you as something various people/institutions in those countries would want? Inertia, in this context is surely the desired state.
I suspect a lot of people here think that a (unusually powerful) human technocracy is the least we have to worry about.
Scrolling down this almost stream of consciousness post against my better judgement, unable to look away perfectly mimicked scrolling social media. I am sure you did not intend it but I really liked that aspect.
Loads of good ideas in here, generally I think modelling the alphabet agencies is much more important than implied by discussion on LW. Clown attack is a great term, although I'm not entirely sure how much personal prevention layer of things really helps the AI safety community, because the nature of clown attacks seems like a blunt tool you can apply to the public at large to discredit groups. So, primarily the vulnerability of the public to these clown attacks is what matters and is much harder to change.
Wow this really pulls together a lot of disparate ideas I've had at various times about the topic but wouldn't have summarised nearly as well. A note on the psyops point: if UAP are Non Human Intelligence, then we should still expect (a lot of) disinformation on the topic. Not just as a matter of natural overlap, but as a matter of incentive, it is reasonable to assume that muddying the waters with disinfo and making everyone out to be a 'crackpot' that Stephen Hawking can dismiss, would be a viable strategy to covering up the reality. Real issues are used for psyops all the time, it does not mean they do not exist. Russian troll farms capitalise on race issues in America or culture war topics, it doesn't mean the issues themselves are entirely fabricated.
Your post implies/states that would be a kind of straightforward explanation but I'm not sure it would be. For one, the idea that ball lightning is not only much more common than previously thought, which it would need to be to also explain UFOs, but also has a hallucination component would both be quite startling if true.
Secondly, there are aspects ball lightning cannot explain. What are we to make of the recent addition of "USO's" for instance? Unidentified Submerged Objects have consistently been part of this recent narrative, sometimes having been UFO's beforehand. Further, it only kind of unsatisfactorily explains people seeing actual 'craft'. Why would it consistently produce a hallucination where people see saucer shaped UFOs? Why not mundane craft? Why not something even more unbelievable?
Thirdly, stacking an additionally wild psyop on top of it only makes it less mundane. It would be a big story if it were to be confirmed aspects of the intelligence community were deliberately running alien psyops on their own military.
It is a bizarre situation, but I think I disagree with you about the most likely prosaic explanation. Increasingly, especially with the latest events, the psyop explanation seems a relatively better explanation than the 'politicians are just fools' one. The reason being that politicians with higher clearances (and so more data) than us are making stronger and stronger commitments publicly taking UAP=ET seriously. That suggests to me there is a credible combination of evidence and people that had led them there. Further, the claims being made are so extreme it seems impossible to kind of stumble your way into them by accident. It seems more likely that someone, somewhere, likely within the military industrial complex would have to be pushing these claims as the origin point.
That is my takeaway so far, is that the most prosaic explanation is weakening relatively, but interestingly I haven't seen anything from the debunking/skeptic community that reflects this.
But is it necessarily unlikely that they would be screwing with us if they existed? That's something I don't like about the bigfoot comparison, it's obviously laughable that large apes are evading camera detection at every turn, but with aliens, presumably it would be trivial to do so. We know that they would have the means, so that only leaves the reasoning to do this. I also don't necessarily agree with the assumption that our commercial sensor tech is good enough to detect hypothetical aliens. Try filming a drone from a distance with your phone. It will look surprisingly unclear. Modern cameras are obviously more than adequate to film a bigfoot but I don't think so for aliens-the sky is big etc.
What I didn't get from your post is how the prosaic sensor anomalies/atmospheric oddities and statistical artifacts etc lends itself to explaining the much more zany claims that are now coming out of intelligence and intelligence connected people. It doesn't seem to explain someone claiming there are actual recovered bodies/craft, at all. My take on that is the psyops/disinfo angle you wrote off becomes much more likely.
So Grusch is another one of these Pentagon UAP investigatory program guys, which means he is claiming people have come to him from the compartmentalised Special Access Programs claiming they have recovered craft. That is important because unless he is saying somewhere he personally witnessed these craft, it is perfectly possible he fully believes his claim and is telling the truth in that yes, someone has come to him with these claims. Unfortunately I suspect whoever these first hand sources are will be shrouded entirely in classified red tape. I agree at this point a sophisticated and extensively planned hoax/disinfo operation is becoming increasingly likely and if I was totally sceptical I think that would be the best explanation. However, I don't intuitively think aliens/non human intelligence is highly unlikely because I don't trust my or others ability to model possible behaviours. For instance, the idea that this is all clearly nonsense because super advanced aliens wouldn't have malfunctioning/rudimentary craft at all- it could be that it is simply a form of interaction/manipulation.
The best evidence that addresses both your claims would probably come from the military, since they have both state of the art sensors+ reliable witnesses. The recent surge in UFO coverage is almost all related to branches of the military (mostly Navy?) so the simple explanation is, it's classified to varying degrees. My understanding is that there is the publicly released stuff which is somewhat underwhelming, then some evidence Congress and the like has seen during briefings, and then probably more hush hush stuff above that for non civilians. The members of Congress who were briefed seem to have continued making noise on the topic so presumably there is more convincing evidence not yet public.
I have no idea where Hanson got those figures from, but from your post it seems like you would be able to rule most civilian sightings out anyway because there is no such thing as a perfectly reliable human witness, and to date camera and sensor quality available to the average person is actually pretty poor (especially compared to government/military hardware).
State level actors don't want rapid disruption to the worldwide socioeconomic order.