I think there could be a 5% chance that the paleocene-eocene thermal maximum 55 million years ago was the result of a prior global industrial civilization. Conditional on that being the case, high probability they were birds and a decent possibility they lived on Antarctica.
We are an existence proof for smart industrial animals being a thing that can happen on Earth. We are not an existence proof of smart industrial animals lasting for geologically long periods of time. There is not necessarily reason to think that just because you are successful in an epoch that you burn the black rocks that you will continue to be so.
As you go back in time the fossil record degrades drastically and many species at this time are known from single digit numbers of specimens. The PETM resembles what we are doing to the earth system entirely too closely, from a large release of biogenic carbon within a few thousand years to the spike in mercury levels to ocean anoxia. At the time primates did not exist in significant diversity and any that did exist were tiny, but birds, whose brains differ from the default tetrapod brains in ways quite similar to the way that of primates do and allows very easy increase in neuron number, did exist in profound diversity.
We are tropical animals and spread across the entire world because we came from the hottest place on Earth and you can keep us warm just by wrapping us in clothes in a low-tech way. If somebody evolved on the coldest parts of Earth, you need high technology (refrigeration) to survive anywhere else and they could be limited to polar latitudes, including the only continent we have almost no geological record of and has been poorly explored - Antarctica. Antarctica and nearby continents also bore multiple great-ape-sized flightless bird lineages at this time, and was temperate while Canada was full of Amazon-style rainforest and the equator bore stifling hot supertropics.
Corollary: Industrial civilization is an unstable self-limiting phenomenon and will be gone in centuries to millennia.
I love the idea, but I’m sceptical based on genetics. Our civilisation has moved a lot of species around, from stuff like bringing placental mammals to Australia to things like exporting food crops around the world. Potatoes evolved in the Americas, now you can find them everywhere. Soy beans came from Japan / East Asia but now they’re heavily cultivated in Brazil.
I assume that any previous industrial civilisation, even if it were less adaptable than humans, would probably have spread outside of its home continent, if only to look for oil and minerals. And they’d end up introducing species all over the place, like we have, and modern day geneticists should be scratching their heads and trying to figure out all sorts of mysteries about what evolved where. But so far as I know (I’m not an evolutionary biologist) we just don‘t have those sort of mysteries where species categories suddenly jump continents.
So, sadly, I don’t think that the Earth has had a previous industrial civilisation at least since Australia separated from the other continents. I wouldn’t rule out previous pre-industrial civilisations, though. In fact, given the wide variety of species today which demonstrate at least some tool use - not just great apes but also capuchin monkeys, corvids, even octopuses - I’d be surprised if no previous species ever got to at least homo erectus level.
Ok, that does sound wierd. Do I understand correctly, that you postulate a PETM civilization that had developed sufficient technology to extract fossil fuels (as source of negative D13 carbon) to explain the observed carbon and climate? What population and per capita energy extraction rates did you factor? And if they let no trace, presumably they somehow found all this FF very close to Antarctica? If so, I think I would struggle to assign even 0.1% weight to this hypothesis compared to competing hypotheses. It has the feel of an invisible dragon in the garage to me.
Thinking about this some more, if there was an industrial civilisation at the PETM I think it would be most likely marine based. (Maybe cephalopods?)
I previously asked myself what evidence we would see if there was a prior industrial civilisation on Earth and I came up with 1) transfer of biological species to other continents as per my previous comments 2) depletion of fossil fuels (I don't remotely know enough geology to begin to answer the question of whether we are 'missing' fossil fuels that ought to be there) and 3) technofossils especially plastics....
Good post.
I have wondered about this myself actually.
The sad thing is that if we mess it up, there is not enough time before the sun renders multicellular life untenable on earth to restore fossil fuels. So for earth we are the last roll of the dice.
Amazing. This is the best thing I've read all week. How do I subscribe to your newsletter? When is the novelization coming out?
Someone has actually written up a scientific paper discussing the hypothesis that the PETM or other events in the geologic record was caused by a prior industrial civilisation. (If you're one of the authors, I apologise for telling you something you already know, but if you're not, I thought you might be interested.) The short version is that there's no smoking gun, but they can't rule it out either.
One item the authors don't go into, which I think is relevant, is the question of whether there are missing fossil fuels. Google tells me that pretty muc...
Jeffrey Epstein didn't commit suicide. Two cameras malfunctioned, the normal procedures weren't followed, and it's silly to think he didn't have compromising information on important people. And it was an incredibly high-profile prisoner.
"Attorney General William Barr described Epstein's death as 'a perfect storm of screw-ups'." Yet several guards were indicted on charges of conspiracy and record falsification.
This belief is so obvious to me that I felt like I was being gaslighted by news outlets and even academics who later called the belief a conspiracy theory in the same class as QAnon and UFOs, including a guest on a FiveThirtyEight podcast about conspiracy theories (I'm a huge FiveThirtyEight fan; they laid the groundwork for me to appreciate this community, which in turn mostly increased my appreciation for FiveThirtyEight).
A majority of Americans seem to agree with me, although who knows why, so maybe it's not a "weird" belief except when compared against the mass media/"elite" narrative.
You could de-convince me with statistics about how often those and similar cameras malfunctioned and how often guards disregarded normal procedures with other prisoners, low profile and high profile.
I had some exposure to this issue a couple of years ago. I got a speeding ticket, which eventually I got off of.
During this process I documented the government making 26 different errors in all. Starting with the speed limit sign that did not comply with their own standards for speed limit signs in 3 different ways....
So I suspect that huge numbers of things go wrong in government all the time and are not noticed. What % of prisoners get checked as required? What fraction of video cameras are out of order at any given time? So the argument "Aha! The camera just 'happened' to be out of order!" is not as compelling to me as you might expect.
Tho' it would not be surprising that JE was taken out. He seems to have operated a blackmail operation in part and no doubt a few people breathed a sigh of relief on hearing of his fate. But I don't know.
Add on the probability of "intentionally allowed to commit suicide" on top of that and the total odds seemingly become high indeed.
I would give it maybe 40%, because on one hand it was very convenient for many people... and because similar situations certainly happened in the past, I would assume there would be processes designed to prevent such accidents... and if it happened regardless... On the other hand, people are generally incompetent, so you should expect them to screw up.
(Knowing more about what is "normal" in prisons could make me change the estimate.)
so maybe it's not a "weird" belief except when compared against the mass media/"elite" narrative.
Yup, there can be a huge dif...
External reality is not a meaningful concept, some form of verificationism is valid. I argued for it in various ways previously on LW, one plausible way to get there is through a multiverse argument.
Verificationism w.r.t level 3 multiverse - "there's no fact of the matter where the electron is before it's observed, it's in both places and you have self locating uncertainty."
Verificationism w.r.t. level 4 multiverse - "there's no fact of the matter as to anything, as long as it's true in some subsets of the multiverse and false in others, you just have self locating uncertainty."
Lots of people seem to accept the first but not the second.
there’s no fact of the matter where the electron is before it’s observed, it’s in both places and you have self locating uncertainty.”
OTOH, realism isn't defined as every observable having a simultaneous sharp value.
Verificationismism in the sense of the logical positivists is a theory of meaning. According to this theory, kowing the meaning of a statement p would amount to knowing the conditions under which it would be true and under which it would be false. (To give it a Bayesian slant, I like to widen this as "knowing what would be evidence for/against p). Is it this what you have in mind?
Verificationismism in this sense was used against postulating transcendent entities or state of affairs. Something is transcendent if it is beyond every possible experience. There...
That governments should, over the long term, run balanced budgets. ie there are many good reasons for a short term budget deficit (global crisis, natural disaster) but governments should budget to return to government surplus as soon as possible and pay down debt (eg to something like 20% GDP).
This obviously doesnt seem weird to me, but people from MMT theorists to heads of world major economies think it is.
Why do I believe that? Well we (New Zealand) had major reforms of economy and government in 1980-90s. At time, (showing my age) I thought it is was madness and seriously, morally bad. However, once the pragmatists replaced the ideologues, it now seems to me that the residuals of the reforms (including the balanced budget requirement) has delivered a strong and resilient economy. Various crises have been managed well because the government has been in a strong fiscal position to start with.
Have I really examined or tested this belief? Nope. I find many things more interesting than economics and whether the belief is right or wrong doesnt impact on anything I do, including voting. The policy has cross-party support so unless I vote for a fringe party, then I am voting for this anyway.
I think a large number of people would benefit from temporarily adopting a mystic/magical religion. Tantra comes to mind first owing to David Chapman's writing, but Wicca, alchemy, Kabbalah and ritual magic are included as well.
These are systems utterly at odds with normal and socially acceptable modes of living. Ideally, these could serve as shocks to break people out of major ruts in thinking or belief, or as outlets for resolving emotional hangups and releasing socially unacceptable desires. I also know a good few people who, if nothing else, could really use an injection of weirdness and wonder to break them out of self-imposed boredom. The exact system matters less than the presence of a system at all.
The key is not to get too caught up in them or start believing they're real. So long as they maintain a playful aspect, you're probably fine. You also want to avoid getting into cults, especially Scientology. They're also weird, and they're also systems of meaning-making, but they take themselves too seriously and in the latter case it's difficult and potentially harmful to leave.
Distinguishing cults from playful religions may be much more difficult than I'm giving credit for. Keep an exit strategy on hand and don't give out your credit card information.
One of my own weird beliefs is very close to this one: Huge amounts of everything accepted by modern western medicine and psychology today was used by people in some way before being "scientifically" explained. Whether we're talking about using compounds from particular plants to treat particular ailments, or using particular psychological tricks to alter peoples' thoughts and behavior, science is literally eating magic's lunch because "magic" is often where science looks to get ideas for hypotheses to test.
Because of this history, and the history of scien...
Not sure if it counts as a "weird belief" but I am an anarchist for relatively "usual" reasons.
I believe Plants, Fungi and even inanimate objects experience consciousness (to some extent). Consciousness is, probably, an intrinsic property of matter and it exists throughout the physical universe in some form.
I believe there is a nontrivial chance that plants experience consciouness. Like maybe 20% or so? I haven't thought about it carefully, and it would require a more operationalized definition of consciousness to assign a solid credence. I thought of this belief before reading the comments and was somewhat surprised to find another person espousing it.
Taking information hazards seriously.
This can range from the benign (is it a good idea to post very weird beliefs here?) to the more worrying (plausible attacks on $insert_important_system_here), and upwards.
At a more concrete level, I've spent the last ~14 months holding strong and unusual views on most pandemic-related matters, though I don't think any of them would raise eyebrows on LessWrong. A minority are probably now mainstream, the others - unfortunately - remain weird.
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I sort of believe in something like this, except without the magical bits. It motivates me to vote in elections and follow the laws also when there is no effective enforcement. Maybe it is a consequence of reading Pratchett's Discworld novels when I was in impressionable age.
My mundane explanation (or rationalization) is a bit difficult to write, but I believe it is because of:
>It gets in people's minds.
When people believe something, it affects their behavior. Thus memetic phenomena can have real effects.
As an example I feel is related to this, I ...
I believe in "supernatural phenomena" due to many anecdotal experiences I personally had. I do acknowledge they may all be me incorrectly evaluating ordinary natural phenomena or mental processes due to psychological quirks of mine. Hence, I make a constant effort to no let them interfere in anything I'm dealing with that has clear scientific consensus and/or hard data, or in my ethical, social, and political standings, preferring to keep both sides well separated. In short, to use LW terminology, I willfully compartmentalize.
However, I do not believe in separate magisteria. I'm confident that eventually either the mechanisms behind those experiences I have had will be well known, solving the confusion in a definite way, or those phenomena will be consistently observed, studied, scientifically understood, incorporated into physics, and turned into useful technologies.
Funnily, I'd have preferred not to have had those experiences, as I really like transhumanism and its projected future possibilities, such as cryonics-based resurrection, cognitive reengineering, uploading, mind splitting/remerging/backing up/restoring, and others, all of which becomes from extremely unlikely to impossible if what I've experienced is real. As such I don't see these, all things considered, as a net positive.
I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!
A significant set of possible models of such phenomena result in them being irreducibly personal and subjective, hampering detailed analysis.
Selection effects are computationally prohibitive to back out of data. If you have a very large combinatorial space and a sufficiently permissive filter one in a million things are happening constantly.
I investigated this by wielding it with intention as a teenager. I would choose something to notice and treat as meaningful, and then watch the rest of the system pattern match adjacent things a lot (synchronicity).
I think that we should be taking the possibility of UFOs more seriously. Over the last year, I've updated from thinking that UFOs are laughable to thinking there's a 10-20% chance of actual alien visitation, and about another 10-20% of something else important going on. (Ie someone - presumably China - has either made a huge leap in drone technology or is getting good at spoofing multiple US military systems simultaneously.)
Why? Because a number of senior and generally sane people seem to be taking this seriously. The US military forces in particular are seeing a number of cases of unidentified phenomena - not just aerial, also submarine - where they see things that look like craft that have capabilities not currently possible with modern technology. Some of these things like the 2004 USS Nimitz incident have been captured on multiple systems like the ship's radar, and aircraft cameras and visually spotted by the pilots. The former Direction of National Intelligence has said recently that there are a lot more sightings which haven't been made public.
Yes, I know there are still other explanations, and the track record suggests sightings will turn out to be some kind of optical illusion or something, but I'm open to the possibility that not every incident is explicable in terrestrial terms.
The link below is a good long-form read which argues that the US Department of Defence is taking the possibility seriously.
https://www.thedebrief.org/fast-movers-and-transmedium-vehicles-the-pentagons-uap-task-force/
Doomsday argument and quantum immortality are both true, and it means that I will be the only survivor of a global catastrophe. Moreover, it will be in a simulation.
Both DA and QI could be tested in other fields. DA was tested to predict other things besides the end of the world by Gott. QI is anthropic principle applied to the future.
Aranyosi claimed that DA and Simulation argument cancel each other, but actually they support each other: I live (or will live because of QI) in a simulation which simulates a doomsday event with one survivor.
That's certainly a weird combination, but I doubt it's the right way to combine those ingredients...
None of my beliefs feel weird to me - I find it weird that many/most people seem to believe different things.
For this site, I'll go with radical anti-realism. All value is personal and relative - there is no objective view or measure about moral decisions. Crowley had it right (on this point; he was wackadoo on others) "Do what thou wilt, and then do nothing else".
There is an objective measure, but it's content free. In the 1960's psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg noticed any moral opinion, irrespective of the direction it went (for or against something), always fits into one of six different patterns, one more cognitively complex than the other, all of them organized into a hierarchical sequence individuals pass through in order as their cognitive abilities develop, which he called stages of moral development. This theory of his was then determined to be psychometrically sound, and to provide reproducible results.
Fiel...
It cannot be stated with >99% certainty that members of the Bush Administration did not have definite prior information of the events of 9/11 or played a role in it.
Untangling the multiple negatives, this says that there is at most a 1% chance that the administration had foreknowledge or involvement. Is that what you intended?
We know that mainstream thinking gets a lot of things wrong. Many of us have experienced being mocked because of our concern for AI extinction-risk. There are plenty of other examples of times where now well-evidenced beliefs were seen as crazy in some way. This post was prompted by my reading around meditation and mindfulness - twenty years ago if you said that meditation had a number of mental and even physical health benefits and was worth practicing for non-religious reasons, then you would be laughed at as a New Age type who probably believed in crystal healing and astrology too. Now there's stacks of scientific evidence supporting that view.
I would like to keep an open mind and not dismiss fact-claims just because they pattern-match to weird people or because they don't pass the absurdity heuristic. On the other hand, there are a lot of crazy people out there and I don't really want to wade through dumb stuff by flat-earth types. So I figured posting this question here is a good way to find some interesting ideas. Fellow Rationalists, what beliefs do you have that would cause the average member of society to laugh at you or call you weird?
I have at least one such belief, but I'll post it as an answer to this question, because I want the focus to be on the question and not on my specific belief.
Edited to add: please include a summary of why you believe what you do - what evidence or chain of reasoning led you to this belief?