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I swear the UFO is coming any minute

191 points by Ariarule

by simonsarris

5 subcomments

I have always like C. P. Cavafy's famous poem about this, Waiting for the Barbarians, because of what it emphasizes about why people want these things to be true. Doom is an abdication of responsibility.
https://simonsarris.com/h/barbarians

by bigbuppo

0 subcomment

One of the more recent "the UFO is coming" events were those people that sold their houses and traveled around in RVs because they thought the rapture was happening on a specific date... or at least that was the message. Turns out most of them just sort of liked the idea of selling their houses and traveling around in RVs.

by nicbou

2 subcomments

Experimental History is such a consistently pleasant read. It's one of the few publications I read religiously.

by MarkusQ

3 subcomments

Surprisingly many things seem to be spoiled by the "too many of the people being studied were actually other researchers trying to study the same thing" (or even more commonly, students being taught about the thing).
I suspect the ability to post/apply for jobs with AI "to study ___" has played a part in getting us into our present predicament. If only one researcher did it, the results would be negligible, but if a significant number try it, all those negligibles add up.

by Borrible

0 subcomment

"Well, it's not quite the conflagration I'd been banking on. Never mind, lads, same time tomorrow... we must get a winner one day."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hJQ18S6aag

by athrowaway3z

0 subcomment

> A blogger named Croissanthology re-ran the study with nearly 10x as many participants (446 vs. 45 in the original). The effect did not replicate. No replication is perfect, but no original study is either. And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.
This should not be used in court today, but I do believe there is also a big component of cultural antibodies developing over time - and thus the study can't be replicated by definition.
In 1975 a sober high-quality source suddenly writing bait "BREAKING: politician SLAMMED diplomat on issue" would register as interesting. Now, people are constantly drowning in information presented that way.

by Joel_Mckay

2 subcomments

I often ponder why Carl Sagan never added another book to his famous reading list for students, as it makes a fairly reasonable argument that most populist movements are essentially interchangeable =3
"The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (Eric Hoffer, 1951)
https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movemen...

by wildzzz

1 subcomments

For the DCA noise complaints, a household (probably the same one as 2015) submitted 19000 complaints in 2016. That's 52 times a day or 3-4 per waking hour.

by jacquesm

0 subcomment

> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.
This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.
Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.

by jongjong

0 subcomment

You can never know if/when an unraveling event will occur.
A problem may be real but you can't know what the resolution will be or when it will come, if ever. The problem (or feeling of doom or whatever) could disappear on its own without even being acknowledged. Also, you could have identified a valid symptom but not the root cause. You could die before the problem is acknowledged by others. The problem could just affect you and people like you and not be universal.
A related concept in economics is "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
If you think a UFO is coming to destroy you, you might be vaguely right in a metaphorical sense that a complex system (or some mysterious adversary) is coming to crush you and your tribe in the next few years due to mysterious reasons though it's not going to be a literal UFO, it may feel like a UFO because you can't fully explain the approaching force but you can feel it intensifying. Without sufficient info and intelligence, the mind will try to transform complex problems that it cannot fully grasp into simple concepts that it can understand and that you can react to and communicate with your tribe (that they can also understand).
A UFO may be a metaphor for a powerful, mysterious, hidden adversary whose capabilities you do not understand. In any case, the correct response is to prepare, hide and flee.

by an-allen

0 subcomment

Ha mate you are on the UFO, and whats coming is your understanding that YOU are flying through the universe trying to get somewhere, not waiting for it to come to you!

by themafia

1 subcomments

> so what we remember is not exactly what we saw.
Yet there are savants with nearly perfect recall which has been tested multiple times. I strongly doubt there is a single model for memory or even a single mechanism for forming memories and as a result personal understandings of it poorly generalize across any random section of the population.

by kaiokendev

0 subcomment

this was a pleasant blog post to read, i enjoyed the jiggling cat

by Animats

1 subcomments

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1235/
It's interesting that the proliferation of cell phone cameras has not improved the quality of UFO reports much.
Nor has the availability of automatic UFO-spotting cameras.[1] They pick up drones, flocks of birds, and the International Space Station. But no good UFO shots.
LINEAR and GEODSS, which find near-earth objects and satellites using a pair of large telescopes at each site, have been running for decades, somehow don't seem to be picking up UFOs.
[1] https://www.space.com/spotting-ufos-sky-hub-surveillance

by pnw

0 subcomment

IDK how many people on HN have read When Prophecy Fails, but it's a seminal paper as I understand it. If you want a more contemporary and readable book on the same topic, When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Cult by Diana Tumminia is very readable and covers the same ground.
Super interesting to see the original research challenged.

by camillomiller

1 subcomments

Seems applicable to AGI

by gzread

0 subcomment

In the cult, straight up "waiting for it", and by "it", haha, let's just say, AGI.

by keyle

6 subcomments

[flagged]

by mmooss

0 subcomment

If all those studies are falsified, maybe the OP blog post is too. At least the studies have extensive research and review. It's always interesting that people give more credence to the most recent person to speak, often the 'debunker'.