Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why UFOs are not Aliens

I agree with this completely:

I've bet $150,000 to $1,000 against past UFO sightings being revealed within 5 years to have a worldview-shattering origin.

My model of the world confidently says no to alien UFOs: Their technology would not be such that, having arrived here across interstellar distances and then remained hidden, they'd need to fly around in large visible vehicles. It is definitely the case, given the physics we already know, that the aliens can do whatever surveillance they want using far tinier devices; eg, covalent-bond-strong, micron-sized robots, like bacteria but not with proteins held together by static cling.

Superintelligence is possible - it is just flat wrong that a human is as smart as any physical system can get - and you'd expect something crossing interstellar distances to be long since superintelligent. If they wanted to stay hidden, they'd stay hidden successfully. If aliens wanted to help Earth and not hide, humans would not be dying of cancer. If aliens didn't want to help, nor to hide, the aliens would have harvested the Solar System for matter and energy.

I have enormously wide uncertainty about the distribution of true alien psychologies, or the spacefaring agencies that grow out of them. But it's uncertainty over a metric where--when we look back down at Earth and what those psychologies would mean to us--the supervast majority of probable alien intellects, would not come here across interstellar distances, quietly and hiding on arrival, and then occasionally fly around in giant visible vehicles.

I have enormously wide uncertainty over the possible range of alien technologies. But I can use current knowledge of physics and chemistry, and the advance analyses that others have done of what technological possibilities those imply, to put a lower bound under alien technology that's comfortably above "needs to use giant flying vehicles for travel or surveillance".

UFOs aren't aliens. You can approximately leave that possibility out of your thinking.

He doesn't even mention that current UFO theories require that these alleged interstellar spacecraft keep crashing.

Just because something is unexplained doesn't mean that the actual explanation is your sci-fi fantasy.

Scott Siskind on Long-Termism

Scott Siskind has a review up of Will MacAskill's What We Owe the Future, a new book that is currently being hyped all over the place. MacAskill is one of the leaders of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, the people who try to calculate what charitable donations (and other acts) do the most good. In practical terms, I think this is great, because some people want to know what charities are really helping poor people, and now they can find out. Philosophicallly, I think EA is extremely dubious, and I think Siskind agrees.

What We Owe the Future shows the problems that make me queasy. It is an argument for what is now called Long-Termism, which boils down to valuing the happiness of people in the future as much as that of those living today. People into this posit lots of hypotheticals about the hundreds of billions of people in the future, and how a 1% increase in the happiness of those future hundreds of billions is vastly more important than a 1% increase or decrease in our happiness today. I think this is stupid. First, it totally ignores human psychology, and any moral movement that ignores what people are actually like is going to fail; and second, it assumes we know anything about the future, and I say we do not. Consider:

The effective altruist movement started with Peter Singer’s Drowning Child scenario: suppose while walking to work you see a child drowning in the river. You are a good swimmer and could easily save them. But the muddy water would ruin your expensive suit. Do you have an obligation to jump in and help? If yes, it sounds like you think you have a moral obligation to save a child’s life even if it costs you money. But giving money to charity could save the life of a child in the developing world. So maybe you should donate to charity instead of buying fancy things in the first place.

MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium? Most people say that you need to pick up the shards regardless of how long it will be - a kid getting injured is a kid getting injured.

Starting with Peter Singer: if you think you can make humans care as much about people they have never seen, met, or heard of as they do about a child drowning in front of them, you are silly, and I will pay no more attention to anything you say.

And now moving on to the Broken Bottle. As an archaeologist, I can tell you that the danger you face from year-old broken glass is almost exactly zero. If your trail is paved or rock, it will long ago have been shoved aside. If your trail is dirt, it will long ago have been trampled down into the soil. In fact, every well-trodden trail in the world is full of artifacts that have been buried in just this way. The soil of every urban park is full of broken glass, and nobody is ever bothered by this.

The point is that Will MacAskill simply does not know enough to predict what actions will have bad future consequences. In this case I do know, and in many other cases somebody else will know. Mostly, though, we have no idea. Which makes worrying too much about the future a big waste of time.

There are, of course, exceptions. Reducing our use and wastage of chemical poisons seems like a no-brainer to me, given the likely future effects. Most of us would agree that pandemics pose a future hazard bad enough that we should invest more in pandemic preparedness; this seems to me like a reasonable investment based on what we know and what we can do. The threat of greenhouse gases seems less certain to me, but real enough that I support moving to a carbon-neutral future. 

But consider: most of us would also agree that nuclear war would be very bad for the future, so we should avoid it. But to those who say that the risk of nuclear war with Russia is so terrible that we should just surrender Ukraine to awful despotism, I say, to hell with you. There are things I will not stomach to avoid a 1% chance of catastrophe.

I think worrying about even a hundred years in the future is silly; we simply have no intellectual basis for it. Over the next few decades, I believe that the biggest threat facing humanity is despotism. I think if people's lives are worse in 20 years than they are now, that will be because governments are worse; what is happening in Russia is Exhibit A. So the most important thing we can do for the future, now, is to defend democracy. And telling people they should do a lot of sacrificing for people they have never seen, or who have not even been born, is a great way to get them to vote for authoritarians who will shut you up.

The Uncountable Towers of Medieval Bologna

Some web site or other offered me a teaser link to an article on the "The 180 Towers of Medieval Bologna". The picture wasn't this one, which I got from wikipedia, but it looked much like it.

Here is another.

My reaction was disbelief. I mean, there were certainly towers in medieval Bologna, because some of them survive. Dante mentioned one of them in Canto XXXI of the Inferno. They were built by noble families in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a period of near constant struggle between the Guelph and Ghibelline factions. The tallest one still standing is 200 feet (61m) high.

What they were for is an interesting question. People like to say that they were "defensive," but against what is a tower like this a defense? They have very few windows for archers, and the top is too high for the effective dropping of boiling oil. I suspect there was a strong element of prestige in having a tower taller than your neighbors'. The whole thing seems like a gigantic waste to me, but perhaps no more of a waste than staging festivals or wearing sumptuous clothes or some other aristocratic habit. Plenty of work for stone masons.

But how many towers were there? The number of 180 comes from a certain Count Giovanni Gozzadini (1810-1887), a senator of the Italian kingdom and fervent Bolognese patriot. He worked from city records, because building a tower required a permit from the commune. But, this assumes that all those that were licensed were built, which is dubious; wikipedia says that more recent scholars favor a total of 80 to 100. Reconstructions like the one at the top also assume that they all stood at the same time. But they were built over a period of around 200 years, and chronicles tell us that some of them fell down before they were even finished. The number that were standing at any given moment would have been less and possibly much less. I think the above image of the town in 1590 might give a better idea of what the medieval town looked like.

Still, how weird that the politics of one Italian commune gave rise to the construction of dozens of tall stone towers, making Bologna the first skyscraper city.

More Myths about Rotten Food: African American Spice

This is NOT TRUE.

My old post about pepper and rotten food in Medieval Europe has logged several hundred page views, so perhaps I have made a small contribution to fighting that nonsense. So I'm going to wade right in and try to fight this one as well. Let's recap a couple of things:

1. It is not possible to hide the taste of rotten meat.
2. Even if you could, rotten meat doesn't just taste bad, it is poisonous. Adding spice would probably just make you sicker.
3. We know quite a lot about the diets of enslaved people in the Caribbean and the American South, from a variety of sources – plantation accounts, agricultural journals, narratives by enslaved people themselves – and rotten meat doesn't feature much.

I'm not saying that nobody anywhere wasn't ever hungry enough to try eating rotten meat; no doubt that happened all the time. They got sick. If they were weak from hunger they might have died. Spices wouldn't have helped them.

I'm also not saying that slaves were always well fed or that their diets did not contribute to the evolution of African American cooking. Not being given enough food was a standard complaint of slaves, and a lot of "Soul Food" was about turning the cuts of meat that planters didn't want for themselves into palatable meals. The bones I excavated at the Bruin Slave Jail in Alexandria, Virginia were mostly the heads and feet of cows and pigs. There is a lot of nutrition in those parts of the animal, but they weren't much sought after, so they were cheap. That deposit also included thousands of oyster shells, which, again, were cheap, at least at certain times of the year. Oysters spoil quickly so it is quite possible that slaves who ate them sometimes got sick, but then that happened to white people, too.

And also what this commenter said. Heavily salted meat was very common in the Americas, for white people as well as black, because salt was cheap and so it was the simplest way to preserve meat for later. Also, heavily spiced and salted food is a West African tradition, and by eating that way enslaved people were maintaining their own culture, not just trying to survive on rotten flesh.

There is an interesting worldwide association between heavily spiced food and poverty. The most refined and expensive cooking avoids the heavy use of hot peppers or horseradish in all the cultures I know anything about, and in many places the poor have a special fondness for spice. I suppose this is because heavily spicing your food is an inexpensive way to make your life a little more interesting, although various neo-Freudian explanations also come to mind.

But there really isn't any reason to trash-talk Soul Food, any more than there is to trash-talk the Blues. Yes, they emerged from a culture of poverty and oppression. But they have a value that transcends the sadness of their origins.

Enslaved black people ate spicy food because they liked it. Let's not retroactively ruin the pleasures they found amidst their toils.

Aliens and Us

The news swirling around US military reports of strange aircraft has a lot of people wondering what we will do if those objects do turn out to be alien spaceships. These days most people assume the craft will be drones with no squishy alien life forms on board, which is in itself interesting: our speculation about alien technology always tracks our own. But then if we are really talking about a civilization capable of exploring interstellar space, who knows what level of consciousness might be embedded in their machines?

I am of course highly skeptical because that's just the way I am, plus I just don't get why aliens would carry on a decades-long tease with us. If they can cross interstellar space they can presumably hide from all of our sensors. And if they didn't want to hide, why are they so elusive? Plus I think the leap to "space aliens" shows a great lack of imagination. I have seen numerous articles along the lines of, "these anomalies have to be one of these three things." (Like, say, "sensor glitches, aliens, or time travelers.") But we should be less certain that we know all the possibilities about things so far beyond our understanding.

Anyway Ezra Klein has an interesting essay in the Times today mulling over what would happen on Earth if we were certain alien spacecraft were visiting us. Excerpts:

One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? . . .

One lesson of the pandemic is that humanity’s desire for normalcy is an underrated force, and there is no single mistake as common to political analysis as the constant belief that this or that event will finally change everything. If so many can deny or downplay a disease that’s killed millions, dismissing some unusual debris would be trivial. “An awful lot of people would basically shrug and it’d be in the news for three days,” Adrian Tchaikovsky, the science fiction writer, told me. “You can’t just say, ‘still no understanding of alien thing!’ every day. An awful lot of people would be very keen on continuing with their lives and routines no matter what.”

There is a thick literature on how evidence of alien life would shake the world’s religions, but I think Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, is quite likely right when he suggests that many people would simply say, “of course.” The materialist worldview that positions humanity as an island of intelligence in a potentially empty cosmos — my worldview, in other words — is the aberration. Most people believe, and have always believed, that we share both the earth and the cosmos with other beings — gods, spirits, angels, ghosts, ancestors. The norm throughout human history has been a crowded universe where other intelligences are interested in our comings and goings, and even shape them. The whole of human civilization is testament to the fact that we can believe we are not alone and still obsess over earthly concerns.

This has even been true with aliens. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson reminded me that in the early 1900s it was widely but mistakenly believed that we had visual evidence of canals on Mars. “The scientific community seemed to have validated that finding, even though it was mainly Percival Lowell, but it’s hard to recapture now how general the assumption was,” he wrote in an email. “There being no chance of passage across space, it was assumed to be a philosophical point only, of interest but not world-changing for anyone.”

QAnon and Child Abuse

The QAnon conspiracy theory spread like crazy over the summer. Along its way to prominence it escaped from the masculine world of 8chan where it began and entered mostly female networks, especially on Facebook. In trying to explain its appeal to women and especially Christian women, some people have pointed to its focus on child abuse. A few halfway serious people have suggested that if nothing else the theory is useful in raising awareness that child sexual abuse is a huge problem in our society.

Ok, fine, but to the extent that QAnon deals with real problems (child abuse, the concentration of power in secret parts of the government) it does so in entirely the wrong way. What we have learned about the Catholic church should inoculate us against dismissing all notions of pedophile conspiracies; Jeffrey Epstein was up to something awfully sinister. But such secret cabals, no matter how evil, are a small part of the evil we deal with every day.

Most abused children are abused by people very close to them. Most abusers are parents, step-parents, other relatives, baby-sitters. Most of the rest is done by other trusted people: coaches, doctors, teachers. Less than 10% of child sexual abuse is done by strangers.

So I think QAnon and allied notions are another case of our never-ending quest to blame outsiders for our problems. It can't be our friendly neighbors who are responsible for this outrage, it must be evil enemies of the people, some group we can identify and cast out and blame. It can't be us; it can't be me.

The other real problem that QAnon touches on is the great power of the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex, which sometimes does act like a Deep State. Sometimes it seems to me that our wars drag on to serve purposes unknown to, and not at all accepted by, the citizens. But on the other hand we had in 2016 Republican debates that devolved into competitions over who could say the most violent and inflammatory things about Iran and Yemen, and the winner was the man who casually suggested carpet bombing whole countries. So it's not like the violent tendencies of America are secret, or confined to shadowy office buildings in Washington.

Sometimes there are real conspiracies, and sometimes they do real harm. But the big problems of our age are right out in the open, and they implicate all of us, not just a shadowy cabal of rich people bent on subverting the values of the good and wholesome majority. 

Not Excited about Life on Venus

Lots of buzz in the news this week about two scientific papers arguing there must be life on Venus. They base their conclusion on the discovery of phosphine (PH3) in the Venusian clouds. Which I admit is pretty cool. Phosphine seems to be a byproduct of respiration among some bacteria, so it might be a sign of life. These scientists go on to say that no known inorganic process could produce it outside the titanic pressures of Jupiter's inner atmosphere, so there must be life  on Venus.

Maybe. But since we understand Venus' strange atmosphere only a little, and its conditions are very difficult to replicate on earth, who knows? Claims that methane and oxygen found on Mars are evidence of Martian life have not exactly panned out, and incidentally nobody knows what made those gases, either.

I despise scientific arguments that go, "I can't think of any other explanation, so it must be alien life." For one thing we still don't even understand how or why bacteria on Earth produce phosphine, so it might turn out to be a fairly simple reaction, 

I support dreaming up some way to study the Venusian clouds and sending a spacecraft to do it, but I am not optimistic that it will find life. I don't think we understand nearly enough about the universe for this sort of leaping to conclusions.

We Don't Know

Nicholas Kriftof:

The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.

“This is a novel virus, new to humanity, and nobody knows what will happen,” said Anne Rimoin, a professor of epidemiology at U.C.L.A. . . .

Some conservatives scoffed that the coronavirus was like the flu, which was utterly wrong. Some liberals foresaw a disastrous outbreak when Jerry Falwell Jr. kept Liberty University open this spring, and that never happened. . . .

One study reported in Health Affairs found that government restrictions collectively averted some 35 million infections in the United States by the end of April; if that’s true, those restrictions also saved an enormous number of lives.

Yet the same study found that school closures didn’t much help, and we still haven’t figured out the optimal level of restrictions to smother the virus’s spread without stifling citizens’ daily routines.

That’s not surprising, notes Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, because we still haven’t figured out the 1918 pandemic. “In 1918, why did the spring wave go away, and then why did it come back in the fall?” Osterholm asked. “We don’t know.”

Epidemiology is full of puzzles. In 2003, the World Health Organization feared that SARS would return in a devastating wave that fall, but instead it was extinguished. In 2009, experts worried that the H1N1 flu would be a lion, but it turned out to be a kitten. Random luck shapes outcomes along with biology; some officials took reckless risks this year and got away with them, but that doesn’t make the actions prudent

“You’ve got to have a lot of humility with these viruses,” Professor Osterholm said. “I know less about viruses than I did 10 years ago.”

What are they for?

In Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, God gathers the archangels and announces that He has made animals. Satan—who else?—asks, “What are they for?” . . .  God answers: “They are an experiment in Morals and Conduct. Observe them, and be instructed.” So Satan goes to Earth and soon concludes that “the people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane.”

-Verlyn Klinkenborg

White Van Hysteria

CNN Reports on the latest viral panic:

Terrifying rumors initially propelled by Facebook's algorithms have sparked fears that men driving white vans are kidnapping women all across the United States for sex trafficking and to sell their body parts. While there is no evidence to suggest this is happening, much less on a national, coordinated scale, a series of viral Facebook posts created a domino effect that led to the mayor of a major American city issuing a warning based on the unsubstantiated claims.

The latest online-induced panic shows how viral Facebook posts can stoke paranoia and make people believe that spotting something as common as a white van, can be deemed suspicious and connected to a nationwide cabal.

"Don't park near a white van," Baltimore Mayor Bernard "Jack" Young said in a TV interview on Monday. "Make sure you keep your cellphone in case somebody tries to abduct you."

The mayor said he had not been told of the apparent threat by Baltimore Police but said it was "all over Facebook." . . .

Indeed, while there is no hard evidence of any such phenomenon in Baltimore, unconfirmed reports of suspicious white vans in Baltimore and other cities across the US have been shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook in recent weeks and have been seen by potentially millions of Facebook users. At least one person who drives a white van has reported being harassed for it as a result of the rumors.

Let's feed the fire by all posting that we're seeing suspicious white vans driven by tall, slender men in black. That ought to shake things up.

Wolf Moon? What Wolf Moon?

As America got all excited about the Super Wolf Blood Moon, I, the resident pedant, asked myself, "In what culture is the January moon called the Wolf Moon anyway?" I mean, I'm a huge folklore nerd, and I can't remember hearing of the Wolf Moon before.

It isn't Germanic; the old German calendars call this either "Winter Month" or "After Yule." It isn't Celtic. It isn't Roman or Greek or Chinese.

All the popular web sites ginning up enthusiasm for the Super Wolf Blood Moon refer to the Old Farmer's Almanac, which is a dubious source but does include some old American lore, much of it drawn from Indians. American Indians certainly did name the moons. However, none of the versions I am familiar with have a Wolf Moon in the winter. Most of the eastern tribes called it something like Ice or Cold or the Sun is Weak or The Moon of Staying Inside. So I did a bit of searching and found this site that lists a whole bunch of Native American calendars (e.g., Choctaw, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush; Pueblo, Moon of the Cedar Dust Wind), but precious little about wolves. The Potawotami call the moon after midwinter the Bear Moon, I suppose because that was when they hunted hibernating black bears; in other calendars, and the ethnography of the Cherokee, that is February. The only calendar on this site that mentions wolves is a generic "Sioux" list that has Wolves Run Together for January, but since Sioux is a name for a language family, not a particular tribe or tradition (Lakota is Hard Moon), I am skeptical of the provenance.

This astronomy site says Wolf Moon is Ojibwa, but all the other sources I have found say their January moon was called The Great Spirit Moon, so again I am dubious.

I am not denying that some Native people somewhere, sometime called the January moon the Wolf Moon, but obviously it was not the most common name. Many more people named this month for its most obvious characteristic, the temperature. This whole business of the Wolf Moon seems to have been gotten up by nineteenth-century publishers to sell almanacs.

Hmph.

The Arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo

Retired police officer Joseph James DeAngelo has been arrested, accused of being the Golden State Killer. The case against him looks strong, so let me pause to celebrate the fall of a monster.

And then move on to wonder about how he was caught.

What the police did was to run DNA samples from old crime scenes – The Golden State Killer's last crime was in 1986 – and then compare them to profiles posted on genealogy web sites. They identified people who were probably related to their suspect. Then they used family trees posted online to find someone of that family who was the right age and lived in the right town. They identified DeAngelo as a possible suspect. Then they grabbed some of his trash to get a sample of his DNA "left in the public domain" and indeed he was a match to their crime scene samples.

Brilliant police work but I find it a bit creepy. Civil libertarians have always resisted letting the police build up a DNA library of the whole population, but that is pretty much what the DNA testing web sites are doing. This is new, rapidly advancing technology, so if it is already good enough to help the police zero in on DeAngelo it will soon be good enough to identify the author of every spit wad, fingerprint and stray hair left anywhere in the country. This is happening without your consent, because some relative of yours has already posted your family tree at Ancestry.com, and most likely some near relation has posted his or her DNA profile. This has already been used by adopted children to break through legal seals on their birth records and track their birth families, with traumatic results.

Another danger is that DNA technology can work from tiny samples. You leave DNA everywhere you go, on everything you touch. Crime scene DNA testing has already identified as least one incorrect suspect that I know of, the worker who built a duct where a body was later found. Fortunately the police sorted that one out, but do you trust them to do that in every case? A clever killer will now do his deed wearing surgical scrubs or a hazmat suit but be sure to leave lots of DNA around from another likely suspect. If there's a gang killing, and blood at the crime scene matches someone known to be active in a rival gang, will the police bother to investigate further? I imagine a world in which careful people will burn all their hair and fingernail parings like those terrified of witches used to do.

Anyway, that's the world we live in. Between your own internet history and family DNA posted online, strangers can now learn a vast amount of intimate stuff about you. This will help catch future serial killers but it is also bound to have lots of unanticipated effects.

But Are They Real?

Let's play "real or fake?" with these two items from the online auction houses. The above is up for sale as a "Viking double-headed raven pendant necklace, 11th-12th century." But 1) it's amazingly well preserved – look at that plaited chain! Is that silver that has been in the ground for a thousand years? 2) the only provenance is "old European collection" and 3) I've never seen anything like it. The raven heads in particular don't look like any Viking examples I know of. I'm thinking fake.

This is supposed to be a bronze Roman statue hand with an iron dagger. I really know nothing about this sort of thing, but I'm suspicious because 1) I've never seen another one quite like this 2) copper and iron react very badly together so there ought to be a mass of corrosion where the bronze and iron meet, or damage from its removal and 3) this is just so much exactly the kind of thing 21st-century people want. I won't offer a firm opinion, not being any kind of expert on classical statuary, but my alarm bells are ringing.

Your "Conventional Narrative" is Made Up, and Your Ideas are Mush

As I complain all the time, most of my contemporaries can only imagine a scholarly debate in one way: as bold new ideas attacking on entrenched orthodoxy. Consider this gem about from Mark Koyama the rise of religious freedom as in ideal:

According to the conventional narrative, freedom of religion arose in the West in the wake of devastating wars fought over religion. It was catalysed by powerful arguments from thinkers such as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire. These philosophers and political theorists responded to the brutality of the religious wars with support for radical notions of toleration and religious freedom. Their liberal ideals then became embedded in the political institutions of the West, following the American and French Revolutions.

In broad outline, such is the account accepted by most political philosophers and social scientists. But the evidence does not support this emphasis on the power of ideas in shaping the rise of religious freedom, and underestimates the decisive role played by institutions. . . .

With my colleague at George Mason University, the historian Noel Johnson, I recently completed the book Persecution and Toleration (2017), in which we show that ideas were not enough to realise religious freedom. Crucially, it took political and institutional changes – specifically, the growth and strengthening of the ability of states to create and enforce rules – to make religious freedom in the West possible and appealing. It wasn’t the ideas of Bayle or Spinoza or Locke driving the rise of state power, it was the need to raise resources for governing and war. For the rising fiscal-military state, religious uniformity and persecution simply became too expensive and inefficient.

This bold new attack on the "conventional narrative," this assault on the established wisdom, is exactly what I was taught in college in 1984. The notion that the rise of the modern state made possible our modern notion of "rights" is old enough that Michel Foucault framed Discipline and Punish as an attack on it in 1975. I wonder if Drs. Koyama and Johnson have even read Foucault, since anyone who had would know that when and why states and societies persecute people is a very complex and difficult question. On the narrow question of religious tolerance, the pro-tolerance thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries took their cue from ancient Rome, so they certainly didn't think there was anything new or unusual about religious tolerance under a strong state. This is an old argument that has been raging for many decades, and neither side is either new or radical.

Everybody is probably bored with my harping on this theme, but somebody has to point out how common this way of framing questions has become, and how idiotic. It is a terrible intellectual habit that has bad effects on our scholarship, distorts how millions of people see the world, and probably messes up our politics as well. We should stop.

Not every argument is about old ideas vs. new ones. Sometimes both sides are ancient (free will vs. determinism; democracy vs. dictatorship), other times both are new (differing interpretations of quantum mechanics).

Just forget about whether an idea is new or old, radical or stodgy, and focus on whether it is right.

Spurious Correlations

Amusing web site with thousands of these. And some of these utterly unrelated things correlate at fantastic rates like .998, which is way better than almost any scientific result you have seen in the news.

The Energy-Rich Ocean of Enceladus

Back in 2015, the Cassini spacecraft flew through the plume of particles that erupts from the south pole of Saturn's small moon Enceladus. Cassini was not designed to look for life, but it does have a simple set of chemical sensors. Those censors showed that while the plume is mostly water vapor, it contains some methane and elemental hydrogen.

Just recently some scientists associated with the Cassini program published a study that shows the chemistry of the plumes is not in equilibrium. That means there is chemical energy available in Enceladus' subsurface ocean that could sustain life. The authors think the process is similar to what happens at hydrothermal vents in Earth's oceans, which as we know are teaming with all sorts of weird life. Very cool.

But on the other hand, if there were life in that ocean, wouldn't it be using up all that energy and returning the mix to equilibrium? If what we are talking about is just microbes that grow and reproduce by feeding on that chemical energy, that's what we would expect. Away from the hydrothermal vents, Earth's oceans don't show that sort of energy-rich dis-equilibrium. But on the other hand Earth's atmosphere is dramatically out of equilibrium (that's why things catch on fire) and has been for a few billion years. I have not yet thought of a set of reactions that life on Enceladus could be using to capture energy and yield the mixture of molecules that these tests reported, but remember that Cassini's chemistry capability is very limited, so a lot might be going on that has been missed.

I would have to say, though, that while I am intrigued by the possibility of life on one or more of these moons the odds are starkly against it. So far as we can tell, most of the universe is empty of life. I think one of the most important questions to ask about the big processes of the cosmos is, why haven't we been visited by aliens, or at least alien robots? Surely we are within a century of launching such probes ourselves. So beings like us must be very, very, extremely, extraordinarily rare. We have discovered that planets are very common, so that can't be the limiting factor. To me that leaves two major questions: how often does life arise? and how often does life, once it appears, evolve intelligence? I think the simplest way to answer the question about aliens is to assume that the answer for both questions is, not very often.

But I'm still willing to pay my part of a powerful mission to one of these moons to find out more.

What do Economists Know?

How much do economists really understand? Russ Roberts:

A journalist once asked me how many jobs NAFTA had created or destroyed. I told him I had no reliable idea. Certainly jobs had been lost when factories closed and moved to Mexico but other jobs had been gained because Americans now had more resources and increased their demand for products that would not be easy to identify. Why not? Because thousands and thousands of jobs are created every month and it is very difficult, perhaps impossible to know which ones are related to NAFTA allowing Americans to buy less expensive goods from Mexico. I also told him that I believed that trade neither destroyed nor created jobs on net. It’s main impact was to change the kinds of jobs and what they paid.

The journalist got annoyed. “You’re a professional economist. You’re ducking my question.” I disgreed. I am answering your question, I told him. You just don’t like the answer.

More:

Most economics claims are really not verifiable or replicable. Most economic claims rely on statistical techniques that try to simulate a laboratory experiment that holds all relevant factors constant. That is the hope. My claim is that in general, holding all relevant factors cannot be done in a way that is reliable or verifiable. And that is why so many empirical issues such as the minimum wage, immigration, fiscal policy, monetary policy and so on, have smart people on both sides of the issue each with their own sophisticated analysis to bolster their claim.

A Scythian Dragon Torc?

This item has been making the rounds on Tumblr, universally described as a Scythian gold torc of 200 to 0 BCE. I am dubious. It doesn't look Scythian to me at all.

I tracked it back to this auction site, which says it has been chemically tested and dated. I'm not impressed by that, either; dating gold is extremely difficult, and any method would have a huge margin of error. By way of provenance they say only that it was purchased in Hong Kong in 1999.

If it does come from Central Asia as they claim, it comes from the eastern end; those are Chinese dragons. There were steppes societies under Chinese influence, and I have posted some of their Chinese-looking art here before. So this might come from a nomad tomb in Kazakhstan or Afghanistan. But it might come from a basement workshop in Hong Kong. Either way it looks pretty cool.

Mind Reading

Consider:

The first true brain-to-brain communication in people could start next year, thanks to huge recent advances. . . . Researchers have managed to get two people, sitting in different rooms, to play a game of 20 questions on a computer. The participants transmitted “yes” or “no” answers, thanks to EEG caps that monitored brain activity, with a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation triggering an electrical current in the other person’s brain.

So with lots of wiring and computers and who knows what else, researchers have managed to get one person to say "yes" or "no" to another.

Which we have been doing for at least 60,000 years using this arcane technology called "language."

I simply don't understand why people are so excited by the prospect of telepathy. Why not just say it? And no this won't help you read someone else's true thoughts unless 1) they are wearing exquisitely sensitive eeg caps and 2) you're only trying to extract a yes or no. Even that probably won't work if they're trying to fool you.

Is this Image of Cernunnos Fake?

I found this artifact on a couple of blogs this week.. It's a gold disk, 5.7 cm (2.2 inches) in diameter, recently sold for 6,000 Euros by a Belgian antiquities dealer. If it is real it is an amazing thing, one of less than a dozen clear representations of the Celtic horned god.

But is it real? I've never seen it, of course, so I won't venture a firm opinion. It's just that I have been studying Celtic paganism for about 35 years now, and I've never seen any picture of it before. I have on my shelves a good 25 illustrated books about the ancient Celts or ancient European paganism, and none of them show it. In fact it is traditional to begin your discussion of the horned god by lamenting how bad the evidence is for anything about him, including how few depictions there are.

Check out, for example, this web site, which discusses six depictions of Cernunnos, only one of which (the one from the Gundestrup Cauldron, above) is as good as the one I am wondering about.

Plus, it was sold on EBay. Plus, the seller is named Nazzi. Ok, that wasn't fair. But EBay – is that where we would expect to see a major historical artifact, a crucial piece of evidence for ancient paganism? The only provenance given at the seller's web site is "ex private collection." It seems to me that if this were real, national museums would bid hundreds of thousands for it.

Until I see more, I'm leaving it out of my lectures.