self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
42m ago
Look dude. No. I'll say it again, that's just the way I talk. There is no malice behind it, at worst it's a textual tic or an expression of mild exasperation. If you find it that I'm was. That's a shame. Take care.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
Absolutely. But it was using Spotify's own metrics to assess popularity, and ran the scripts to collate those figures. We're talking evidence-based, rigorous, scientific glazing. At that point, it's not sycophancy, it's acknowledgement of my clear superiority over other mortals when it comes to diversity in musical taste.
Am I forgetting how light works? Some schmucks somewhere could have invented a superintelligence and started doing whatever ten-thousand years ago and there'd only be a little 20kly diameter bubble around us where we'd notice even if they were blowing up the universe.
If there's a "little" 20kly diameter bubble out there, I promise you we'd see that pretty well. We'd know by now.
Notice what even a mere 20,000 years of existence as rapidly hegemonizing interstellar civilization can achieve. Of course, by the time we see them, it's probably been much longer. And there might be massive civilizations taking over whole clusters we wouldn't know about for another million years. They're far away, if they exist. Their visual absence even with potential billion year headstarts suggests they don't exist.
I mean I'm not going in for aliens being real until somebody plunks down some real evidence or Gleep Glorp comes down and shakes my hand, but this stuff isn't satisfying. You're way too sure no canoe could ever cross the great sea.
The hell? I never disputed that interstellar travel is possible. It's perfectly plausible, the problem is that the civilizations that could launch them are nowhere to be seen. I'm also just saying that it's expensive, it's not very easy to hide, and if you do go to all that bother, then you wouldn't be as incompetent as your friendly neighborhood UFOs of alleged alien origin. If you have a K2 in the Milky Way, we might see it now. That would be a very unusual star, though a distant or occluded one might escape our scopes. If they came from even further away, what have they been up to, signing up with galactic HOA and agreeing to leave all the stars unmolested?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9hr ago
Wow, an LLM told you you had unique and discerning taste? Incredible!
Heh. Claude isn't sycophantic enough to do that. I declared that I have unique and discerning taste.
DJ Claudify
I've been meaning to try this for ages, but kept being too lazy to bother. There's a website called Exportify that dumps your saved Spotify playlists into a csv. The setup is painless: approve access, no suspicious permissions, and you walk away with every track you've ever saved alongside metadata like timestamps and Spotify's own popularity scores.
I exported the lot. I don't really do dedicated playlists; my method is to encounter a song I like, save it on the spot, or, on rare occasions, find something decent on the recommended page. The result is a library in strict chronological order, where almost every track carries temporal and emotional baggage. Here's the song I was listening to during a breakup. That's the one that was playing when I first stepped off the plane in Scotland. Consistency and curation are for try-hards; if I don't like what's playing I queue something better, or jump down the list.
I fed the csv to Opus 4.7 and ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking and asked them to chart my mood and vibes over time. Both did remarkably well, well past reading tea leaves. Then I asked for recommendations, ideally things I hadn't heard before.
From Claude:
"176 tracks in your library have a Spotify popularity score of zero. 244 sit below 10. About a quarter of your library is essentially invisible to the algorithm. Names like Chikoi The Maid, Holy Fawn, Suave Punk, Caleb Bryant, Mokadelic show up there. Meanwhile your highest-popularity saves are exactly the global hits everyone agrees on (Blinding Lights, I Wanna Be Yours, Espresso, deja vu, Hey Ya, 505). That bimodal shape tells me you save the songs everyone agrees on and you save the songs almost no one knows, with a thinner middle than most people have."
Yeah Boi. I can out-hipster the hipsters, I listen to songs and genres you people have never even heard of. All while not predicating my personality around it, because I do listen to normal, human music. Sabrina Carpenter? You've heard of her.
Both delivered. Claude was a touch better, with something like a 50% hit rate by recommendation-to-save ratio. Better than any human I know. Better than Spotify's own recommendations, which is the part that surprised me. Spotify has spent over a decade and presumably a small country's GDP building a hybrid recommender that fuses collaborative filtering, raw audio analysis via convolutional nets, and NLP over reviews and metadata. They have every play, skip, save, and 30-second-bailout from half a billion users.
In other words, they try pretty hard.
And yet a model that has never heard a single waveform is beating them on my library, presumably because it's drawing on the entire written corpus of human music criticism: every RateYourMusic thread, every Pitchfork review, every breathless Reddit comment about a B-side. Collaborative filtering also has a pull toward the popular middle, which an LLM doesn't share, since it isn't trained on user-item interaction logs at all.
Easy chronology probably helps too. Spotify mostly sees a bag of vectors with timestamps; a language model can read your library as a story and notice when the vibe shifts.
You should try it. It helps to give honest, immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't. A sampler:
"Avril sounds like something they'd play in an aquarium that sprang a leak. It's definitely for someone, I'm not sure if that someone is me."
"Blink sounds like elevator music on ketamine. A maybe?"
"Loretta fucked my ear canal and got it pregnant. Instant add."
"Mona Lisa can stay in the museum."
"Vapour has a lot going on. Someone else can get it on, fucking hell, there are notes in there that are best appreciated by a cat."
"Catamaran sounds like it was recorded inside a toilet. From the adjacent stall. Miss."
"Mountains isn't bad, but it's for a very moody teen girl, or a middle aged woman going through a divorce/mid life crisis. Close but no cigar. Sigh. I'll add it anyway."
The whole experience was unreasonably pleasant, especially given that I'm not even sure Claude can ingest audio, or was meaningfully trained on music samples. The rest of you are getting mogged by a blind deaf entity that lives in a computer. I added something like 20 songs over the hour, which is a ridiculous number against my usual rate of about one a week.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10hr ago
Thanks! I'm comparing myself to the other trainees when it comes to test scores and I think I'm slightly ahead on net. Not by the margin where I can take my foot off the gas, but I think I have an honest shot. If not, I'll be mad about breaking a lifelong streak of never failing any exam (of actual importance), but that's not the end of the world.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10hr ago
Look dude. You're not telling me anything really new, I've already explained that the kind of big, impossible to miss, incontrovertible and dramatic evidence that would make me sit up straight and take this more seriously. If Oumuamua deployed radiators and then settled into a parking orbit, I wouldn't be making this argument.
Anything less than that moves the needle by negligible amounts. It's one more floppy disk at best, against mountain that is the other evidence suggesting the wider evidence is empty, or that if the aliens do exist, they have to remarkably stupid/incompetent.
In short, I think this is a massive waste of time. Not the search for aliens, in general. They might be out there. We might spot a K2 in Andromeda or something. Maybe someone is laying the foundation on a new Dyson swarm, which will affect property prices and escalate the race for the light cone. I'll believe it when I see it. We should keep spending some money on observing the cosmos in detail. But if you're looking on Earth, with evidence this scanty, with a claim this enormous? I'm not moved, the lever isn't long enough.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10hr ago
Of course. But that's only like half the nominal weighting on the test. Maybe 2/3rds. I imagine there's enormous overlap there, but that's one area where the SPMM notes haven't failed me nearly as badly. It's harder to bungle copy-pasting NICE/BAP guidelines.
Not that I would really have the time either way.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10hr ago
Slight amenable is generous, and I must note that the logical/empirical part of my brain does not switch off easy. Not even when I actively try. Maybe a proper night out with the lads might lead to a blackout and then waking up with at the aisle with a standard issue Mormon wife, but I'd probably run from the altar. I can't handle the divorce man, I ain't got much to lose.
And pretty sure the Scottish Mormons are... disapproving of polygamy. I don't think there's a DailyMail article about it, which is the minimum standard for reporting on the lurid and unusual. A single blonde wife? Who'll get mad if I drink coffee? Goddammit. Not quite sold. My immortal soul goes to the highest bidder.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10hr ago
Logically speaking, there's several billion years of history when we could have been visited by any number of interstellar space probes, without anybody in a real position to notice or file a complaint about violated speed limits.
I will note that acceleration is fine. You can probably make the beam tight enough despite unavoidable dispersion to get away with it, especially if you choose an oblique final angle of approach. Deceleration without getting caught is the hard part, especially if you aren't going to dramatically lengthen the journey in the process. I don't think that even the ~hardest torchship engines can avoid ridiculously large thermal emissions.
At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter all that much for the sake of my general argument. There is very little justification for aliens that advanced to go to all the bother and do... whatever they're presently accused of doing. Which doesn't seem to be much. It wouldn't explain why they don't seem to be doing anything at all back home, wherever that is.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15hr ago
Hmm. Not bad advice in a vacuum, but I'd say it's somewhat impractical. The reason I'm using SPMM is because I don't have the time to go through the official reading list cover to cover, or even to skim it properly. American psychiatry textbooks might be of a higher quality, as might be the case for PG-exam oriented material, but the MRCPsych is very UK specific, in terms of knowledge about systems as well as our psychiatric guidance and patient-pool.
Just the stats? Sure. But I have 10 days and no time to do more than cry, or more productively, cry while doing mocks. Maybe if I fail this go, which I really hope won't happen.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15hr ago
Good at apologetics? You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me, though I appreciate the honesty.
(This is mostly a joke. Mostly. I'm fond of beautiful women.)
I suppose that missionaries are explicitly or implicitly sorted for charisma/looks. I wouldn't want to have uggos repping me if I can help it, though I have little choice in the matter. Thank goodness I mostly communicate through text.
For what it's worth, I have met a total of 7 Mormons in-person, at least that I knew were Mormon. 6 of them were missionaries. 1 of them was my driving instructor, who was a genuinely nice person. I'm an atheist, and an anti-theist, except I don't have the time or energy to get it into those debates these days. The pragmatic reason for it is that religious debate rarely achieves anything - the expected value calculation is poor, for me. I suppose that if you must know, I think Mormonism is particularly suspect as a religion because of the well-documented nature of its founding, which makes the implausible historical claims particularly jarring to me. Other, more established religions have the minor fig leaf of being founded so far back in the past that the truth is murkier, even if I still don't believe in them.
Otherwise? Uh, I have no real reason to dislike you guys. No Mormon has ever bothered me beyond asking me for a few seconds of my time. I just don't think I'm a good candidate for conversion, and I don't want to be converted. I like alcohol, nicotine through vapes, and "drugs", the last category apparently inclusive of coffee. I think I'm reasonably familiar with your religious tenets, but if you still want to explain after I've said everything above, be my guest. I genuinely don't mind.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16hr ago
Possible? Yes. Very many things are possible, more than this textbox has the room to catalog or contain.
Plausible? No. More importantly, the more epicycles you tag on, the worse the theory gets. UFOs = alien visitation is rickety enough as is, tacking on "monkeys that found a spaceship" doesn't help.
I do agree with you that aliens seem pretty unlikely, I’m just pushing back on the idea that advanced technology implies advanced other things.
You're conflating implies with requires. I'm keeping those things separated. It would be very curious if the operators of this sufficiently-advanced technology were just incompetent enough to get caught so infrequently, with such plausible deniability.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
There is a difference between being skeptical and being hostile. I am immensely skeptical, but I am perfectly willing to accept the proposition that "advanced alien civilizations exist in the observable universe". Unfortunately, the balance of evidence is against it. Our telescopes would have spotted Kardashev 3s. The universe has had plenty of time for even a slightly temporally privileged civilization to make a dent in their astrographical vicinity, to a degree we can see from here.
Why rely on the Kardashev scale? Because energy-consumption, while imperfect as a scale for gauging technological progress, is far better than alternatives in the sense that it would be something we could observe, and what we would expect to observe barring a dramatic upsets. Moar energy = Moar good. Why leave all those stars alone, wasting perfectly good negentropy shining into empty rooms?
Then thermodynamics itself imposes constraints in the form of waste heat. It would be extremely implausible that an advanced, older civilization wouldn't make use of available resources, or that it could completely disguise their heat signature.
K2 and below? They still be very likely to leave obvious signatures on interstellar travel. They don't have the same resources, though interstellar travel is hardly out of the question if you own even a thousandth of a Dyson swarm. The question is why you aren't something useful with that capability, instead of engaging in glorified voyeurism on primitive neighbors. For a more mundane example, the CIA could gang-stalk a random farmer in sub-Saharan Africa. But they don't, because they have better uses for their time and energy.
If there are aliens out there, then they're most likely to be pond scum if they're in our galaxy. If they're more advanced, then they're almost certainly further away, and we have pretty decent limits on what is plausible. If you want more, read up on Grabby Aliens (and lack thereof) as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
The point of all of this is that there is a very long list of observations that do not comport to known phenomenon.
Length and verbosity is a very poor metric for quality of evidence. You can collect a million people willing to swear on the benefits of homeopathy, still doesn't best placebo.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
18hr ago
It is a joke. But I do appreciate the accidental nerd-snipe, that's an interesting tit-bit tidbit!
I have no idea if these ladies came from OG Mormon stock, or if they were made in a lab in Scotland. Presumably plenty of Utah Mormons came from here in the first place, and there's no shortage of (fake) blondes in these parts.
I'm unimpressed. The "they're here" hypothesis is a stack of conjuncts you have to price separately. I say this every single time this topic comes up, because someone has to.
Physics first. For aliens to be in our atmosphere, getting here without us noticing, physics has to break. Hard. Either FTL or energy budgets that make Kardashev-I civilizations look like loose change. Getting even a 1,000 kg probe to 20% of c needs something like 10^18 joules of kinetic energy, and that's a one-way trip. Sub-luminal crewed travel runs into interstellar hydrogen turning into ionizing radiation past ~0.5c, with deceleration costs equal to acceleration.
The energy costs are far from impossible, but the bigger issue is that deceleration would be a dead give-away. There are plausible approaches to stealth in interplanetary space, such as the Hydrogen Steamer, but when we're talking interstellar travel that doesn't take a gazillion years (especially from outside the immediate stellar neighborhood?). Fuck no. You'd be brighter than most stars from our perspective.
The easiest way to get around detection (for a non-standard definition of "easy") would be to get as close to the speed of light as you can, without bothering to slow down. That minimizes the temporal delta between your emissions giving you away and your arrival in system.
There is, however, a serious problem with that. I hope the keen-eyed reader can parse it. If not? Well: what I've just described is a Relativistic Kill Vehicle. Very different from something carrying a cargo you want to survive a journey, to a planet that you also would prefer mostly intact.
I can hear the response: "our physics is incomplete!" Yeah buddy, I know. It came free with the dark matter and dark energy. But if we grant FTL, reactionless drives, warp bubbles, exotic matter etc etc, then all bets are off. But once you've blown off the cost of the trip, you've blown up the priors on what these beings can do.
A civilization that solved interstellar travel has, with overwhelming probability, also solved stealth, signal control, and not-getting-photographed. Conditioning on "crossed several light-years" and "doesn't want to be caught by humans" should not leave you predicting "keeps getting caught on jet FLIR looking like fuzzy tic-tacs." The more advanced you demand the hypothetical aliens to be, the more evidence you need that the cryosleep has given them brain damage bad enough to explain the terrible OPSEC.
I'm not picking one explanation for what's in the released material. Far more likely, ridiculously more likely that it's several things compounding. Sensor artifacts (Sean Kirkpatrick, who ran AARO until 2023, has consistently argued the famous clips are jet engines doing weird things at long focal lengths). Tired pilots, going off a culture that treats every blip as anomalous. Black programs where one arm of USGov tests toys it didn't tell the other arm about. Adversary hardware misclassified, because, at least in theory, China might have some fun toys. Foreign and domestic psy-ops. Plain grift and running cover. A classified drone test, witnessed by a fatigued pilot, captured on a wonky sensor. This can all give you roughly the corpus we have, for far cheaper evidentiary cost.
Aliens? C'mon. I don't rule them out categorically. I just notice that "we're in a simulation and the admins are messing with us" buys roughly the same explanatory power at roughly the same cost in violated assumptions, and nobody treats it as the modal explanation. Pick your absurdity.*
What would move me is something an advanced interstellar civilization should find trivial. Hijack global comms and broadcast a coherent signal in every language at once. Live-stream a constructive proof of the Riemann hypothesis. Set an undeniable craft on the White House lawn at noon, on every camera. Drop asteroids in the Sahara to spell "ssup?" in characters and craters legible from orbit. None of that is demanding for someone who cracked star travel. The action-to-evidence ratio of "do something unambiguous, once" massively dominates "occasionally appear as a fuzzy shape humans argue about for decades." Our tech has gotten better since the 60s. It would be very awkward if theirs has improved at just the right pace to keep getting caught at the same rate.
So you've got a dichotomy. Either they want us to know they're here, in which case the demonstration is trivial and we'd already have it. Or they don't, in which case routinely showing up on cockpit thermal cameras is a level of opsec failure inconsistent with the engineering required to be here at all.
I don't think the evidence forces me to pick either. I advise that everyone chill the fuck out. If you're going to update, then update at the rate of installing Windows 11 from floppy disks.
*I'll dwell further on the fact that the simulation hypothesis and the alien hypothesis are explanatorily isomorphic in the relevant sense. Both posit an agent with effectively unbounded capability who is, for unstated reasons, choosing to interact with us via low-bandwidth ambiguous signals rather than the high-bandwidth unambiguous ones available to them. If you state your reasons, that really doesn't help, since the usual explanations I've heard are really bad. Embarrassingly so. I'm a hard-SF nerd, so if I can't salvage your argument, who can?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
19hr ago
I'm told by reliable yet confidential sources, that the trek to Utah provided ample eugenic pressure. Mostly by killing off the women with inadequate fat stores.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
19hr ago
I had my third encounter with the Mormons of the Bridge.
For the second time running, two bubbly blonde girls intercepted me as I was hustling my exhausted ass back to my apartment. I wasn't paying attention, had earphones in, and assumed I was being asked for directions. I popped out a bud, made the mildly inconvenienced face one gives lost tourists, and was instead asked if I would like to find God and attend church on Sunday.
What I really, really wanted to be doing was lying in bed, dissociating, queueing up another dose of stimulants, and grinding my nose against my exam notes. But I wanted to be polite. So I told them the main thing God could help me with this weekend was exam prep.
The two of them looked at each other and communicated telepathically (as Mormons do), then informed me, with the cheerful assurance of customer service reps reading from a flowchart, that this was no problem at all. God wears many hats, and is a first-line service worker for the academically distressed.
I considered asking whether He might sit the exam for me, reconsidered on grounds of basic civility, and told them I'd be spending the weekend at the altar of an entirely different kind of book.
By this point the exchange had run unusually long. Normally I dispatch them inside fifteen seconds with a polite "thanks, but I'm not interested." It seems my willingness to engage past the standard cutoff registered as encouragement, because they then asked for my number, so they could send a friendly reminder once exams were behind me.
It pained me to decline such requests from reasonably attractive young women, particularly the taller one. But academics come first. I told them this. I didn't tell them that God has nothing if not time, because that would prompt them to argue that I'm the one with limited time under the sun, with the stakes being my immortal soul. However, I plan, eventually, to outlast Him from inside a Matrioshka Brain, at which point the sun has finite time under me. None of which I said aloud, on the grounds that what I was facing was, functionally, a sales pitch, and they'd been rather polite so far. Nor was a windy, windy bridge the best place for a debate about applied transhumanism.
They took non-disinterest as a green light and pressed further. They volunteered the address of their church and helpfully clarified that they belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Couldn't have inferred that from physiognomy alone, let alone the badge. I'm genuinely impressed by how they mass-produce these people from a single template perfected somewhere in Utah: clean shaven, soberly dressed young men; clean skinned, soberly dressed young women, big honkers as standard issue. The willingness to press without quite tipping into overbearing serves them well in respectable sales careers and at the CIA. I'm less impressed by their theology, though I've seen worse from people far less well-groomed.
In fairness, the operation is well-oiled. The median LDS missionary baptizes 3 to 5 converts a year, which is more impressive than I'd thought.
Why do they keep approaching me? On 2/3 of these encounters I've been the only human on the bridge, so it was me or the seagulls, who are Anglican and not open to conversion. Maybe I look like a particularly lost lamb. Maybe I look like a lost lamb because I am undercaffeinated, in which case they are correctly identifying a state I'm authentically in and misattributing it to spiritual rather than circadian causes. In fact, becoming a Mormon would probably make the coffee-problem worse. Maybe a brown Indian man scores well on diversity-funnel metrics. I'm sorely tempted to attend one Sunday just to see what happens, which is, of course, exactly how they get you.
I told them I'd keep it in mind, and that I knew where to find them. Which I do.
I kept walking.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played.
A shame, because those exist? That's like claiming that we wouldn't need speed limits on the interstate highway if motor vehicles didn't exist. They do.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Whatever you do, don't come to Scotland. I'm fine with nail polish, in general, but the nail extensions you can see in the trashier parts of the country are so long and garish they should probably count as edged weaponry.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Yup. If it's an old injury, and there are no glaringly obvious signs of ongoing inflammation/disease, physio would be the first port of call. I imagine it's easier to go to a physio and then a doctor if they so advise, instead of the other way around.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Yeah, it really shouldn't taste like fried rice, in the same sense that fried rice shouldn't taste like risotto.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
It's a bit late to be praying that that's the case, but I'm not going to risk it again.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Not at all. You can spend your entire career as a psychiatrist without ever having to worry about whether you need to use ANOVA instead of MANOVA. I dare say most psychiatrists don't need to know any of this, I've never seen a senior of mine sit down and calculate PPVs or positive LRs while working with a real clinical case. If they ever knew, they've probably forgotten, and it doesn't seem to hurt them.
In theory, this information might come in handy if we need to do critical appraisals of a new paper or engage in research. That's the theory anyway, the practical aspects of it were already iffy, and these days? Everyone is going to check ChatGPT. There are zero clinical scenarios involving a real patient where this specific question matters.
Or, putting it in another way, if I learned psychiatrists are being taught and examined on wrong statistics, how scared should I be?
Don't lose sleep over it. That's my job. I'd rather be unemployed.
Ahem :
And even before the SETI article:
Need I remind you that we shouldn't be looking for "just" a single Dyson swarm candidate? A civilization with the technology to build even one should be in the process of a Grabby Alien takeover of the lightcone. You'd want to see a roughly spherical wave of expansion, perhaps including swarms-in-progress.
When the technosignatures, scrutinized closely, overwhelmingly tend to turn out to be well explained by natural phenomena? Yeah. We ought to check, because it's cheap and possibly quite important if we detect something real, but expectations should be very, very low if you're modeling things sensibly.
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