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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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we dismiss things that look like non-inertial movement as non-inertial movement is impossible

If aliens can violate the equivalence principal then what other laws of physics could they violate? the Born rule? Or, why not the laws of thermodynamics? If aliens can break the laws of physics in this way then What constraints are there on alien capabilities? Against this you say that "glitches etc" have too much explanatory power. Forget a small war, aliens could construct a second earth somewhere between here and Mars and we would never know.

Priors are supposed to be updated both ways.

I think you should pick some numbers and calculate. I think you'll find that the size of the update is much larger in one direction vs the other.

In physics, there are a fuckton of 'constants'. Many of these are unexplained. It's some random number you push into an equation and makes it work. But we haven't explained why that constant exists, or why it has the value it has. Even the speed of light, we have no idea why it is that speed. And it's typically viewed as a maximum, but there's no reason to assume the speed of light is some universal speedcap. We don't think like that for the speed of sound.

Even when it comes to constants, many of them seem to be variable. It's just that their variance is so small, and the level of our tech so primitive, that it's handwaved away, since it is of no consequence to us. It's a bit like how we tell high school students that water is incompressible. Because there's really no need to go into the minutiae at that level.

So physics is full of holes that we've bandaged over, but that could radically change our understanding of the universe if we discovered what is truly behind it.

Well if we saw signs of a second Earth between Earth and Mars, like a massive inexplicable gravitational anomaly sitting there...

Massive gravitational anomalies apparently make up 95% of the universe! Some of our 'laws of physics' are wrong or very very incomplete.

If objects could travel faster than the speed of light (which they can), you'd expect to still be able to measure their gravity, but not visually see them.

like a massive inexplicable gravitational anomaly sitting there..

Only if you believe that aliens are incapable of shielding the gravitational signature of a massive object. And you do believe that they can violate the equivalence principal. Why one and not the other?

Why are you trying to get me to defend a massive hidden mass between Earth and Mars? We're talking about a specific phenomenon with specific evidence. If we see all these objects violating the equivalence principle, or seemingly doing so, then that's evidence against the equivalence principle. The essence of science is making conclusions from observations, not the other way around.

We're seeing some signs of things that are not easily explained by sensor failures or human error. Maybe a single fighter aircraft has an error. But multiple radar, aircraft and visual observations shouldn't have the same error in the same time and place.

You rejected the "glitch" explanation because it explained too much. I'm trying to tell you that, "aliens can violate arbitrary laws of physics" is a vastly more powerful explanation. I.e if you reject the first you should definitely reject the latter on the same grounds.

Incompetence and malice can explain almost any failure in business. Maybe your accountant is just an idiot and missed all the money flowing away. Or maybe they're siphoning it away, maybe they're deliberately sabotaging the company. Distinguishing between them is a very important skill. You distinguish between them based upon various factors. If four accountants overlook the same erroneous transaction, it becomes more likely that they're all in on it than that they all made the same error. If you just assume 'oh well Hanlon's Razor, infinite arbitrary technical errors', you'd make a terrible spy chief.

'Aliens can reject laws of physics' does have a lot of explanatory power but it also fits better for certain scenarios, as does 'there's a conspiracy to promulgate evidence of aliens' for that matter.

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