NoScienceDenial

I’m going to post screen shots of the most outrageous #sciencedenial and nonsensical tweets I come across. And great comebacks too. Like this gem! Open to see.

@TheStalwart @TheStalwart what you are missing is easy to understand. You have almost half the population believing lies by Trump. When Trump says everything‘s OK, and it’s boom times ahead, they buy. It really is that simple. Reality will eventually win.

ANOTHER OMINOUS LABOR MARKET SIGNAL It's jobs week, and there's still this seeming disconnect between hard and soft data. Today's Conference Board survey showed that the % of consumer who perceive jobs to be "not so plentiful" just hit its highest level since Covid

@rkdoctr Everything about him is horrible! How are you doing?

@DavidSacks Inflation was global, your comment is illogical. spending continues at the same rate, yet inflation is down. How do you explain this? Do you understand economics?

Biden’s out-of-control spending caused inflation; Harris wants $1.7 trillion more. Biden blamed corporate greed; Harris would institute price controls. Harris wouldn’t just continue Biden’s policies, she would intensify them.

@DavidSacks So you support Trump, who wants to establish a religious theocracy in the United States. You are a traitor to this country.

First they told us that Kamala’s inexplicable laughter was joy. Next they’ll be telling us that her word salads taste great with dressing.

@DavidSacks So you support Putin, got it.

Oh look, somebody decided to collect every imbecilic take on the Ukraine war in one place.

@ClassicSophie Yes, and that soon the truth would be revealed to the world!. I’m still waiting at the edge of my seat.

@NoScienceDenial But when Trump sent his own "team" to Hawaii to investigate Obama's birth certificate, he claimed that we wouldn't "believe" what they found. To this day, he never revealed what they found. Weird...

@ianmSC You know nothing about the topic. Go away.

Excited to announce my new book, "Illusion of Control: COVID-19 & the Collapse of Expertise" is out today It’s a comprehensive examination of how and why Fauci, CDC, media and “Experts™” were wrong on masks, vaccine mandates & every other COVID decision amzn.to/3NYDWFx

@rkdoctr True. Check your DMs!

@PleasantHillCA You are rarely close to being accurate. It was 80f yesterday.

temperature up 7°C -> 9°C wind 11kmh -> 15kmh

@RJDownard @erichovind So true

@NoScienceDenial @erichovind Eric doesn't fact check what he believes, and may well be making a modest boodle on the mythology, twin incentives for him to be no more prone to changing his mind than his more blatantly grifting dad.

The Bible isn't just a random book. All 66 books, written over 1000s of years, point to one person and one message; the person of Jesus Christ and the message of salvation through Him.

@jacasiegel People judge SF by a small section with problems they saw on Fox News. Like if an earthquake hit and a few houses fell and everybody thinks the city was destroyed.

This is a subtweet at nearly everyone I have told that I am moving to San Francisco.

Hello, when someone tells you they are moving somewhere, please try not to respond with, “That place sucks” or “I would never move there” or “I would never want my daughter to move there.” It is not helpful or funny or whatever you think it is.

@jayvanbavel @jacasiegel The same goes for if they think the earth is 10,000 years old, and all land animals descended from those on a big boat 4000 years ago.

Biggest predictor of climate change beliefs is partisanship: Democrats are nearly 60% points higher than Republicans in believing climate change is a major threat!

@AngryExile @rkdoctr Interesting. I had no idea!

@NoScienceDenial @rkdoctr Apparently they’re having trouble changing it on iOS. Turns out Apple insist on minimum two character names on the App Store and it’s a rule they’ve never made an exception to for anyone else. Make of that what you will as far as things like forward planning goes.

@rkdoctr @wendelltalks Raises hand… Shakes it vigorously. I know, I know!

@ESYudkowsky Of course, if $150,000 will yield you $151,000 after the bet, that’s only two or three months worth of interest with zero risk.

I should probably also say: Kids, don't try this at home ($150K bets at 150:1 odds) unless you have read the literature on expert overconfidence, and tested your own calibration repeatedly.

P/S/B: UFOs are almost certainly not aliens, and this is knowable with study and thought. Perhaps you've heard that before. But it's not just empty words, this time; 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. Alien psychology would not be such as to (per Robin Hanson) stay mysterious and uncertain yet occasionally visible, in order to maximize their status. If aliens wanted to shape our opinions and had no rules against causal impacts on us, they could literally just rewrite our brains. If they wanted to leave us alone instead, we'd apparently be alone. If aliens wanted to accomplish Hanson's exact hypothetical end of gaining status in our eyes, there'd be much better strategies than generating disreputable UFO stories. 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". I don't need to know exactly what aliens are trying to do, to know that only a few and unlikely goals would imply a best possible strategy of flying around in sightable UFOs while staying otherwise hidden. We live in a world where people saying "that can't happen" is cheap; where supposed "experts" hardly even stop to think before they flap their mouths, rejecting out of hand any possibility that feels a little weird to them. An expert opinion like that often indicates little more intelligence than GPT-4 uses to respond; or less, if you count chain-of-thought prompting and tell GPT-4 to think out loud before it states or implies an answer. Plenty of Experts and Authorities said in early 2020 that Covid wouldn't be a big deal, and those words were not mistaken so much as empty air. So I'm communicating 'yes I really actually believe that' in a properly credible way, the way experts and authorities would do it in a saner world, by betting $150,000 to $1,000. You can't easily do that for bets about the world ending, but you can do it for bets about UFOs - which draw on much of the same background knowledge, even. (If I was somehow told with certainty that I would lose my bet, but not told the details, I would cry. With happiness and relief and hope. My present worldview is a grim one; anything that shatters my worldview is good news in expectation if not in certainty.) UFOs aren't aliens. You can approximately leave that possibility out of your thinking. I've studied some of what one needs to study, to know that a bit more surely. There's vast room above human intellect and human technology, and what that implies is this: if there are hidden aliens, they're successfully hiding. Like, actually successfully, without the whole UFOs thing. I don't promise that absolutely, of course. I'm no superintelligent alien myself, to know things like that. But I can still communicate what I believe, in a way that hopefully comes across. Not through the speech of promising things; not by the social act of requesting you to believe, or ordering you to believe; but by the act of betting. That's what an authoritative institution charged with evaluating the possibilities and telling people not to worry about (or hope for) would do in a sane world; on Earth, of course, it falls to me instead. ...though symmetrically, /users/RatsWrongAboutUAP on the LessWrong forum sure has credibly communicated that they think UFOs are a big weird deal. So it comes down to who you trust more, I guess? And whether you believe my models about superintelligent psychology and superintelligent technology? Because if you don't trust me about that model, which forms the basis of my own betting position--if you think I'm too sure about things like that--then /users/RatsWrongAboutUAP has sent a loud signal that they think they know something important that I don't. They've made over $5,000 total in bets, not just with me. lesswrong.com/posts/t5W87hQF…

@rkdoctr Definitely. I was torn watching the tweets come in several times per second. I felt an odd sense of relief when they stopped advancing.

@rkdoctr I don’t know if I want a Nazi who wants to nuke Ukraine, taking over Russia!