FFS those are "blueberries"! Honestly, this was the dumbest thing I have ever seen Robin Hanson tweet (and I say that with respect to Robin who usually tweets very high quality content).
Anyone who followed the Spirit and Opportunity rovers remembers how they studied the "blueberries" ad nausea.. even drilling into them and imaging them with a microscope. They even found one that was split in half and imaged that with the micrscope, IIRC. The rest of the pictures have very prosaic explanations. It was a weird seeing so many people get drawn into this paper -- wishful thinking, I guess. Yet, actually it's good there's no life -- if there was life Mars colonization would get harder because there would be concerns about humans ruining whatever ecosystem exists.
Great comment. I agree that Robin normally does really high quality content. I too was briefly fooled and excited, so I can't blame him much. But Hanson has kind of held onto it for a relatively long time now. Ultimately I think Hanson is strongly contrarian, which normally serves him well. But intellectuals can't be correct about everything. For example, I think Hanson is an incredibly thinker who has come out with a lot of really creative and singular hypotheses. At the same time, I think his stuff about how in the future all civilization will be a bunch of uploaded brains called "ems" is really stupid. Like, science fiction without the plot stupid. A lot of intellectual heavy-hitters are really variable and this is just one of those times where his variability didn't serve him well.
I don't think Hanson believes strongly the future will be ems, but he does think it's plausible, perhaps equally plausible to the AI takeover scenarios.
It wasn't just Hanson - I saw a rationalist who I otherwise respect post about it telling everyone they had to check it out, etc.
The funny thing is this isn't the first time this has happened... it's just the most high profile case, probably because of the trappings of being a journal paper (although I haven't seen any evidence it's actually been accepted for publication as the authors claim on ResearchGate). Ever since NASA/JPL started posting all the raw images online, there's been people making hay out of oddly shaped rocks and "rocks that move". Sometimes the culprit was the rover spinning its wheels and kicking up debris in unexpected ways.
FFS those are "blueberries"! Honestly, this was the dumbest thing I have ever seen Robin Hanson tweet (and I say that with respect to Robin who usually tweets very high quality content).
Anyone who followed the Spirit and Opportunity rovers remembers how they studied the "blueberries" ad nausea.. even drilling into them and imaging them with a microscope. They even found one that was split in half and imaged that with the micrscope, IIRC. The rest of the pictures have very prosaic explanations. It was a weird seeing so many people get drawn into this paper -- wishful thinking, I guess. Yet, actually it's good there's no life -- if there was life Mars colonization would get harder because there would be concerns about humans ruining whatever ecosystem exists.
Great comment. I agree that Robin normally does really high quality content. I too was briefly fooled and excited, so I can't blame him much. But Hanson has kind of held onto it for a relatively long time now. Ultimately I think Hanson is strongly contrarian, which normally serves him well. But intellectuals can't be correct about everything. For example, I think Hanson is an incredibly thinker who has come out with a lot of really creative and singular hypotheses. At the same time, I think his stuff about how in the future all civilization will be a bunch of uploaded brains called "ems" is really stupid. Like, science fiction without the plot stupid. A lot of intellectual heavy-hitters are really variable and this is just one of those times where his variability didn't serve him well.
I don't think Hanson believes strongly the future will be ems, but he does think it's plausible, perhaps equally plausible to the AI takeover scenarios.
It wasn't just Hanson - I saw a rationalist who I otherwise respect post about it telling everyone they had to check it out, etc.
The funny thing is this isn't the first time this has happened... it's just the most high profile case, probably because of the trappings of being a journal paper (although I haven't seen any evidence it's actually been accepted for publication as the authors claim on ResearchGate). Ever since NASA/JPL started posting all the raw images online, there's been people making hay out of oddly shaped rocks and "rocks that move". Sometimes the culprit was the rover spinning its wheels and kicking up debris in unexpected ways.