What weird beliefs do you have?

I love the idea, but I’m sceptical based on genetics. Our civilisation has moved a lot of species around, from stuff like bringing placental mammals to Australia to things like exporting food crops around the world. Potatoes evolved in the Americas, now you can find them everywhere. Soy beans came from Japan / East Asia but now they’re heavily cultivated in Brazil. 
 

I assume that any previous industrial civilisation, even if it were less adaptable than humans, would probably have spread outside of its home continent, if only to look for oil and minerals. And they’d end up introducing species all over the place, like we have, and modern day geneticists should be scratching their heads and trying to figure out all sorts of mysteries about what evolved where. But so far as I know (I’m not an evolutionary biologist) we just don‘t have those sort of mysteries where species categories suddenly jump continents.

So, sadly, I don’t think that the Earth has had a previous industrial civilisation at least since Australia separated from the other continents. I wouldn’t rule out previous pre-industrial civilisations, though. In fact, given the wide variety of species today which demonstrate at least some tool use - not just great apes but also capuchin monkeys, corvids, even octopuses - I’d be surprised if no previous species ever got to at least homo erectus level.

Ok, that does sound wierd. Do I understand correctly, that you postulate a PETM civilization that had developed sufficient technology to extract fossil fuels (as source of negative D13 carbon) to explain the observed carbon and climate? What population and per capita energy extraction rates did you factor? And if they let no trace, presumably they somehow found all this FF very close to Antarctica? If so, I think I would struggle to assign even 0.1% weight to this hypothesis compared to competing hypotheses. It has the feel of an invisible dragon in the garage to me.

Thinking about this some more, if there was an industrial civilisation at the PETM I think it would be most likely marine based. (Maybe cephalopods?)

I previously asked myself what evidence we would see if there was a prior industrial civilisation on Earth and I came up with 1) transfer of biological species to other continents as per my previous comments 2) depletion of fossil fuels (I don't remotely know enough geology to begin to answer the question of whether we are 'missing' fossil fuels that ought to be there) and 3) technofossils especially plastics. I only commented about 1) because that's the one I thought the most compelling argument.

But actually, a marine civilisation accounts for all three arguments. The oceans were and are connected, so it's not a surprise to find the same species in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. And the oceans are severely under-studied so we'd be much less likely to notice any oddities. We're also much less likely to notice missing fossil fuels under water (yes our civilisation drills in the sea if it's shallow enough but it's less explored and less understood than the land). And the odds of us finding fossils under the seabed are practically zero. (Unless there's a good area where what was seafloor at the PETM is now uplifted into a landmass?)

We still have a complete absence of evidence that any such civilisation existed, but I might join you in giving it a 5% possibility. 

And now my mind goes down more speculative routes - what does the tech tree of a marine civilisation look like? They couldn't have fire, therefore no metalworking or pottery. Is there some other basic technology, as hard-to-imagine for us terrestrials as fire would be to a stone-age squid? (Maybe: can you exploit large changes in water pressure to change the properties of wood or other materials? Could a marine civ drop or lower objects a couple of kilometres down, leave them for a while, and then retrieve them, and would that produce useful changes?) How would a civilisation without fire invent combustion engines or steam turbines or other ways to get energy out of fossil fuels? Hmm. I will stop now before I spend all day going down this rabbit hole.

Good post.

I have wondered about this myself actually. 

The sad thing is that if we mess it up, there is not enough time before the sun renders multicellular life untenable on earth to restore fossil fuels. So for earth we are the last roll of the dice.

Amazing. This is the best thing I've read all week. How do I subscribe to your newsletter? When is the novelization coming out?

That is weird.

Someone has actually written up a scientific paper discussing the hypothesis that the PETM or other events in the geologic record was caused by a prior industrial civilisation. (If you're one of the authors, I apologise for telling you something you already know, but if you're not, I thought you might be interested.) The short version is that there's no smoking gun, but they can't rule it out either. 

One item the authors don't go into, which I think is relevant, is the question of whether there are missing fossil fuels. Google tells me that pretty much all existing fossil fuels were formed at least 65 million years ago, which I think makes it unlikely that the PETM 55mya was a previous industrial civilisation, because they'd have burned those fuels instead of leaving them for us to find. But I have zero geological expertise, so someone who knows better than me might be able to pick holes in that argument.

I had some exposure to this issue a couple of years ago. I got a speeding ticket, which eventually I got off of. 

During this process I documented the government making 26 different errors in all. Starting with the speed limit sign that did not comply with their own standards for speed limit signs in 3 different ways....

So I suspect that huge numbers of things go wrong in government all the time and are not noticed. What % of prisoners get checked as required? What fraction of video cameras are out of order at any given time? So the argument "Aha! The camera just 'happened' to be out of order!" is not as compelling to me as you might expect.

Tho' it would not be surprising that JE was taken out. He seems to have operated a blackmail operation in part and no doubt a few people breathed a sigh of relief on hearing of his fate. But I don't know.

Add on the probability of "intentionally allowed to commit suicide" on top of that and the total odds seemingly become high indeed.

I would give it maybe 40%, because on one hand it was very convenient for many people... and because similar situations certainly happened in the past, I would assume there would be processes designed to prevent such accidents... and if it happened regardless... On the other hand, people are generally incompetent, so you should expect them to screw up.

(Knowing more about what is "normal" in prisons could make me change the estimate.)

so maybe it's not a "weird" belief except when compared against the mass media/"elite" narrative.

Yup, there can be a huge difference between comparing against the beliefs of:

• average people,
• smart people,
• media,
• Less Wrong.

there’s no fact of the matter where the electron is before it’s observed, it’s in both places and you have self locating uncertainty.”

OTOH, realism isn't defined as every observable having a simultaneous sharp value.

Verificationismism in the sense of the logical positivists is a theory of meaning. According to this theory, kowing the meaning of a statement p would amount to knowing the conditions under which it would be true and under which it would be false. (To give it a Bayesian slant, I like to widen this as "knowing what would be evidence for/against p). Is it this what you have in mind?

Verificationismism in this sense was used against postulating transcendent entities or state of affairs. Something is transcendent if it is beyond every possible experience. Therefore there is nothing which could verify of falsify facts about it. The logical positivists argued on the basis of verificationismism that statements about transcendent things (certain conceptions of God for example) are meaningless. Not false, but meaningless.

(Verificationismism lost a lot of popularity in the 1950s and 60s because there was very little progress in making the notion precise. Also, some apparently unverifiable theories (e.g. in astronomy) seemed to be perfectly meaningful. Whether those problems can be met I don't know. Another point is that verificationismism was meant only as a condition of meaningfulness of so-called synthetic statements. Statements are synthetic iff their truth depends not only in their meaning. In contrast, the truth of "analytic" statements only depends on their meaning. The logical positivists assumed that logical and mathematical statements were analytic. Since verificationismism doesn't apply to the meaning of those latter statements, it arguably isn't a theory of meaning in the general sense.)

But, provided you speak about this notion, why would verificationismism lead to external world anti-realism? Because statements like "there is a tree in my garden" cannot be truly "verified" -- because there might be no garden and no tree, and I might instead be deceived by a Cartesian demon?

For the "wider" conception mentioned above this wouldn't be a problem I think. Having the visual impression of a tree is at least some evidence for there being a tree, even though there might be no tree. Then the statement is meaningful.

On the narrower conception and with a strict sense of "verification" the statement "There is a tree in my garden" would indeed be meaningless. Because there is apparently no experience which would verify or falsify it definitely. The same would be true about all other synthetic statements about the world. This wouldn't mean that those statements are false and that external reality doesn't exist: It would "only" mean thst those statements are meaningless. But here is the problem for this theory: It is obviously not meaningless to say that there is a tree in my garden.

One could argue that synthetic statements aren't really about external reality: What we really mean is "If I were to check, my experiences would be as if there were a tree in what would seem to be my garden". Then our ordinary language wouldn't be meaningless. But this would be a highly revisionary proposal. We arguably don't mean to say something like the above. We plausibly simply mean to assert the existence of a real tree in a real garden.

So I would argue that "evidence verificationismism" is much more plausible than "definite verification/falsification verificationismism". The former would not lead to the conclusion that synthetic statements about the world are meaningless. Nor would it be in need of radical revisionism about the meaning of ordinary language.

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One of my own weird beliefs is very close to this one: Huge amounts of everything accepted by modern western medicine and psychology today was used by people in some way before being "scientifically" explained. Whether we're talking about using compounds from particular plants to treat particular ailments, or using particular psychological tricks to alter peoples' thoughts and behavior, science is literally eating magic's lunch because "magic" is often where science looks to get ideas for hypotheses to test.

Because of this history, and the history of science being very confidently wrong about many things in the past, I don't find it problematic to use personally pieces of "magic" or "superstition" as lifestyle or cognitive building blocks when they suit a particular purpose better than the available scientific ones.

Then again, I think that what "most people" need to learn from a foray into the occult is the ability to build their own systems to meet their needs, rather than just raw weirdness.

I  believe there is a nontrivial chance that plants experience consciouness. Like maybe 20% or so? I haven't thought about it carefully, and it would require a more operationalized definition of consciousness to assign a solid credence. I thought of this belief before reading the comments and was somewhat surprised to find another person espousing it.

Does this include extreme examples, such as pieces of information that permanently damage your mind when exposed to, or antimemes [? · GW]?

Have you made any changes to your personal life because of this?

At a more concrete level, I've spent the last ~14 months holding strong and unusual views on most pandemic-related matters, though I don't think any of them would raise eyebrows on LessWrong. A minority are probably now mainstream, the others - unfortunately - remain weird.

I sort of believe in something like this, except without the magical bits. It motivates me to vote in elections and follow the laws also when there is no effective enforcement. Maybe it is a consequence of reading Pratchett's Discworld novels when I was in impressionable age. 

My mundane explanation (or rationalization) is a bit difficult to write, but I believe it is because of:

>It gets in people's minds.

When people believe something, it affects their behavior. Thus memetic phenomena can have real effects.

As an example I feel is related to this, I half-believe that believing in magical rationalizations[1] can also enable good societal outcomes, as long as enough people believe that also other people believe them, and it facilitates trust.

Have you read Joseph Conrad's Nostromo? It deals with how valuable things and what they do affect people's behavior, both on the societal scale (how corruption in imaginary South American state of Costaguano seeds more corruption) and personal scale.

[1] "if I vote in the national elections, it somehow makes difference, maybe because then more people like me are encourage to vote in elections" and "if I obey the law of not serving alcohol to underage people when there is no probably harm to them from it, or stop at the traffic signs at deserted street in midnight, the world somehow becomes a better place because world would be better place if more people followed the laws". 

I don’t follow the last bit. If ghosts were real, the first-order news would be amazing: maybe humanity wouldn’t have truly lost the brain-information of any human, ever!

A significant set of possible models of such phenomena result in them being irreducibly personal and subjective, hampering detailed analysis.

Selection effects are computationally prohibitive to back out of data. If you have a very large combinatorial space and a sufficiently permissive filter one in a million things are happening constantly.

I investigated this by wielding it with intention as a teenager. I would choose something to notice and treat as meaningful, and then watch the rest of the system pattern match adjacent things a lot (synchronicity).

How is that different than say the CIA taking ESP seriously, MKULTRA etc?

That's certainly a weird combination, but I doubt it's the right way to combine those ingredients... 

There is an objective measure, but it's content free. In the 1960's psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg noticed any moral opinion, irrespective of the direction it went (for or against something), always fits into one of six different patterns, one more cognitively complex than the other, all of them organized into a hierarchical sequence individuals pass through in order as their cognitive abilities develop, which he called stages of moral development. This theory of his was then determined to be psychometrically sound, and to provide reproducible results.

Field studies all over the world since then have shown the six stages in an adult population follow a Normal distribution, with some limited variance due to culture and ethnicity, but not much. In other words, when an individual reaches full maturity, by their mid-30's or so, they've usually arrived at the maximum stage they'll be stuck with for life, which suggests there are genetic and/or environmental causes for this cognitive limitation.

Hence, while what someone will consider "right" or "wrong" isn't determined by the stage they're in (those are influenced by group affiliation, culture, personal history, formal education, and many other factors), how they go about reasoning about moral decisions does indeed follow objectively measureable patterns.

Untangling the multiple negatives, this says that there is at most a 1% chance that the administration had foreknowledge or involvement. Is that what you intended?