I’ve been thinking; there are lots of supposedly weird mysteries regarding aliens, secret technologies and other hush-hush shit that’s been covered up in America over the decades, and it created the impression that the Americans have who-knows-what secret shit they’re not telling anyone about, stuff developed in cooperation with aliens, or remote viewing capabilities using psychics and so on.
Let’s see, the Philadelphia experiment – they supposedly had a ship equipped with some kind of a magnetic device that caused weird phenomena and reportedly teleported from one place to another and so on. It was in 1943. The most likely explanation I found is that there was a shipment of uranium for the Manhattan project and they had to make up a story explaining enhanced security when they were unloading and storing it. By apparently confirming that there was some secret military experiment going on, they explained away everything they wanted to hide, provided an explanation that sounded completely unrealistic and bound to waste a potential adversary’s time, and it also creates a veil of mystery around American scientific and technological capabilities. It’s a triple-win.
The Roswell UFO incident. Supposedly a hush-hush military operation of recovering the fragments of an alien spacecraft, including the actual aliens. Cover story is that it was a meteorological balloon. A more likely explanation is that Roswell is very close to the White Sands missile base and all sorts of nuclear installations, and who knows what kind of an accident they had with nuclear or other secret military hardware that they didn’t want anyone to know about, since it was 1947, at the height of the cold war paranoia when all sorts of weapons were being developed and tested. When journalists started talking about the aliens and a cover-up, this must have been perceived as an excellent thing by the military – any possible inquiry will be redirected into total nonsense, and they can even invent some of it to keep the story going, and, if anything, it will scare the Russians and make them think we’re stronger than we are.
Area 51 in Nevada. Supposedly a place where the military keeps the UFOs and aliens and stuff. Later revealed that it was probably used for testing the U-2 spy plane. Let’s assume it was also used for testing stealth aeroplanes and similar equipment. Let’s make a further jump and assume it was used to test stealth nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and similar stuff that was prohibited by the START treaty and the Russians couldn’t know about it. You first let out rumours that you’re keeping the aliens there. When the Russians ask to inspect it, you tell them that you have stealth aeroplanes and all sorts of spy shit there that you can’t let them inspect, but none of it’s START-related, scout’s honour. If you let the information leak through a double agent or some other source the Russians trust, they will believe it.
Remote viewing. You let everybody know that the CIA is experimenting with remote viewing and parapsychology in order to peek into Soviet secret facilities. You actually do keep a team working on it, in order to make it plausible. In reality, it serves the purpose of protecting a spy you have in the Soviet facility, whose identity would have been compromised if something became public that nobody could possibly know about unless he’s on the inside.
Basically, it’s a double-whammy: you hide what you want to hide by pretending to hide something extraordinarily weird and advanced, and you also create the impression that you have stuff that’s completely “out there”, while your adversaries are “mere humans” with ordinary human technology; and if the entire story is debunked, the real secret is still safe. It’s all guesswork on my part, but it provides a very simple and straightforward explanation for lots of very weird stuff that’s been “leaked” over the decades, but eventually nothing ever came of it. It’s also very much in line with the Americans always creating an impression that there’s more to their technology than there actually is, and there’s much more going on than anyone is allowed to know.
One UFO incident that I found interesting was the Tic Tac UFO, but although there’s enough evidence of something, there’s also not enough data to figure out what it was, which is typical for UFO sightings:
https://youtu.be/aB8zcAttP1E?t=4264
It’s also conceivable that the guy was planted by the Army to fuel UFO speculations. He actually admits that he faked appearance of UFOs as a joke, so maybe the whole Tic Tac incident is just a more elaborate version of those jokes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRM8AMrqqsc
Basically, I stopped caring about those reports since nothing concrete ever materialized from this direction over the decades; it’s a nothing-burger.
One maybe less obvious thing which dispels Area 51/UFO stories is that there is quite enough of madmen in the US government structures, that if they really did have some extreme mil-sci advantage over Russians and Chinese, they would have used it by now. Instead, they struggle with totally expected problems. For example Americans have problems creating their version of Zircon (manoeuvrable hypersonic rocket). But, they have barely managed to create their version of Avangard hypersonic glider (Dark Eagle in the US). They struggle for example with maintenance/operations software for F-35 (ALIS), and don’t have some amazing out-worldly alien AI software tech, which just writes whatever software they need in a few seconds, without bugs. In fact the “smartest” AI currently is a statistical sentence finishing artificial neural network (ChatGPT) which is more or less bullshit.
All the systems they build in various military areas are “conventional”, i.e. somebody else on the planet is also doing something similar, and efforts can be relatively easily copied by the other team (there is no magical ingredient). For example Americans just made a new radar for aircraft, which can work in all modes (air and ground) at once, track targets in extremely targeted way (using “beams” just directed into a small area), and can use different frequency for every transceiver in the array. Yeah, cool, but not alien tech. It just requires Russians and Chinese now to take the idea of how it works and implement it using the technological base which is more appropriate to them. On the other hand Russians developed “Penicillin” counter-battery detection system which does not use radar as the others, but just passively detects IR and sound and based on advanced processing locates all sorts of battlefield mortars, tanks, howitzers etc. and US has to catch up to that.
In any case it all looks very conventional, there are no real quantum leaps, that would require insight into alien technology to be plausible.
I tested ChatGPT yesterday, in a very straightforward way – I asked it “What can you tell me about Danijel Turina?”
It wrote a pretty decent generic article, except that it had almost all the facts wrong, and when I repeated the query it had them wrong again, in different ways. If someone didn’t know the facts, they would have been fooled into thinking that this is an awesome thing, but it’s worse than google.
For instance, it got my age wrong, it correctly said that I’m a writer and a philosopher, but it got all the books wrong; didn’t name a single one I wrote, but named five or so that I didn’t write. Also stated that I graduated on several university studies that I didn’t, and so on. Literally, the only thing it got right is managing to write a coherent article, but I can’t even guess how it managed to get the facts so wrong. Basically, it sounds like American articles about other countries. They manage to get the names of the countries right, and they have lots of emotions, but every single fact manages to be wrong.
I looked at part of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLnhg9kir3Q because Stephen Wolfram actually does know how ChatGPT works, and was quite surprised that the thing is literally the statistical sentence finishing engine. It knows what the next letter, sentence, paragraph etc. should be based on statistics (which is based on parsed text of all pages on the internet, contents of books and a few other sources) and that is after a lot of technobabble more or less it.
Basically, it’s qualified to be a journalist in the main stream media. 🙂
According to ChatGPT, I’m a professional tennis player from Split. 🙂 Apparently, “Croatian tennis player” gets statistically relevant number of mentions on the Internet, and my name was recognized as Croatian.
It’s a garbage in, garbage out kind of thing, and it rewrites and hides sources which I would simply ignore in a normal Google search as not credible, so the major rule is don’t trust ChatGPT, just like you don’t trust everything you read on Internet. It appears that version which is embedded into Bing gives sources, which will definitely be an improvement. Bing version is also connected to Internet, and I expect it to perform pretty well in queries like “give me 10 major tech news stories in the last week”.
That said, it’s incredibly useful for certain purposes. I’m using it a lot for coding, and it regularly saves me a bunch of googling. The fact that it’s confidently wrong most of the time doesn’t matter with coding, as I can simply run the code, see if it works, and tell it to rewrite it if necessary, and it is aware of a context which is wonderful as you can train it to focus on the stuff you need. For example, I’ve had it write CSS, HTML and Javascript of a simple site with a text form and a submit button, then had it rewrite it all to ClojureScript, then do the same but without using Reagent. Then I used it as a template in my own project. Then I had it create a generic FAQ for the same project, and it spat out some generic questions and answers, some of which were useful, which I modified into a real FAQ. In other words, I plugged in my own algorithm, but saved a ton of time on cosmetics and boilerplate code which typically has me googling for hours in order to find specific syntax or some stupid CSS trick that works in all browsers.
It’s also great for searching recipes, for example “give me 3 taco recipes with beans and cheese that can be made in a single pan while camping.” No ads, no food porn videos, just ingredients and instructions.
I’ve also used it for stock research and it did very well – for example, I’ve had it list major companies in quantum computing field, then had it explain strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and then I did some queries on what projects they were involved with and what happened to a certain founder which is no longer with that company. Then I had it list me websites of all companies we talked about, and went on to read quarterly reports, and googled specific stuff from there. It’s great for establishing general context and finding out who the players are, which Google sucks at, but then you have to dig deeper yourself and fact check it.
Trouble is, this thing is so good at creating seemingly coherent content, that once content managers start using it to generate daily and weekly content to rank higher on search engines, it will completely drown out any hint of information on the Internet in pure noise. Especially when it gets fed all that generated Internet content back in a sort of a feedback loop, kind of reverse technological singularity.