LanceHunter posted:

So this Tuesday's episode of the Ezra Klein show had an interview with Leslie Kean, one of the reporters who did the big story in The Debrief about Grusch.

Klein seems emotionally sympathetic to Kean and her position, but basically gives her enough rope to hang herself and completely wipe out any credibility to her story. By the end, without Klein outright stating so, it becomes clear that Kean has either been duped or is a con artist herself.

(Slightly tangental rant incoming...)

As much as we recognize the UFO folks as kooks, I think there needs to be the same level of skepticism leveled against the SETI-types who try to cloak the same fundamentally religious desire for communication with a higher power in a thin veneer of "hard" science. These types always try to claim that the universal nature of math should allow a basis for communication, or they hand-wave away a lot of fundamental questions with the imaginary concept of "hyperintelligence". Like, look at this laughable poo poo:



The number of wild assumptions that are being made here are absolutely astounding. The biggest one being that some completely unknown lifeform out there would even have a concept of two-dimensional representational images.

I get that funding was hard to find after we landed on the moon a few times, and telling these kinds of stories made for a great hook to get Congress to cough up some coin. But I think it really blurred the line between legitimate science and pseudoscience for a couple of generations, and we are still feeling the effects of that now in our culture.

I think the problem of comprehensibility is the biggest one out there for anyone who is claiming that they are searching for intelligent life outside of Earth. I personally think we should set this standard: Until we can teach a whale to do calculus, we shouldn't even begin to claim that we could communicate with anything that might be out there. Until we can find a way to communicate that level of abstract concept with the sufficiently intelligent lifeforms on our own planet that already share 80% of our DNA, then even pretending that we can communicate anything out there has about as much scientific grounding as saying that angels will hear our prayers.