What cuts against this
If I only showed you the evidence that agrees with me, this would be a sales pitch. This page collects the findings I know of that complicate what I say, and what I take from each. I confirmed each paper’s title, authors, journal and year through Crossref. I have not read every one in full, so read them before you rely on my summary.
On the claim itself
- DoD news, March 2024. The Pentagon’s AARO historical review found no evidence of extraterrestrial technology. That is the official position, and I cannot show a document that contradicts it.
- Unresolved is not unexplained. France’s GEIPAN lists most of its cases as identified or lacking data, and only about 3.3 percent as having no rational explanation after investigation. Most cases that look strange get an ordinary answer once someone has the data.
On whether people give with nothing back
- Hoffman, McCabe, Shachat and Smith, Games and Economic Behavior, 1994. When a game was double blind, so no one could see what a person gave, people gave less. Giving when no one is watching is not as clean as my examples suggest.
- Levitt and List, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2007. Generosity in lab games may overstate what people do in real life. I lean on real cases for that reason, but cases are stories, not samples.
- Dear, Dutton and Fox, Evolution and Human Behavior, 2019. A meta-analysis of the watching-eyes effect. It found evidence that eyes reduce antisocial behavior and little that they make people more generous.
- Burger, American Psychologist, 2009. A partial replication of Milgram’s obedience study. Obedience stayed close to the original rate, and seeing someone else refuse did not change it. Example does not always move people.
- Choi and Bowles, Science, 2007. Models in which cooperation inside a group evolves together with hostility toward outsiders. Cooperation is real, and it can have an edge.
On whether the world is getting more peaceful
- Cirillo and Taleb, working paper, 2015. Argues that the post-1945 “long peace” is not statistically distinguishable from luck, given how rare and large wars are.
- Clauset, Science Advances, 2018. Finds that changes in the severity of interstate wars are hard to tell apart from chance. I should not lean on a trend that is not settled.
On fear and on transparency
- Tannenbaum and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2015. A meta-analysis finding that fear appeals do work, modestly. My claim has to be narrower than “fear does not work”: fear can buy compliance, and I doubt it buys sincere belief.
- Lindstedt and Naurin, International Political Science Review, 2010. Transparency alone does not reduce corruption. People also need to be able to see it, understand it and act on it.
- Lorenz, Rauhut, Schweitzer and Helbing, PNAS, 2011. Crowds get less accurate when people see one another’s answers first. Many hands only help if they judge independently.