Sports media
Prestige media
Scientific American: Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding
Guardian: The alien hunter: has Harvard’s Avi Loeb found proof of extraterrestrial life?
“All of this would be terribly exciting if it were true”
Sabrina Imbler at Defector tells the story:
How did Loeb manage to pinpoint the stretch of ocean where the microscopic fragments of a former fireball might have sunk five years ago? His team targeted a seven-mile region in the Pacific Ocean based on the obscured sensor data from the U.S. military satellites, which was released publicly through CNEOS, as well as data from a seismometer from Manus Island, located near where the meteor fell. All of this would be terribly exciting if it were true.
On March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, several scientists presented early evidence that directly refutes Loeb’s claims, Nature reported . . .
The second, funnier refutation, is directed at the seismic data Loeb examined to home in on the meteor’s landing spot. When Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins University, examined the ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station on Manus Island, he found no evidence of seismic waves from a meteor. Instead, he noticed the signal Loeb cites “changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” Fernando said in a press release, suggesting that the “alien sound” was actually a heavy truck driving to and from the hospital. . . .
If the sound of the meteor was merely a truck, what did the actual meteor sound like? In their preprint, Fernando’s team examined data from stations in Australia and Palau equipped with sensors to detect sound waves from nuclear tests and found waves that seemed to resemble a meteor hitting the atmosphere—more than 100 miles from the spot Loeb investigated. . . .
Hey, what’s going on here?
Imbler continues:
Loeb built an establishment career over decades publishing hundreds of papers on standard astronomical stuff—black holes, dark matter, etc.—and ascended to various directorships at Harvard. All this changed in 2017, when a cigar-shaped object named ‘Oumuamua soared through our solar system from another. . . .
Loeb published a paper suggesting ‘Oumuamua could be a form of space travel called a lightsail, and therefore a sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Since then, Loeb has pivoted to aliens, a focus that has skyrocketed his public profile. If you do not read Loeb’s blog, you can read Loeb’s books, read about Loeb in a series of glossy magazine profiles, listen to Loeb on Joe Rogan and other podcasts . . .
And some perspective:
None of this is surprising, of course, because this is what celebrity scientists do . . . . They preach from their pulpits, extrapolating bizarre connections from their putative fields to completely unrelated issues. They simply must go on Joe Rogan. . . . They leap at the chance to show their faces, no matter the context, which is how Neil deGrasse Tyson has made cameos no one asked for in such illustrious films as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, even playing the astrological sign Taurus in Jennifer Lopez’s self-financed $20 million dollar autofictional music video . . . They hog attention, both in fawning stories about their work and stories about the researchers who inevitably question their work. . . .
Imbler concludes:
No field of science should be associated with a face. It’s telling that a newcomer to the search for intelligent life like Loeb has become the figurehead for SETI in seven years when a researcher like Jill Tarter, a SETI pioneer who is the inspiration for the film Contact, is not mentioned once in the New York Times Magazine profile of Loeb, “How a Harvard Professor Became the World’s Leading Alien Hunter.” (Loeb infamously yelled at Tarter during a public webinar after she critiqued his characterization of the field that she worked in for more than 40 years.) When we give attention to celebrity scientists, even in the form of much-needed critiques, without spotlighting the researchers who are doing the real, grueling, longterm work that doesn’t always lead to sensational claims and is therefore left out of the discourse, we are still only promoting the celebrity scientist and their many money-making projects. . . .
So with that, let this be the first and last time I write anything about Loeb, whose work I only want to encounter after it has been translated and contextualized by his critics. And in the case of the spherules, Fernando told Scientific American, “I think they’ve found some sludge.”
Stick to sports
So . . . what happened? How did Scientific American, the Guardian, and NPR get conned? The answer is, they didn’t get conned. They wanted clicks, they got clicks. Many of the news media articles on this space aliens guy cover their butts, just a little, by pointing to skeptics. But not in a balanced way. The Scientific American article has three paragraphs about Loeb and only one paragraph about his skeptics, followed by an interview with Loeb featuring no tough questions. The Guardian article has a question mark in its title—good for them!—but the actual article, which is 16 paragraphs long, has only three and a half paragraphs expressing any skepticism. Etc.
Journalists have a reputation for skepticism. But, as we’ve discussed in the past in the context of Gladwell/Freakonomics/NPR/Ted/etc., credulity is a kind of superpower for a journalist. If you’re willing to believe, you can write these clickety-click stories with no pangs of conscience.
There’s also the scientist-as-hero thing, which I absolutely hate, especially when “Harvard” or “Nobel Prize” are involved.
So how did sports site Defector nail it? I think it’s because, if you’re a sports journalist, you get familiar with stories where rich guys make stuff up and get fawning media coverage. From that perspective, this Harvard dude with the space aliens isn’t so different from some zillionaire who greases the local politicians and press in order to get funding for a new stadium.
Last word
As a Reddit commenter put it:
I honestly find it impressive how Avi Loeb took a statistically quite impressive track record for a scientist and entirely trashed it within a few years.
P.S.
OK, the prestige media aren’t all bad. Palko points to this Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, “Sensational claim of possible alien debris hits a science speed bump.”
This is hilarious. Thanks for posting about it.
Why are people’s “priors” on things like aliens so vulnerable to obviously implausible nonsense?
It isn’t really about aliens. It’s about an object that was observed in the sky, deemed to be a meteor but moving much faster than usual.
One explanation for this “excess” speed is an interstellar origin.
One explanation for interstellar origin is aliens.
Then they tried to guess where it landed based on the astronomical observations. A signal was also found in some seismograph data from nearby the expected site.
One explanation for this signal is the impact of the object.
Finally, they went and dredged up the putative landing site and found some magnetic spherules with somewhat unusual composition.
One explanation for this composition is the spherules had extraterrestrial origin.
You can see the problem is not at all with priors, it is with considering one explanation in isolation. The correct thing to do is use bayes rule to compare the plausibility of the various proposed explanations. And yes this includes aliens and “god put it there”.
PS, this is hilarious:
So invisible stuff that exists only as deviations from theoretical calculations is ok but not meteorites from other solar systems. I really LOLed at this.
Sure, if you ignore his tons of stuff about aliens, it’s not about aliens.
To be fair, I skimmed the journal/arxiv articles instead of the news. Those who (only) read the news about it will have a highly distorted view.
In terms of entertainment, the NPR/etc are fine. But for information purposes, they only serve to cite some source where we can hope to figure out what is actually going on. And often we don’t even get that.
” …standard astronomical stuff—black holes, dark matter, etc.
So invisible stuff that exists only as deviations from theoretical calculations…”
I’m not an astrophysicist or anything close to that. But it is my understanding that, as opposed to dark matter, which _is_ invoked to explain a deviation from the calculations of general relativity (GR), black holes are, in fact, predicted by GR*. And while black holes, by their very nature, cannot be directly seen, there is abundant evidence of their existence based on observation of their predicted effects on their surroundings.
*GR characterizes black holes as singularities in space time. It is questionable whether this corresponds to physical reality, since conditions of extreme gravitational fields in small volumes of space probably need to take quantum effects into account. So, GR’s characterization of black holes is not entirely correct. Nevertheless, abstracting away from the specifics of the most interior region of a black hole, the existence of such things is definitely predicted by GR.
I was referring to Dark matter.
But after looking into it a bit, I saw “Black holes” in the general (Massive dark star) sense are also predicted by Newtonian mechanics. And in the specific (divide by zero) “singularity” sense Einstein denied them multiple times:
https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.48.73
https://old.phys.huji.ac.il/~barak_kol/Courses/Black-holes/reading-papers/Einstein1939.pdf
He did like wormholes though.
“The correct thing to do is use bayes rule to compare the plausibility of the various proposed explanations. And yes this includes aliens and “god put it there”.
If you do this sort of thing in a serious way, such as a Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis, you don’t put “god put it there” and “aliens” on the cause tree. Ironically, in engineering, the rather sardonic term for this concept (as it was taught to me) is “comet strike,” with the idea that everything MORE likely than a comet strike should be put on the tree, but not a comet strike itself or anything even more implausible.
Everything on the tree – whether predicting future incidents or trying to figure out the root cause of past ones – requires either a mitigation or evaluative test, and there is no mitigation or test for “god put it there” or “aliens did it.”
When calculating 100/(100+300+1) its not a big deal to ignore the one in the denominator most of the time. It is a convenient approximation, but not correct per se.
I’m not sure why I bother responding to this, but: either some variant of dark matter or some modification of gravity at large scales is required to explain our measurements of the CMB and the flattening of galactic rotation curves, as well as other observations e.g. the clustering of galaxies. You can argue for one or the other, but the evidence we have gathered so far indicates that GR alone is insufficient in explaining this.
This isn’t the first time, but one really is reminded of “Gell-Mann amnesia” when one comes across comments like these from frequent posters — although for that to really hold it usually has to from a contributor who you otherwise trust on subjects you aren’t familiar with. That ship has sailed long ago.
I am especially sad to see this happen to the Scientific American. I still have fond memories of reading their Mathematical Games column as a kid. First that, always, then the issue from cover to cover. The good old days when clicks were not a concept.
Angela Collier covers Avi Loeb nonsense beautifully (a long video tho):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI
meant to say to focus specifically on the Av Loeb part start at 24 mins