How should you change your life decisions if we are being watched by alien drone probes?

I’ve asked a few people that question lately, and get either no answer or very exaggerated answers.

Rep. Burchett recently raised the possibility of being terrified and not sleeping at night if UAPs are aliens.  But even if that is your immediate response, you need a more constructive medium-term adjustment to the new situation.

One option would be to pray to the aliens as gods, but I do not recommend that.

Another option is to not change anything, on the grounds that the aliens (probably?) have not been interfering in earthly affairs.  Or if they have been interfering, they might be interfering in steady ways which are compatible with you continuing your previous life course.

That is mostly a defensible stance, but it hardly seems a true marginalist should make zero adjustments in light of the new and very radical piece of information.  If nothing else, you need to consider that other people will in time respond, and you will in turn want a response to their choices.

A third option is to write more about the aliens, so that when their presence is (partially?) revealed, you will rise in status and influence.

Should you buy more insurance?  But against what exactly?

Hold more defense stocks in your portfolio, if you anticipate more defense spending as the pending human reaction to the revelations?

Consume more?  Maybe.

The most plausible decision however is to slightly lower your level of ambition.  Consider a few of the core scenarios.

If the aliens go rogue on us and end it all, the efforts you might be making now will have been for naught.

If the aliens are here to cap the level of human achievement, for instance to keep us on Earth and prevent us from exploring the galaxy, yet without harm, you also can scale back your ambition a bit.  You do not need to invest so much capital in supporting the space program.  Most of your more local ambitions however should remain untouched.  You might even become more ambitious in keeping the Earth a safe place, since escape hatches are now less likely.  Alternatively, you might think the aliens are our “saviors of last resort,” but that too probably makes you less ambitious.

A more general Bayesian update is simply that human efforts, in the broader scheme of things, have lower relative marginal products than you might have thought.  The aliens apparently have lots of powers, at least if they managed to get here.  That too militates in favor of lowering your ambitions.  Conversely, if you start believing we are the only intelligent, agentic beings in the galaxy, arguably you should increase your ambitions.  There will be fewer outside forces to stop, limit, or reverse your efforts.

To be clear, in this Bayesian update large numbers of people still should increase their ambitions, since they were not optimizing in the first place.  But they should increase those ambitions slightly less than one used to think.  And in some areas, perhaps they should not increase their ambitions at all.

Finally, you should not decrease your ambitions a lot.  For one thing, you may need an ongoing high level of energy and ambition to deal with the changes that aliens — or even the perceptions of alien presence — will bring to earthly civilization.  Furthermore, since any alien-induced uncertainty about the future is very hard to model, most people will do best by simply continuing on their current tracks.  It makes no sense to start waving around a sword to scare off the alien drone probes.

Nonetheless, some of your more extreme ambitions should be carved back just a wee bit.  Sorry about that.

I guess it is a good thing nobody is watching then.