it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually
arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
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there was even an SSC post about this paper and still nobody knows about it smh
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just an embarrassing chapter in the intellectual history of humanity tbh. decades of ink spilled over what amounts to a failure to understand that the product of a bunch of independent random variables is ~lognormal (ish) and a highly uncertain lognormal has a very heavy tail
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my favorite point that isn't just "lol git gud at probability" is that the most uncertainty by far in the drake equation is about the rate at which earth-like planets produce life; they argue for uncertainty over 200 orders of magnitude which is where the tail comes from
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I would suggest that one paper does not a solved paradox make, and that, even if this were the case, the thinking around other solutions has been generally useful to humanity's understanding of its place in the universe
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I was aware of this! but I now feel some pretty gnarly fear thinking about the Fermi paradox or anything related because of Bostrom's "Where Are They"... have you read it?
nickbostrom.com/extraterrestri
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i think the sandberg-drexler-ord paper's analysis roughly implies that the great filter is most likely to be abiogenesis although i don't think they exactly say that so i'd have to think about it to be confident
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can't be *that* bad, there's all those numbers
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