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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Why is that?
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“Nobody thought of it before”? I heard arguments of it being ~zero back in the late 90s. The book “Rare Earth” (2004) by Ward & Brownlee mentions such possibilities. Here bretthall.org/rare-earth-bio I describe an argument from (~1998). Excerpt below
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Thanks a lot for posting about this! I had no idea.
I didn't get 'smh' in this context, was it an expression of frustration against the educational system, or the inefficient ways we have of dispelling stale ideas, or what? What should have gone better in this scenario? :)
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