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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been really enjoying the recent pages! "the world is not a casino" is very catchy
meaningness.com/eggplant/proba
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Couldn’t the paradox re-emerge if we become more certain about the parameters
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#actually, I think you have misinterpreted Sandberg, Drexel, & Ord. (But that's OK: I think they misinterpret it too.)
Fermi: 1 of the numbers in the Drake Equation must be really low—& that's very surprising!
SDO: 1 of the numbers in the Drake Equation must be really low— 1/
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but given our almost complete lack of knowledge about these processes and the great uncertainty, that is not very surprising
TAKEAWAYS:
1. (At least) 1 of the numbers in the Drake Equation is really low
2. Log normal distributions are not normal. Log normals gotta log, 2/
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