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
Conversation
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 never had this explicit understanding of the problems involved, but my instinctive reaction to people who discussed Fermi paradox was always "man, you care a lot about those numbers you pulled out of your ass".
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