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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I think this dramatically overstates the naΓ―vetΓ© of people pre-2018 about these issues. I think that people understood these issues of course. And everyone thinks that the Drake equation is a wildly simplistic model anyway.
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well, depends a lot on what you mean by "people" i guess. there's a broad range from astro domain experts to nick bostrom to science popularizers to laypeople. this point is nowhere to be found in nick bostrom's paper on the great filter for example:
nickbostrom.com/extraterrestri
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I havenβt read the paper tbh but have seen his arguments - will take a look. I did hear him on Sean Carrollβs podcast basically saying the Drake equation shouldnβt be taken too seriously. I donβt think btw that the Fermi paradox is totally resolved by...
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Noting the multiplicative nature of errors. For many of the factors in DE we have little concrete evidence for their values - itβs a guess. But if you grant that no one is there, then one or multiple of the unknown factors is close to zero, and we donβt
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