In your opinion, what is the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox?
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i was partly convinced that this was somewhat overstating the case, but: bad statistics
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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 like this answer because it is not at all sexy. you can't construct a short story based on this premise
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I found it pleasantly thought provoking but really it all boils down to assuming log uniform distributions of the uncertainty. Why would one do that?
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i think 1) they're relatively easy to simulate and 2) the authors' broader claim is that it would take a strong argument to justify a log distribution that is substantially more concentrated than that. the conclusion should be very robust to changing the distribution moderately
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Well in my mind no number is more likely than another number and no order of magnitude is more likely than any other order of likelihood. This state of uncertainty canโt be modelled by a probability distribution, yet I suspect itโs how most people see the issue.
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well if that's your state of uncertainty then the fermi paradox also dissolves because you admit to knowing nothing whatsoever about the likely number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, right?
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I don't see how that follows. There is a definitely a sense that the existing theories can't definitively account for why you'd see nobody else in the galaxy. One can think of this as Fermi's incompleteness rather than paradox but it's a real question either way.
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ah, i see what you mean, nvm. yeah, that makes sense. so you're like "we know almost nothing a priori about what this number should turn out to be, it appears to be ~1, that's a weirdly specific number huh"?
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that doesn't smell right to me. it's breaking the symmetry between us and other possible civilizations in the galaxy in possible worlds where there's more than one. but i'm not particularly confident about any kind of anthropic reasoning ๐
They also have to assume there's at least one, right? Not sure how the symmetry is broken