Inspection Paradox (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Inspection Paradox (2015)

allendowney.blogspot.com

Another neat example is that 98% of the world's population lives in a country larger than the median.

A more interesting deduction is that humanity is probably atypical, and larger than the average extraterrestrial civilization. Any sentient observer is equally likely to be any single individual, but purely on statistical grounds it is more likely to be part of a larger group. There are further corollaries (see the linked paper), like that the average inhabitated planet is probably smaller than the Earth, the average alien probably has a longer lifespan, and they are probably larger than us in size. But in my opinion, these are a bit spurious as they hinge more on the unknown distribution of life over variables like species diversity, surface area, gravity etc...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07804

Is there a website or book that digs into this topic, what an extraterrestrial life would likely be like - to the best of our current knowledge? Or more generally about the search and likelihood's of finding them on x timescale, and the practical implications.

Overall the article is very informative. But I hit a Gell-Mann amnesia moment very early.

The author says: Airlines complain that they are losing money because so many flights are nearly empty. But airlines haven't complained about that in a while. Here's a quick google: https://www.statista.com/statistics/221085/passenger-load-fa...

Delta had a load factor of 85.6% last year. It would be hard to find "nearly empty" flights given that load factor. Many years ago airlines ran with 50% load factor. Nowadays they're selling most of their middle seats, most of the time!

> But I hit a Gell-Mann amnesia moment very early. [...] The author says: Airlines complain that they are losing money because so many flights are nearly empty. But airlines haven't complained about that in a while.

Is that the article being wrong, or is that just an older example? Keep in mind the article itself is from 2015, and all of the examples presented might not be up to date (since the author was listing ones that they've noticed over time). That's nowhere near what Crichton described: "You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect."

> It would be hard to find "nearly empty" flights given that load factor.

Isn't the load factor a type of average? In that case, there could be a number of flights with low occupancy, and a number with 100% occupancy. What we should look for is statistics about the frequency of airlines complaining about empty flights.

I also note the graph shows load factor from 2008 to 2017 and does not start from zero. it starts from 81.4% so there is a (small?) 4.2% improvement over almost a decade. To me, that shows an improvement but not evidence about how they have stopped complaining about some empty flights.

This is also why, even if Bitcoin blocks are mined every 10 minutes on average, the average size of the current waiting period between blocks is 20 minutes, when averaged over all moments in time.

I wonde if submitter found this blogpost after the recent discussion about Poisson processes.

As I pointed out there, Bitcoin blocks are not mined every 10 minutes on average, because hashpower changes. You can look up the actual average time over various periods of time here https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/block_time/all?f=m10&t=l This is not the graph of a pure poisson process.

Which discussion was that?

Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321062

Non-mobile link: https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-inspection-para...

The plural of "bus" is "buses".

"busses", refers to kissing.

That is all.

Nope, both spellings are fine: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/busses

British English vs American English :)

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