The Big Alien Theory
thebigalientheory.com
thebigalientheory.com
I'm myself not a mathematician, but I believe I understand his argument, and I see no fallacies. Everything he's written falls out of assuming power laws govern the pertinent quantities. In the absence of additional information, this seems not just valid but the correct starting assumption.
I hope we all understand the linked website is a casual release for the public. With the reception he's getting here -- the absolute lack of respect for a professor's passion project -- it's no wonder few scientists bother to engage with the public. He's written a formal paper on this: https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/456/1/L59/2589573 A dollar says that his ideas have survived close scrutiny by his colleagues, both mathematicians and astrophysicists. One of them might step in to teach us something, if we were a bit more respectful.
"if other sentient species exist, we should expect ours to have an unusually high population"
Except that sentience evolving is, as far as we know, extremely tied to population numbers and then afterwards sentient agents will have strong incentives to manage their population in some way (or you could say: the odds of them deciding to exactly match their pre-sentient population levels, now that they can make a choice, is small).
The underlying explanation of the principle of mediocrity and a mathematical intuition for it is pretty good.
Maybe people in 2021 are just extremely skeptical about "if we assume the most likely thing every step and pretend each choice is independent we can build a prediction that we can assume is maximally accurate, which means it is meaningfully accurate" chains of reasoning? That's how you get "Roko's Basilisk scenarios scaring people" type outcomes. It certainly is the source of my distaste and bias against it if I'm being honest with myself.
I don't see how it is reasonable to assume a species will gain sentience and not alter their behaviour in a way that alters their population. That is a "big" threshold to cross in terms of ability to alter your surroundings.
It doesn't have to be controlled, it just has to change significantly because of the gain of sentience for this argument to not be valid.
But if someone starts drawing conclusions like "due to the correlation between population size and landmass, it is therefore unlikely any country is more than 20% larger than mine", there is a 98% chance they are not Russian and therefore incorrect (and there is a 100% chance that their country is dwarfed by either population or landmass by some other country). The probability of them being the largest country is roughly the same as the probability of them being from a small island group like the UK or Japan
If the principle falls apart when applied to the human populations whose population density relationships its estimated from, how can we assert 95% certainty that the circumference of planets supporting very different civilisations will be no more than 20% greater than Earth?
Your mistake was to stop using statistics to refer to groups forming a distribution, and referring to ONE particular country, Russia.
The argument only works when you keep things in the realm of statistical distributions. An argument that works should be:
"due to the correlation between population size and landmass, it is unlikely most other countries are more than 20% larger than mine".
You would be right almost every time! Yes, it's a weaker argument but still extremely interesting.
As far as I can see we can't even predict that for distributions of individuals on earth (the article suggests the median human lives in a country as populous as Pakistan; a random other human has an 18% chance of being Chinese which is quite a bit more than 10x the size of Pakistan by landmass) and that's long before we add ancillary assumptions like alien species' size distribution matching earth's and their tolerance for population density being no greater than mean human population density (which requires them to be less tolerant of dense populations than many self-sufficient human regions!)
"we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth".
The author shouldn't have added "such as our nearest neighbour" as that just adds confusion.
The fact that this prediction is not 100% accurate when considering Earth's countries does not invalidate the argument. I see a lot of people doing this: showing one practical example where it doesn't work and calling it BS.
Please try to do as the author suggested: plot your own data against many world statistics... you will see that while yes, some of those statistics fail for you (e.g. you might be 90% taller than everyone else) when taken all together, they should all indicate you're pretty close to the middle in the majority of them... and knowing this, hopefully you can see how, yes, this prediction by the author might be BS, but given what we know, it's the only prediction we can make which has a good chance of being true.
I mean, it does , because he's moved from making general applications of the anthropic principle to very explicit claims about confidence intervals, relationships between variables and shapes of the distributions which don't match even the figures for the part of reality that actually is observable. I'm not just saying "but there are exceptions". I'm saying "given actual human population/landmass distributions, it appears obviously wrong to say that a random person has a 95% probability of living in a country no more than 20% larger than the home country of a randomly selected person from another country, and so a claim the confidence interval is that narrow for planets and alien species is quite extraordinary"
(it's moot that much of my own data also works pretty badly for anthropic reasoning, and I'm almost convinced that the applicable version of the anthropic principle for some of those stats is "if an individual is willing and able to make observations about the anthropic principle, the probability they are exposed to Western culture and in the top decile for access to education, cash and free time is ~1" :-) )
You are just refusing to believe statistics has any value. It's just maths, not opinions.
I mean, when we say a fair coin will turn up heads exactly 50% of the time, we mean it in a mathematical way.
Do it 3 times, and you might get 3 tails... based on your argument, the theory should be put into question... but of course it's not how maths works.
Do it 1000 times, and you will see how the normal distribution becomes aparent, with a mean nearly exactly a 0.5. Do it 1 million times, and the mean becomes even more evident... you can keep going on forever, it will ALWAYS become more evident. This is not useless just because it doesn't work after a few times. You can be extremely confident it would work after a large amounts of tries.
If you chose Iceland and used this logic to conclude you're in a high pop country, you'd be wrong. But of course, most people don't live in Iceland. You probably don't live in Iceland. If you pick a random person on Earth, odds are very good that they live in a high pop country like France, the US, China, India, etc.
If you pick a random country, there's a 50% chance you'll pick a country with a lower population than the median country. But not if you pick a random human from Earth.
So it seems you need at least some guess of what the distribution might look like to quantify the likelihood of guessing correctly that you're in a high population country. But your guessed distribution doesn't have to be perfect. If you knew the exact distribution, you could compute the exact chance that a random individual is from a high pop country (just take the integral of the distribution). But if you don't know the exact distribution, you can abstract one level up, try to reason about the range of possible distributions there could be, and come up with a probability based on your more limited knowledge. At least, that's what I understood from the article.
For the actual calculations, the author links to them in the article, but I haven't looked at them myself.
Instead, the whole thing depends critically on other arguments about the possible distributions, which are much weaker and than the initial ironclad statistical argument.
Funny how you fell into a very common logical fallacy by trying to make a statement about the arguments made against the author.
It is not a logical fallacy to assume a relevantly credentialed person would give a stronger argument. It would be a fallacy to assume that he must give stronger arguments.
OP does not make this mistake. He assumes the argument is probably not idiotic, because the author is probably not an idiot (in this subject).
Again, the fallacy is in assuming it must be correct (thereby bypassing the argument itself). Probably correct is a very different thing, and is why we have credentials in the first place. An idiot will likely make an idiot’s argument. It doesn’t mean he can’t have a spur of brilliance... but it’s not likely.
Alternatively, from a programmer perspective... the compiler is probably not the one that’s wrong. It could be, but it’s probably you.
Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, or not. That doesn’t mean it has no place is evaluating whether the argument is likely to be constructed well and without trivial mistakes. It also doesn’t mean authority is useless, just that it’s in no way the final say (the argument of course should hold up on its own)
You wrote it yourself: Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, _or not_.
If I'm in a windowless room and don't know whether it's raining outside, I might assume based on the season that it is more or less likely to be currently raining.
That does not mean that if I actually look outside in the middle of summer, I won't believe my eyes if I see raindrops.
If we didn't take shortcuts in generalizations no generation would get further than the previous. Of course you can generally assume an authority on a subject is correct. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't question them, just that most of the time you'd simply be wrong.
But this theory shouldn't be controversial at all: A random sample taken from any distribution is more than likely to be representative of that distribution. It's a basic idea but I like how he's illustrated it here with lots of examples and connected it to the alien notion. Meaning it leads to a good insight. Namely why most described encounters of aliens detail beings that are a lot like ourselves. The so-called five star pattern: a head, two arms, two legs. And hands with fingers.
In fact the ideas advanced in this essay are so fundamental they're like informational entropy or enthalpy/thermodynamics in that they are basic but insightful and sometimes counterintuitive principles that advanced reasoners can use to figure about the world. I wish more people knew of them.
I'm so blown away by this essay. in a limit sense I think this type of reasoning represents the best that you can possibly do starting from a position of ignorance. And as essay says that position is the safest one to start at. Sure you can apply a bunch of priors and constraints to limit the variations of different populations to what you think is right but really in this topic those things are just distortions. so the conclusions arrived at in this paper I think are in the limit sense the best that you can possibly do from the intellectually honest position of almost totally ignorance about this.
it's telling that so many people want to instinctively reject this and instead blindly impose their own priors while being blissfully unaware that's exactly what they're doing, resisting the general purpose conclusions of this essay and trying to pass off their own beliefs as truth.
The reason why ALL described alien encounters have happened has nothing to do with the statistics of possible alien life in the universe, it has everything to do with the human psyche - as they are all either delusions, lying, false memories etc.
And the reasons why that is essentially impossible all stem very clearly from much more solid physical considerations, that have to do with the extreme amounts of energy necessary for interstellar travel at anything approaching a reasonable time frame (i.e. less then the age of most stars).
But that claim, yours, is crazy. Can you prove all those people wrong? Can you prove they haven't? Nooope.
"is essentially impossible all stem" -- so because you have a belief that you understand everything that's possible (An arrogant humancentric "if we haven't figured it out" it can't be done), you're going to pretend everyone that has a personal experience that contravenes your prejudgment is crazy. That's the crazy thing dudettee ... you don't see that tho right.
It's also a narrow minded viewing. You could say they worked out how to jump from far away to get here, in ways we don't understand. Possible. You could also take the more-feasible-to-you view that they are already in the solar system and can come take a look at us when they want. Also possible. But acknowledging such possibilities would rob you of the posture of saying anyone who has an experience you don't want to even try explain is crackpot and delude. You sound like the lazy and deluded crackpot nutcase for saying that anyone who has something you can't explain is crazy. I suppose pretending this must have high payoff for you. You can't just impose your priors on others and think they're true. I guess you don't yet see that.
Your position on the other hand could be used as well to believe in God (YHWH), Lord Vishnu, kami, aliens or anything else that someone has ever claimed to see.
You are also treating pretty well understood physical limits (the speed of light, E=(mv^2)/2 etc.) as mere technological problems that someone could "figure out". And all this to justify listening to a few disparate people who can offer no more proof than their own story telling.
As a side note, please refrain from calling people you are directly talking to "lazy and deluded crackpot nutcases", especially for relatively simple logical inferences.
Define "verifiable results"? There's plenty of stories of corroboration between people saying they had some experience that can't be explained and that you want to pretend to yourself has to be untrue, and something more verifiable happening. Like they got cured, or they went missing, or they got an implant, or a mark was left on their body, or the ground was irradiated, and so on.
Many of these have led to such "verifiable" results, it's only that you're too resistant to see that. Have you proved all these stories to be false? Have you debunked everyone's experiences, stories and beliefs in things you can't explain? No. you. have. not. So I think it's time you entirely stop pretending that because you don't want to see it, it isn't happening. It's very very disrespectful to witnesses of this.
Do we have any "verifiable" data on drug abuse? Sexual assault? Parental abuse of children? Much of that data is self-reported. But it's "hard data" from the point of view of public health / legal system. It's only because you're unwilling to concede that there's anything outside your understanding, so you'd rather pretend these people are lying, crackpot, deluded, than having experienced something that you, in your arrogance, don't understand and therefore refuse to accept is real.
You're trapped by your own biases and priors, ignoring evidence and seeking confirmation bias. Ok, fine, you do that. But please don't ever - EVER - call people crackpot nutcases deluded liars and think you can get away with having people be silent in the face of that, and not calling you the same.
Pretty well understood physical limits - who says they're limits? You? What are you, God? You don't know for sure. Stop pretending if humans can't understand it it can't be done. How arrogant and stupid that is! But you think you can persist in this, call people you disagree with "crackpot deluded liars" and then you want everyone to silently accept your abusive language and not push back, as you complain when the very same language is used against you. Hahahaha! This totally shows not only your intellectual bias, but your personal bias and arrogance. Please reform yourself.
First of all, you are the one claiming knowledge that more or less contradicts some of our most fundamental physical understanding based on hearsay. If you don't understand how fundamental the speed of causality limit (c) or the mass/energy equivalence are to all of the rest of modern physics (and technology), how well proven they are, to what extraordinary precisions, how many other observations would make no sense without them, then there really is no point in continuing our discussion. Until you can account for the hundreds of thousands of reproducible experiments showing how speeds compose and time dilates without a fundamental limit to speed, saying that someone thinks they saw some bizarre phenomenon is very weak evidence.
Comparing "evidence" of aliens (which, I keep stressing, could as likely be angels or demons or devas) to evidence of drug abuse, parental abuse, rape etc is disgusting. Those in the later case are known, well understood phenomena, where we have clear, obvious reasons why reporting is going to be necessarily one-sided. By contrast, there is no clear reason why or how aliens (or angels, gods, kami) would interact sporadically with a few individuals, leaving little if any clear trace of their passing, despite the inordinate amounts of energy that would actually be required to achieve their stipulated movements (try to hide a space rocket launch for comparison).
Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return. I didn't even initially insult the people making these claims (I "insulted" the claims themselves), though I did do that in my follow-up comment, for which I apologize. Still, some of the people making these claims have been proven to have simply lied for various reasons. I firmly believe all of the others have had various hallucinations such as sleep paralysis or symptoms of various mental illnesses. This is not an insult, anymore than claiming that all people who have heard Lord Vishnu's voice and seen his chariot are either mistaken, lying, or have experienced some kind of altered mental state.
Claims of implanted devices have never been medically confirmed.
"as they are all either delusions, lying, false memories etc."...
"the various crackpots and deluded people who claim"...
You don't think it's an insult to a person to call their experience, sincerely recounted, a delusion, a lie, a false memory? Of course it is. Then as you admit, honorably, you do call them crackpots and deluded. Fair enough, but just because some people have been proven liars (or in the rape case, fake accusers), does not mean we should doubt other people coming forward, does it? and certainly does mean we should blanket call those people crackpots, or deluded or pretend they're lying, does it? "Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return." You don't expect to be insulted in return for accusing others in this abusive way of being without credibility? Exactly what I said, You expect silence in response to your abuse. Reform yourself. I saw you pushing down on people, and I pushed back. You can't take it? Don't dish it out. That's the way it is, focker.
You may firmly believe it, but then you're blind (or empathically missing the point) that accusing someone of having a mental illness, or hallucinating something you haven't experienced and have no frame for, is an insult, and more than that. You're saying you know their mind better than they do. You're saying their experience, of their life, is trumped by your opinion. And is less valuable than your "in the stands" commentary on it. You are not involved at all in what they experienced, yet you denigrate it, and claim you're not insulting them. Abusive insulting practice hiding behind veneer of being legitimate.
All I'm saying about physics is we don't know it all yet, and can't assume we do. Science admits as much, but few on the inside are courageous enough to take that to its logical conclusion.
Comparing evidence for rape, abuse, etc, to evidence for aliens is not disgusting, and you're certainly okay with doing that because you're okay to claim that all these millions of people with their stories and experiences must have simply imagined it, implanted a false memory, lied, etc. It's not about reporting being one-sided, it's about reporting consisting solely of witness testimony, often just of one person. That's true both for the alien case, and the rape and abuse case. You don't quite seem to see what you're doing when you want to doubt so many people for telling their story. It wasn't a long time in the past when people were laughed at or dismissed for telling their stories of rape and abuse, just like you'd have people do with those with stories of aliens today.
It seems you have not been acquainted with enough stories, I suggest you do some research and read up on people discussing abduction stories, and so on. Enter it as a skeptic, full of confidence you'll be able to explain it away. Talk to people involved. Give them a chance to be heard. Empathize with them. Instead of pretending you're "disgusted" by the very same comparative dismissal you yourself are hawking, while somehow laying claim to a moral grounding in this when you've been behaving anything but about it.
Similarly, when someone is reporting something we know to be impossible or extremely improbable from other considerations, we are not accusing them of something when we say that their experience or memory of that experience was delusional (or mistaken, depending on the details). Again, I was insulting when I called such people "delusional", as it implies they often have such hallucinations, which of course I can't know and don't believe - and, again, for this I apologize.
Now, the major difference to accusations of sexual assault is the plausibility of the claim. I of course do not personally know if Harvey Weinstein assaulted any of the women that accused him. However, I know that such accusations are painful and risky for the person making them; and I know that sexual assault is something that can absolutely happen; so, the witness testimony carries a lot of weight.
If on the other hand the exact same women accused Harvey Weinstein of stealing their souls through satanic rituals, I would not think much of these claims, and I would believe, and feel justified in believing, that the women are either lying or have had some hallucinations that have convinced them of this (or are having false memories).
Of course, if you tend to believe that aliens (or angels, curses etc) are plausible, you may lend more credence to these testimonies, even without scientific style evidence for what may have happened.
I still believe that comparing the certainty we can have that sexual assault is a real thing that real men and women may experience to the certainty that aliens (or demons and ghosts) are real is deeply insulting to victims of sexual assault.
I also don't believe there are millions of people claiming to have experienced alien abductions. Looking around a bit, I assume this claim is coming from a Roper Poll that found 119 out of some 6000 respondents had experiences which were considered typical of alien abduction, which would be extrapolated to 3.7 million out of the 185 million people for which the poll was representative. Crucially, the respondents were not claiming that they had had an experience of being abducted by aliens, they were claiming that they had had some experiences like "waking up paralyzed and feeling a presence in the room", "finding puzzling scars on your body", "seeing unexplained lights in a room" - all of which require a significant jump to conclude "ALIENS!". In the best case, they could be used to claim unknown phenomena are real, but to pick any specific posited phenomenon would be deeply wrong: these are as likely to be signs of aliens as they are of being fairies or ancestor spirits or mind/body dualism or anything else; including altered mental states (especially as the poll didn't even ask about the respondent's belief that the experience was real - for all we know, some of those 119 people could have sought psychiatric help themselves after these experiences).
it's not disrespectful to true UFO experiencers, or abductees, nor to true victims of drug abuse, sexual assault and rape to comapare their claims to UFO and alien witnesses, and to each other, because it's about evidence and the truth. if we discount the standard of evidence we undermine justice which is the very thing that can strive to protect and remedy real victims. it is disrespectful to undermine the standards of truth and evidence underlying criminal culpability and conviction by applying a biased standard to some and not others because you're saying we'll believe you because of our pre-existing beliefs not because of the facts of the case and your story, applying this discount to the standards required is totally disrespectful to true victims of crime because it lowers the percieved quality of evidence and allows the true claims to be swamped by false ones. It's false to believe something occurs because in general you believe it to occur therefore in a specific instance it is more likely. Each case must be considered on its evidence and merits. Even tho your opinins have no legal impact, they risk damaging the public narrative and discourse around these topics by degrading the reliability of real witnesses by demonstrating a bias toward believing claimaints that align with particular beliefs versus otherwise. This essentially reduces rape (and sexual abuse, etc) to a culturally relative, temporally relative, belief relative consturct, rather than the rock solid legal position it can be to solidly prosecutre and punish true perpetrators, and bring justice to real victims. You don't seem to see that degrading the standards of evidence by giving preferential treatment to those things you believe, rather than taking cases on their merits and comparing them equally regardless of the topic of the story or its current status in the cultural milieu is the best way to bring justice to victims and their families, everyone involved, and society as a whole. That's the empathic and compassionate position to take: to hear everyone's story, but adjudicate each claim in a balanced and unbiased way free of discrimination (based on belief) or prejudgement. That's the essence of judgement, and under the guise of you thinking you're being just you're just undermining it.
looking at that honestly is the ebst way to respect true victims of sexual abuse, parental abuse, accusations of drug abuse (vs planted evidence). again, you're so deluded or deliberately deceptive in that you think you're being good, but were actually being abusive, and protest when people stand up against that, and also think that trashing that value of witness testimony, while holding up a biased standard because you have reason to think that in "general" these things happen, therefore specifically it happened -- that's not the weight of testimony at all! that's undermining everything. you have reason to think that in "general" alien things happen because of the preponderance of evidence, but you're biased, revealing a lack of even handedness that's actually harmful and disrespectful to true victims and to justice. casting doubt on stories because people look at it preferentially or in a biased way. that's not the weight of testimony at all, that undermines it. you casually disregard the pain and fear of people sharing UFO stories while ignoring the obvious humiliation and abuse and dismissals and disbelief they are subjected to, just as you wanted to subject them to, yet you stand there and pretend to be for victims of sexual abuse. so disrespectful, and disingenuous! you may have pesonal experience but that doesn't mean you stand for victims and justice when you undermine people like this in these biased and unfair ways.
Also, even if consciousness is somehow separate from the body, it is still subject to the speed of light limit, as long as it can interact with the physical world.
I will simply note that I am merely stating what is the current understood scientific consensus, and my personal belief. Obviously everyone is free to believe whatever they want, but I am also free to think they are entirely wrong and explain why.
You could argue that we just lack the mental technology to achieve this, just as some string theorists argue we lack the physical technology to detect supersimmetry, and then we are each left with our beliefs until such a time as these mental/physical technologies are developed.
Note that entanglement, while non-local as a process in most interpretations of QM, is mathematically proven to be unable to transmit information any faster than the speed of light.
If you'd stated your opinion in this respectful way differential to the opinions of others initially then there would have been no issue. It was your arrogance and abusive language that led to your downfall here.
even if you're unable to publicly admit your responsibility here, nor acknowledge your mistake and admit your guilt, hopefully you learn that now for yourself. That would be good.
And you think this is respectful "Your consciousness is a physical process happening in your body (especially your brain). It can no more travel the universe than your digestion can manifest in another galaxy" Again your speaking for someone else, "your consciousness", "can no more", as if you are setting the limits.
If you'd said, "I think," or even better, "my consciousness..." or even better, "I've never experienced..." If you'd showed curiosity...or asked to learn more. That is respectful.
But you assert these things as if they're irrefutable truths, and talk of science. But you haven't considered the science of consciousness and remote viewing. Search the Central Intel Agency archives for this or join an online community and try for yourself if you're going to speak with such absolutism about things which you do not know anything at all. Educate yourself first, otherwise you'll get a part of the picture but think you know everything to deny all other parts, like this attitude: https://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/06/18/scandinavian-schools-...
Of course, you are again wildly off base with your reading of my replies. "You" in both my post and the post I was replying to were not referring to someone in particular, they are obviously the rhetoric "you". They weren't telling me that I, personally, am able to travel instantly with my consciousness, and I wasn't telling them that they, personally, were not allowed to do so.
Then, adding "I think", "I believe" etc is generally just noise - obviously everything I say is a personal belief or thought. Saying "my particles can't travel with speed greater than c" or "I've never experienced something traveling faster than c" would be needlessly specific - my belief in the theory of special relativity only works if it applies to everything, so that is the belief I stated.
At best, if I wanted to be quite pedantic, I could have added an "According to special relativity,".
You're really quite offended by basic speech and physical facts...
So...basic speech and physical facts, huß? So you read it as I'm offended by these things hmm, that's interesting. I suppose reading it that way you can more easily dismiss or try to minimize to yourself what I'm saying, tell yourself it's just emotional or irrational and something you don't need to learn form.
Do you know how I feel about it? If you really know then tell me? You don't know. You're just pretending, to suit yourself.
The difference with the other posted is they are not imposing limits, but you are. You might think it's symmetric, but it's not. It's more likely that things are more abundant than you know, than that you have already discovered everything that's possible, so you should be more respectful and modal when expressing restrictions.
You say adding qualifiers like "I think" and "I believe" is noise, but it's about respect and empathy and the tactic acknowledgment that you don't have all the answers, other people's ideas are valid, and what you are saying comes with that openness and curiosity to learning more. It makes sense that you read those things as "noise" given the low quality of your responses and low respect and empathy with other's opinions here: ie your totally disrespectful language pretending people who don't share your narrow view are "crazy"
It's good you reveal your thinking about it. I think you are missing the point that you're not just writing down a verbatim statement of the facts like a dry mathematical treatise or policy document you are communicating with other human beings. Trying to come off like that, will do you much better, and I think you have much to learn.
You'll definitely be able to do that if you make the effort it. That's why I spent so much time on you.
I believe you can, please do the effort and have a good one.
"I am more likely to have been born in a high population country than a low population country"
This is incorrect. If there is one country with one million people, and a hundred countries with a hundred thousand people, you are overwhelmingly more likely to have been born in a low population country.
This will also be the case in your example. The median population is 100K. Assume there are tiny deviations around the median. Then 50 x 100K people live in countries below the median population. And 49 x 100K people, plus 1 million, live in countries above the median. (And 100K people live in the median population country itself.)
If you don't like the tiny deviations, then still, more people live in countries weakly above the median (everyone) than live in countries weakly below the median (everyone minus a million); and more people live in countries strictly above the median than strictly below.
What it does is allow some weak inference about the existential landscape, about everything that exists out there. I believe the author's refutal of 'inference from a single datapoint' is mostly wrong -- I believe indeed we're likely some kind of uniform sample, and single uniform samples don't reveal variance. But, there's not exactly a single variable here. We have a pretty large number of variables: population of the Earth, number of Neurons per individual, and so on. It's still not much though to give an accurate picture of the landscape.
I would indeed be wary of taking any hard conclusions from the data. If you use hard knowledge from biology, physics and computational disciplines, you can probably use our "sample" to refine estimates about life in our own universe.
Overall, the most I would conclude from this hypothesis is the following: "You and I probably (but not certainly) typical among numerical living beings in the entirety of existence.". The practical lesson I would take from that is to be thankful for what you have, and do the most of what you can for the world, because the basic donitions don't get much better than this.
So we know that one example of life exists, the Earth. The question we are trying to answer is, does a second example exist. For this, we have no information other than that it is possible.
Hint: write code that tries all distributions wihin a certain range, then check the probabilities of a person within any of those scenarios being correct.
However, this statement does make a huge assumption about it, and thus, it is invalid.
As we do not know the distribution, you can not make that assumption.
"I am more likely to have been born in a high population country than a low population country"
And you don't think that's useful?
Their basic argument is right, but useless: it's true that, over all sentients in the universe, the sentients thinking they are on one of the most populous planets are more likely to be right; but there is no way to estimate what that likelihood is until you found out the actual distribution.
So basically, to have any predictive power whatsoever, the argument depends entirely on the other arguments about the possible distributions, which are all bogus given how little we understand about what other forms of life are possible, and the extremely little we understand about what forms of life can develop human-like intelligence .
All other species that don't know the actual distributions should expect that all other species are larger than themselves.
If we base our search for alien intelligence on this assumption but it turns out that intelligent life is not possible on smaller stars because the habbitable distance also means the planet is tidally locked and some other filters, we're wasting our time.
It's great for SCI-FI though.
> For example, let's take Usain Bolt's 100m World Record of 9.58 seconds. Imagine that was the only data point we had regarding human running speed. Wth that one data point we could confidently make a powerful prediction, that anyone we pick from the world population will take more than 9.58 seconds to run 100 metres.
This is not true at all. Either he's saying that the "single datapoint" is "Bolt ran 100 m in 9.58 s". If that is the datapoint, we can't draw any conclusions from that, for all we know he could be the slowest human in the world.
If on the other hand he means that the single datapoint is "Bolt ran 100 m in 9.58 s and nobody has run faster" then sure, we can conclude that nobody is faster, but that's part of the datapoint so it's not very interesting.
1. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s
or
2. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s and he’s the fastest ever
A single datapoint can tell you a lot, if you know other things about it. In this case, knowing that it's a world record dramatically changes its utility. It's powerful in the sense that it tells you a lot about the overall dataset, not in the sense that it's a novel insight.
That is, now that you've admitted that a single datapoint does in fact have the potential for providing extreme information in the extreme case, then you should expect to find (some) information in the other cases... so that's what he does. As long as you assume its not a purely random distribution, which he does not.
Any data pertaining to humans would be a single data-point in the true sense, which in itself gives almost zero information. You can't compare that to knowing global properties of the sample or the distribution, it's completely different things.
It is in no way comparable to knowing how many humans there are, which can't actually tell you anything about how many aliens there could be.
What if you knew instead that one particular human being can run 100m in 16s?
It's not even inference, it's simply saying the same thing in different ways.
And in any case, it's of course not very relevant for his main argument anyway, since don't don't have any such data-points about aliens.
If we knew that "humans are the smallest intelligent beings in the universe" well then yes could "infer" that all aliens are larger. But that is trivial and pointless.
That is the absurd case, one piece of data has total information in it. Accept that, and you can then see that a less extreme datapoint can have less extreme amounts of information in it, and can be used to make less confident predictions - but still more confident than guesswork.
Really the only point is, if I picked a random person and asked you to bet $1 whether they were slower than Usain Bolt, would you say “ok” or would you say “I can’t infer ANYTHING from only ONE data point”?
If you can infer something from only one datapoint, you can infer something about aliens with better than guesswork confidence using humans as one data point.
And by that definition the Bolt record is not a data-point, it's a global property of the distribution, namely the minimum value.
In his main argument though (and your example here), we just have a single value, and no information at all about the distribution, we don't even know if n>1. In such cases we can hardly say anything at all.
So in order to be able to infer something from the single datapoint, we need to make assumptions about the distribution of the values. The problem is that all the interesting conclusions we can draw come from those assumptions, not from the single value itself.
To tie it back to Usain Bolt. If you only know his time on 100m, that means nothing. We can of course posit that he's the fastest in the world, and from that we can draw conclusions such as "everyone else is slower", or (somewhat less trivially) that "the average time is above 9.58 s".
But we could equally well posit that he is the slowest in the world or that everyone is equally fast, which would lead to completely different conclusions.
So we clearly see that all the interesting information comes from the distribution, which sort of makes his arguments pointless.
And if I then told you one example alien covered 100m in 9.58 seconds would you not change your estimate at all from learning that information? You wouldn’t assign less probability to nuclear powered teleporting aliens or crawling vine plant aliens or insect sized slug aliens because “you can’t say anything without knowing the distribution”?
No that would be silly; you would put a lot more weight on times around 9.58 seconds, because that tells you something.
Saying “it doesn’t tell you much” is right but it’s told you something, there is non-zero amounts of information there.
From pure statistical reasoning, or even taking into account basic physics (e.g. speed < c) and biology (e.g. speed > 0, almost certainly speed << c), you can't conclude anything about the average speed of an alien species by finding out that one individual can run as fast as Usain Bolt.
Maybe not much more. But definitely more. And not with 100% confidence, we can't conclude anything. But there is information there, and we would be daft to ignore it completely because it isn't conclusive. We should adjust our predictions.
> "you can't conclude anything about the average speed of an alien species by finding out that one individual can run as fast as Usain Bolt."
If you know that a sloth takes 6min40s to cover 100 meters, a giant ant takes 1min40s to do it, and you run it in 30 seconds and a cheetah can do it in 5.1seconds. I say "I'm thinking of a creature, what is it?" your answer has to be "I don't know". If I say "an example of the creatures I'm thinking of takes 9.58 seconds" you ought to be thinking "slow cheetah or fast human" not "could be a sloth because ackchyewally the distribution of sloth speeds could be very wide so we don't know".
You could assume the individual was the fastest of their species, but why would they be? You could assume the individual was noteably slow, a famous creature to be laughed at. With no way to know which is the case, you may as well assume the creature is a typical example - not because you know they are, but because if they aren't you have no way to know which way they aren't.
Before we knew nothing, now we have more information than nothing. We ought to update our predictions based on this information, even if it's not much information and we can't know for sure. We ought to think the alien is less likely to be an immobile plant or silicon intelligence, less likely to typically move at the speed of a sloth. Not impossible, but this isn't meant to be a trick question where we get a deliberately wildly misleading time. 9.58 seconds is more like (cheetah, human, giant ant, jellyfish) than it is like (panda, mushroom, saltwater snail, sentient light beams). And yes, there might be nothing like those creatures at all, but "we could be wrong" is no reason not to adjust our best available guess.
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2220211-desert-ant-runs...
From pure statistical inference, you know precisely 1 more thing than nothing: an individual of the species can run 100m in 9.58s.
Now, adding other kinds of information and reasonable assumption from physics and biology, we can conclude more than that 1 thing, as you say. It's unclear exactly how much those would apply to alien biology, but they might.
On the contrary, making bold assertions about the entire universe generalizing from one example is a worse hubris. Manipulating some numbers in equations and coming out with absolute certainties is hilarious bad when you step back from having your nose in it. It's not like someone else wrote that summary of his ideas. He wrote it. From those conclusions I really won't trust any line of reasoning, no matter how complicated the equations.
It's worthwhile to note that HN isn't your average reddit crowd. There are educated people here, and mathematicians. There are also plenty of people who know philosophy and can spot dubious results easily.
I posted elsewhere in the thread about it, but the whole line of reasoning about us being randomly distributed over...well, anything, really...is just flawed. By this reasoning we'd all be dead, Boltzmann brains, ants, or a whole host of absurd conclusions. And the fact that we live on the end of a chain of extremely improbable events means that you'd literally never get here if probability was your only tool.
And that's just it. The only tool in the toolbag here is some probability equations. Stunningly bad reasoning.
The author went ouf of his way to make sure people understood that probabilities are NEVER certainties, they are just about chances of things being true... yet here we are.
> We don't yet know the breadth of planet sizes on which intelligent life exists. Some will be larger than others. The larger planets have a greater area, and receive more energy from their star. Therefore they are capable of sustaining larger populations, on average.
It is a major leap to go from planets with larger surfaces sustain larger populations. For starters, increased planet size will increase gravity, which means everything needs to expend more energy and either animals or their food getting larger becomes more difficult. Then what effects will this larger planet have on plate tectonics and continent formation. Further, life does not spread out uniformly over a planet's surface, compare the land area of vietnam to siberia and ask where you would expect to find larger populations.
> A similar connection between area and population is seen among countries on Earth. Those with a larger population also tend to have a larger area.
Compare Canada to Bangladesh. The sizes of nations are an incredibly complex function of conquests and mergers where tiny feudal states tended to get gobbled up by larger polities who in turn became stronger and able to acquire more territory, which was critical to pre-industrial societies where population density was constrained by area and then break apart into smaller polities during industrial times when population densities were not so constrained. Planets have no analogous function - Earth doesn't get the moon's land area because it is more populous, nor does it break into tinier planets as humans gain technology. If instead of countries we looked at continents, we'd see 5 out of 7 do not match the prediction.
On the topic of individual size, the author assumes that if a human is a normal member of a group with the variation in size of the great apes, the average size should be 320kg. Obviously though if you applied the exact same logic to the great apes, you'd be way off. Indeed looking at earth, most species tend to be small. The simple assumption that just because something results in a smaller population size means it should lead to more populations is clearly incorrect in this case, and likewise is questionable in other cases where there isn't a clear causal link.
More generally, the author's logic is a permutation of the doomsday argument, which while being mathematically intriguing is widely critiqued as a method of making predictions about reality.
Examples:
"if other sentient species exist, we should expect ours to have an unusually high population"
"most planets will have a very much smaller population"
"The Earth represents the planet of an ordinary being, and Homo Sapiens represents the species of an ordinary being." ??? what?
"Compared to our seven billion strong civilisation, their population will be much smaller. Perhaps only in the tens of millions."
"We should expect to be in a large group, not an ordinary one." <- No! This is the author's main flawed argument. You have to look at the distribution of the data. For instance: "you are more likely to have attended a school with more pupils than most other schools", no way, schools have limited attendance and it doesn't follow a power law, i.e. there isn't a school with 1,000,000 students and many small ones with 10 students each, and, even if that were the case, if all of the small 10-student schools make up for 10,000,000 students, the probability of an individual coming from the "big one" is only 10%. Come on, this is common sense.
"this also means we should expect to be living on a large planet". This goes against the evidence found, so far.
"You might be tempted to think that most of our energy is spent moving around or by fighting against gravity." No.
"A species with twice the body mass of another, will on average have half the population density." The plot right before that argument disagrees with that ..., also that plot, named "The probability distribution for the body mass of intelligent species, based on our single piece of data" is nonsense; it has varied greatly throughout the history of life on our planet.
"I'm an astrophysicist at the University of Barcelona, formerly a research fellow at the University of Edinburgh, following my PhD at the University of Cambridge." Oh well ...
Update:
OMG! The guy seems to apply that same line of reasoning to everything: https://twitter.com/frgsimpson/status/895944043645075457
inb4: "Aliens' lifespan should be around 70 years since that's the average for humans, on Earth, at the present time."
Not sure if it's common sense, but you are right, it is basic probability theory...if you assume that you are randomly distributed over those 11 million total students. But that if fundamentally is NOT a scientific IF, it's a philosophical one, in fact it's a unstated philosophical axiom that underlies tons of lines of reasoning on this subject.
What if we are not randomly distributed amongst possible universes? After all, we are not even randomly distributed amongst all humans who have ever lived (100+ billion)--by definition we are only amongst survivors in the present. Cue the anthropic principle, which mops half of these stupid probability theories right out the door. We a.) have survivorship bias and b.) live in a universe that must, no matter how improbable the chain of events that leads up to this present moment, have been capable of and, indeed, did produce this present moment. Considering that our past is littered with extremely improbable survival events, that means we should not really expect that other places in the universe aren't full of stupidly improbable things too.
What I am saying is that I actually do not believe we live in an average universe. In fact, we can't, because in most, we are dead!
I also don't believe that we're randomly distributed over possible intelligent beings, because why aren't we Boltzman brains?
unless we are boltzmann brains.
Isn't this statement still true in your example? (Assuming some small variance among the small schools just so it's still possible to order them by size.)
If one school has 1,000,000 students and a million schools had about 9 to 11 students, the median school would have about 10 students. No matter what (ignoring exact ties), 500,000 schools are going have more students than the median school, even if most of those schools just have 10 or 11 students. Sure, most people in your example come from the ~10 person schools, but more students come from the more populated half of those ~10 person schools. There's at least a 54% chance that you "attended a school with more pupils than most other schools" (6 of 11 million students).
(It's fair to ignore exact ties because it's unlikely that many planets have the exact same population.)
Your distribution makes it likely that there is one school with a much larger population than your own, but not that most schools have a larger population.
You cut out the context in some of your quotes that makes this clearer. The article says
> imagine that planet populations are distributed in the same pattern as countries on Earth ... in that case, most planets will have a very much smaller population
They're saying, for purposes of illustration, imagine planet populations were distributed like countries on Earth. But that's not the distribution they use in their actual calculation. It's just to help explain.
There's many reasons why the Earth is in the Goldilocks zone. It's just the right temperature for liquid water, we have oxygen in the atmosphere, and the planet doesn't weigh too much.
Without oxygen, creating mechanical work from fuel by burning, is 'tricky' (though maybe not impossible), no mechanical work, no industrial revolution, no technology. There's an argument that cooking food (fire) leads to better diet, more calories, and the evolution of the brain.
Whilst there are types of alternative biochemistry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi...) carbon is by far the most likely.
And lastly, if the earth were slightly more massive, the mass of (chemical) fuel required to propel a rocket becomes too much.
I'm doubtful that we'd see biological 'big aliens', or even 'small aliens', that significantly differ from our size, if they exist.
The problem in the article is that it tries to predict something with nothing but a single data point. In which it explicitly argues that you can: you can have an idea about how fast a human can run by clocking a single human (Usain Bolt). However you have absolutely no way of knowing if it is fast or slow for a human, at least not without making assumptions to create artificial data points.
It doesn't mean it is wrong to believe aliens are big, but I think it is wrong to believe anything about how aliens would compare to us using maths alone. Considering that we don't know any aliens, the argument for big aliens have to be somehow backed by observation, physics, chemistry, etc... not just statistics.
By example, most users on this forum are men from the US born in the 80s or 90s. The most common first name in the US those decades was Mike. The most common surname in the US is Smith. The most populous county in the US is LA County. The single most likely combination of these is that you are Mike Smith from LA County, but you are probably not.
But we are probably in 9/10 of those likeliest assumptions, even if we don't know which 9.
There are more people who are not me than who are me. Therefore I am more likely to have been born not me than to have been born me.
"There are more people who are not phs than who are phs. Therefore I am more likely to have been born not phs than to have been born phs."
"There are more people who are not imtringued than who are imtringued. Therefore I am more likely to have been born not imtringued than to have been born imtringued."
The problem becomes obvious, it's a different bet each time and each time all winners are excluded because they never enter into the bet in the first place.
E.g. I will never bet "Therefore I am more likely to have been born not phs than to have been born phs." even though it's a clear win for me.
The Big Alien Theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089274 - May 2020 (11 comments)
The Big Alien Theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11358491 - March 2016 (7 comments)
The Big Alien Theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353239 - March 2016 (140 comments)
If they could have made this video a 200 years ago, the population on earth would have been 800mm people, instead of 7.7bn people. Same humans, same planet, but ~10x difference in what our existence implies about population of other forms of life existing out there
I find the other corollary worrying - we're more likely to be existing at a point in time when we are a higher population than any other. In other words, this is likely to be a high point in human population over time, and our future contains less people than now.
None of the predictions in the article actually use # of humans as a data point.
You aren't gonna input 800m to a calculation and get any different result - no calculation uses that number.
The author uses all species of earth to estimate a species size - population density ratio. This works if you remove humans from the equation.
The only other data point specific to humans is our weight.
The relevant question is to what extent brain size facilitates and is correlated with intelligence.
It doesn't seem to be irrelevant. Large brains are correlated with higher IQ within humans. Also, humans' intelligence came about with an almost doubling in brain volume over two million years.
Across very different species there is a weaker correlation but it still seems to be positive. Whales and dolphins are far smarter than ants. Octopuses seem to be an outlier in that respect.
I think it's fair to say that the probability of an "Einstein" is positively correlated with body mass, and therefore negatively correlated with population density, at least up to a point (whether that correlation turns negative beyond a point can be debated).
Our world would look like that Netflix movie “Bright”, with multiple intelligent species living and working together. (The movie was bad by the way)
Also, we’ve been shaped by our tools since day one, and these animals use little or no tools.
We’re very different animals from dolphins and elephants.
We may have nothing at all in common with extraterrestrial beings.
An overlap of concepts is needed for two entities to communicate.
Why is that? If aliens are 10X larger than humans, but their planet is also 10X larger in surface area and resources, why can't the population be similarly large?
Also, isn't it similarly likely for some aliens to be on average smarter than us, due to some freak of evolution, and some to be dumber..
Genuinely curios if I'm missing something.
ETA: or the copernican wrap-around: "Any random person is more likely to be near an average size than not, so...[five dubious steps later]...obviously aliens are mostly going to be average human-sized."
But I will say this is based on entirely reasonable assumptions and observations.
It's an interesting argument as I've always been of the opinion that life is abundant but the universe so large that it's still quite spread out.
This is basically my optimistic/pessimistic view of alien life. The scale of the universe means the probability of alien life existing must be essentially 100%, while the scale of the universe also means the probability of any life finding another instance of life must be essentially 0%.
Although a fun corollary inspired by the Big Alien thought experiment is that local maxima must also exist: Somewhere, some planet with intelligent life must have been close enough to another such planet that they did indeed find each other.
Interesting point. It follows that as we can observe how galaxies and clusters form, it must follow that if life requires a star, it would cluster and group similarly, and eventually group closely enough for two intelligent species to bump into one another.
It would imply that the average planet is less detectable than our own planet and thus the Fermi-Paradoxon is resolved from our perspective. Lots of life absolutely everywhere but most of it is undetectable.
Of course this is only about our perspective, the assumption is that aliens would never visit us. So one step further, bigger populations correlate with ability travel. (pulled out of nowhere) However, if they are advanced enough to visit us and therefore have a bigger population than ours (interplanetary species), wouldn't they run into the opposite problem? They would have trouble detecting us because we only live on a single planet.
Now if I were to resettle humankind to 250 or so exoplanets and gave each country its own planet, and each planetary civilization eventually brings forth a smart guy who reasons along the lines presented in the Big Alien piece, then I end up with 250 papers or so arguing that surely most exoplanets will have a much smaller population than their own. Almost all the papers will have guessed wrong.
Note that while one can always ruin likelihoods by tampering with the data, in this case the exoplanetary populations were modeled on a realistic sample that does follow a power (Zipf, Pareto) law.
It's interesting that Russia is frequently perceived as a high-population country while in reality by population it's only slightly bigger than Japan and is smaller then Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Nigeria.
Why? Well, in times of consistency, the natural trend is for life to get bigger. For herbivores, bigger means access to more vegetation (eg giraffes can eat higher in trees) and is a defense against predators. For predators, size increases the size of prey you can, well, prey on.
But as soon as there's a sudden change, size is a disadvantage. You have high food needs (predator or prey). This makes you vulnerable.
It's probably more amazing that the dinosaur era lasted >150M years than that this era was ended by a meteor impact.
Some things are just physics. Physics places absolute limits on how small or large an organism can be, for example. It's why I'm not worried about the possibility of superintelligent viruses.
There is a long theory of the value of thought experiments in science. The word "atom" is derived from the Greek "atomos", which was the result of a 2000+ year old thought experiment about if something was infinitely divisible or not. Experimental evidence didn't come until the 1800s (IIRC).
It seems weird that any article talking about possible alien life doesn't at least touch on the anthropic principle, which is a whole set of thought experiments.
My personal view is that our knowledge of the Universe at this point isn't perfect but it's closer to correct than not. That means (IMHO) the speed of light is an absolute limit and thermodynamics holds true.
With just those two things, you have a lot of constraints and you can start making some observations. For example: a burgeoning civilization needs energy (and matter), will produce waste heat and that waste heat has to go somewhere.
This of course touches on various thought experiments relating to the Fermi Paradox.
My personal view is that there simply aren't any starfaring civilizations to find within a pretty large (1M+ light years) light cone. And if you look at the Milky Way, if there aren't any to find now, it's highly unlikely there other civilizations beyond our light cone just because of the low probability of two (or more) such civilizations evolving to that point within 100,000 years of each other.
What if some virus evolved to work super intelligently as a hive mind?
> My personal view is that our knowledge of the Universe at this point isn't perfect but it's closer to correct than not.
I think most of the evidence contradicts this. My suspicion is that if we continue to progress at the same rate or accelerate, in 1000 years we (assuming we are still recognizably human) will look back at our understanding of reality right now as nearly completely wrong.
So your constraints don't seem to be givens.
> My personal view is that there simply aren't any starfaring civilizations to find within a pretty large (1M+ light years) light cone.
This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement, or that our model of spacetime is basically right and there isn't much more to expand into besides our sparse region of reality.
Most of the evidence?
We haven't found any new physics phenomenon from which we can derive new technology. There's no known or theoretical ways for us to traverse to different realities let alone prove or disprove such existence, for example.
This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement, or that our model of spacetime is basically right and there isn't much more to expand into besides our sparse region of reality.
Just because we can imagine something doesn't make it possible.
Our understanding of the physical universe has grown so much within the last hundred or couple hundred years that I'm not sure understanding had grown equally much even throughout the entire preceding human history. At least you'd have to go pretty far in history.
With accelerating growth of understanding you will, at some point, get to "mostly correct". I don't know if we're there yet but you can't extrapolate linearly from history that we aren't.
One pathological example that could overturn our entire understanding of the physical world is finding out that we are in a simulation. You'd think you were "mostly correct" until you are "100% wrong". Not suggesting we are in a simulation, but it's an example that shows that as long as the possibility exists that we can discover something that overturns our current models, there's no way we can say we are "close to the truth". It's pompous and presumptuous.
I don't see how the pace of understanding is important. It presumes that we are somehow getting closer to the "truth", the absolute nature of reality. That is not how science works. It says nothing of "truth"
OK, you can argue semantic all you want, but science is pretty much the closest thing we have to 'truth'.
The acceleration of the last couple hundred years only says that we are getting better at refining the current model to match current testing capabilities, but it doesn't make the model impervious to some bit of information we could discovery that destroys its entire validity.
No. Newton's Law isn't invalidated just because we came up with relativity. It's useful enough that we still use it to calculate orbit and teach students and do a kazillion things with it.
It is incorrect to assume that one day in the future that some new theory will destroy our previous understanding and invalidate everything we know.
Scientific understanding has been about filling in fine details about the very small and very large, not throwing everything out the window every 5 years.
I'd say that this would make that Hive organism look a lot like a macro-organism.
> ... in 1000 years we (assuming we are still recognizably human) will look back at our understanding of reality right now as nearly completely wrong.
So let's take gravity as an example. Newton proposed his laws ~350 years ago. Newton's laws are a pretty good approximation. Of course, Einstein improved on this with special/general relativity but... Newton's laws are still mostly correct. Classical and relativistic models only really diverge in extreme circumstances.
That's a long time to be mostly correct without a massive revision.
> This makes a lot of assumptions, including that intelligent species don't accelerate quickly into something unrecognizable as they evolve to more advancement
Yeah, there's a whole lot discussion about this as a possible answer to the Fermi Paradox. The idea has a problem though: ultimately civilizations are bound by how much mass and energy they have access to. If they aren't, this breaks thermodynamics.
So in a universe where this is limited, it will be an advantage for a civilization to hoard as much as possible for the long term. That sort of thing would tend to be... noticeable.
The other is that it isn't limited. If that's the case it really creates more problems than it solves. Basically life in the Universe should be even more prevalent and thus visible.
Only the ones that can reengineer themselves to not be warlike and violent before they destroy themselves will survive for long enough to exist at the same time as us. Therefore it is likely any intelligent species we meet will be peaceful (among themselves at least).
In other words, imagine a normal distribution with very, very low variance (say, 0.0001). The mean is unknown to you. If you take one sample, your sample will very likely be close to the mean.
However, for the sake of the argument, variance can be arbitrarily high and still provide increasingly lower amounts of Bayesian evidence. As long as the variance is not unbounded (i.e. as long as the distribution is Gaussian, which I think is a reasonable assumption in nature), you can extract _some_ evidence from a single sample.
IMO, biological corporeal from for intelligence is not a longterm solution. Bodies are good at what the things they evolved to do and interstellar travel aint one of those things. Now downloading your consciousness onto a robot/computer/swam on the other hand is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more robust against all manner of failures and threats and really opens up the door for interstellar travel.
HOWEVER.... Assume speed of light is an absolute limit. This means even short hops between stars take a really long time. This doesn't really get much better with increasing technology either, because the amount of computation and evolution we would expect for a sentient robot swarm likely increases faster or at least at the same rate to where, in relative time, it's probably always going to be long and expensive in terms of energy. Even worse... take two "individuals" within this civilization and separate them for 100 years, which is not an unreasonable estimate for interstellar travel. They will be separated for far longer in practical computation time and are likely to evolve substantially without a lot of communication over that time. They will be so different as to not even be the same kind by the time they rejoin. So any semblance of stability for a galactic civilization is such a massively unlikely assumption in my mind. Instead individuals are likely to be in competition with each other. This produces an incentive to prevent such travel from occurring to begin with.
We're essentially blind but saying there's nothing to see. We don't yet have the technology to really observe what's happening in our galactic neighborhood. We don't even know what's going on under the atmospheres of the gas giants in our own solar system and it's mostly speculation.
If another planet had a pipeline linking their planet to a star for pure plasma energy, we couldn't even observe that with today's tools.
Another planet observing earth for intelligent life using our standards would also conclude that there's absolutely nothing here. Artificial lighting is under 200 years old, leaving little in the visible spectrum as an obvious sign of intelligent life for anything over 200 light years away. They could easily brush off oxygen/CO2 production as some sort of natural process. They could also conclude that the idea of life existing on earth for hundreds of millions of years is insanity, because clearly earthlings have planetary rodeos where we'd drag planets around for fun or we'd be using the methane on our gas giants for sustenance.
For instance, my blood type is not a "likely" or "unlikely" choice out of all existing blood types. It is predetermined to a large degree by my parents. So is my country of birth.
Of course, if you pick a human at random, or repeat the test with many different humans, the argument is valid again. But this shows you why the extrapolation to aliens does not work. We don't have any aliens in our sample set.
Without postulating a quasi-randon mechanism that made you a human instead of an alien, this argument simply doesn't work. Or rather it doesn't have any meaning.
If aliens are sufficiently common, then we are much more likely than not to be a “normal” species. It is possible we are not normal, but that’s what a confidence interval is for.
If your best bet only has a miniscule probability of being right, then your best meta-bet is not to bet. At some point the correct conclusion is to say "We don't know", instead of fooling ourselves with empirically-unsupported navel gazing.
If every intelligent creature in the universe wrote down “I am on a high-population planet” and then we zipped around with a spaceship to pick them all up, we would find most of the pieces of paper to be correct.
You could also use this same argument to claim that most aliens speak English, Chinese or Indian; that they are Christian, Hindu or Muslim, that they have whitish skin, brown eyes, brown hair, 2 arms, 2 legs, 10 fingers, etc. In fact, according to this argument, aliens are quite likely to be humans in fact.
In other words, the (correct) statistical argument that the article devotes its first half to is completely inconsequential. Only the second, much more argumentative side, the one that uses speculative biological and chemical knowledge, has any predictive power, and it is on very shaky ground given our extremely limited understanding of the possibilities of non-Earth life.
That being said, at least in the blog post — I haven't read the paper the author also wrote on the subject — there's one critical error, where the author assumes that because most alien species are less populous and more massive, if we ever successfully contact one, we should expect our own species to be more numerous and physically smaller than the contacted alien species. But that assumes contact is based on a random distribution of species! It seems much likelier that contact would be biased just as population size is: that is, we are more likely to contact aliens from a more numerous species than a less numerous one, because they have more spaceships and satellites and listening devices, etc. Using that framework, the contact case actually inverts: the most likely species to contact is the most numerous one, and while it is likely that we are among the most numerous intelligent species, it's not likely that we are the most numerous — at least, not using the country-based datasets. Therefore, it's likely that even though the author is correct that we are more numerous than most, in general alien contact will seem to contradict this, because we will likely be contacting the (relatively few) species that are more numerous than us. We are most likely the Pakistan of the galaxy, but we are also most likely to contact galactic China — not galactic Iceland.
The contacted species will also likely be physically smaller than us, for the same reason: contact is biased towards the largest populations, and species with large populations are biased towards physical smallness for thermodynamic reasons.
Edit: I read the author's paper, and indeed, the error is not present in the paper (which presumably received more scrutiny) — it's only present in the blog post. The paper instead claims that our nearest intelligent neighbors are likely to be less numerous, physically larger, and from smaller planets — which seems correct. The conclusion of the paper speculates that it may be more useful to search for nearby neighbors than more-numerous far away neighbors, and thus we should prioritize searching nearby systems that have smaller planets (since that's where the neighbors likely are). I'm not necessarily sure that's true — it really depends on whether physics allows reliable semi-FTL travel such as stable wormholes — but it's an interesting take and not immediately controvertible.
Suppose every human in China severed their corpus callosum such that they now have two distinct conscious observers in their heads.
If my memory is completely wiped, and I'm given the above info and nothing more, should I maintain or increase my probability estimate that I am Chinese (i.e. should I guess 1.4/7.67 or 2.8/(7.67+1.4))?
https://sites.psu.edu/intropsychsp14n2/2014/02/04/severing-t...
They're two separate conscious entities after the CC.
See the wiki page on Split-brain for an overview.
P(Chinese | no memory, post-pan-Chinese callosotomy) / P(Chinese | no memory, pre-pan-Chinese callosotomy)
I'm not sure what it's like to have a corpus callosotomy, but I'll assume you're correct and total memory loss occurs. If you suddenly awoke with an empty memory, how would you know whether you were just born or your memory was just wiped?
I submit that your prior should be exactly 1, since every human is guaranteed to have an empty memory at some point in their lifetime. If so, then the probability of you being Chinese, post-pan-Chinese callosotomy should remain unchanged.
Based on the comments in the source code, it seems like it's made from: https://html5up.net/
Well, maybe it's a bit heavy, but still was pleasant to read.
Simples.
But reading it the way you did, I disagree. We do have plenty of data on aliens. Do we have any "data" on drug-use? On parental abuse? On sexual assault? Most of these "data" are self-reported by people involved. But that's "hard data" from a public health / legal point of view.
Equivalently, we have plenty of witness data about actual non-human beings in craft. And we have plenty of data about craft that seem to exceed anything we are capable of. So we have "we do have plenty of data" not "we don't have any data at all" is what you meant to say, if you were reading the world consistently, honestly and openly.
>The above statement might sound reasonable, and intuitive, but it lacks justification. Standing on its own, it’s just a piece of dogma.
well let's try the following statement then
1. Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being studied.
There are rare items of knowledge that are cogitated upon first and found to exist later, but in general things that you learn about will be like most of the things that you learn about - they will be observed as existing and then be studied.
Is this true at this point for physics and astronomy? I have no idea what the relative proportion of discoveries are "this was predicted to exist and we found it!" vs "whoa this is totally unexpected." I suspect that there's also a ton of things in the middle, where an anomalous reading that doesn't directly show the existence of something but does show the deficiency of a theory then leads to corrections in the theory which then result in another cascade of predictions of existence from the theory.
For example euclidean geometry is observably not true. Einsteins General relativity shows that the observable geometry of our universe is not euclidean. Yet the field of euclidean geometry is still intensely studied and a valid mathematical field.
I should be getting paid for this.
But anyway, speculation based on probabilities over distributions that we don't know is useless. We can only speculate based on knowledge we have.
Also, 'which begs the question' doesn't mean what the author think it means. Really bored of seeing this phrase misused. 'To beg the question' is a fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it.
What exactly is the argument? Humans are uniquely unique?