The Big Alien Theory(thebigalientheory.com)
thebigalientheory.com
The Big Alien Theory
http://thebigalientheory.com/
245 comments
It certainly uses a logical structure that requires independent variables when we have strong evidence to believe these things are not independent.
"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.
"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.
The ability to solve widespread coordination problems is... probably orthogonal to consciousness?
Bees and ants do it without consciousness, and humans clearly suck at it.
Or you could say: The odds of them being capable of using their sentience to solve their desire to have a controlled population level is small.
“Bees and ants do it without consciousness” do they? Prove it.
Our population changed radically when we gained sentience.
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.
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.
I am not a mathematician either and only read the “Quick Intro” but that left me with the following question: What happens if I replace the Earth’s populations with that of France and the Earth’s countries with the French cities? If I do that and then follow the logic in the Quick Intro then it makes sense to me that it is likely that I would be born in Paris, but I do not understand how I can follow from this that France is a high population country. What do I miss?
You would be wrong, but lots and lots of people following the same logic from China, India, USA would be right.
I think the main problem is piling up the estimates. If I use anthropic reasoning to conclude that I am from an extremely populous country like India, I am wrong, but 2 billion Chinese and Indian people would be right, and the majority of people making the estimation would in fact be from larger than average countries
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?
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?
> "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
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.
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.
It's a weaker and more plausible claim, but it's also a different claim from the one advanced by the author "we can say with 95% confidence that another planet with intelligent life, such as our nearest neighbour, will have a circumference no more than 20% greater than that of the Earth".
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!)
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!)
The correct claim should be:
"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.
"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.
> The fact that this prediction is not 100% accurate when considering Earth's countries does not invalidate the argument.
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" :-) )
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" :-) )
> 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...
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.
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.
Thanks, that makes sense. Do you know if there is any "mathematical trick" to quantify the likelihood of me being wrong (without knowing the population numbers of the other countries)?
Incidentally, France is a pretty high population country. It's ranked 22 out of 195 in population.
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.
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.
Yes, I do understand that. So there is a certain probability that my “i am a high population country” conclusion is wrong (e.g. if I am from Iceland). As already asked below: Do you know a way to quantify the likelihood of me making the wrong conclusion (without knowing the population numbers of the other countries)?
The author of the article makes some assumption about the distribution of alien animal sizes to come up with their estimate. But they use loose bounds, saying intelligent life can probably vary in size at least as much as the great apes (50kg - 160kg), but probably not to tens of millions of kilograms.
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.
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.
There is no way to do it from statistics alone, which is why the whole argument is useless.
Instead, the whole thing depends critically on other arguments about the possible distributions, which are much weaker and than the initial ironclad statistical argument.
Instead, the whole thing depends critically on other arguments about the possible distributions, which are much weaker and than the initial ironclad statistical argument.
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>attributing simpletons' logical fallacies to a published astrophysicist
Funny how you fell into a very common logical fallacy by trying to make a statement about the arguments made against the author.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
Funny how you fell into a very common logical fallacy by trying to make a statement about the arguments made against the author.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
The logical fallacy would be “he’s clearly correct, because he’s an astrophysicist”. But that’s not OP’s claim; rather it’s that “he’s probably not an idiot, because he’s an astrophysicist” — that is, if he’s wrong, it’s probably not for reasons you’d attribute to a simpleton off the street.
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.
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.
Kindly read and ponder about the first two sentences under "Use in science" on the wikipedia page I referenced.
Sure. My point still stands. They assumed the argument was correct, because of who said it, rather than reviewing the argument itself.
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)
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)
The fallacy lies in assuming anything connected w/ authority.
You wrote it yourself: Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, _or not_.
You wrote it yourself: Authority has no place in evaluating an argument is correct, _or not_.
Evaluating whether something is likely to be true is not the same thing as evaluating whether something is true.
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 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.
> The fallacy lies in assuming anything connected w/ authority.
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.
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.
Theoretical explanation for observed reactions: Lemma 1: alien topic is like religion, not a great amount of data, but very high stakes. Lemma 2: There's a lot of intellectual "soccer mums" on HN eager to find an outlet for their unrealized (?) intellectual prowess. Corollary: Alien topic seems like fair game, because low risk associated to bring wrong, and hard to disprove with facts or experts. Theory: this topic manifold provides attractive attachment site for brains looking to engage in intellectual proving games and leads to lots of low signal comments intended to make others wrong to achieve a sense of being right. It will take HN some time to adopt the correct posture to discuss leading edge questions in areas with lots of ambiguity. QED.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Hahaha. you're so deluded that you've applied your own priors and beliefs there that everybody who has this experience must be lying. You've recklessly imposed your prior that all of this witness data has to be false because you simply personally disagree with it. But you don't think that's crazy at all then you do that. You are right now blind to that distortion. But you need to wake up to how crazy that is. this paper if you read it with an open mind is exactly the type of reasoning that you need to plug yourself into
This paper lends absolutely no credence to the various crackpots and deluded people who claim they have met aliens.
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).
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).
Because you don't know if they're "Crackpots and deluded people"...that's the claim without credence. So unfair to all those witnesses. You can't judge them, you don't have any idea. It's your personal opinion that you parade as truth, but pretend others are wrong. But not just wrong, crazy.
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.
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.
There are thousands of years worth of people claiming personal experiences with various gods, aliens, animal spirits and so on. None of these have ever led to any kind of verifiable results, so I think it's about time we entirely stop listening to such stories, whatever the reason they are being told.
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.
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.
Hahahaaha. This so hilarious. I just saw your comment now. You are so blind to what you're doing. You really think you're going to get away with your abusive language and expect silence in return? Who's been enabling you? I used that language because it's the commensurate response to you using that language to describe people you disagree with or don't believe, and the right response to your claim that believers are wrong and you know better. So you can't take it, simiones? Don't dish it out. Please refrain from having a double standard.
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.
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.
There is so much to unpack here.
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.
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.
Wow, you're trying to get out of what you did. You didn't insult the people, you insulted the claims? No you did not.
"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.
"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.
Recently my grandmother, whom I had just helped out of an ambulance and back into her apartment, told me that she had just come back home after meeting with a neighbor. I was not "accusing" her of something, nor insulting her, when I called her doctor to let them know she was having delusions.
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).
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).
- thanks for proving my point. you doubt granny because you know her to already be of inconstant and diseased mind, and you are involved in and know the facts of what actually happened, because you were there. so you're in a reasonable position of authroity to dispute her suggested history as well as label it as a delusion. but wrong that you equate this with your unfair, unreasonable, arrogant and abusive criticism of people with alien/UFO stories as deluded, or delusions. equivalently, you place yourself above them, pretend with zero justification you knew better, were somehow ahold of the facts of the situation or were there, you weren't, and have zero klnowledge of their mental state but blanket critcize humiliate and dismiss them. yet insiste you were still right to do so, because you care for you granny? sickening to abuse the love for you granny to try to pass of your abusive behaviour on others as okay. also sickening that this analogy is one where the power imbalance is great, you are in a carer position for granny, you have power in relation to her, and you are deciding things for her. sickening and revealing how you think about these people whose stories you trashed.
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.
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.
You don't need to travel physically when you can do it instantly with your conscience.
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.
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.
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.
Stop pretending. You have NO idea what consciousness is or isn't. You speak these words as if they are truth, "it can no more", but you are not god. You don't decide. You're trying to limit the reality of existence to your own limited and biased experience of it. Fine, OK. Do that if it's too scary for you to look outside that shell, but don't you dare - EVER - try to call people crackpots liars and deluded because they think different and have experienced different to you. See your own bias, and exist within that if that's what you choose. But don't persecute others or impose your priors as if they're truth. You think it's fair game to attack people whose stories you don't believe as liars, crackpots and deluded? Well I'm here to push back on you. Do you get it? I'm here to tell you it's not fair game, focker. Do you get that?
This is getting borderline abusive on your part.
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.
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.
It's already abusive if you were an innocent here, but as it stands it's the commensurate response to your abuse, and that's the point, you're getting back what you gave, and it's justified because because you're the primary aggressor. You started it but try to disown your responsibility. You're still blind to the that.
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.
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.
On this thread, I did state my opinion in a clear and respectful way. I did not accuse the GP of anything at all, and I responded to their definite assertion (that consciousness can travel non-materially at infinite speed) with a definite assertion of my own (that consciousness is a physical process and subject to special relativity as much as other physical processes).
"This thread" is still here with your totally disrespectful "This paper lends absolutely no credence to the various crackpots and deluded people who claim they have met aliens."
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-...
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-...
"Scientific consensus" seems a little bit like a dogma. The science of the mind and the philosophy of life on nowadays hegemonic culture is so in daipers that I wouldn't try to take it so seriously. I won't talk about your beliefs, they're yours and nobody is entitled to question them. The thing about scientific consensus though... Not so much.
Still, if consciousness can pass physical barriers and disconnect from the body, and interact with matter or other consciousnesses, we should be able to scientifically test this with relative ease, at scientific standards of reproducibility.
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.
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.
Psychoenergetics experiments were done that, among other things, provided successful access to information through mental means only by a viewer in a submersible 140 m and more below the surface of the ocean, and also viewers were able to see eclipses of the moons of Jupiter and that information was verified 80 minutes later by astronomers. Jupiter is 80 light minutes away. That indicates that it operates faster than the speed of light. there's other known phenomena that do, information exchanged via entanglement is thought to operate faster than the speed of light. As far as could be determined these consciousness abilities could not be shielded and were not electromagnetic in nature.
> I see no fallacies
"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.
"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.
Only if you aren't careful enough about what you mean by "low population". The argument is that you are probably born in a country with above the median population.
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.
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.
But does "above the median population" actually tell you anything that is useful? I don't see that as being anything more than a truism.
The claim being made here is what I call the "Existential inference hypothesis": that we are somehow, as individuals, sampled from a large ensemble of consciousness across space and time. There is some difficulty in defining the conscious cross-section that governs this sampling process (could you be born a mouse? Maybe yes, but then you probably couldn't be asking those questions... Could you be born a rock? That makes even less sense; but all that differs among those cases is their atomic configuration). I think the sampling in this case might be a soft measure among linguistically capable entities.
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.
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.
We really can't draw any even weak inferences here. The only thing we know is that life that is much like ourselves is possible. We can not in any way say if it is common, or so exceedingly unlikely that we are the only example. The only data point we have is that we exist, but that data point confers no information, since it is a given. If we did not exist, we could not consider it.
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.
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.
No, it's not incorrect. You are giving one example when that would be incorrect. To prove this is incorrect, you would need to offer a large number of examples similar to what you did, but with a uniform distribution of population distributions (because we're claiming complete ignorance on how populations should be distributed - so each scenario is as likely). Once you do that, do you still believe the statement to be incorrect?
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.
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.
No, I would not. We have zero knowledge of the distributions involved, and we can not get that information, so we are not allowed to make any assumption about it.
However, this statement does make a huge assumption about it, and thus, it is invalid.
However, this statement does make a huge assumption about it, and thus, it is invalid.
What huge assumption? That we know nothing of the distribution, hence we must assume each distribution is as likely? You seem to fail to grasp what it means to not make assumptions.
It makes the huge assumption that these things follow a distribution where their claims are true.
As we do not know the distribution, you can not make that assumption.
As we do not know the distribution, you can not make that assumption.
Not so - the result holds for all feasible distributions.
I just gave one where it doesn't hold.
Ah I see, apologies, I understand your concern.
If we define 'big' and 'small' as being above or below the average (mean) value, then you're quite right that it breaks down for many cases, like the one you gave. But if we define 'big' and 'small' relative to the middle (median) value of the distribution, then it becomes a robust result. Hope that helps!
But if you do that, it becomes a truism, and I do not think it actually gives you any useful information any longer.
Just so we're clear, you no longer consider this to be a fallacy if by 'high' we use the median as a reference point?
"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?
"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?
But the problem here is that the paper is obviously concluding too much from too little data.
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 .
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 .
Is there anything useful out of this?
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.
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.
I don't even understand his main argument, but here's a random, incorrect argument he made.
> 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.
> 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.
That's the entire point. With the right one piece of data, you can draw powerful and useful inferences. You don't need data on the 100m dash running speed of every single human being on Earth. That one item can be sufficient. It all depends on what the data is and what you're trying to infer. How is that incorrect?
But that's not what he's doing. He isn't concluding that everyone runs slower than the record (which is almost a tautology), he's trying to conclude things about the average running speed of people. That's extremely deceptive, because you can't actually conclude a damn thing about the average based on the minimum.
Except that it's not lower than the minimum, but that isn't much.
What can you infer from just knowing one human being can run 100m in 9.81s?
What if you knew instead that one particular human being can run 100m in 16s?
What if you knew instead that one particular human being can run 100m in 16s?
We can’t infer much about how fast others run. Only that it’s possible to run 100m in 9.81s. We don’t know if everyone else can do that, or no one.
Yes we do, we know it's the world record. That's the data point.
I would not call it "powerful" that you can infer from "X is the world record" that "nobody is faster than X".
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.
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.
The world record is not 1 data point, it is a property of all human running in history.
What is the datapoint in this case?
1. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s
or
2. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s and he’s the fastest ever
1. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s
or
2. Bolt runs 100m in 9.58s and he’s the fastest ever
It's what he said: Usain Bolt's 100m World Record of 9.58 seconds.
And what can you infer from that?
Given that it's a world record, you can infer that the majority of the species cannot run so quickly.
That is not a "powerful and useful inference", it's not an inference at all. It is simply the definition of a world record.
the point is that a "single datapoint" does not mean the same thing as a "single datapoint", depending on what that datapoint is and the context around it. The myth he was specifically busting in the original paragraph was that you cannot learn anything from a single datapoint, but that's only true if that datapoint is drawn from a random distribution.
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.
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.
The global minimum of a distribution is not, in any way, a "single datapoint". It is a property of all the data points that ever were - in this case, it contains information about all humans that have ever run in the history of the species.
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.
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.
Sure, if you happen to know the global minimum value, then you know a lot. For aliens though, we don't have anything resembling that, so the conclusions we can draw are much less interesting.
The purpose was debunk that myth so that he can derive further (though less information) about aliens, and then the author goes on to do so.
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.
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.
There is no such myth. Nobody is surprised that you can say something about a distribution if you know some facts about the distribution. Using "single data-point" in two completely different ways is just bait and switch.
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.
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.
You’re missing the point of that claim; he’s refuting “you can’t infer anything from one datapoint” using reductio ad absurdum - if the one datapoint contains in it the information “world record” then you can make a confident prediction that applies to 7 billion people, without measuring anything about their running speed; that’s already included in the one piece of information.
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.
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.
If by "data-point" you mean a single sample from an unknown distribution, then no we can't really say anything based on that, definitely nothing interesting.
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 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.
If I asked you to predict an alien time to cover 100 meters would you assign equal probability to every millisecond between 0 (teleport) and infinity (plants can’t move)?
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.
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.
There are a priori arguments that can tell you that 0 and infinity are bad estimates. If you find out that one individual of this species can run 100m in 9.58s, there are biological intuitions that suggest certain possibilities for the entire species. Crucially, those intuitions could be entirely wrong for alien biology - they are not statistical reasoning, they are intuitions built from Earth biology.
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.
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.
Yes those intuitions could be entirely wrong. You're reading it as I'm saying "if we know one individual can cover 100m in 9.58 seconds then we can confidently understand everything about the alien species, their biology, their origin, the world they live on, with 100% accuracy" and saying no we obviously can't. I agree we obviously can't say all that. It's the other way round, we start with a blank slate and can say absolutely nothing about their origin, biology, world, etc. But when we find out one member can cover 100m in 9.58 seconds then we can say ever so slightly more than nothing about them, a non-zero amount more than nothing.
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...
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
> It smells like few people here are mathematicians, and yet they're speaking with reddit levels of hubris, attributing simpletons' logical fallacies to a published astrophysicist.
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.
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.
> Manipulating some numbers in equations and coming out with absolute certainties is hilarious bad
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.
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.
It's not really bad reasoning when, from the very start of the article, the author points out what their limitations are in their approach. This is like saying that the Drake Equations are "stunningly bad reasoning".
The author goes far beyond just assuming power law distributions.
> 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.
> 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.
I really like this theory and enjoyed the read, however, the arguments are full of (very naive and) wrong interpretations of statistics and non sequiturs.
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."
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."
The last part about his titles is sad. It is like preemptively saying "buuut PhD!" when people will point the mess in his math.
I replied the same to a sibling comment already but all the content on this website is on a single page - where should the author have put the "About me" section instead if not at the end?
> 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.
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?
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?
Yeah, trying to infer probabilities from a dataset with one sample point is strange. (Especially when all our priors are from philosophical axioms and not observation.)
> For instance: "you are more likely to have attended a school with more pupils than most other schools"
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.
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.
Yes, but there is no way you can conclude "the typical student should come from school X" from that, which is the main issue with the author's argumentation.
I think the author is saying that if there's no variance (e.g. all schools have 10 students), then our school is as big as all the other schools, and as you increase the variance, the odds of you being in a larger than average school increases. But no matter the distribution, we're never most likely to be in a smaller than average school.
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.
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.
Precisely. I'm glad you took the time to understand. :)
Try to apply a set of constraints to a problem to reduce the possible set of results is a good thing, provided the constraints are extensive. Two things are universal in the, erm, universe, physics, and by extension chemistry and I don't see any consideration of those.
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.
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.
For me, it is similar to the doomsday argument[1]. An argument that predicts the likely end of humanity by year 10000, using only statistics. There are 8 rebuttals in the Wikipedia article alone...
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
When you making predictions about wide ranges of possibilities along many axes, it's very reasonable to choose the single most likely option on each of these, but you end up multiplying some 10% chance by a 20% chance by another 10% chance N layers deep, and the net result still ends up vanishingly unlikely. We are almost certainly not in the most likely possible world.
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.
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.
> We are almost certainly not in the most likely possible world.
But we are probably in 9/10 of those likeliest assumptions, even if we don't know which 9.
But we are probably in 9/10 of those likeliest assumptions, even if we don't know which 9.
But a hypothetical Mike Smith from LA County will be very representative for an average (or median to be more correct) user on this forum. I think that's the point of the article.
> I am more likely to have been born in a high population country than a low population country
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 me than who are me. Therefore I am more likely to have been born not me than to have been born me.
It's true! If you didn't know who you were, and were asked to take odds on the probability that you were phs, I hope you'd bet that you weren't, 'cause odds are about 10 billion to one against.
The problem is that there is no one on the other side of the bet. The self referential word play obscures the actual bet instance.
"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.
"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.
I believe this is commonly known to mathematicians as the 'karma is a bitch' rule.
Some past threads:
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)
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)
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I like this idea, but I am not convinced about how it is applied here.
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
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
Yes, but it covers that - out of all the possible times to make the video, this one is more probable because the population is higher and there are more professors of statistics with free time on their hands.
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.
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.
That corollary is known as the Doomsday Argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
The corollary also shows the limitations: you can't actually come up with a real probability for being wrong without knowing other things about this distribution (you can't know how likely you are to be in the most populous time in the history of the human race without knowing the entire past and future history). So the whole argument from statistics holds no water: it depends entirely on other arguments that give a shape to the distribution, and those arguments have their own problems and ways that they can be attacked.
The predictions actually won't change at all!
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.
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.
If larger aliens means smaller populations of aliens, would that mean that there are fewer possibilities for einsteins to come into existence? If einsteins are less likely, I could see the rate of growth of civilizations being slower, but no real intuition of whether or not that would make much of a difference in the long term.
Does this assume that the likelihood of each alien to be an "einstein" remains constant with size? It seems like a larger being which can support a larger brain might stand a better chance to develop higher thoughts.
Larger brains don't necessarily mean higher cognitive function. Humans have smaller brains than African elephants and many dolphin and whale species.
"Necessarily" is a standard that's too strict and binary.
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).
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).
Bird brains, such as parrot and crows so that brain size is not everything. A crows brain is smaller than a chimps in overall size and body:brain ratio, yet crows show more complex social behavior, problem solving and tool use (despite not having hands). Bird's brains are much denser than mammals, so it's less size and more number of neurons, and the complexity of how these neurons are networked.
Outliers do not invalidate a correlation.
This reminds me of Douglas Adams writing about how "on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."
Maybe dolphins/whales and elephants are in fact smarter than us but are stuck underwater with no fire and no tech tree or on land without opposable thumbs
I feel like we’d be communicating with them by now if that were the case. The dolphin-socrates would have a YouTube channel campaigning for dolphin rights or something, via a human translator and camera crew.
Our world would look like that Netflix movie “Bright”, with multiple intelligent species living and working together. (The movie was bad by the way)
Our world would look like that Netflix movie “Bright”, with multiple intelligent species living and working together. (The movie was bad by the way)
While that would be awesome, these foreign intelligences might have too little in common with our wiring to communicate in any way.
Also, we’ve been shaped by our tools since day one, and these animals use little or no tools.
Also, we’ve been shaped by our tools since day one, and these animals use little or no tools.
Motivation could be an issue. What if they do not want to communicate with us? What if we are too slow for them? Dolphins produce burst pulses that have interclick interval of just few milliseconds. We cannot even hear these individual clicks and for us the burst pulse sounds like a creaky door. But they, supposedly, can hear individual clicks. We do not understand or use echolocation, they do, so their "dolphin-socrates" probably would have their own allegory of the cave that is not based on what individuals can see.
Humans have the computers and machine learning experience. Why aren't they making software to figure it out? And dolphin/machine interfaces? Touch screens for elephants?
Idiots are radically more common, so we are probably idiots. Aliens will be smarter.
It doesn't matter, because as soon as a civilization figures out AGI or safe genetic modification they will no longer have to rely on the genetic lottery to produce genius.
> If larger aliens means smaller populations of aliens,
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.
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.
I'm not exactly sure, but I think the author is asserting that planets are likely not to be much larger than ours [1] and if that is the case, larger aliens means they require more space and that puts an upper bound on population size (e.g. the example he gives is if there were as many humans as there were ants, then together all humans would require more energy than what hits earth from the sun).
[1] http://thebigalientheory.com/#planets
[1] http://thebigalientheory.com/#planets
Assuming a finite population there is always a smartest member in that population.
At some point, this sort of thing turns into a weird inverse of naive copernicanism. I look forward to the version of this argument that concludes that we statistically must be the giant aliens and everyone else in the universe is probably hobbit-sized.
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."
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."
I take this the same way I take the Drake equations: As an interesting thought experiment but only as good as the assumptions they make.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> local maxima must also exist
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.
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.
Key word being eventually. It may be that is the case but we are early in the universe and that it will be another 10 billion years before enough life exists for two independent life trees to give rise to multiple civilizations within range of each other to ever meet.
I'm pulling this out of nowhere but let's say bigger populations correlate with ease of detection.
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.
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.
I’m Scott Aaronson’s book he calls it Computing with the Anthropic Principle. It’s a fun exercise, though obviously quite dangerous. I believe he also mentions that following this reasoning would lead us to expect that the end of the world is near due to us expecting to live at a time of maximum human population!
I don't think the argument is sound. If I walk into a big room with the general assembly of humankind and shake hands with a random person, that person will probably be from China, Russia, US, India or some such because those few countries have more than 50% of Earth's population. However if I walk into the UN where each state has one seat no matter how small and I shake hands with a random person, that delegate will likely be from a small country because there are many more small countries than big ones.
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.
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.
>China, Russia, US, India or some such because those few countries have more than 50% of Earth's population
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.
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.
Sorry bias from someone who's been living ~100m from the iron curtain. Russia's sort of close. But you're right, according to Wikipedia the ranking is (1) China — (2) India — (3) United States — (4) Indonesia — (5) Pakistan — (6) Brazil — (7) Nigeria — (8) Bangladesh — (9) Russia; the first 6 countries (of 241 countries and territories, i.e. 2%) give you 49% of the world's population; 14% of all countries and territories account for 80% of the population, so Pareto more or less.
China + India have well over a third of the world's population between them, the next seven largest countries combined (which includes Russia) roughly equal that of China.
Decades back, Omni Magazine talked to biologists about what dinosaurs could have evolved to if it hadn't been for the meteor. They seemed to have assumed the smart ones would have all been human sized.
So the thing about the dinosaurs is they were probably always doomed. It just happened to be the meteor that (mostly) finished them off.
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.
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.
It’s crazy that they lasted > 150M years and never developed intelligence. Meanwhile we’ve been here just 10 million years or so and we’re starting to make it to other planets.
Intelligence is usually a huge waste of resources so it's not typically selected for past a certain level. I would still consider my cat highly intelligent with her strategy making during play, and her understanding of human emotions. In the case of our ancestors, there was a time when traditional resource gathering techniques were not as successful as those that took strategy, coordination with others, understanding migrations of other animals and seasonal progressions of edible plants, and potentially even tool use. Those that were intelligent enough to adopt these techniques managed to feed themselves and reproduce, while those lineages that weren't struggled, and eventually died out entirely. The end of the Neanderthal was sort of like this. They failed to improve their hunting strategies, their population shrank especially in competition with early humans, and eventually they died out.
Perhaps they did but they did not have means to express themselves and modify the environment?
I started thinking about that after I posted. What a shame that would be!
Mammals have been around for more than a hundred million years, maybe as old as the first dinosaurs themselves. 10 million years is about the time humans and gorillas diverged from a common ancestor. We’ve been evolving just as long as every other animal and it was environmental pressures (and luck) that lead to us being what we are.
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Or dinosaurs developed technology, detected the killer meteor, and relocated to Venus.
There were plenty of small dinosaurs.
There were small dinosaurs as well...
Some of them still exist!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds
That's kind of the point: the _small_ ones still exist.
And some are crazy intelligent
Whales seem to have better feeding strategy as they can depend on microbiota.
More large (potentially far more terrifying )flightless birds today, that's probably it.
other than birds, crocodilians, etc.
I'm usually a skeptic but I don't buy into the idea that we can't reason anything about aliens until we find them.
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.
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.
Honestly, the idea of a coherent starfaring civilization is itself kind of dubious to me based on the following things:
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.
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.
If mind states can be streamed and integrated continuously while traversing those light years, that would make reintegration less of shock.
That's a hell of a network latency to contend with.
We've only barely detected that planets exist outside of our solar system fairly recently. Our observations are mainly limited to the general size of them, e.g. 1 Jupiter width, 2 earth masses, etc. Telescopic images of other stars in our galaxy are just a couple pixels.
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.
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.
> superintelligent viruses
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm referring to historical evidence. At any point in history other than recent, our understanding of reality has been completely revised since then. And the extrapolation is that the same trend will continue. We've got zero evidence whatsover that we've found core models that can't be overridden by further discovery, and eventually made obsolete in whole by large paradigm shifts.
I will happily argue there is pretty strong historical evidence our models are correct. In my amateur trip through philosophy from Plato to Wittgenstein I've seen a lot of acknowledgements by the intelligencia of a generation as to what is presumed, convenient, or constructed fact and what is actual fact. Paradigm shifts in thinking have gotten repeatedly smaller over the written record, and would hardly be considered a paradigm shift by previous generations.
That would be true if the development of our understanding had happened at a linear pace. It hasn't, though.
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.
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.
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" - that's the realm of religion and philosophy. It builds models that can be tested empirically, refined and sometimes replaced. 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. The Catholic church did great a refining their model of reality and making it more internally self-consistent, but it doesn't mean that it's the same thing as the truth. Neither is a particular scientific model, and it is just as prone to being eventually dismantled or replaced.
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.
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.
Again, just because it's possible that there's more to cover doesn't make it true.
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.
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.
Here’s a possible counterexample: our understanding of the overall shape and structure of the universe has changed drastically over the last 100 years. The concept of a “galaxy” is fairly new; the idea that the universe is expanding is fairly new and was initially shocking (most scientists had assumed a steady state); the idea that expansion is accelerating is new and surprising.
Constellations are still useful for teaching the stars, but it doesn't mean that mythical beings embedded themselves in the sky. Discovering that the earth was not the center of the universe pretty much did invalidate everything we know about cosmology. Newton's laws are fine for now, but once again, it doesn't make them truth. It makes them useful tools. We can't confuse useful for true, that's the entire point, because one day, even if it's still useful, there's a chance it will be found to not be true.
You're right that we've repeatedly revised understandings of reality that were based on mysticism and voodoo. But understandings of reality based on Science have only been refined and updated, rather than replaced. Newtonian physics is still accurate for day-to-day purposes. Similarly, the quantum nature of light isn't important for optics, nor steam or internal combustion engines, physical machines, radio, or even fast networks. Electricity concepts like voltage and current are still madly useful.
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.
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.
> What if some virus evolved to work super intelligently as a hive mind?
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.
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.
In a thousand years, most of what we know will still be right, so far as it goes, but as wholly irrelevant to choices being made as Thomas Aquinas's conclusions are today. We are missing that great ocean of truth, distracted by washed-up seashells.
My view is that we can reason about organisms living in space because we are one of them. We have a sample size of one, but assuming that properties of different space-faring organisms are distributed normally, it stands to reason that the first sample collected is near to the mean of the underlying distribution.
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.
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.
Within your argument, what's the justification for assuming low variance?
There is none! Variance could be arbitrarily high I suppose. In the limit, if you assume a uniform distribution, I don't think that a single sample will give you any information about the underlying distribution characteristics.
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.
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.
Natural selection means that they likely are warlike and violent. Warlike and violent intelligent species destroy themselves quickly so are unlikely to exist at the same time as us.
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).
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).
Read it through (quickly though). One thing that I did not get is why the alien should be around 310kg.
If I were to naively use the same arguments: as surely as I am probably from a country with a very high population, and as surely as I probably have a common bloodtype, surely I have probably a very common weight? So should not the average alien bij somewhere around 80-100kg?
For the average alien, yes. For the average alien species, no.
I don't like these kind of arguments (see doomsday argument) because they do indeed have a deep logical flaw. They use definitions and mechanics from probability theory for phenomena that are not repeatable.
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.
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.
The point he’s making is that if you don’t know what the factors are, then your best bet is to pick from the larger group — you’ll be more likely to be correct.
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 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.
> The point he’s making is that if you don’t know what the factors are, then your best bet is to pick from the larger group — you’ll be more likely to be correct.
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 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.
"More likely than not" is not a "miniscule probability".
You make a mistake in your argument. Some assumption being "more likely to be correct" has no meaning without a distribution that can be described as random. Without repeating the assumption multiple times the words "probability" or "likelihood" simply cannot be applied.
Even without “a quasi random process that made you a human” (which seems reasonable to me, but let’s put it aside for the moment)
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.
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.
Your second paragraph is absolutely correct, yet it leads to a circular argument, because it does not tell you anything about how correct your paper is. In fact, in that experiment, the probability of your paper being among the correct ones is the same quantity as the actual population density. You cannot derive any meaningful information from assuming you are above,about,or below average.
Yes, we don't know whether ours specifically is a good sample planet or not, but statistically it is, and out of all the universe's planets' statisticians, most postulating this theory are.
Exactly - so, the statistical argument tells us absolutely nothing about other aliens at all. With different distributions of aliens in the universe, we would be more or less likely to be wrong.
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.
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.
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I believe the author is correct that statistically, most intelligent alien species are likely to be less populous, and more physically massive than, human beings.
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.
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.
Thought experiment:
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))?
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))?
That's not at all how the CC works. Severing it used to be a common treatment for epilepsy (it prevents the synchronized firing of neurons that cause seizures), and those people were all basically themselves afterwards.
https://sites.psu.edu/intropsychsp14n2/2014/02/04/severing-t...
https://sites.psu.edu/intropsychsp14n2/2014/02/04/severing-t...
It is how the CC works.
They're two separate conscious entities after the CC.
See the wiki page on Split-brain for an overview.
They're two separate conscious entities after the CC.
See the wiki page on Split-brain for an overview.
What is your prior probability that sudden memory loss occurs in the general population?
I'm sure there's a reason you're asking but I can't figure it out. Why does it make a difference?
The prior probability matters because iff it is strictly less than 1 then your estimate should increase by a factor of:
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.
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.
Btw. as you can see in the figure about blood type distributions, »I am more likely to have a common blood type than a rare one"« is actually false. It is more likely to have any other type than A. But fair enough, neither of the blood types are very rare.
Related, maybe (I've not read TFA, but the comments about the reasoning made me think of this): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
That seems like a nicely made webpage!
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.
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.
Fun fact I just made another site last week with an html5up.net theme: https://3d.st
If you're reading this you're likely to be from Earth; more likely than from some other sentient-life bearing planet; therefore other sentient-life bearing planets must have fewer sentient beings!
Simples.
Simples.
Using the same line of reasoning, men could argue that the majority of people are men. The whole argument is based on a crude form of survivor bias It's complete and utter bunk.
Too many predictions with too many assumptions and too little data.
The assumption stated is that we should imagine that we are part of the population of intelligent species and then imagine are we in a big country or a small country.... well the thing is if we say that the country is our species then that says things about homo saps. But we could just as well say that we are in the group of rapidly emerging soon to go extinct species, which would make us typical but with no species specific characteristic. Our biology, morphology and origin are probably irrelevant when characterizing us.
On that note: Aliens Are Slow.
http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf
http://cantrip.org/slow.pdf
This reminds me of the novel Semiosis. Some similar concepts.
[deleted]
lots of hand-waving and conclusions pulled out of thin air :(
Detractors propose alternate theory explaining data or criticism immediately invalidated.
Explain what data? We don't have any data at all on aliens.
Well, in the case of that paper it's true. It's using deductive reasoning, but my statement is more easily read about inductive reasoning. However, you could equally read it, "other theories that provide predictions that contradict this reasoning". My point was be constructive and creative, not just dismissive and destructive. Have something to offer, an alternative way of viewing the world, rather than just saying "this way doesn't work".
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.
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.
Why is it more reasonable to expect that the human individual is typical among intelligent lifeforms and thus belongs to an atypical, larger-than-median population and planet, than to expect that earth is a typical habitable planet and that its individuals are atypical?
>We cannot learn anything about aliens until we find them"
>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.
>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.
> Most things that are learned about are observed to exist before being 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.
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.
All of engineering is determining what could exist independently of anybody having seen it before or not. If your statement were true, we would live in a very boring world.
But anyway, speculation based on probabilities over distributions that we don't know is useless. We can only speculate based on knowledge we have.
But anyway, speculation based on probabilities over distributions that we don't know is useless. We can only speculate based on knowledge we have.
A lot of math is done by working on conjectures that take time to prove or disprove.
Conjectures in math are based on observations and intuition gained from related observable things. Specifically they seem to be statements about properties of things already known.
Allowing the word "related" to do a lot of heavy lifting, I'd say that it is the same for aliens.
No conjectures in math are called theorems and they are based off of made up assumptions called axioms. Whether the axiom is true from an observational standpoint is irrelevant to math.
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.
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.
The author really needs to bone up on clear arguments and philosophy - this topic is covered more pellucidly and at greater length elsewhere. I couldn't work out what he was arguing for even after scrolling all the way to the end. Amazed someone could get through Phd at Camb. and not have their arsed handed to them repeatedly for poor argumentation. The reasoning throughout seems confused and wooly.
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?
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?
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.