I feel like a lot of people here are pontificating about something they don't understand. 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. Usually Hacker News is better than this.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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".
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 .
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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-...
The poster above also stated their beliefs as absolute truths, by your standards: "You don't need to travel physically when you can do it instantly with your conscience.". My tone is perfectly identical with theirs - we are both plainly stating our opinions of how the world works.
Of course, you are again wildly off base with your reading of my replies. "You" in both my post and the post I was replying to were not referring to someone in particular, they are obviously the rhetoric "you". They weren't telling me that I, personally, am able to travel instantly with my consciousness, and I wasn't telling them that they, personally, were not allowed to do so.
Then, adding "I think", "I believe" etc is generally just noise - obviously everything I say is a personal belief or thought. Saying "my particles can't travel with speed greater than c" or "I've never experienced something traveling faster than c" would be needlessly specific - my belief in the theory of special relativity only works if it applies to everything, so that is the belief I stated.
At best, if I wanted to be quite pedantic, I could have added an "According to special relativity,".
You're really quite offended by basic speech and physical facts...
You haven't offended me. You've offended yourself, and the decency of the people you spoke to on here. You limited yourself, and disrespected them and I saw you doing that and pushed back. And you complain and now try to prove you were mostly OK all whole time. You're offended here, isn't it?
So...basic speech and physical facts, huß? So you read it as I'm offended by these things hmm, that's interesting. I suppose reading it that way you can more easily dismiss or try to minimize to yourself what I'm saying, tell yourself it's just emotional or irrational and something you don't need to learn form.
Do you know how I feel about it? If you really know then tell me? You don't know. You're just pretending, to suit yourself.
The difference with the other posted is they are not imposing limits, but you are. You might think it's symmetric, but it's not. It's more likely that things are more abundant than you know, than that you have already discovered everything that's possible, so you should be more respectful and modal when expressing restrictions.
You say adding qualifiers like "I think" and "I believe" is noise, but it's about respect and empathy and the tactic acknowledgment that you don't have all the answers, other people's ideas are valid, and what you are saying comes with that openness and curiosity to learning more. It makes sense that you read those things as "noise" given the low quality of your responses and low respect and empathy with other's opinions here: ie your totally disrespectful language pretending people who don't share your narrow view are "crazy"
It's good you reveal your thinking about it. I think you are missing the point that you're not just writing down a verbatim statement of the facts like a dry mathematical treatise or policy document you are communicating with other human beings. Trying to come off like that, will do you much better, and I think you have much to learn.
You'll definitely be able to do that if you make the effort it. That's why I spent so much time on you.
I believe you can, please do the effort and have a good one.
"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.
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.
Could you cite some of these studies? I would be honestly curious to read them.
Note that entanglement, while non-local as a process in most interpretations of QM, is mathematically proven to be unable to transmit information any faster than the speed of light.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> "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.
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!)
"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" :-) )
> 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.
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)?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.