6 ms·
I think you (and some others) are being dismissive of a good-faith attempt to formalize thinking of a problem with many unknowns. I can't access the paper itsel
by scott_s 8y ago
I think you (and some others) are being dismissive of a good-faith attempt to formalize thinking of a problem with many unknowns. I can't access the paper itself, but commenter carry_bit posted a link to the slides, and the conclusion slide says:
The Fermi question is not a paradox: it just looks like
one if one is overconfident in how well we know the
Drake equation parameters.
• Doing a distribution model shows that even existing
literature allows for a substantial probability of very
little life, and a more cautious prior gives a significant
probability for rare life.
• The Fermi observation makes the most uncertain
priors move strongly, reinforcing the rare life guess
and an early great filter.
• Getting even a little bit more information can update
our belief state a lot!
I think their arguments deserve more consideration than what they are getting in this thread.
- jerf 8y agoYou should be able to access the paper. Arxiv doesn't require any logins or credentials or anything; just check the "download" section in the upper right. This should go straight to the PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 (Unless, you just mean you're on a device that can't render PDFs or something. It's a simple PDF, though, even a phone should be able to handle it.)
- scott_s 8y agoI'm on a large corporate network for a research organization, and I think they're rate-limiting us. All of the links give me an "Access Denied" message, with a referral to https://arxiv.org/denied.html https://arxiv.org/denied.html. I can't even access https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/.