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The turtle would be working with considerably less data, though. Does he know how old his island is? Does he have conclusive evidence of the existence of other

The turtle would be working with considerably less data, though. Does he know how old his island is? Does he have conclusive evidence of the existence of other islands? Is he aware of the similarity or difference of other islands compared to his own? Would he be able to observe if seafarers were living on a nearby island or does he need to wait for them to actually land on his beach? Does he have a reasonable estimate for the size of the earth? The amount of ocean? For the distribution of islands across the ocean? Also, since he’s a turtle, he doesn’t, presumably, yet actually know how hard it is to make a boat. The argument for determining whether or not you are the only seafaring species depends, first, on you having attained the ability to travel the seas… All of that seems necessary before he can conclude whether or not he should consider it ‘surprisingly late’ for his island not to have been reached yet by any seafarers. But the interesting part of the analogy is maybe that the turtle might fool himself into thinking he understands the parameters well enough to estimate this probability - after all, he’s paddled around off the beach and even made it to a nearby rock - so he reckons he’s got a pretty good handle on how hard it must be to travel between islands.

addingnumbers 5y ago
I wonder how I failed to express my position so badly that people who seemingly agree with me think they don't. Ignorance and misestimation of the true underlying factors isn't a trait unique to these hypothetical turtles. Or, perhaps you have a much higher confidence than I do in humans' assessment of the factors involved in your questions. I'm saying we are over-confident in the underlying premises of our understanding, just like the turtles would be. The more of the questions you pose that go partly unsolved, the more unsubstantiated the conclusion. Their probability calculations are pointless -- garbage in, garbage out. As demonstrated by the patent wrongness of their conclusion. If you are confident that we've got solid answers to the interstellar corollaries of all your questions with the evidence we can gather at this point, then we aren't on the same page at all. This idea, that our observations of the universe are a properly representative sample from which to form conclusions about the unobserved universe, makes as much sense to me as the thinking-turtles assuming you need a small green island to and a thick shell to enable sentience because that's what their observations show.

addingnumbers 5y ago

I wonder how I failed to express my position so badly that people who seemingly agree with me think they don't. Ignorance and misestimation of the true underlying factors isn't a trait unique to these hypothetical turtles. Or, perhaps you have a much higher confidence than I do in humans' assessment of the factors involved in your questions. I'm saying we are over-confident in the underlying premises of our understanding, just like the turtles would be. The more of the questions you pose that go partly unsolved, the more unsubstantiated the conclusion. Their probability calculations are pointless -- garbage in, garbage out. As demonstrated by the patent wrongness of their conclusion. If you are confident that we've got solid answers to the interstellar corollaries of all your questions with the evidence we can gather at this point, then we aren't on the same page at all. This idea, that our observations of the universe are a properly representative sample from which to form conclusions about the unobserved universe, makes as much sense to me as the thinking-turtles assuming you need a small green island to and a thick shell to enable sentience because that's what their observations show.