tjradcliffe

"Maybe people intuitively figured out what was up (one of the parameters of the Drake Equation must be much lower than our estimate) but stopped there and didn’t bother explaining the formal probability argument."

There's no "intuitively" about it. We know from the data available that the probability of machine-building general intelligence of the kind that is unique to humans on Earth is fantastically unlikely to arise. It depends on a confluence of completely unrelated selective pressures: one on tool-making, one on social cooperation, and one on continuous mate competition/selection. There is good evidence that all of those forces are important to specifically human--not dolphin or bird or whatever--intelligence on Earth, and without any one of them we'd still be fairly handy monkey-creatures banging rocks around.

As well as a theoretical understanding, we have empirical data. We can ask, "If something is at all probable how many times will it have evolved on Earth?"

Eyes, for example, have evolved independently multiple times, based on differences in retinal biochemistry. Wings and fins and legs have also evolved many times across an incredible diversity of species. This tells us that things that are easy to evolve have evolved multiple times in Earth's history.

Specifically human, machine-building intelligence has evolved exactly once. This is strong evidence that it has an enormously low probability.

Once you've realized that one of the parameters in the Drake equation is incredibly small, the Silent Universe is no longer surprising. And both empirically and theoretically, the probability of evolving specifically human, machine-building intelligence is incredibly small.

However, I have never met anyone enamoured of Fermi's Paradox who gives any credence to this, which is why no attempt to resolve the paradox will ever have any effect on the discussion. This is in general the case with so-called paradoxes: no matter how many times they are clearly and simply resolved, people who want there to be paradoxes will pretend the resolution doesn't exist, or will deliberately misrepresent it as a non-solution. Or they will present some other non-solution as more compelling, even when the solution presented makes those non-solutions unnecessary.

This story is a textbook example of bad reporting.

The headline and opening paragraph combine two completely different categories of error--"wrong" and "late"--so that it is possible to say "most Americans".

The story then goes on to talk exclusively about "wrong" as if that was the dominant category. "Late" is never mentioned.

The abstract of the ($60) report talks about errors only, but reading between the lines "late" is subsumed under the author's notion of "error".

So this story tells us nothing about the actual rate of misdiagnosis, but it leaves unwary readers with the probably false impression that "most Americans will experience misdiagnosis".

This is not to say that misdiagnosis is not a serious problem. But then, so is really bad reporting.

I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is there a classical world at all?" Decoherence and similar approaches at least try to address this question, and don't fit at all well with their two-Type scheme.

Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)

The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even (plausibly) the English Civil War and its aftermath. Those random accidents--including the founding of universities in the late Middle Ages--created a set of conditions where people with the brains to create science were given access to institutions that let them think and investigate at the same time when they had both the social freedom and the technological capacity to publish their work, and the freedom to engage in institutional innovation to create things like the Royal Society, whose founding should be considered the final act in the birth of modern science: once it existed, it would be extremely hard not to get something like science going.

So on this view, the reason why science happened here and not there was the same reason why hominids with the capacity for general, tool-using, representational intelligence and language happened in Africa and not the Americas: such developments depend on a confluence of multiple unlikely factors and as such are very unlikely to happen at all, much less multiple times. If science hadn't been created in Western Europe in the 1600's it might never have happened. It only looks inevitable because it did.

Sure you can, unless you're shuffling a perfectly ordered deck. OP was deleted so there may be some context missing?

That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show very slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whether or not someone is religious, beyond church/temple/mosque attendance, which is equivalent to asking them.

Does he reference any data that would give his suggestion non-negligible plausibility?

It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an instrumental or analysis artefact." It's intermittent (huge red flag) and while the article doesn't say so (additional red flag) close to the threshold of observation.

There are completely mundane explanations (upper atmosphere models slightly wrong, unaccounted-for EM effects) so while there may be a fundamental cause (gravity is doing something exciting) the odds are that it's a boring effect, just like the superluminal neutrino observations.

Their results may be significant to VCs, but likely aren't to anyone else.

They get about a 4% increase in good outcomes, from 23% to 27%, for a 1 sigma increase in expert positive response. This is significant at the 5% level.

It's enough to say that "Experts do slightly better than chance in IP-heavy fields", but about 3/4 of those businesses will still fail, and that remains true regardless of expert evaluation.

If you're a big investor this could make a difference to your bottom line. If you're a small investor or entrepreneur, it is pretty much irrelevant.

Reality is continuous. Human categories--like cancer--only have sharp edges because we draw them with an act of selective attention. The edge of our attention is discontinuous. Nothing else (that doesn't involved quantum mechanics or integer counting of attentionally-isolated objects) is.

"Cancer" is not a simple thing. Two people with "breast cancer" may have very similar or almost completely different diseases. As others here have pointed out, the magnitude and frequency of wins and losses matter even though trades are binary win/lose (which they can be because we've created an entire category of imaginary objects called dollars that can be counted).

Bayes rule is as applicable to any area of significant uncertainty, including win/loss magnitude. It is universal.

The meaning is not the same because it's very difficult for poor and less educated parents to give their children what rich and more educated parents give them. My kids went to a high school that had a considerable socio-economic range and I was fairly involved in some stuff there, and it was clear there were plenty of poorer, less educated parents who were working really hard to give their kids everything they needed, but it was almost impossibly difficult for them.

This is not an argument against treating your children well, but the reality is that having parents who are well-off and educated buffers you against all kinds of mistakes and issues that would sink other kids. Moderating (not eliminating, which is neither possible nor desirable) social inequality is important precisely because we can say with as much certainty as we can say anything that there are kids out there today as talented and driven as Bill Gates who don't have anything like the resilient support system that he had, and without it they are likely going to be a drag on society rather than contributors to it.

Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.)

Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)

For comparison, the Great Lakes are about 60 m above sea level (Kingston, at the junction of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, is at 200 ft). Salt water inundation has not been a problem. However, invasive species (zebra mussels, for example) have been. They are fresh water species that get sucked up into ballast water in other ports (many of which are on rivers or estuaries) and pumped out in other destinations. There are procedures to avoid this (exchanging fresh-water ballast for salt water while at sea, for example) but those procedures are inevitably implemented by humans, who are certain to eventually make a mistake sufficient to cause contamination.

These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fascinating, but it also must have been very difficult.

So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation.

In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach".

I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work."

Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us.

So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.

All knowledge is probability-based. The question is: are the probabilities in this case low (or high) enough to be very interesting?