[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Sat Nov 9 11:24:08 UTC 2013


On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 11:34:00PM +0000, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> On 2013-11-06 14:30, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> >There is absolutely no data to postulate a future filter. You
> >being able to read this message is not a source of data for
> >statistical reasoning
> 
> Actually, it is. It is just a single data point, but it can skew
> things surprisingly strongly:
> http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/anthropicshadow.pdf

Why are you using probability in a perfectly biased case
of one sample? It isn't applicable. The first sample only 
gives you the information that it's possible. Only the 
second unbiased sample gives you a lot of information.

The first sample is almost pefectly useless.
 
> >(lottery winners don't have a good grasp of overall winning
> >probability).
> 
> Actually, they know the probability is nonzero. That is in itself a

Cogito, ergo sum is a trivial result. We know we exist, we care
to know how many of others like us are there.

> lot of information. And depending on which branch of anthropics you
> buy into (BTW: advert: http://www.philosophy-of-cosmology.ox.ac.uk/events/fourth-oxford-miniseries-anthropics-selection-effects-and-fine-tuning-in-cosmology/
> - course and workshop in December) they might get other weak
> information.

I need to read your paper at leisure.
 
> >As long as we don't have causally unentangled data about higher
> >life nevermind life capable of intelligent observer status nobody
> >has a case.
> 
> Well, data can be of different kinds. The evolutionary history of
> Earth has a bias due to one species becoming observers, but there is
> information in it (does it look hard to ramp up or down
> encephalization or behavioral complexity?)

You still have no idea how special or common that pattern is.
Even if you get a different sample of a nontrivial ecosystem
in this solar system but which is causually entangled with
local emergence events it's tainted. 



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