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Joined November 2022
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Regardless of the math, this is just another reason we must survive as a species.
THE FERMI PARADOX HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED
for sixty years you have been sold a mystery. the universe is huge, the stars are old, somebody should have called by now, and the silence demands an explanation.
three researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford went to check the arithmetic under the product.
what was in the old packaging: one number plugged into each slot of the Drake equation. a single value for the share of planets where life starts, a single value for the share where intelligence appears. point estimates.
the trouble is that our knowledge of those quantities is smeared across orders of magnitude. you cannot be uncertain by a factor of a billion and then write down one number for it.
so Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord fed in the whole spread of the uncertainty instead. they ran it twice, once from their own reading of the science, once from the range of published estimates in the astrobiology literature.
the output:
> probability we are alone in the Milky Way: from about half to near certainty
> probability we are alone in the observable universe: from about 40 to 85 percent
at those numbers the silence stops being strange. nothing is missing from the sky. no paradox left to explain, and no Great Filter needed to explain it.
i went in expecting to find the trick, because a paper that deletes a famous problem usually has one. what i came out with is a complaint about method. one number written where a range belongs, repeated for sixty years.
the fine print, and i am the one insisting on it. these are probabilities under the distributions the authors picked, so change the assumptions and the numbers move. the paper measures how little we know and it does not prove that nobody is out there. what it takes away is your right to be surprised that nobody has called.
link in the comments
The election results should be celebrated as a small victory against facists.
But, they’re the beginning.
If we don’t do real shit in the next two years it won’t fucking matter.
We’ve backed an animal in its cage and into a corner. That can be very dangerous.
Stay frosty.
We’re an outcome, now
This is honestly shocking.
Three months ago, Hong Wang was awarded the Fields Medal for resolving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions.
Today, OpenAI released a proposed proof of the conjecture in ALL dimensions.
And that’s not all. It also announced a proposed existence proof for quantum chromodynamics and a proposed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
Experts say that, if confirmed, these would be Nobel prize and Turing award level discoveries respectively.
A journalist just asked me: “What remains for humans to do?”
I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that more and more problem solving will be automated.
But humans will remain crucial in determining the direction of discovery. Deciding which problems are worth solving.
Because the value of a discovery depends on our needs, our priorities and the kind of world we want to build.
There will be a shift from problem solving to problem setting.
I also think there will be huge individual differences.
People with strong critical thinking skills, creativity and imagination will be supercharged by AI.
People without those skills risk surrendering to it.
I’m particularly concerned for children, who may never develop these skills.
I think epistemic literacy - how to distinguish information from knowledge - is the single most important skill we should be teaching.
