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Hanson estimates "we will meet this kind of alien in roughly a half billion years" BECAUSE MATH (https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/how-far-aggressive-aliens.html)
36

So what I’m hearing is we can safely postpone this discussion as irrelevant for the next few million years.

From the comments

You can be “at risk” of getting promoted, getting married, or having kids. Doesn’t mean those are bad things.

English isn’t my first language, but this seems like a very weird definition of ‘at risk’.

Think of it this way: imagine one of the men you most greatly admire in life receives large amounts of money in donations but has minimal responsibility, and has a constant rotating stable of fresh-faced idealistic college grads willing to do free labor and also fuck. Wouldn't anything that involves more real-life responsibility be an existential risk to that lifestyle?
Aha yes you are right thanks.
It is, and the quotation marks around it are intended by the author to indicate that.
The definition of risk as including both good and bad things is present in some project management academic papers. Although to be fair I never knew project management academia was a thing until I accidentally signed up to study it.
Ah thanks, I was thinking about risk managment from a security perspective.
  1. Title your blog Overcoming Bias.
  2. Write takes that are Overwhelmingly Biased in the same direction.
  3. ???
  4. BIASEDGOD
like "fair and balanced" on Fox, this is to be understood not in the most ordinary sense, but in contrast to the hated Other, whose attempts at actually being "fair and balanced" and "unbiased" are, in the special universe occupied by Yud and Hanson and Tucker C., \*actually\* biased and balanced. easy pz
TYBG

The virgin Drake equation

The Chad voluntary extinction

How many less stupid terms could he have chosen to describe his Space Americans? Expansionist? Imperial? Colonial?

Nah, gonna go with fucking “grabby” lmao. Top notch rationalist term-smithing right there.

Taboo your words! Those words are political, and double unplus ungood.
Point taken... but so is civilization. Might as well stick with the five year old lexicon and name it "grabby bunch".

Snarking about the implications of worrying about something that will happen half a billion years from now aside, I really can’t get past the fact that this is:

  1. Trying to make a model from one data point
  2. Presuming (as is bloody typical) that colonizing other planets is as easy as puttering around and landing there, and that there won’t be overwhelming engineering, logistic, biochemical, and other barriers that prevent an alien civilization from ever extending beyond its solar system, much less colonizing the whole galaxy.

These sorts of things are basically mysticism/gut hunches at this pt

If you want to read something actually insightful about the Fermi Paradox instead of whatever this is, try this https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404

>we find a substantial ex ante probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe This is one of my favorite ideas just because it would crush so many sci-fi fantasies.
A bountiful universe all for Humanity's shaping has its own sort of romanticism to it. The aliens can always come from within; plenty of people already want to be anthropomorphic animals and whatnot.
That's true. It's something to consider when looking out into the night sky. It could be a whole universe just for us.

We should instead guess that eventually the universe will be mostly filled with civs, and thus one of the key constraints on the origin of any one civ is a need to pass a local great filter, going from no life to simple life to complex life to intelligence, etc., before some other civ arrives to colonize that area, and prevent new pics there.

Why should we guess this?