From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Thu Mar 27 2003 - 17:47:50 MST
[Bleak downcast confession: I run the risk of treading old familiar ground
to the Bayesians here, but it's either that or dredging for W*R news, and
for the moment I choose the former. Bayes, forgive me, for I have sinned.]
On Thu, 27 Mar 2003 23:22:34 +0100, scerir <scerir@libero.it> wrote:
> Thus anthropic reasoning predicts that we should
> find ourselves in such a large civilization, while in fact we do not.
> There
> must be an important flaw in our understanding of the structure of the
> universe and the range of development of civilizations, or in the process
> of
> anthropic reasoning.
This bugs me, and statements of this sort have always bugged me. I think
I'm wary of it as a possible misapplication of what is often called "the
law of large numbers".
It seems to me that saying things like "we should" rather than something
more like "out of /x/ trials, a civilization was seen in /y/ cases to
possess property /w/, with a variation /z/ across trial sets, suggesting
probability P" is a huge palming-of-a-card, possibly itself in a quasi-
anthropic way. Akin to the claim (a loaded one, but easy to come by) that
because x-ethnicity is usually in jail, I "ought to be" in jail because I
am x-ethnicity. I mean, it (getting to "we/I should") *is* apparently the
evolutionary-biology explanation for why we *like* odds so much, but that
doesn't make it _true_.
On momentary reflection about my objection, it also seems to me to,
vaguely, relate to the gambler's fallacy. But I'm not sure I can put my
finger on why, just now.
We don't have a huge set of observations/trials (monte carlo or otherwise)
of something like our-civilization-being-instantiated, or more to the point
"our-individual-beings-being-instantiated" to go on. We have a theory (a
notion, actually), and the ability to create a formula and do algebra, and
one data point. "HEY! I got the THREE OF CLUBS! The odds of that are 52 to
1! Wow, how unlikely!"
I mean to say, what if 51 of the kinds of civilizations that might exist
don't look anything like ours, or each other?--as one possibility only. Or
what if we *are* a "big" civilization? Seems like a pretty plain variation
on the old Drake equation--either the combinatorics create a dinky number,
or the model is incomplete, or the observations are missing something, or
some combination of factors. In which case it's old news--Fermi's "Where
are they?" in a different t-shirt.
Perhaps I'm just a lazy thinker. Perhaps my gray-to-white-matter ratio will
never permit me to apprehend this sort of thinking deeply enough to accept
it as truth. At present, though I can entertain it, it just makes my
bogometer needle wander into the yellow zone, rather near where many
people's retreats to commitment do. "If I were a dog, I'd hate it, because
I'd chase sticks. And I hate chasing sticks."
Am I making any sense here?
I'll try to think more about it. "Help thou my unbelief."
MMB
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