gjm comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

65 Post author: Yvain 03 November 2012 11:00PM

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Comment author: gjm 05 November 2012 12:02:53AM 3 points [-]

(Nice interrobang.)

There's only something wrong with holding both "Pr(intelligent life in Milky Way) non-negligible" and "Pr(intelligent life in observable universe) not-almost-1" if the events "life in galaxy 1", "life in galaxy 2", etc., are independent or approximately so. So if you assign substantial probability to propositions like "intelligent life basically can't actually emerge naturally at all, but we were put here by a god" or "subtle variations in the laws of physics across the universe mean that our galaxy is suitable for intelligent life but most others aren't" then you can consistently give such answers.

I can't think of any reason for the right sort of intergalactic correlation that's likely to be thought probable by many LWers, though.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 05 November 2012 01:26:14AM 1 point [-]

See my comment here.