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Coacher comments on If there IS alien super-inteligence in our own galaxy, then what it could be like? - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
Usually lack of evidence is evidence of lacking. But given their existence AND lack of evidence, I think probability of purposefully hiding (or at least being cautious about not showing off too much) is bigger than they just doing their thing and we just don't see it even though we are looking really hard.
Big difference between there being a lack of evidence, and a lack of an ability to detect and identify evidence which exists.
I think people are rather cheeky to assume that we necessarily have the ability to detect a SI.
There is no difference in saying that there is no evidence and that there might be evidence, but we don't have ability to detect it. Does god exist? Well maybe there is plenty evidence that it does, we just don't have the ability to see it?
Big difference.
You don't know how much money is in my wallet. I do. You have no evidence, and you don't have a means to detect it, but it doesn't mean there is no evidence to be had.
That third little star off the end of the milky way may be a gigantic alien beacon transmitting a spread spectrum welcome message, but we just haven't identified it as such, or spent time trying to reconstruct the message from the spread spectrum signal.
We see it. We record it at observatories every night. But we haven't identified it as a signal, nor decoded it.
It seems you have some uncommon understanding of what word evidence means. Evidence is peace of information, not some physical thing.
I like this :-)
There is indeed a difference between "we have observed good evidence of X" and "there is something out there that, had we observed it, would be good evidence of X".
Even so, absence of observed evidence is evidence of absence.
How strong it is depends, of course, on how likely it is that there would be observed evidence if the thing were real. (I don't see anyone ignoring that fact here.)