You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

loldrup comments on Using Bayes to dismiss fringe phenomena - Less Wrong Discussion

1 [deleted] 05 October 2014 01:42AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (39)

Comments (39)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: [deleted] 05 October 2014 10:15:19AM *  1 point [-]

What value should I then guesstimate P( UAP ) to be? If I choose a generic 0.5, then the result will be an even higher P( UAP | observation ) than 0.53. Thus it would be even harder to dismiss the observation.

When I think of it, I recall I'm not the only one trying to estimate P(UAP). The Fermi paradox concludes something like this:

"Aliens surely do exist, so how come we don't see them?"

In this sentence lies an estimate of P(UAP). The only problem is that it is rather high ( 'surely' == 0.9 ?), thus making it even harder again to dismiss P( UAP | observation )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Comment author: gjm 05 October 2014 08:29:30PM 1 point [-]

That isn't an estimate of P(UAP). The following two propositions are very different:

  • "There are technologically advanced civilizations elsewhere in the universe."
  • "Sometimes things happen visibly in our skies that aren't adequately explained by anything uncontroversially known to be real."

The first of these can be true without the second -- maybe there are aliens but they never come here. (That was rather the point of the Fermi paradox.)

The second can be true without the first -- maybe people have actually seen angels, or time travellers from earth's future, or spontaneous rips in the fabric of spacetime.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit