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Re:The Big Alien Theory by titzer on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @10:05AM (#27368824)
> It smells like few people here are mathematicians, and yet they're speaking with reddit levels of hubris, attributing simpletons' logical fallacies to a published astrophysicist.

On the contrary, making bold assertions about the entire universe generalizing from one example is a worse hubris. Manipulating some numbers in equations and coming out with absolute certainties is hilarious bad when you step back from having your nose in it. It's not like someone else wrote that summary of his ideas. He wrote it. From those conclusions I really won't trust any line of reasoning, no matter how complicated the equations.

It's worthwhile to note that HN isn't your average reddit crowd. There are educated people here, and mathematicians. There are also plenty of people who know philosophy and can spot dubious results easily.

I posted elsewhere in the thread about it, but the whole line of reasoning about us being randomly distributed over...well, anything, really...is just flawed. By this reasoning we'd all be dead, Boltzmann brains, ants, or a whole host of absurd conclusions. And the fact that we live on the end of a chain of extremely improbable events means that you'd literally never get here if probability was your only tool.

And that's just it. The only tool in the toolbag here is some probability equations. Stunningly bad reasoning.

Re:The Big Alien Theory by brabel on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @01:07PM (#27371203)
> Manipulating some numbers in equations and coming out with absolute certainties is hilarious bad

The author went ouf of his way to make sure people understood that probabilities are NEVER certainties, they are just about chances of things being true... yet here we are.

Re:The Big Alien Theory by shakezula on Wednesday June 02, 2021 @12:18PM (#27370509)
It's not really bad reasoning when, from the very start of the article, the author points out what their limitations are in their approach. This is like saying that the Drake Equations are "stunningly bad reasoning".