Comment by vsm on Covid 12/24: We’re F***ed, It’s Over · 2020-12-25T11:54:52.162Z · LW · GW

Also New Zealand, which has a handful of new cases trickling in from arrivals, but approximately zero community transmission due to the managed quarantine at the border. Even if this new strain has the increased transmissibility I expect NZ to not be anywhere near overwhelmed.

Comment by vsm on The Fermi Paradox: What did Sandberg, Drexler and Ord Really Dissolve? · 2018-07-09T02:21:02.307Z · LW · GW

"

This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe.

I find that this conclusion does not follow from the main result of the paper .... It is quite possible that in our universe there is a Great Filter "by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe," because, for example one specific parameter has the value that is many orders of magnitude lower than the estimate, and it would be really useful to know which one and why. "

I think you are in fact in agreement with SDOs intended meaning. They are saying there is no need to explain why ETIs are hidden from our observations, as would be the case if we believed the initial interpretation of the Drake equation of there being many ETIs. They are doing away with the 'aliens transcended' or choose not to talk with us class of hypotheses. But their analysis still says some of the factors in the equation must be very low to filter out all the places ETIs could have evolved.

The 'paradox' was 'they should be here, why aren't they?', which is dissolved as the first part is not true. Now it is only a question of the actual values of the Drake equation factors

Comment by vsm on Why it took so long to do the Fermi calculation right? · 2018-07-04T11:26:06.269Z · LW · GW

That might explain why many individual researchers failed, but it can't be common enough to filter out everyone thinking about the problem except SDO. To see how many researchers we would expect to find this solution, we must multiply our estimates of the number thinking about it, by the fraction of those who know about the correct statistical technique of using distributions, multiplied by the odds they would apply this technique, do it correctly, and consider the result worth publishing.

N=R*f(s)*f(a)*f(c)*f(p)

Using personal estimates I obtained a result of N=2.998, close to the observed number of publishers of the paper