To be clear, I think you included all the necessary disclaimers, your article was well written, well argued, and the use of probability was well within the standard for how probability is used in EA.
My issue is that I think the way probability is presented in EA is bad, misleading, and likely to lead to errors. I think this is the exact type of problem (speculative, unbounded estimates) where the EA method fails.
My specific issue here is how uncertainty is taken out of the equation and placed into preambles, and how a highly complex belief is reduced to a single number. This is typical on this forum and in EA (see P|doom). When bayes is used for science, on the other hand, the prior will be a distribution. (See the pdf of the first result here).
My concern is that EA is making decisions based on these point estimates, rather than on peoples true distributions, which is likely to lead people astray.
I’m curious: When you say that your prior for alien presence is 1%, what is your distribution? Is 1% your median estimate? How shocked would you be if the “true value” was 0.001%?
If probabilities of probabilities is confusing, do the same thing for “how many civilisations are there in the galaxy”.
To be clear, I think you included all the necessary disclaimers, your article was well written, well argued, and the use of probability was well within the standard for how probability is used in EA.
My issue is that I think the way probability is presented in EA is bad, misleading, and likely to lead to errors. I think this is the exact type of problem (speculative, unbounded estimates) where the EA method fails.
My specific issue here is how uncertainty is taken out of the equation and placed into preambles, and how a highly complex belief is reduced to a single number. This is typical on this forum and in EA (see P|doom). When bayes is used for science, on the other hand, the prior will be a distribution. (See the pdf of the first result here).
My concern is that EA is making decisions based on these point estimates, rather than on peoples true distributions, which is likely to lead people astray.
I’m curious: When you say that your prior for alien presence is 1%, what is your distribution? Is 1% your median estimate? How shocked would you be if the “true value” was 0.001%?
If probabilities of probabilities is confusing, do the same thing for “how many civilisations are there in the galaxy”.