it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 

there was even an SSC post about this paper and still nobody knows about it smh https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/03/ssc-journal-club-dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/

just an embarrassing chapter in the intellectual history of humanity tbh. decades of ink spilled over what amounts to a failure to understand that the product of a bunch of independent random variables is ~lognormal (ish) and a highly uncertain lognormal has a very heavy tail

my favorite point that isn't just "lol git gud at probability" is that the most uncertainty by far in the drake equation is about the rate at which earth-like planets produce life; they argue for uncertainty over 200 orders of magnitude which is where the tail comes from

wonder if @Meaningness would be interested in using this as an example somewhere in the Eggplant