This seems like a variation of the smoking lesion problem. The lesion is associated with dying, and with smoking, but smoking itself may not necessarily cause death. You are deciding whether to smoke. You can reason that even if smoking doesn’t directly cause either death or the lesion, refusing to smoke is Bayseian evidence that you don’t have the lesion and are less likely to die.
One problem with this reasoning is that “smoking is correlated with the lesion” can’t sensibly mean “smoking for any reason whatsoever is correlated with the lesion”. It probably means “there are several factors which lead to you smoking and some are correlated with the lesion and others aren’t”. For instance, the lesion might make you find smoking more fun. So refusing to smoke because it’s not a lot of fun may be correlated with not dying, but refusing to smoke because you deduced that it reduced your chances of dying might not be.
Likewise, having your name up because you won may be correlated (at 100% probability, in fact) with surviving the fight, but having your name up because of some other reason (like bribing the owner) might not be. The same, of course, applies to transmitting a signal—transmitting a signal isn’t really associated with survival; transmitting a signal for the normal reasons is associated with survival. You can’t increase your chance of survival by choosing to transmit a signal anyway because “choosing to transmit anyway” is not one of the normal reasons.
What’s the analog of that? Civilizations being missing at higher rates than can be justified by the lack of signal transmission? The lack of saignal transmission already justifies 100%, you can’t go any farther.
Sorry but I don’t understand what you mean. To clarify what I meant, the smoking lesion problem assumes (I think) that we fully understand all of the causal relations, which we don’t with the Fermi paradox. So the analogy would be the lesion explains 20% of the cancer rates, we don’t know the cause of the other 80%, and from an inside view it doesn’t seem that smoking could cause cancer but something strange is going on so who knows.
My response to the smoking lesion paradox is that longer life is not associated with not smoking, but with not smoking that is done for reasons other than to avoid death. Likewise, for the extraterrestrial signal paradox, survival of civilizations is not associated with sending radio signals, but rather with sending radio signals for reasons other than to ensure survival.
If you’re going to go with a partial correlation, then 20% of the correlation between smoking and death is caused by the lesion and 80% is caused by something else (such as the fact that smoke isn’t good for you).
In the analogy, 20% of the correlation between no radio signals and death of a civilization is caused by something destroying the civilization before it gets to produce signals, and 80% is caused by something else. That doesn’t make any sense.
This seems like a variation of the smoking lesion problem. The lesion is associated with dying, and with smoking, but smoking itself may not necessarily cause death. You are deciding whether to smoke. You can reason that even if smoking doesn’t directly cause either death or the lesion, refusing to smoke is Bayseian evidence that you don’t have the lesion and are less likely to die.
One problem with this reasoning is that “smoking is correlated with the lesion” can’t sensibly mean “smoking for any reason whatsoever is correlated with the lesion”. It probably means “there are several factors which lead to you smoking and some are correlated with the lesion and others aren’t”. For instance, the lesion might make you find smoking more fun. So refusing to smoke because it’s not a lot of fun may be correlated with not dying, but refusing to smoke because you deduced that it reduced your chances of dying might not be.
Likewise, having your name up because you won may be correlated (at 100% probability, in fact) with surviving the fight, but having your name up because of some other reason (like bribing the owner) might not be. The same, of course, applies to transmitting a signal—transmitting a signal isn’t really associated with survival; transmitting a signal for the normal reasons is associated with survival. You can’t increase your chance of survival by choosing to transmit a signal anyway because “choosing to transmit anyway” is not one of the normal reasons.
I agree, but what if there was a smoking paradox that involved smokers dying at much higher rates than seemed to be justified by the genetic lesion?
What’s the analog of that? Civilizations being missing at higher rates than can be justified by the lack of signal transmission? The lack of saignal transmission already justifies 100%, you can’t go any farther.
Sorry but I don’t understand what you mean. To clarify what I meant, the smoking lesion problem assumes (I think) that we fully understand all of the causal relations, which we don’t with the Fermi paradox. So the analogy would be the lesion explains 20% of the cancer rates, we don’t know the cause of the other 80%, and from an inside view it doesn’t seem that smoking could cause cancer but something strange is going on so who knows.
My response to the smoking lesion paradox is that longer life is not associated with not smoking, but with not smoking that is done for reasons other than to avoid death. Likewise, for the extraterrestrial signal paradox, survival of civilizations is not associated with sending radio signals, but rather with sending radio signals for reasons other than to ensure survival.
If you’re going to go with a partial correlation, then 20% of the correlation between smoking and death is caused by the lesion and 80% is caused by something else (such as the fact that smoke isn’t good for you).
In the analogy, 20% of the correlation between no radio signals and death of a civilization is caused by something destroying the civilization before it gets to produce signals, and 80% is caused by something else. That doesn’t make any sense.