The point you raised, that “expected number of aliens is high vs. substantial probability of no aliens” is an explanation of why people were confused.
Right, I think it’s important to separate out the “argument for X” and the “dissolving confusions around X” as the two have different purposes.
I’m making this comment because if I’m right it means that we only need to look for people (like me?) who were saying all along “there is no Fermi paradox because abiogenesis is cosmically rare”, and figure out why no one listened to them.
I think the important thing here is the difference between saying “abiogenesis is rare” (as an observation) and “we should expect that abiogenesis might be rare” (as a prediction) and “your own parameters, taken seriously, imply that we should expect that abiogenesis might be rare” (as a computation). I am not aware of papers that did the third before this, and I think most claims of the second form were heard as “the expected number of aliens is low” (which is hard to construct without fudging) as opposed to “the probability of no aliens is not tiny.”
But this paper does not talk about “your own parameters.” The parameters it uses are the range of published parameters. Saying that people should have used that range is exactly the same as saying that people should not have ignored the extremists. (But I think it’s just not true that people ignored the extremists.)
Right, I think it’s important to separate out the “argument for X” and the “dissolving confusions around X” as the two have different purposes.
I think the important thing here is the difference between saying “abiogenesis is rare” (as an observation) and “we should expect that abiogenesis might be rare” (as a prediction) and “your own parameters, taken seriously, imply that we should expect that abiogenesis might be rare” (as a computation). I am not aware of papers that did the third before this, and I think most claims of the second form were heard as “the expected number of aliens is low” (which is hard to construct without fudging) as opposed to “the probability of no aliens is not tiny.”
But this paper does not talk about “your own parameters.” The parameters it uses are the range of published parameters. Saying that people should have used that range is exactly the same as saying that people should not have ignored the extremists. (But I think it’s just not true that people ignored the extremists.)