Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Has Robin Hanson’s paper on grabby aliens influenced you at all on this, in terms of civilizational collapse and things like that? I think, in Robin’s work on grabby aliens, he’s trying to infer too much from seeing nothing. In my view, we know so little about the parameters of the problem that what we can infer from seeing nothing is pretty close to nothing. We don’t quite see nothing. You asked me about UFOs before — maybe that’s only a 1 percent chance that it’s some product of an alien civilization. No, I think we are mostly in the dark when it comes to grand speculations about the universe and how settled it is with life. So I don’t agree with Robin’s work, but I’m glad he did it. It’s very thought-provoking. We may be in the dark about whether we’re alone in the universe and the future of civilization, but we’re less in the dark about some predictions you made this time last year.…

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