Free Republic

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...

Although I suspect that intelligent life is rare in the cosmos, I’m playing little more than a hunch. So it’s interesting to see that Andrew Watson (University of East Anglia) has analyzed the chances for intelligence elsewhere in the universe by looking at the challenges life faced as it evolved. Watson believes that it took specific major steps for an intelligent civilization to develop on Earth, one of which, interestingly enough, is language. Identifying which steps are critical is tricky, but in the aggregate they reduce the chance of intelligence elsewhere. A linguist at heart, I wasn’t surprised with the...

[Q NOTE: Many bolds within paragraphs emphasis added. Red text at the end was in the original] Rebutting the Skeptics' Likely Criticisms Let's look at some of the skeptic's likely responses to what we have presented, and consider their validity. The Hanukah Example Wasn't Intended to be the Result of Exhaustive Searching While this is true in a strict sense, such a response belies the fact that there is a very serious limit to how many relatively improbable ELSs you can find about one topic in any text if the author of the text wasn't trying to embed them. If...