[lotharbot]

I sometimes draw an analogy between low-probability catastrophizing and the Drake Equation.

The Drake Equation attempts to calculate how many planets there should be in the universe where intelligent life exists, by multiplying together all sorts of probabilities. But if you put error bars on the various estimates, what you find is that the overall calculation can result in anything from "there should be trillions of planets with intelligent life on them" to "humanity is some kind of fluke; even we shouldn't exist." Which means that using the Drake Equation to make arguments about what we "should" be doing about intelligent alien life is actually useless. It doesn't tell us anything meaningful or useful; it's just a way some people justify their own priors.

There are a lot of things I can spend my time, money, energy, and attention on. Some of them are entertainment (sports, video games, TV/movies, music.) Some are serious day-to-day life (family, parenting, work, chores.) Some are trying to interact with the broader world from a positive influence perspective (political/religious advocacy, voting, charity, counseling, encouragement.) Some are planning for negative outcomes to protect myself and my family (having good insurance, canned food, filtered water storage, ways to create winter heat, an evacuation plan or two.) Someone using Drake Equation type reasoning can suggest that their particular negative-outcome scenario has such high costs that I should expend literally everything to mitigate them -- but as soon as I allow for error bars and for alternatives that they might get me to ignore if I'm all-in on their issue, that transforms my whole thought process. The AI signularity might be so dangerous that I should invest everything to stop it, or it might be such a nothingburger that it's not worth the Doritos I ate while writing this comment. Without a clear way to distinguish, I should just filter it out. If they can't do enough in the time they've already had to convince me it's actually a real issue, they haven't earned the right to my attention.

[Dove]

I suppose there's a numerics take on the situation: Epsilon times negative infinity is so poorly conditioned that we procedurally set it to zero until we can get some real numbers.

[lotharbot]

Indeterminate. There's no information to be gleaned. And we don't turn our lives upside down on no information.