There's no "intuitively" about it. We know from the data available that the probability of machine-building general intelligence of the kind that is unique to humans on Earth is fantastically unlikely to arise. It depends on a confluence of completely unrelated selective pressures: one on tool-making, one on social cooperation, and one on continuous mate competition/selection. There is good evidence that all of those forces are important to specifically human--not dolphin or bird or whatever--intelligence on Earth, and without any one of them we'd still be fairly handy monkey-creatures banging rocks around.

As well as a theoretical understanding, we have empirical data. We can ask, "If something is at all probable how many times will it have evolved on Earth?"

Eyes, for example, have evolved independently multiple times, based on differences in retinal biochemistry. Wings and fins and legs have also evolved many times across an incredible diversity of species. This tells us that things that are easy to evolve have evolved multiple times in Earth's history.

Specifically human, machine-building intelligence has evolved exactly once. This is strong evidence that it has an enormously low probability.

Once you've realized that one of the parameters in the Drake equation is incredibly small, the Silent Universe is no longer surprising. And both empirically and theoretically, the probability of evolving specifically human, machine-building intelligence is incredibly small.

However, I have never met anyone enamoured of Fermi's Paradox who gives any credence to this, which is why no attempt to resolve the paradox will ever have any effect on the discussion. This is in general the case with so-called paradoxes: no matter how many times they are clearly and simply resolved, people who want there to be paradoxes will pretend the resolution doesn't exist, or will deliberately misrepresent it as a non-solution. Or they will present some other non-solution as more compelling, even when the solution presented makes those non-solutions unnecessary.

The headline and opening paragraph combine two completely different categories of error--"wrong" and "late"--so that it is possible to say "most Americans".

The story then goes on to talk exclusively about "wrong" as if that was the dominant category. "Late" is never mentioned.

The abstract of the ($60) report talks about errors only, but reading between the lines "late" is subsumed under the author's notion of "error".

So this story tells us nothing about the actual rate of misdiagnosis, but it leaves unwary readers with the probably false impression that "most Americans will experience misdiagnosis".

This is not to say that misdiagnosis is not a serious problem. But then, so is really bad reporting.

Or to put it another way: observers are intrinsic to reality as well as the systems under observation, and any attempt to treat them separately will fail. But this is uninteresting, because any interpretation is going to have to acknowledge this at some level (as Bohr correctly pointed out quite a long time ago.)

So on this view, the reason why science happened here and not there was the same reason why hominids with the capacity for general, tool-using, representational intelligence and language happened in Africa and not the Americas: such developments depend on a confluence of multiple unlikely factors and as such are very unlikely to happen at all, much less multiple times. If science hadn't been created in Western Europe in the 1600's it might never have happened. It only looks inevitable because it did.

Does he reference any data that would give his suggestion non-negligible plausibility?

There are completely mundane explanations (upper atmosphere models slightly wrong, unaccounted-for EM effects) so while there may be a fundamental cause (gravity is doing something exciting) the odds are that it's a boring effect, just like the superluminal neutrino observations.

They get about a 4% increase in good outcomes, from 23% to 27%, for a 1 sigma increase in expert positive response. This is significant at the 5% level.

It's enough to say that "Experts do slightly better than chance in IP-heavy fields", but about 3/4 of those businesses will still fail, and that remains true regardless of expert evaluation.

If you're a big investor this could make a difference to your bottom line. If you're a small investor or entrepreneur, it is pretty much irrelevant.

The answer is: we are humans, doing human things within the scope of human capabilities. If there are ideas that are inexpressible by us, we can't possibly know about them. If there is physics profoundly beyond our ken (what lies behind the quantum veil, for example) we simply don't know about it.

Mathematics is a natural language (as physicists use it) to describe nature to ourselves. The fact of the knowing subject, and the activity of the knowing subject, cannot be left out without leaving a central mystery, which always amounts to "Why does the knowing subject do what they do?" (like restrict math to Smolin's four key categories of number, geometry, algebra and logic). If you imbue some mystical subject-free "mathematics" with these properties, rather than the activity of the knowing subject with them, they will remain mysterious.

This also explains why mathematics is so very, very bad at describing reality: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=381

"Cancer" is not a simple thing. Two people with "breast cancer" may have very similar or almost completely different diseases. As others here have pointed out, the magnitude and frequency of wins and losses matter even though trades are binary win/lose (which they can be because we've created an entire category of imaginary objects called dollars that can be counted).

Bayes rule is as applicable to any area of significant uncertainty, including win/loss magnitude. It is universal.

This is not an argument against treating your children well, but the reality is that having parents who are well-off and educated buffers you against all kinds of mistakes and issues that would sink other kids. Moderating (not eliminating, which is neither possible nor desirable) social inequality is important precisely because we can say with as much certainty as we can say anything that there are kids out there today as talented and driven as Bill Gates who don't have anything like the resilient support system that he had, and without it they are likely going to be a drag on society rather than contributors to it.

Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)

So a better title might be: "How I was motivated to be dedicated enough to become a novelist." And this is actually a more interesting story, at least for other artists, because the thing everyone faces at the outset is failure and lack of belief in our own work. We have to have something to keep us going. He had that single moment at a baseball game. Others have other things, but having a weird little talisman like that can be very useful in solving the ongoing problem of motivation.

In my own life, at the age of 13 I ate at a Chinese restaurant for the first time (on a school trip to the 'big city' a couple of hours distant from the town I grew up in) and got a fortune cookie that read, in its entirety, "An ambition far beyond your reach".

I've achieved a good deal in the forty years since then, and at times when the going has been particularly tough I've thought back to that and told myself, "Yeah, well, you were told what to expect and went ahead anyway. So don't complain, just get back to work."

Would I have accomplished as much without being able to do that? Maybe, maybe not. But being able to do it made the journey easier at times. It's a silly thing--I don't believe in fate or fortunes--but sometimes silly things can be made to work for us.

So I could say that was "the moment I became X", where X is any major achievement since, but "One weird trick to stay motivated and focused on your goals" would be at least as accurate.

My reasons for this are a) it is very difficult to find any pre-2005 citation for the joke, despite one supposed reference from 1975; b) the details of the story don't seem to me very plausible given what I know of comedians; and c) it's the kind of thing Penn Jillette would do.

So the story may have already played out in the modern era, if not in this case then perhaps in others: the 'Net is so full of nonsense and mis-information it would be very hard to tell. Social fragmentation of information sources likely makes it even easier today... you could argue that Birthers and the like are an example of this kind of hoax (or victims of it.)

Also, I meditate very easily and prefer a whitenoise environment for meditation. And I'm very happy in my own head and used to being alone. So the whole thing was not much a novelty in any respect, and the lack of whitenoise made it suboptimal for meditation.

I wonder how people's response to these things varies as they move along the extroverion-introversion scale. It seems plausible that extroverts would find them a much more novel and disturbing experience than introverts.