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by James Robertson.
Original Post: ET and Religion?
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The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.
That's the sort of statement that a lot of people are going to argue with, but I see little wrong with his analysis - go read the article and look at the Drake equation. Once you realize that none of the terms are known, you see where he's coming from. While you read the rest of the article, you simply have to set your political beliefs aside. Evaluate what Crichton says, not what you think the political effects of what he says are or should be. Hard to do, but go ahead and try
Let me use that as a way to pivot over to an only slightly related topic - business strategy. take a look at how the company you work for makes decisions. How many of us work for companies that rely more on leaps of intuition than on actual facts and data? This isn't to say that intuition plays no part in business or marketing; clearly, it does - else new markets would never get created. On the other hand, most of what we do every day could be improved - a lot - by actually looking at real data. Instead, what do we do?
We follow analyst reports. Sit down and read one sometime, and look at how woefully thin on real data they tend to be
We "follow the herd" - i.e., if everyone else jumps on a bandwagon, we do as well
Do we ever stop to think whether the analyst report or the bandwagon make sense for our business given what we know (via actual data) about our customers and prospects? Based simply on this post from yesterday, I'd say we very often don't. We make uninformed decisions based on herd behavior, rather than actually posing thoughtful questions about how and why - i.e., how will a given direction help us, and why are we making that decision if we don't know?
The internet bubble of the late 90's was only the best example of this in recent memory - the failures of companies like Hasbro and Fao Schwartz similar, but more recent. The rate of failure in the IT sector is another example - tons of IT shops engage in herd behavior without once asking what the actual benefits might be - how many Java conversions were done over the last 7 years that actually delivered a quantifiable business benefit, for instance? I'd guess very few.
Go ahead and read Crichton's article, and then apply the same thinking to the way your company makes decisions. I'd be willing to bet that there's more magical thinking out there than any of us would like to admit
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