[karpierz]

There's the bonus problem of: even if you magically have correct priors, you still need to assume that Drake's Equation is a good model for the generation process of civilizations. If the equation is missing terms or has extra terms, no amount of Bayesian reasoning helps correct for that.

It's like thinking that you can use Bayesian reasoning to determine the likelihood of Russell's Teapot existing.

[mjburgess]

Yes, this is essentially what i mean by "distributions are sampled from distributions", ie., there's a subjective uncertainty in the choice of model but also an uncertainty in the very determination of that uncertainty.

You can model a plausible "final stable distribution", after all these recursions, with a power law.

This makes intuitive sense, if you consider how science works: all the confirmatory evidence in the world doesn't help, all the information lies in the single refutative point. This is how power laws work.

So basically we're always operating under a heavily under-determined region with high uncertainty, and we can only improve that by disconfirmatory apparent outliers.