That's a great video, and obviously she is very qualified to speak to this subject. I don't see how this shows that the GP comment is "right" in its assertion that this is just an effect of biased sampling.
I only had time to look at the first few minutes, but around 6:50 she does say that our solar system is "not that common", which she quantifies as "it could only be as much as 10-20% of star systems". Maybe that means <= 10-20%?
So, this does not seem to contradict anything Vogt and Brown were quoted as saying.
Incidentally, I wasn't going by the statement in the NPR article, but also by the press release from UCSC (http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/12/tau-ceti.html), Vogt's home institution. I don't think that quote is subject to journalistic mangling.
I agreed with tocomment that it was a biased sampling not in the sense that planetary systems happen to be this way in the region we are looking at, but in the sense that planetary systems seem to be this way when we look at things from THIS set of instrumentation and methodology.
IOW, I disagree with NPR's claim that "Our Very Normal Solar System Isn't Normal Anymore". Addendum: It may indeed be abnormal. But we don't have data to conclude that yet, or even to suspect it.
Unusual is a subjective term. She says 10%-20% of the planetary systems are like ours. Are you saying that that was the point made in the original article too?
"Unusual is a subjective term" -- absolutely. I don't want to go back and forth on this one either.
Listen carefully to the video. She says "It could only be as common as 10-20%". Just before saying that, she pauses and looks upward, to formulate the sentence correctly. The 10-20% number is an upper bound, not a direct estimate.
You have to give her credit for communicating the idea carefully. The difficulty of doing this in real time is extreme. And if you do it wrong, you really get taken to task by your colleagues.
I don't know if it was, but I'm not concerned. What I took away from the original article was: We have a theory for how solar systems form. That theory assumes that our solar system is typical. The data we're finding does not agree with our theory, because the data indicates that our solar system is not typical.
Yes, scientists may have been quoted in this article, but I have seen how most journalists mangle, ignore, or sensationalize things that were said.