amcknight comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (233)
Can somebody explain to me why people generally assume that the great filter has a single cause? My gut says it's most likely a dozen one-in-a-million chances that all have to turn out just right for intelligent life to colonize the universe. So the total chance would be 1/1000000^12. Yet everyone talks of a single 'great filter' and I don't get why.
I don't have an answer but here's a guess: For any given pre-civilizational state, I imagine there are many filters. If we model these filters as having a kill rate then my (unreliable stats) intuition tells me that a prior on the kill rate distribution should be log-normal. I think this suggests that most of the killing happens on the left-most outlier but someone better at stats should check my assumptions.