amcknight comments on The Octopus, the Dolphin and Us: a Great Filter tale - Less Wrong

48 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 03 September 2014 09:37PM

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Comment author: Sophronius 30 August 2014 11:57:07AM 14 points [-]

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.

Comment author: amcknight 25 September 2014 03:05:56AM 1 point [-]

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.