chaosmage comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gondolinian 15 June 2015 12:02AM

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Comment author: D_Malik 17 June 2015 08:41:01AM *  0 points [-]

Agreed. But the Great Filter could consist of multiple Moderately Great Filters, of which the Malthusian trap could be one. Or perhaps there could be, say, only n Quite Porous Filters which each eliminate only 1/n of civilizations, but that happen to be MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive), so that together they eliminate all civilizations.

Comment author: chaosmage 17 June 2015 04:01:30PM *  0 points [-]

That seems correct to me, but it is quite different from your original proposal.

Can you think of other filters that are MECE with the Malthusian trap? I don't see obvious ones. Maybe a good way out of the Malthusian trap would be mechanisms that limit procreation, and those make interplanetary colonization - which is procreation of biospheres - seem immoral? I don't think that sounds very convincing.

Comment author: estimator 18 June 2015 07:16:56AM 0 points [-]

Filters don't have to be mutually exclusive, and as for collectively exhaustive part, take all plausible Great Filter candidates.

I don't quite understand that Great Filter hype, by the way; having a single cause for civilization failure seems very implausible (<1%).