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Jiro comments on Quickly passing through the great filter - Less Wrong Discussion
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What's the analog of that? Civilizations being missing at higher rates than can be justified by the lack of signal transmission? The lack of saignal transmission already justifies 100%, you can't go any farther.
Sorry but I don't understand what you mean. To clarify what I meant, the smoking lesion problem assumes (I think) that we fully understand all of the causal relations, which we don't with the Fermi paradox. So the analogy would be the lesion explains 20% of the cancer rates, we don't know the cause of the other 80%, and from an inside view it doesn't seem that smoking could cause cancer but something strange is going on so who knows.
My response to the smoking lesion paradox is that longer life is not associated with not smoking, but with not smoking that is done for reasons other than to avoid death. Likewise, for the extraterrestrial signal paradox, survival of civilizations is not associated with sending radio signals, but rather with sending radio signals for reasons other than to ensure survival.
If you're going to go with a partial correlation, then 20% of the correlation between smoking and death is caused by the lesion and 80% is caused by something else (such as the fact that smoke isn't good for you).
In the analogy, 20% of the correlation between no radio signals and death of a civilization is caused by something destroying the civilization before it gets to produce signals, and 80% is caused by something else. That doesn't make any sense.