If there are several “hard steps” in the evolution of intelligence, then planets on which intelligent life does evolve should expect to see the hard steps spaced about equally across their history, regardless of each step’s relative difficulty. [...]
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[...] the time interval from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens is too short to be a plausible hard step.
I don’t think this argument is valid. Assuming there’s a last hard step, you’d expect intelligence to show up soon after it was made (because there’s no more hard steps).
In terms of the analogy to lock picking, it’s inappropriate to set the clock to timeout now. The clock should timeout when it’s too late for intelligence to succeed (e.g. when the sun has aged too much and is evaporating the oceans away).
Also, I tested if the claim about the even spacing was correct. The locks do appear to have the same distribution when you condition on being below the time limit. However, the picking times don’t appear to be evenly spaced particularly often. With a timeout of 1000 and clocks with pick-chances of 10^-3 through 10^-8 I get average standard deviations between picking times of ~300 which I think implies that the most common situation is for a lock or two to be picked quickly with the other locks consuming all the slack.
edit Now when I read the sentence I see something slightly different. Did you mean “the undertaking of the step should take a long time” or that “the amount of time since the last step was made should be a long time”?
I’m going to nitpick on Section 3.8:
I don’t think this argument is valid. Assuming there’s a last hard step, you’d expect intelligence to show up soon after it was made (because there’s no more hard steps).
In terms of the analogy to lock picking, it’s inappropriate to set the clock to timeout now. The clock should timeout when it’s too late for intelligence to succeed (e.g. when the sun has aged too much and is evaporating the oceans away).
Also, I tested if the claim about the even spacing was correct. The locks do appear to have the same distribution when you condition on being below the time limit. However, the picking times don’t appear to be evenly spaced particularly often. With a timeout of 1000 and clocks with pick-chances of 10^-3 through 10^-8 I get average standard deviations between picking times of ~300 which I think implies that the most common situation is for a lock or two to be picked quickly with the other locks consuming all the slack.
edit Now when I read the sentence I see something slightly different. Did you mean “the undertaking of the step should take a long time” or that “the amount of time since the last step was made should be a long time”?