So to use my former example of the Great Filter Hypothesis: sure, it makes predictions, sure, we can assign probabilities, sure, we can do updates. But nothing about the Great Filter Hypothesis is constructive or causal, nothing about it tells us what to expect the Filter to do or how it actually works. Which means it’s not actually telling us much at all, as far as I can say.
?
If the Filter is real, then its effects are what causes us to think of it as a hypothesis. That makes it “true belief caused by the truth of the proposition believed-in”, conditional on it actually being true.
If the Filter is real, then its effects are what causes us to think of it as a hypothesis.
That could only be true if it lay in our past, or in the past of the other Big Finite Number of other species in the galaxy it already killed off. The actual outcome we see is just an absence of Anyone Else detectable to our instruments so far, despite a relative abundance of seemingly life-capable planets. We don’t see particular signs of any particular causal mechanism acting as a Great Filter, like a homogenizing swarm expanding across the sky because some earlier species built a UFAI or something.
When we don’t see signs of any particular causal mechanism, but we’re still not seeing what we expect to see, I personally would say the first and best explanation is that we are ignorant, not that some mysterious mechanism destroys things we otherwise expect to see.
Hm? Why doesn’t Rare Earth solve this problem? We don’t have the tech yet to examine the surfaces of exoplanets so for all we know the foreign-Earth candidates we’ve got now will end up being just as inhospitable as the rest of them. “Seemingly life capable” isn’t a very high bar at the minute.
Now, if we did have the tech, and saw a bunch of lifeless planets that as far as we know had nearly exactly the same conditions as pre-Life Earth, and people started rattling off increasingly implausible and special-pleading reasons why (“no planet yet found has the same selenium-tungsten ratio as Earth!”), then there’d be a problem.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
Neither do I, hence my current low credence in a Great Filter and my currently high credence for, “We’re just far from the mean; sometimes that does happen, especially in distributions with high variance, and we don’t know the variance right now.”
Well I agree with you on all of that. How is it non-causal?
Or have I misunderstood and you only object to the “aliens had FOOM AI go wrong” explanations but have no trouble with the “earth is just weird” explanation?
It isn’t. The people who affirmatively believe in the Great Filter being a real thing rather than part of their ignorance are, in my view, the ones who believe in a noncausal model.
?
If the Filter is real, then its effects are what causes us to think of it as a hypothesis. That makes it “true belief caused by the truth of the proposition believed-in”, conditional on it actually being true.
I don’t get it.
That could only be true if it lay in our past, or in the past of the other Big Finite Number of other species in the galaxy it already killed off. The actual outcome we see is just an absence of Anyone Else detectable to our instruments so far, despite a relative abundance of seemingly life-capable planets. We don’t see particular signs of any particular causal mechanism acting as a Great Filter, like a homogenizing swarm expanding across the sky because some earlier species built a UFAI or something.
When we don’t see signs of any particular causal mechanism, but we’re still not seeing what we expect to see, I personally would say the first and best explanation is that we are ignorant, not that some mysterious mechanism destroys things we otherwise expect to see.
Hm? Why doesn’t Rare Earth solve this problem? We don’t have the tech yet to examine the surfaces of exoplanets so for all we know the foreign-Earth candidates we’ve got now will end up being just as inhospitable as the rest of them. “Seemingly life capable” isn’t a very high bar at the minute.
Now, if we did have the tech, and saw a bunch of lifeless planets that as far as we know had nearly exactly the same conditions as pre-Life Earth, and people started rattling off increasingly implausible and special-pleading reasons why (“no planet yet found has the same selenium-tungsten ratio as Earth!”), then there’d be a problem.
I don’t see why you need to posit exotic scenarios when the mundane will do.
Neither do I, hence my current low credence in a Great Filter and my currently high credence for, “We’re just far from the mean; sometimes that does happen, especially in distributions with high variance, and we don’t know the variance right now.”
Well I agree with you on all of that. How is it non-causal?
Or have I misunderstood and you only object to the “aliens had FOOM AI go wrong” explanations but have no trouble with the “earth is just weird” explanation?
It isn’t. The people who affirmatively believe in the Great Filter being a real thing rather than part of their ignorance are, in my view, the ones who believe in a noncausal model.