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Notes -
Annoyingly, this paper references the Doomsday Argument, which is completely wrong (it does mention some of the arguments against it, but that's like mentioning the Flat Earth Hypothesis and then saying "some people disagree"). I went on a longer rant about the Doomsday Argument here if you're curious.
The central question is interesting, though. Basically, if you believe (sigh) Yudkowsky, then any civilization almost certainly turns into a Universe-devouring paperclip maximizer, taking control of everything in its future light cone. This is different than the normal Great Filter idea, which would (perhaps) destroy civilizations without propagating outwards. I was originally going to post that the Fermi paradox is thus (weak) evidence against Yuddism, because the fact that we're not dead yet means either a) civilizations are very rare, or b) Yudkowsky is wrong. So if you find evidence that civilizations should be more common, that's also evidence against Yuddism.
But on second read, I realized that I may be wrong about this if you apply the anthropic argument. If Yuddism is true, then only civilizations that are very early to develop in their region of the Universe will exist. Being in a privileged position, they'll see a Universe that is less populated than they'd expect. This means that evidence that civilizations should be more common is actually evidence FOR Yuddism.
Kind of funny that the anthropic argument flips this prediction on its head. I'm probably still getting something subtly wrong here. :)
Maybe, but it's at worst an interesting sort of wrong: https://grabbyaliens.com/
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