I believe great filter is a kind of broad shape of a thing rather than one specific thing, and i believe the shape of the thing is: cost of (Great Filter Candidate) > benefit of (overcoming Great Filter Candidate) + [some metric representing the badness of the filter]; or cost of (Great Filter Candidate) - benefit to overcome (Great Filter Candidate) > [some metric representing the badness of the filter]. Therefore one could say that Tiktok is a Great Filter, as is the Ocean, the Vastness and General Unfriendliness of Space, etc.
I think Tiktok is one of the faces of the Dual Phd Problem / a distributed, slow burn manifestation of the Unabomber manifesto: cost of (digesting huge amounts of complexity) > benefit of (having digested huge amounts of complexity) at the margin. Illustrative example: Suppose I figured out how the lithium supply chain is orchestrated end to end, including all the edge cases, best mine locations, how to source chemicals for processing, offtake etc. What would I get? Probably not much since there’s an incumbent. But scrolling Tiktok....
I believe great filter is a kind of broad shape of a thing rather than one specific thing, and i believe the shape of the thing is: cost of (Great Filter Candidate) > benefit of (overcoming Great Filter Candidate) + [some metric representing the badness of the filter]; or cost of (Great Filter Candidate) - benefit to overcome (Great Filter Candidate) > [some metric representing the badness of the filter]. Therefore one could say that Tiktok is a Great Filter, as is the Ocean, the Vastness and General Unfriendliness of Space, etc.
I think Tiktok is one of the faces of the Dual Phd Problem / a distributed, slow burn manifestation of the Unabomber manifesto: cost of (digesting huge amounts of complexity) > benefit of (having digested huge amounts of complexity) at the margin. Illustrative example: Suppose I figured out how the lithium supply chain is orchestrated end to end, including all the edge cases, best mine locations, how to source chemicals for processing, offtake etc. What would I get? Probably not much since there’s an incumbent. But scrolling Tiktok....