As well known, in scenarios with hard steps that are overcome anthropically, the hard steps are expected to be distributed on the timeline approximately uniformly. This seems to conflict with the most intuitive location of the intelligence hard step: somewhere between chimp and human.
This is basically the Doomsday problem. Any of its proposed resolutions would solve this problem and let us place a single hard (i.e. evolutionarily unlikely) step in our recent history.
As I said in a reply to Mark Friedenbach, I somewhat regret the naive treatment of anthropics in this post. Hopefully I’ll write a UDT-based analysis later.
This is basically the Doomsday problem. Any of its proposed resolutions would solve this problem and let us place a single hard (i.e. evolutionarily unlikely) step in our recent history.
As I said in a reply to Mark Friedenbach, I somewhat regret the naive treatment of anthropics in this post. Hopefully I’ll write a UDT-based analysis later.