Minimum Viable Intelligence: A conjecture I came up with, that argues that the innate unaugmented intelligence of an alien species is unlikely to be significantly higher than that of humans.
Reasoning:
Sufficiently high intelligence leads to civilization
Civilization leads to exponential technological progress
Sufficient technological progress removes evolutionary pressure for higher intelligence
Therefore, in any given environment, the minimum intelligence required to enable exponential technological progress is also roughly the maximum intelligence evolution can produce
The difficulty of an environment would dictate the minimum viable intelligence for civilization, so it is still possible for evolution to produce smarter aliens, however it seems unlikely to me that the band stretches further than a single order of magnitude at best
Note: I am talking about innate natural unaugmented intelligence of the average specimen. Excluding neuralink style augmentations or AI assisted gene editing.
Is there not just a simple resolution that at probability estimates such tiny, there is orders of magnitudes of error bars (with how many orders of magnitudes it being off itself having its own error bars if that makes sense), so any attempt to calculate the EV is pointless
If you did have a true tiny probability with large payoff that still made the payment +EV under whatever utility functions you have, then its not really a fallacy to pay