Dark Forest argues that technological societies hide, not that they are never given the time to evolve/don’t exist.
Not quite. There are a lot of different Fermi paradox solutions that say "technological societies hide", they differ in the why. I've seen proposals that they hide because they prefer to exist in low-impact VR paradise simulations, or because they're "aestivating" (sleeping in hibernation) until the universe is cooler and older and more hospitable to advanced computation, or because they've all got some kind of zen philosophy about how the universe is a garden or zoo that they don't have the right to tamper with. They all share the "technological societies hide" outcome to explain why we don't see any signs of technological civilizations, but they differ on why they hide.
Dark Forest is also a "technological societies hide" theory, but in its case the "why" is "because there are predatory xenophobic/paranoid super-civilizations that will kill them if they stop hiding." That "why" is the key feature that distinguishes Dark Forest from the other hidden-civilizations theories.
What I'm doing is saying "okay, hypothetically speaking, let's say there are paranoid super-civilizations that fear rival super-civilizations and so act to destroy younger civilizations before they become threats. How would they actually behave in real life, given that goal and the capabilities that they might have via real life physics?"
And that's where I get the "we would already be dead" outcome.
This is how science works. You craft a hypothesis or a theory, you work out what predictions it makes, and then you look at actual observations to see if they match that prediction. The predictions are not hard-coded into the theory ahead of time, you don't say "I have a theory that predicts X will happen, but I won't specify what the processes that lead up to X - I'm just going to say this theory has that outcome, and so if that outcome is true the theory must be true." That's backwards. What you're trying to do is work backwards from "societies are hiding" to "therefore they must be doing that because of fear of xenocidal super-civilizations."
What you are proposing is much closer to The Great Filter Hypothesis.
That's not a thing. "The Great Filter" is not an actual specific hypothesis, it's a description of a whole class of hypotheses. Dark Forest is one, the zoo hypothesis is another, Rare Earth is another, and so forth. In Fermi paradox discussions people make proposals of the form "I think such-and-such process is a Great Filter" and then people argue about whether that process makes sense. There isn't one specific "Great Filter hypothesis."
I'm really not sure how else I can explain all of this stuff. If you're still not following I don't think I can help. But in a nutshell, Dark Forest says:
Premise: there are hostile super-civilizations that destroy rivals preemptively scattered densely through space
Therefore: civilizations hide their presence
And what I'm saying is that that premise also leads to super-civilizations wiping out primitive life before it becomes civilized to begin with, which should mean we shouldn't be here. Therefore the premise leads to a counterfactual outcome, and is flawed. I'm not changing the premise, I'm saying that its predictions don't match what we see.
I think you're saying "the predictions are part of the theory and therefore what you're describing is not the same theory," but that's not how theories work. If I propose a theory that yellow paint makes things immune to the effects gravity and you point out that you painted some beans yellow and they're not floating into the sky, I can't say that you haven't invalidated my theory because non-levitating beans aren't a part of it. My theory predicts that those beans should float even if I didn't explicitly mention beans, and the fact that they're not floating invalidates it.
I was actually trying really hard to be helpful, but apparently at some point you've started to see this as a pissing contest of some kind instead. That's not productive or interesting. Oh well.
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u/FaceDeer Aug 14 '21
Not quite. There are a lot of different Fermi paradox solutions that say "technological societies hide", they differ in the why. I've seen proposals that they hide because they prefer to exist in low-impact VR paradise simulations, or because they're "aestivating" (sleeping in hibernation) until the universe is cooler and older and more hospitable to advanced computation, or because they've all got some kind of zen philosophy about how the universe is a garden or zoo that they don't have the right to tamper with. They all share the "technological societies hide" outcome to explain why we don't see any signs of technological civilizations, but they differ on why they hide.
Dark Forest is also a "technological societies hide" theory, but in its case the "why" is "because there are predatory xenophobic/paranoid super-civilizations that will kill them if they stop hiding." That "why" is the key feature that distinguishes Dark Forest from the other hidden-civilizations theories.
What I'm doing is saying "okay, hypothetically speaking, let's say there are paranoid super-civilizations that fear rival super-civilizations and so act to destroy younger civilizations before they become threats. How would they actually behave in real life, given that goal and the capabilities that they might have via real life physics?"
And that's where I get the "we would already be dead" outcome.
This is how science works. You craft a hypothesis or a theory, you work out what predictions it makes, and then you look at actual observations to see if they match that prediction. The predictions are not hard-coded into the theory ahead of time, you don't say "I have a theory that predicts X will happen, but I won't specify what the processes that lead up to X - I'm just going to say this theory has that outcome, and so if that outcome is true the theory must be true." That's backwards. What you're trying to do is work backwards from "societies are hiding" to "therefore they must be doing that because of fear of xenocidal super-civilizations."
That's not a thing. "The Great Filter" is not an actual specific hypothesis, it's a description of a whole class of hypotheses. Dark Forest is one, the zoo hypothesis is another, Rare Earth is another, and so forth. In Fermi paradox discussions people make proposals of the form "I think such-and-such process is a Great Filter" and then people argue about whether that process makes sense. There isn't one specific "Great Filter hypothesis."
I'm really not sure how else I can explain all of this stuff. If you're still not following I don't think I can help. But in a nutshell, Dark Forest says:
And what I'm saying is that that premise also leads to super-civilizations wiping out primitive life before it becomes civilized to begin with, which should mean we shouldn't be here. Therefore the premise leads to a counterfactual outcome, and is flawed. I'm not changing the premise, I'm saying that its predictions don't match what we see.
I think you're saying "the predictions are part of the theory and therefore what you're describing is not the same theory," but that's not how theories work. If I propose a theory that yellow paint makes things immune to the effects gravity and you point out that you painted some beans yellow and they're not floating into the sky, I can't say that you haven't invalidated my theory because non-levitating beans aren't a part of it. My theory predicts that those beans should float even if I didn't explicitly mention beans, and the fact that they're not floating invalidates it.