great filter

1) you could say intelligence means being able to give yourself what you want.

2) giving yourself what you want often isn't good for you. food makes you fat, youtube videos make you conservative or liberal.

3) does this explain why we don't see intelligent life anywhere in the universe?

there are feedback mechanisms to defend against getting fat, like dieting. but could it be that as our ability to give ourselves what we want in many domains accelerates, it overpowers those mechanisms. is this what inevitably kills any intelligent species?

ps. this is steve's idea