A 50% chance of meaning us good vs harm isn’t a prior I find terribly compelling.
There’s a lot to say here, but my short answer is that this is both an incredibly dangerous and incredibly valuable situation, in which both the potential opportunity costs and the potential actual costs are literally astronomical, and in which there are very few things I can legitimately be confident of.
The best I can do in such a situation is to accept that my best guess is overwhelmingly likely to be wrong, but that it’s slightly less likely to be wrong than my second-best guess, so I should operate on the basis of my best guess despite expecting it to be wrong. Where “best guess” here is the thing I consider most likely to be true, not the thing with the highest expected value.
I should also note that my priors about aliens in general—that is, what I consider likely about a randomly selected alien intelligence—are less relevant to this scenario than what I consider likely about this particular intelligence, given that it has observed us for long enough to learn our language, revealed itself to us, communicated with us in Morse code, offered mutually beneficial trade, etc.
The most tempting belief for me is that the alien’s intentions are essentially similar to ours. I can even construct a plausible sounding argument for that as my best guess… we’re the only other species I know capable of communicating the desire for mutually beneficial trade in an artificial signalling system, so our behavior constitutes strong evidence for their behavior. OTOH, it’s pretty clear to me that the reason I’m tempted to believe that is because I can do something with that belief; it gives me a lot of traction for thinking about what to do next. (In a nutshell, I would conclude from that assumption that it means to exploit us for its long-term benefit, and whether that’s good or bad for us depends entirely on what our most valuable-to-it resources are and how it can most easily obtain them and whether we benefit from that process.) Since that has almost nothing to do with the likelihood of it being true, I should distrust my desire to believe that.
Ultimately, I think what I do is reply that I value mutually beneficial trade with them, but that I don’t actually trust them and must therefore treat them as a potential threat until I have gathered more information about them, while at the same time refraining from doing anything that would significantly reduce our chances of engaging in mutually beneficial trade in the future, and what do they think about all that?
A 50% chance of meaning us good vs harm isn’t a prior I find terribly compelling.
There’s a lot to say here, but my short answer is that this is both an incredibly dangerous and incredibly valuable situation, in which both the potential opportunity costs and the potential actual costs are literally astronomical, and in which there are very few things I can legitimately be confident of.
The best I can do in such a situation is to accept that my best guess is overwhelmingly likely to be wrong, but that it’s slightly less likely to be wrong than my second-best guess, so I should operate on the basis of my best guess despite expecting it to be wrong. Where “best guess” here is the thing I consider most likely to be true, not the thing with the highest expected value.
I should also note that my priors about aliens in general—that is, what I consider likely about a randomly selected alien intelligence—are less relevant to this scenario than what I consider likely about this particular intelligence, given that it has observed us for long enough to learn our language, revealed itself to us, communicated with us in Morse code, offered mutually beneficial trade, etc.
The most tempting belief for me is that the alien’s intentions are essentially similar to ours. I can even construct a plausible sounding argument for that as my best guess… we’re the only other species I know capable of communicating the desire for mutually beneficial trade in an artificial signalling system, so our behavior constitutes strong evidence for their behavior. OTOH, it’s pretty clear to me that the reason I’m tempted to believe that is because I can do something with that belief; it gives me a lot of traction for thinking about what to do next. (In a nutshell, I would conclude from that assumption that it means to exploit us for its long-term benefit, and whether that’s good or bad for us depends entirely on what our most valuable-to-it resources are and how it can most easily obtain them and whether we benefit from that process.) Since that has almost nothing to do with the likelihood of it being true, I should distrust my desire to believe that.
Ultimately, I think what I do is reply that I value mutually beneficial trade with them, but that I don’t actually trust them and must therefore treat them as a potential threat until I have gathered more information about them, while at the same time refraining from doing anything that would significantly reduce our chances of engaging in mutually beneficial trade in the future, and what do they think about all that?