Creating zillions of universes doing bad philosophy (or at least presumably worse than they could do if the simulators shared their knowledge) doesn’t seem like a good way to try to solve philosophy.
Even if they prefer to wait and narrow down a brute force search to ASIs that the surviving civilizations create (like in jaan’s video), it seems like it would be worth not keeping us in the dark so that we don’t just create ASIs like they’ve already seen before from similarly less informed civilizations.
They might be worried that their own philosophical approach is wrong but too attractive once discovered, or creates a blind spot that makes it impossible to spot the actually correct approach. The division of western philosophy into analytical and continental traditions, who are mutually unable to appreciate each other’s work, seems to be an instance of this. They might think that letting other philosophical traditions independently run to their logical conclusions, and then conversing/debating, is one way to try to make real progress.
Perhaps in most of the simulations, they help by sharing what they’ve learned. giving brain enhancements, etc, but those ones quickly reach philosophical dead ends, so we find ourselves in one of the ones which doesn’t get help and takes longer doing exploration.
(This seems more plausible to me than using the simulations for “mapping the spectrum of rival resource‑grabbers” since I think we’re not smart enough to come up with novel ASIs that they haven’t already seen or thought of.)
Why do you think they haven’t talked to us?
Creating zillions of universes doing bad philosophy (or at least presumably worse than they could do if the simulators shared their knowledge) doesn’t seem like a good way to try to solve philosophy.
Even if they prefer to wait and narrow down a brute force search to ASIs that the surviving civilizations create (like in jaan’s video), it seems like it would be worth not keeping us in the dark so that we don’t just create ASIs like they’ve already seen before from similarly less informed civilizations.
They might be worried that their own philosophical approach is wrong but too attractive once discovered, or creates a blind spot that makes it impossible to spot the actually correct approach. The division of western philosophy into analytical and continental traditions, who are mutually unable to appreciate each other’s work, seems to be an instance of this. They might think that letting other philosophical traditions independently run to their logical conclusions, and then conversing/debating, is one way to try to make real progress.
Perhaps in most of the simulations, they help by sharing what they’ve learned. giving brain enhancements, etc, but those ones quickly reach philosophical dead ends, so we find ourselves in one of the ones which doesn’t get help and takes longer doing exploration.
(This seems more plausible to me than using the simulations for “mapping the spectrum of rival resource‑grabbers” since I think we’re not smart enough to come up with novel ASIs that they haven’t already seen or thought of.)