It seems likely that when a simulation turns out to be especially interesting or unusual due to natural randomness, its simulator will decide to roll out that simulation more times. This wouldn’t look like a measurable violation of the laws of physics from the perspective of the simulatees, as long as the simulators don’t abuse their resampling power in extremely obvious ways.
Unpredictable simulation rollouts are more scientifically interesting, informative, and fun to observe. So simulatees can expect to live in an unpredictable world, whether their simulation is used for science, prediction, or entertainment.
For example, if someone simulated the entire universe millions of times and finally got a planet with life on it, surely they’d want to roll out that timeline many times, rather than throwing it away and starting from scratch.
Much more speculatively, you could imagine that in a civilization of aliens playing “Earth: The Video Game,” one of the aliens happens to play out a timeline where Trump becomes president, they think it’s so hilarious they share their checkpoint all over the alien Internet, and it becomes one of the most popular checkpoints to start a game from.
I don’t necessarily think worlds where Trump becomes president are the particular kind of world that the simulators would prioritize running. But maybe? In any case, Trump’s election hasn’t noticeably affected my credence of being simulated (which is pretty dominated by my low starting prior).
In that case, I’d expect to be living in the early 20th century. Would you not say that WW1 & WW2 were especially random, unpredictable, and interesting? With the exception of AI development, I feel this time period was relatively more stable
I don’t know, personally I’m much more interested in the ongoing history of AI development than WW1 and WW2, but I guess those wars are also pretty interesting.
If we’re indeed living in the hinge of history, and humanity is about to create AIs that spread certain values throughout the universe, it seems very interesting and important to find out what the outcome is. I hear this is especially relevant for acausal trade.
Honestly, I don’t think WW1 and WW2 were particularly random or unpredictable by the standards of human history; I think they felt that way because the development of technologies, and ongoing industrial revolution made them highly unprecedented, but I don’t think the fact those wars occurred, or their results were particularly out of distribution.
I am super not a historian, so take my opinion with some salt, but I would guess the most unlikely things in history were the things that *could have happened earlier, but took a really long time to happen.
So in order of peculiarity:
1) Formation of Eukaryotic life; 1.4 billion years of prokaryotic life before this happened.
2) Formation of multicellular life; around 1.5 billion years of eukaryotic life before this happened.
3) Homo Sapiens level intelligence/civilization; we actually dont have a great way of knowing how rare this is, only that other civilizations are absent from the fossil record, and apparently absent in the cosmos, despite centralized nervous systems evolving around 540 million years ago (only 60 million years after multicellular life became a thing at all)
4) Development of agriculture; between 200 and 300 thousand years of homo-sapiens and similar species before we see permanent settlements really take hold.
5) Industrial revolution/enlightenment; this one feels like it should barely make the list, since there are only about 10,000 years of human agricultural civilization without it, and the absolute earliest ot could have happened was probably 2000-3000 years ago. Actually, now that I think about it the iron age and the development of bloomeries was actually the unprecedented event that led to the industrial revolution, since it seems likely we had other metals like copper and bronze going for about as long before iron processing as we have since.
6) Not blowing ourselves up (so far) since developing and stockpiling a massive amount of nuclear weapons.
Anyway, these are the events I would guess most likely to be candidates for “makes our simulation more interesting, so run lots of versions of it”, and events like D-Trump getting elected feel pretty tame in comparison, IMO.
Things are stable now, but we are in the prequel to the singularity war. In 5,10,20 years’ time I expect we will be playing through the most unstable & consequential era of human history before or since.
Maybe if worlds where a peculiar set of circumstances tend to lead to a particularly interesting set of peculiar results down the line? So the prediction from this hypothesis would be that we live in a timeline/simulation where we are heading for a particularly unlikely final result.
If we all survive the rapid development of ASI in some particularly undignified and unlikely way, that might be relatively strong evidence for a simulation, given that we are pretty confident after the fact that it was in fact insanely unlikely, and the particular set of coincidences that led to us escaping various filters were selected in form Ina sort of simulation equivalent of quantum immortality.
More likely though (under this hypothetical theory, which my gut says is still all very silly) is that the entity simulating us is more interested in the particularly peculiar ASI/mind that ends up succeeding us due to our particular set of muddled interventions in it’s development.
It seems likely that when a simulation turns out to be especially interesting or unusual due to natural randomness, its simulator will decide to roll out that simulation more times. This wouldn’t look like a measurable violation of the laws of physics from the perspective of the simulatees, as long as the simulators don’t abuse their resampling power in extremely obvious ways.
Unpredictable simulation rollouts are more scientifically interesting, informative, and fun to observe. So simulatees can expect to live in an unpredictable world, whether their simulation is used for science, prediction, or entertainment.
For example, if someone simulated the entire universe millions of times and finally got a planet with life on it, surely they’d want to roll out that timeline many times, rather than throwing it away and starting from scratch.
Much more speculatively, you could imagine that in a civilization of aliens playing “Earth: The Video Game,” one of the aliens happens to play out a timeline where Trump becomes president, they think it’s so hilarious they share their checkpoint all over the alien Internet, and it becomes one of the most popular checkpoints to start a game from.
I don’t necessarily think worlds where Trump becomes president are the particular kind of world that the simulators would prioritize running. But maybe? In any case, Trump’s election hasn’t noticeably affected my credence of being simulated (which is pretty dominated by my low starting prior).
If there was a simulation you were in that was being run multiple times, you would not notice, because it would be the same outcome repeatedly.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gSdhh33y9kYWQnCzD/boltzmann-tulpas
In that case, I’d expect to be living in the early 20th century. Would you not say that WW1 & WW2 were especially random, unpredictable, and interesting? With the exception of AI development, I feel this time period was relatively more stable
I don’t know, personally I’m much more interested in the ongoing history of AI development than WW1 and WW2, but I guess those wars are also pretty interesting.
If we’re indeed living in the hinge of history, and humanity is about to create AIs that spread certain values throughout the universe, it seems very interesting and important to find out what the outcome is. I hear this is especially relevant for acausal trade.
Honestly, I don’t think WW1 and WW2 were particularly random or unpredictable by the standards of human history; I think they felt that way because the development of technologies, and ongoing industrial revolution made them highly unprecedented, but I don’t think the fact those wars occurred, or their results were particularly out of distribution.
I am super not a historian, so take my opinion with some salt, but I would guess the most unlikely things in history were the things that *could have happened earlier, but took a really long time to happen.
So in order of peculiarity:
1) Formation of Eukaryotic life; 1.4 billion years of prokaryotic life before this happened.
2) Formation of multicellular life; around 1.5 billion years of eukaryotic life before this happened.
3) Homo Sapiens level intelligence/civilization; we actually dont have a great way of knowing how rare this is, only that other civilizations are absent from the fossil record, and apparently absent in the cosmos, despite centralized nervous systems evolving around 540 million years ago (only 60 million years after multicellular life became a thing at all)
4) Development of agriculture; between 200 and 300 thousand years of homo-sapiens and similar species before we see permanent settlements really take hold.
5) Industrial revolution/enlightenment; this one feels like it should barely make the list, since there are only about 10,000 years of human agricultural civilization without it, and the absolute earliest ot could have happened was probably 2000-3000 years ago. Actually, now that I think about it the iron age and the development of bloomeries was actually the unprecedented event that led to the industrial revolution, since it seems likely we had other metals like copper and bronze going for about as long before iron processing as we have since.
6) Not blowing ourselves up (so far) since developing and stockpiling a massive amount of nuclear weapons.
Anyway, these are the events I would guess most likely to be candidates for “makes our simulation more interesting, so run lots of versions of it”, and events like D-Trump getting elected feel pretty tame in comparison, IMO.
Things are stable now, but we are in the prequel to the singularity war. In 5,10,20 years’ time I expect we will be playing through the most unstable & consequential era of human history before or since.
Maybe if worlds where a peculiar set of circumstances tend to lead to a particularly interesting set of peculiar results down the line? So the prediction from this hypothesis would be that we live in a timeline/simulation where we are heading for a particularly unlikely final result.
If we all survive the rapid development of ASI in some particularly undignified and unlikely way, that might be relatively strong evidence for a simulation, given that we are pretty confident after the fact that it was in fact insanely unlikely, and the particular set of coincidences that led to us escaping various filters were selected in form Ina sort of simulation equivalent of quantum immortality.
More likely though (under this hypothetical theory, which my gut says is still all very silly) is that the entity simulating us is more interested in the particularly peculiar ASI/mind that ends up succeeding us due to our particular set of muddled interventions in it’s development.