I feel like I’m missing something. I feel like there are a bunch of people who have spent a bunch of time thinking about anthropics
I have. Hi! I think the reasoning is approximately correct. The caveat is that “civilization” is not an ontologically basic element in the calculation. What you should update on is your total set of observations, and then you should prefer universes where that set of observations is more likely to be instantiated. But (without reading the grabby aliens paper) it sounds to me like this approximates the update that the paper makes.
I thought that my model aligns with UDASSA, but I’ve derived it independently and I’m not sure.
We are a member of a uniformly-randomly-selected civilization out of all civilizations in the past, present, and future of the universe.
We are not a uniformly-randomly-selected individual out of all individuals in the past, present, and future of the universe. For example, if Civilization A contains 1020× more individuals than Civilization B, then our prior should be that we are 1020× more likely to be any particular individual in Civilization B than any particular individual in Civilization A.
We are not on a uniformly-randomly-selected civilized planet out of all civilized planets in the past, present, and future of the universe. Same idea as #2 above.
We are not a uniformly-randomly-selected individual out of all individuals in in the past, present, and future of Earth. For example, if there will eventually be 100 trillion intelligent individuals on Earth, we should not update on the fact that we are unusually early.
You agree with all four of these? The contrast between #1 vs #4 seems especially weird to me—if we’re going to update on human civilization being early with respect to all civilizations, shouldn’t we also update on me being early with respect to all intelligent Earthlings?? #4 is of course the doomsday argument, which incidentally Robin Hanson rejects, which seems inconsistent to me.
No, not quite; if this list is correct, I was wrong about what G/A claims.
You are a uniformly sampled observer-moment (according to my model). That means you should have a master list of all instances that could implement this moment and then assume you’re sampled from those. This is in fact the beginning and end of my model. To make this more manageable, you can assume your memories from the last five minutes are accurate,[1] and then draw a slightly larger box, i.e., “I’m a randomly sampled 5-minute segment”.
Applying this:
I agree with #2 because you see that you live in a civilization with 7∗1010 people, not one with 1020
Ditto #3.
Ditto #4, you’re not randomly sampled out of people who live early and late because you see that you live early. The question for doomsday is whether a universe where lots of civilizations go extinct makes it more likely to see that you’re early (plus everything else you see), and I don’t see why it would.
So the way I disagree with #1 is similar; we can see that we’re early in the history of the universe. If GA relies on ignorance on that point (right now I can’t figure out from memory if it does), I probably disagree with it. I guess I’ll come back to this when I reread the paper or at least the video.
This goes wrong iff you are a Boltzman brain or something similar, which my model is perfectly happy to treat as coherent possibility, but Boltzman brains are extremely complex, so this should not give you a lot of moments.
I have. Hi! I think the reasoning is approximately correct. The caveat is that “civilization” is not an ontologically basic element in the calculation. What you should update on is your total set of observations, and then you should prefer universes where that set of observations is more likely to be instantiated. But (without reading the grabby aliens paper) it sounds to me like this approximates the update that the paper makes.
I thought that my model aligns with UDASSA, but I’ve derived it independently and I’m not sure.
For example, IIUC, Grabby Aliens is claiming:
We are a member of a uniformly-randomly-selected civilization out of all civilizations in the past, present, and future of the universe.
We are not a uniformly-randomly-selected individual out of all individuals in the past, present, and future of the universe. For example, if Civilization A contains 1020× more individuals than Civilization B, then our prior should be that we are 1020× more likely to be any particular individual in Civilization B than any particular individual in Civilization A.
We are not on a uniformly-randomly-selected civilized planet out of all civilized planets in the past, present, and future of the universe. Same idea as #2 above.
We are not a uniformly-randomly-selected individual out of all individuals in in the past, present, and future of Earth. For example, if there will eventually be 100 trillion intelligent individuals on Earth, we should not update on the fact that we are unusually early.
You agree with all four of these? The contrast between #1 vs #4 seems especially weird to me—if we’re going to update on human civilization being early with respect to all civilizations, shouldn’t we also update on me being early with respect to all intelligent Earthlings?? #4 is of course the doomsday argument, which incidentally Robin Hanson rejects, which seems inconsistent to me.
No, not quite; if this list is correct, I was wrong about what G/A claims.
You are a uniformly sampled observer-moment (according to my model). That means you should have a master list of all instances that could implement this moment and then assume you’re sampled from those. This is in fact the beginning and end of my model. To make this more manageable, you can assume your memories from the last five minutes are accurate,[1] and then draw a slightly larger box, i.e., “I’m a randomly sampled 5-minute segment”.
Applying this:
I agree with #2 because you see that you live in a civilization with 7∗1010 people, not one with 1020
Ditto #3.
Ditto #4, you’re not randomly sampled out of people who live early and late because you see that you live early. The question for doomsday is whether a universe where lots of civilizations go extinct makes it more likely to see that you’re early (plus everything else you see), and I don’t see why it would.
So the way I disagree with #1 is similar; we can see that we’re early in the history of the universe. If GA relies on ignorance on that point (right now I can’t figure out from memory if it does), I probably disagree with it. I guess I’ll come back to this when I reread the paper or at least the video.
This goes wrong iff you are a Boltzman brain or something similar, which my model is perfectly happy to treat as coherent possibility, but Boltzman brains are extremely complex, so this should not give you a lot of moments.