I also don’t see the point of making historical simulations of that kind in the first place. It strikes me as unnecessarily complex and costly.
Calibration test: How many policies that have been enforced by governments worldwide would you have made the same claim for? How many are currently still being enforced? How many are currently in planning/discussion/voting/etc. but not yet implemented?
In my own, not seeing the point and this being unnecessarily complex and costly, combined with the fact that it’s something people discuss as opposed to any random other possible hypothesis, makes it just as valid a candidate for government signaling and status-gaming as many other types of policies.
However, to clarify my own position: I agree that the second premise implies some sort of motive for running such a simulation without caring for the lives of the minds inside it, but I just don’t think that the part about having billions of “merely simulated” miserable lives would be of much concern to most people with a motive to do it in the first place.
As evidence, I’ll point to the many naive answers to counterfactual muggings of the form “If you don’t give me 100$ I’ll run a trillion simulated copies of you and torture them immensely for billions of subjective years.” “Yeah, so what? They’re just simulations, not real people.”
It certainly raises interesting questions, and I can’t presume to know enough about human psychology (or future AI development) to confidently make a prediction one way or another.
I’d be careful here about constraining your thoughts to “Either magical tiny green buck-toothed AK47-wielding goblins yelling ‘Wazooomba’ exist, or they don’t, right? So it’s about 50-50 that they do.” I’m not quite sure if there even is any schelling point in-between.
I can’t say that any policy comes to mind at this point. In my country the norm has always been to claim for more government intervention and higher direct taxes, not less. If anything, I find government spending cuts are the ones that tend to be irrationally implemented and make a mess of perfectly serviceable services, and I always see those as a threat. The private sector is the one in charge of frivolities, luxuries and unnecessary stuff that people still want to spend money on, as long as it isn’t public dimes. [I’ve been downvoted over expressing this kind of opinion in the past; if you have different opinions that consider these to be blatantly stupid, I’ll still humbly request that you refrain from doing that. Please.].
It’s only something people discuss because, as far as I can tell from the superficial data I’ve collected so far, some intellectual hipster decided it would be amusing to pose a disturbing and unfalsifiable hypothesis, and see how people reacted to it and argued against it. As far as I’m concerned, until there’s any evidence at all that this reality is not the original, it simply doesn’t make sense to promote the hypothesis to our attention.
That counterfactual mugging would at least give me pause. Though I think my response would be more long the lines of attempting pre-emptive use of potentially lethal force than simply paying the bribe. That sort of dangerous, genocidal madman shouldn’t be allowed access to a computer.
I didn’t imply that there are only two ways this can go, but the hypothesis space and the state of current evidence is such that I can’t see any specific hypothesis being promoted to my attention, so I’m sticking with the default “this is the original reality” until evidence shows up to make me consider otherwise.
I’d be careful here about constraining your thoughts to “Either magical tiny green buck-toothed AK47-wielding goblins yelling ‘Wazooomba’ exist, or they don’t, right? So it’s about 50-50 that they do.” I’m not quite sure if there even is any schelling point in-between.
Complexity-based priors solve that problem. Magical tiny green buck-toothed AK47-wielding goblins yelling ‘Wazooomba’ are complex, so, in the absence of evidence that they do exist, you’re justified in concluding that they don’t. ;)
Calibration test: How many policies that have been enforced by governments worldwide would you have made the same claim for? How many are currently still being enforced? How many are currently in planning/discussion/voting/etc. but not yet implemented?
In my own, not seeing the point and this being unnecessarily complex and costly, combined with the fact that it’s something people discuss as opposed to any random other possible hypothesis, makes it just as valid a candidate for government signaling and status-gaming as many other types of policies.
However, to clarify my own position: I agree that the second premise implies some sort of motive for running such a simulation without caring for the lives of the minds inside it, but I just don’t think that the part about having billions of “merely simulated” miserable lives would be of much concern to most people with a motive to do it in the first place.
As evidence, I’ll point to the many naive answers to counterfactual muggings of the form “If you don’t give me 100$ I’ll run a trillion simulated copies of you and torture them immensely for billions of subjective years.” “Yeah, so what? They’re just simulations, not real people.”
I’d be careful here about constraining your thoughts to “Either magical tiny green buck-toothed AK47-wielding goblins yelling ‘Wazooomba’ exist, or they don’t, right? So it’s about 50-50 that they do.” I’m not quite sure if there even is any schelling point in-between.
I can’t say that any policy comes to mind at this point. In my country the norm has always been to claim for more government intervention and higher direct taxes, not less. If anything, I find government spending cuts are the ones that tend to be irrationally implemented and make a mess of perfectly serviceable services, and I always see those as a threat. The private sector is the one in charge of frivolities, luxuries and unnecessary stuff that people still want to spend money on, as long as it isn’t public dimes. [I’ve been downvoted over expressing this kind of opinion in the past; if you have different opinions that consider these to be blatantly stupid, I’ll still humbly request that you refrain from doing that. Please.].
It’s only something people discuss because, as far as I can tell from the superficial data I’ve collected so far, some intellectual hipster decided it would be amusing to pose a disturbing and unfalsifiable hypothesis, and see how people reacted to it and argued against it. As far as I’m concerned, until there’s any evidence at all that this reality is not the original, it simply doesn’t make sense to promote the hypothesis to our attention.
That counterfactual mugging would at least give me pause. Though I think my response would be more long the lines of attempting pre-emptive use of potentially lethal force than simply paying the bribe. That sort of dangerous, genocidal madman shouldn’t be allowed access to a computer.
I didn’t imply that there are only two ways this can go, but the hypothesis space and the state of current evidence is such that I can’t see any specific hypothesis being promoted to my attention, so I’m sticking with the default “this is the original reality” until evidence shows up to make me consider otherwise.
Complexity-based priors solve that problem. Magical tiny green buck-toothed AK47-wielding goblins yelling ‘Wazooomba’ are complex, so, in the absence of evidence that they do exist, you’re justified in concluding that they don’t. ;)