You come away with the conclusion that “I think the best futures at least would require a good deal of preventing constraining competition, at least re-locust like value systems, and this despite many risks that this entails.”
I don’t understand why you think competition with locusts probably burns much of the galactic resources in expectation. It’s obviously unclear how space combat/exploration dynamics go, but I think defense dominance (in most respects) is significantly more likely, perhaps like 80%. So, totally yolo-ing locusts maybe loses ~20% of the value in expectation on my views.
I do think that in the worlds where space combat isn’t sufficiently defense dominant you’ll need serious mitigations as you discuss. (And in cases where we’re not yet certain about defense dominance we’d also want these mitigations.)
It’s obviously unclear how space combat/exploration dynamics go, but I think defense dominance (in most respects) is significantly more likely, perhaps like 80%.
My intuitions are kinda ‘acausal decision theory means that speed of light doesn’t buy us much defense dominance’. Even if two civilizations are traveling apart at greater than c, they might still end up in offense-dominated acausal conflict.
When I say space combat / exploration dynamics, I’m not including acausal interactions. I don’t think that locusts are especially a problem for acausal interactions.
why? i think acausal locust (agents who maximise their acasual influence) is more concerning than causal locust (agents who maximise their casual influence).
mostly bc ‘search over all strategies + unconstrained competition’ seems more likely in the acausal landscape than our future lightcone. acausal landscape is bigger, and more likely to be multipolar.
The short version containing some of my understanding: Things in space are far away and expensive to reach in a timely way. So, if someone gets to some resources first, they can spend a small fraction on defenses and be reasonably well defended unless an attacker spends far more resources sending over things to attack them.
One major counterargument is that maybe the most efficient space megastructures will be soft targets (because they can’t jitter fast enough) meaning that defense is effectively very expensive because you can’t use the most efficient megastructures.
Whether you can cause various destructive chain reactions is pretty important. If locusts could benefit from causing vacuum collapse, or could trigger star supernova, or could efficiently collapse various bodies into black holes, that could easily eat up large fractions of the universe.
it seems contradictory to believe both in vacuum decay and that space combat would be defense dominant .. what’s your definition of the latter that excludes “poisoning the wells”, please? (seems like you have some sub-category of conflict in mind, not the totalizing variant)
By “defense dominant”, I meant “the person who gets to resources first can defend them from other actors who want these resources cheaply” (or something roughly like this). Vacuum decay gets no one any resources, so it feels natural to pull out into a separate category. I agree that value systems which want vacuum decay cause problems and you can imagine locust like value systems which also want vacuum decay.
Separately, I think that something like vacuum decay is maybe around 40% likely to be doable for agents in our universe (based on reports from the best informed people I’ve heard from), so I wouldn’t exactly say I believe in vacuum decay (though I certainly think it is an important possibility which is very plausible).
I can imagine scenarios where you could end up with more resources from causing vacuum decay without extortion. Like if you care about doing something with resources quickly and other agents want to use resources slowly, then if you cause vacuum decay inside your region, the non collapsed shell of your region becomes more valuable to you relative to other agents because it only exists for a short duration, and maybe that makes other agents fight over it less. Or maybe you can vacuum decay into a state that still supports life and you value that
Sure, I agree this is possible in principle. (And if many uncaring actors can cause vacuum decay then it makes sense that at least one of them might have a slight incentive to do this.)
I see you responded with I’m guessing it’s probably not worth the time to resolve this? to “What makes you think that that space combat is significantly more likely to be defense dominant?”
Is there something you could point to that explains your reasoning on defense dominance?
If not, I would consider removing the original comment. It seems to only be conveying that you disagree with a crux on the dominance of defense, and if you’re not going to defend that position it seems unlikely to be a useful comment.
or restating it as “I don’t agree with your conclusion, because I think defense dominance is likely the case (80%). I will not elaborate”
You come away with the conclusion that “I think the best futures at least would require a good deal of preventing constraining competition, at least re-locust like value systems, and this despite many risks that this entails.”
I don’t understand why you think competition with locusts probably burns much of the galactic resources in expectation. It’s obviously unclear how space combat/exploration dynamics go, but I think defense dominance (in most respects) is significantly more likely, perhaps like 80%. So, totally yolo-ing locusts maybe loses ~20% of the value in expectation on my views.
I do think that in the worlds where space combat isn’t sufficiently defense dominant you’ll need serious mitigations as you discuss. (And in cases where we’re not yet certain about defense dominance we’d also want these mitigations.)
My intuitions are kinda ‘acausal decision theory means that speed of light doesn’t buy us much defense dominance’. Even if two civilizations are traveling apart at greater than c, they might still end up in offense-dominated acausal conflict.
When I say space combat / exploration dynamics, I’m not including acausal interactions. I don’t think that locusts are especially a problem for acausal interactions.
why? i think acausal locust (agents who maximise their acasual influence) is more concerning than causal locust (agents who maximise their casual influence).
mostly bc ‘search over all strategies + unconstrained competition’ seems more likely in the acausal landscape than our future lightcone. acausal landscape is bigger, and more likely to be multipolar.
What makes you think that that space combat is significantly more likely to be defence dominant?
The short version containing some of my understanding: Things in space are far away and expensive to reach in a timely way. So, if someone gets to some resources first, they can spend a small fraction on defenses and be reasonably well defended unless an attacker spends far more resources sending over things to attack them.
One major counterargument is that maybe the most efficient space megastructures will be soft targets (because they can’t jitter fast enough) meaning that defense is effectively very expensive because you can’t use the most efficient megastructures.
Whether you can cause various destructive chain reactions is pretty important. If locusts could benefit from causing vacuum collapse, or could trigger star supernova, or could efficiently collapse various bodies into black holes, that could easily eat up large fractions of the universe.
it seems contradictory to believe both in vacuum decay and that space combat would be defense dominant .. what’s your definition of the latter that excludes “poisoning the wells”, please? (seems like you have some sub-category of conflict in mind, not the totalizing variant)
By “defense dominant”, I meant “the person who gets to resources first can defend them from other actors who want these resources cheaply” (or something roughly like this). Vacuum decay gets no one any resources, so it feels natural to pull out into a separate category. I agree that value systems which want vacuum decay cause problems and you can imagine locust like value systems which also want vacuum decay.
Separately, I think that something like vacuum decay is maybe around 40% likely to be doable for agents in our universe (based on reports from the best informed people I’ve heard from), so I wouldn’t exactly say I believe in vacuum decay (though I certainly think it is an important possibility which is very plausible).
I can imagine scenarios where you could end up with more resources from causing vacuum decay without extortion. Like if you care about doing something with resources quickly and other agents want to use resources slowly, then if you cause vacuum decay inside your region, the non collapsed shell of your region becomes more valuable to you relative to other agents because it only exists for a short duration, and maybe that makes other agents fight over it less. Or maybe you can vacuum decay into a state that still supports life and you value that
Sure, I agree this is possible in principle. (And if many uncaring actors can cause vacuum decay then it makes sense that at least one of them might have a slight incentive to do this.)
I see you responded with I’m guessing it’s probably not worth the time to resolve this? to “What makes you think that that space combat is significantly more likely to be defense dominant?”
Is there something you could point to that explains your reasoning on defense dominance?
If not, I would consider removing the original comment. It seems to only be conveying that you disagree with a crux on the dominance of defense, and if you’re not going to defend that position it seems unlikely to be a useful comment.
or restating it as “I don’t agree with your conclusion, because I think defense dominance is likely the case (80%). I will not elaborate”