If we’re in a sim, it’s being used for acausal trade
Me: Our world is exactly the kind of thing you’d simulate if you were doing acausal trade! It’s just before civilisation develops the ability to lock-in deals.
Sceptic: Sure, but there’s other reasons ppl might simulate earth. Maybe it’s for ppl’s entertainment? Maybe it’s social science, exploring alternate histories?
Me: For sure. But whatever the purpose of the sim is, it will contain info that’s relevant to ppl that want to do acausal trades. It will have info about who has power post-AGI, what their values are, and whether they want to do acausal trade. If someone ran the sim for entertainment, they’d obviously sell that info to the acausal trade folks.
Sceptic: Won’t the acausal trade folks just run their own sims?
Me: Maybe! But they’ll be keen to buy relevant info from others who runs sims. If others run earth sims for entertainment, the acausal trade folks will buy the info and run fewer earth sims themselves.
At this point we can’t be very sure that acausal trade is even a thing, since we don’t have a formal solution to decision theory we can be confident in (or even meet the lower bar of not having clearly serious flaws), and therefore can’t derive acausal trade from it as a solution to some decision problem. (Or have some other way to gain high justified confidence that acausal trade is actually a thing.)
And then even if acausal trade is a thing, whoever is running sims of us may not be running a decision theory that allows or recommends acausal trade, or we may not have anything to trade that they want, or the trade fails for some other reason like high “transaction costs”.
I was reacting to the lack of hedging or explicit uncertainty in the first line “If we’re in a sim, it’s being used for acausal trade”. Possibly Tom didn’t mean to express very high confidence by it (I see that in a more formal occasion he does explicitly state his uncertainty about acausal trade[1]), but I feel an obligation to err on the side of caution here, in case some readers do interpret it as expressing high confidence.
Quote from the link: Of course, unlike the causal case, whether consensus goods get funded depends on whether agents want to do acausal cooperation at all—which depends on their decision theories and their beliefs about their degree of correlation with others.
Ah, cool, yeah, fair enough. I interpreted that as more of a title, and am used to titles usually skipping epistemic qualifiers because you really want them to be short.
But I wouldn’t rule out someone who’s thought a lot about DT being pretty confident. I don’t think you need to need “solve” DT to be v confident that acausal trade is a thing anymore than you need to solve ethics to know that murder is wrong.
I could imagine that some of the acausal trade crowd have thought long enough about the space of decision theories and their implications to conclude that acausal trade is a consequence of many plausible DTs and is very likely happening.
My understanding is that even with CDT you can get sim-based trade (which i’d consider a form of acausal trade), and that on a first pass EDT and UDT both imply that acausal trade makes sense. So we only need some powerful agents to do one of these decision theories for acausal trade to go ahead.
I guess I can imagine a countercase like “bc of threats very few civs do acausal trade”, though it’s hard to see it go down to zero. I’d be curious if you have other counter-cases in mind.
(In general i’d defer to someone who thinks about this more on how likely acausal trade is to happen overall!)
I could imagine that some of the acausal trade crowd have thought long enough about the space of decision theories and their implications to conclude that acausal trade is a consequence of many plausible DTs and is very likely happening.
I’m not aware of anyone who has claimed this, and wouldn’t trust such claims anyway, since humans just aren’t that good at fully delineating the space of plausible solutions to some philosophical question. E.g. for the first half century of decision theory as a field, nobody thought that updatelessness might be worth investigating.
(In general i’d defer to someone who thinks about this more on how likely acausal trade is to happen overall!)
I wouldn’t defer a lot, because humans are also bad at finding flaws in their favorite philosophical ideas. Think of, e.g., theorists/proponents of Objectivism or Communism.
I’d be curious if you have other counter-cases in mind.
There are too many civilizations in the multiverse to simulate all of them. We can only do a sampling and then decide how to trade based on the statistical properties, but this gives an incentive to free-ride (i.e. getting the benefits of trade from other civilizations that did not specifically simulate us, without paying the costs), which may cause an overall breakdown in trade.
There are too many civilizations in the multiverse to simulate all of them. We can only do a sampling and then decide how to trade based on the statistical properties, but this gives an incentive to free-ride (i.e. getting the benefits of trade from other civilizations that did not specifically simulate us, without paying the costs), which may cause an overall breakdown in trade.
Hmm, but if each civ simulates 1 million others, every civ should be simulated 1 million times? I.e. the more civs in the universe, the more civs to do the simulating. And then i think there’s a stable equ where you only give nice things to the civs you simulate if you see them giving nice things to the ones they simulate. I suppose there’s a q of whether we’re able to achieve that equ?
Also, you can do the thing where when your sims run their own sims, you insert your universe into their sim, guaranteeing 2-way trade?
tiny nit: non-trade sims could happen late in the universe when the available lightcode isn’t big enough to impact trade much, or people could have already locked in their acausal trade decisions, or something analogous in another universe.
But then, entertainment sims might oversample entertaining outcomes (e.g. rerun an event 10 times and use the branch with the most entertaining result). And then, as a result, acausal trade folks’ marginal willingness to pay for info about how those entertaining worlds turn out would go down. And for similar reasons, the stakes of our actions would then generally be lower in any given entertainment sim.
If someone ran the sim for entertainment, they’d obviously sell that info to the acausal trade folks
Weak argument? The set of times that people incidentally produce information relevant to other people is much broader than the set of times they sell it to them.
I think I mostly agree with what this is actually saying, but I’m not sure it’s definitively acausal trade. e.g. it might be for just mundane trade, dividing gains by simulating Shapley values or something as part of a (very elaborate) cooperative bargain.
If we’re in a sim, it’s being used for acausal trade
Me: Our world is exactly the kind of thing you’d simulate if you were doing acausal trade! It’s just before civilisation develops the ability to lock-in deals.
Sceptic: Sure, but there’s other reasons ppl might simulate earth. Maybe it’s for ppl’s entertainment? Maybe it’s social science, exploring alternate histories?
Me: For sure. But whatever the purpose of the sim is, it will contain info that’s relevant to ppl that want to do acausal trades. It will have info about who has power post-AGI, what their values are, and whether they want to do acausal trade. If someone ran the sim for entertainment, they’d obviously sell that info to the acausal trade folks.
Sceptic: Won’t the acausal trade folks just run their own sims?
Me: Maybe! But they’ll be keen to buy relevant info from others who runs sims. If others run earth sims for entertainment, the acausal trade folks will buy the info and run fewer earth sims themselves.
At this point we can’t be very sure that acausal trade is even a thing, since we don’t have a formal solution to decision theory we can be confident in (or even meet the lower bar of not having clearly serious flaws), and therefore can’t derive acausal trade from it as a solution to some decision problem. (Or have some other way to gain high justified confidence that acausal trade is actually a thing.)
And then even if acausal trade is a thing, whoever is running sims of us may not be running a decision theory that allows or recommends acausal trade, or we may not have anything to trade that they want, or the trade fails for some other reason like high “transaction costs”.
Do we need to be “very sure”? Seems like the OP doesn’t assert any enormous confidence.
I was reacting to the lack of hedging or explicit uncertainty in the first line “If we’re in a sim, it’s being used for acausal trade”. Possibly Tom didn’t mean to express very high confidence by it (I see that in a more formal occasion he does explicitly state his uncertainty about acausal trade[1]), but I feel an obligation to err on the side of caution here, in case some readers do interpret it as expressing high confidence.
Quote from the link: Of course, unlike the causal case, whether consensus goods get funded depends on whether agents want to do acausal cooperation at all—which depends on their decision theories and their beliefs about their degree of correlation with others.
Ah, cool, yeah, fair enough. I interpreted that as more of a title, and am used to titles usually skipping epistemic qualifiers because you really want them to be short.
Thanks, i’m not personally “very sure” either
But I wouldn’t rule out someone who’s thought a lot about DT being pretty confident. I don’t think you need to need “solve” DT to be v confident that acausal trade is a thing anymore than you need to solve ethics to know that murder is wrong.
I could imagine that some of the acausal trade crowd have thought long enough about the space of decision theories and their implications to conclude that acausal trade is a consequence of many plausible DTs and is very likely happening.
My understanding is that even with CDT you can get sim-based trade (which i’d consider a form of acausal trade), and that on a first pass EDT and UDT both imply that acausal trade makes sense. So we only need some powerful agents to do one of these decision theories for acausal trade to go ahead.
I guess I can imagine a countercase like “bc of threats very few civs do acausal trade”, though it’s hard to see it go down to zero. I’d be curious if you have other counter-cases in mind.
(In general i’d defer to someone who thinks about this more on how likely acausal trade is to happen overall!)
I’m not aware of anyone who has claimed this, and wouldn’t trust such claims anyway, since humans just aren’t that good at fully delineating the space of plausible solutions to some philosophical question. E.g. for the first half century of decision theory as a field, nobody thought that updatelessness might be worth investigating.
I wouldn’t defer a lot, because humans are also bad at finding flaws in their favorite philosophical ideas. Think of, e.g., theorists/proponents of Objectivism or Communism.
There are too many civilizations in the multiverse to simulate all of them. We can only do a sampling and then decide how to trade based on the statistical properties, but this gives an incentive to free-ride (i.e. getting the benefits of trade from other civilizations that did not specifically simulate us, without paying the costs), which may cause an overall breakdown in trade.
Hmm, but if each civ simulates 1 million others, every civ should be simulated 1 million times? I.e. the more civs in the universe, the more civs to do the simulating. And then i think there’s a stable equ where you only give nice things to the civs you simulate if you see them giving nice things to the ones they simulate. I suppose there’s a q of whether we’re able to achieve that equ?
Also, you can do the thing where when your sims run their own sims, you insert your universe into their sim, guaranteeing 2-way trade?
tiny nit: non-trade sims could happen late in the universe when the available lightcode isn’t big enough to impact trade much, or people could have already locked in their acausal trade decisions, or something analogous in another universe.
Interesting! Continuing this chain of thought…
But then, entertainment sims might oversample entertaining outcomes (e.g. rerun an event 10 times and use the branch with the most entertaining result). And then, as a result, acausal trade folks’ marginal willingness to pay for info about how those entertaining worlds turn out would go down. And for similar reasons, the stakes of our actions would then generally be lower in any given entertainment sim.
How do you “buy” info from another universe? They can’t respond.
It’s not from another universe, just from your neighbours who run different simulations.
Weak argument? The set of times that people incidentally produce information relevant to other people is much broader than the set of times they sell it to them.
I think I mostly agree with what this is actually saying, but I’m not sure it’s definitively acausal trade. e.g. it might be for just mundane trade, dividing gains by simulating Shapley values or something as part of a (very elaborate) cooperative bargain.