“or more likely we are an early civilization in the universe (according to Robin Hanson’s “Grabby Aliens” model) so, 2) quite possibly there are no grabby aliens populating the universe with S-Risks yet”
But our model implies that there are in fact many aliens out there right now. Just not in our backward light cone.
Aw, I still don’t know which face goes with the TGGP name.
Wow, it seems that EVERYONE here has this counter argument “You say humans look weird according to this calculation, but here are other ways we are weird that you don’t explain.” But there is NO WAY to explain all ways we are weird, because we are in fact weird in some ways. For each way that we are weird, we should be looking for some other way to see the situation that makes us look less weird. But there is no guarantee of finding that; we just just actually be weird. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/07/why-are-we-weird.html
You have the date of the great filter paper wrong; it was 1998, not 1996.
Yes, a zoo hypothesis is much like a simulation hypothesis, and the data we use cannot exclude it. (Nor can they exclude a simulation hypothesis.) We choose to assume that grabby aliens change their volumes in some clearly visible way, exactly to exclude zoo hypotheses.
I’m arguing for simpler rules here overall.
Your point #1 misses the whole norm violation element. The reason it hurts if others are told about an affair is that others disapprove. That isn’t why loud music hurts.
Imagine there’s a law against tattoos, and I say “Yes some gang members wear them but so do many others. Maybe just outlaw gang tattoos?” You could then respond that I’m messing with edge cases, so we should just leave the rule alone.
You will allow harmful gossip, but not blackmail, because the first might be pursuing your “values”, but the second is seeking to harm. Yet the second can have many motives, and is mostly commonly to get money. And you are focused too much on motives, rather than on outcomes.
Yup.
The sensible approach is. to demand a stream of payments over time. If you reveal it to others who also demand streams, that will cut how much of a stream they are willing to pay you.
You are very much in the minority if you want to abolish norms in general.
NDAs are also legal in the case where info was known before the agreement. For example, Trump using NDAs to keep affairs secret.
“models are brittle” and “models are limited” ARE the generic complaints I pointed to.
We have lots of models that are useful even when the conclusions follow pretty directly. Such as supply and demand. The question is whether such models are useful, not if they are simple.
There are THOUSANDS of critiques out there of the form “Economic theory can’t be trusted because economic theory analyses make assumptions that can’t be proven and are often wrong, and conclusions are often sensitive to assumptions.” Really, this is a very standard and generic critique, and of course it is quite wrong, as such a critique can be equally made against any area of theory whatsoever, in any field.
The agency literature is there to model real agency relations in the world. Those real relations no doubt contain plenty of “unawareness”. If models without unawareness were failing to capture and explain a big fraction of real agency problems, there would be plenty of scope for people to try to fill that gap via models that include it. The claim that this couldn’t work because such models are limited seems just arbitrary and wrong to me. So either one must claim that AI-related unawareness is of a very different type or scale from ordinary human cases in our world today, or one must implicitly claim that unawareness modeling would in fact be a contribution to the agency literature. It seems to me a mild burden of proof sits on advocates for this latter case to in fact create such contributions.
“Hanson believes that the principal-agent literature (PAL) provides strong evidence against rents being this high.”
I didn’t say that. This is what I actually said:
“surely the burden of ‘proof’ (really argument) should lie on those say this case is radically different from most found in our large and robust agency literatures.”
Uh, we are talking about holding people to MUCH higher rationality standards than the ability to parse Phil arguments.
In our simulations, we find it overwhelmingly likely that any such spherical volume of an alien civ would be much larger than the full moon in the sky. So no need to study distant galaxies in fine detail; look for huge spheres in the sky.