Thanks for this great explainer! For the past few months I’ve been working on the Bayesian update from Hanson’s argument and hoping to share it in the next month or two.
Tristan Cook
I’ve finally commented on LessWrong (after lurking for the last few years) which had been on the edge of my comfort zone. Thanks for exercise!
Something about being watched makes us more responsible. If you can find people that aren’t going to distract you, working alongside them keeps you accountable. If it’s over zoom you can mute them
I like Focusmate for this. You book a 25 minute or 50 minute pomodoro session with another member of the site and video call during the duration. I’ve found sharing my screen also helps.
It looks like you’ve rediscovered SIA fears (expected) infinity
Replicating and extending the grabby aliens model
I agree it seems plausible SIA favours panspermia, though my rough guess is that doesn’t change the model too much.
Conditioning on panspermia happening (and so the majority of GCs arriving through panspermia) then the number of hard steps in the model can just be seen as the number of post-panspermia steps.
I then think this doesn’t change the distribution of ICs or GCs spatially if (1) the post-panspermia steps are sufficiently hard (2) a GC can quickly expand to contain the volume over which its panspermia of origin occurred. The hardness assumption implies that GC origin times will be sufficiently spread out for a single to GC to prevent any prevent any planets with step completions of life from becoming GCs.
Could your model also include a possibility of the SETI-attack: grabby aliens sending malicious radio signals with AI description ahead of their arrival?
I briefly discuss this in Chapter 4. My tentative conclusion is that we have little to worry about in the next hundred or thousand years, especially (which I do not mention) if we think malicious grabby aliens to try particularly hard to have their signals discovered.
Great report. I found the high decision-worthiness vignette especially interesting.
Thanks! Glad to hear it
Maybe this is discussed in the anthropic decision theory sequence and I should just catch up on that?
Yep, this is kinda what anthropic decision theory (ADT) is designed to be :-D ADT + total utilitarianism often gives similar answers to SIA.
I wonder how uncertainty about the cosmological future would affect grabby aliens conclusions. In particular, I think not very long ago it was thought plausible that the affectable universe is unbounded, in which case there could be worlds where aliens were almost arbitrarily rare that still had high decision-worthiness. (Faster than light travel seems like it would have similar implications.)
Yeah, this is a great point. Toby Ord mentions here the potential for dark energy to be harnessed here, which would lead to a similar conclusion. Things like this may be Pascal’s muggings (i.e., we wager our decisions on being in a world where our decisions matter infinitely). Since our decisions might already matter ‘infinitely’ (evidential-like decision theory plus an infinite world) I’m not sure how this pans out.
SIA doomsday is a very different thing than the regular doomsday argument, despite the name, right? The former is about being unlikely to colonize the universe, the latter is about being unlikely to have a high number of observers?
Exactly. SSA (with a sufficiently large reference class) always predicts Doom as a consequence of its structure, but SIA doomsday is contingent on the case we happen to be in (colonisers, as you mention).
The habitability of planets around longer lived stars is a crux for those using SSA, but not SIA or decision theoretic approaches with total utilitarianism.
I show in this section that if one is certain that there are planets habitable for at least , then SSA with the reference class of observers in pre-grabby intelligent civilizations gives ~30% on us being alone in the observable universe. For this gives ~10% on being alone.
Wouldn’t the respective type of utilitarian already have the corresponding expectations on future GCs? If not, then they aren’t the type of utilitarian that they thought they were.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Are you saying that in general, a [total][average] utilitarian wagers for [large][small] populations?
So there’s a lower bound on the chance of meeting a GC 44e25 meters away.
Yep! (only if we become grabby though)
Lastly, the most interesting aspect is the symmetry between abiogenesis time and the remaining habitability time (only 500 million years left, not a billion like you mentioned).
What’s your reference for the 500 million lifespan remaining? I followed Hanson et al. in using in using the end of the oxygenated atmosphere as the end of the lifespan.
Just because you can extend the habitability window doesn’t mean you should when doing anthropic calculations due to reference class restrictions.
Yep, I agree. I don’t do the SSA update with reference class of observers-on-planets-of-total-habitability-X-Gy but agree that if I did, this 500 My difference would make a difference.
Thanks for putting this together! Lots of ideas I hadn’t seen before.
As for the meta-level problem, I agree with MSRayne to do the thing that maximises EU which leads me to the ADT/UDT approach. This assumes we can have some non-anthropic prior, which seems reasonable to me.
A thread for miscellaneous things I find useful
Watching videos at >1x speed
I’ve listened to audibooks and pocasts at >1x speed for a while and began applying this to any video (TV or film) I watch too.
For the past few months I’ve been watching film and TV at 1.5x to 2.5x speed quite comfortably. I made the mistake of starting a rewatch of Breaking Bad, but powered through at 3x speed without much loss of moment-to-moment enjoyment. At faster speeds I find it very hard to follow without using subtitles.
I recommend Video Speed Controller (free & open source extension for Chrome & Firefox) for any online videos and most local video players (e.g. VLC) have speed controls built in.
Using an adblocker to block distracting or unnecessary elements of web pages
On the uBlock Origin extension (Chrome | Firefox) one can right click to “Block element” and pick an element of a webpage to hide. I find this useful for removing distractions or ugly elements (but I don’t think speeds up page loading at all)
Some examples
- the Facebook news feed (for which dedicated addons also exist) as well as the footers and left and right sidebars
- the YouTube comments, suggested video sidebar, search bar, footer
- the footer on Amazon
Not using a web browser on my phone
I’ve gone nearly a year without using a web browser on my phone. I minimise the number of apps that are used for websites (e.g. I don’t use the Reddit or Facebook apps but heavily rely on the Google Maps app).
This habit makes me more attached to my laptop (and I feel more helpless without it) which seems mixed. I’ve only rarely needed to re-enable the app and occasionally ask other people to do something for me (e.g. restaurants that only have a web based menu or ordering system)
My Android phone has Chrome installed as a system app so can only be disabled in the settings and not uninstalled.
Using DuckDuckGo as my address bar search..
… but rarely actually searching DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo allows for ‘bangs’ in the search.For example “London !gmaps” redirects your search to Google Maps. At least half of my searches involve ”!g” to search Google since the DuckDuckGo search isn’t very good.
The wildcard ”!” takes you to the first result on DuckDuckGo’s search. For example, “Interstellar !imdb” is slower than “Interstellar imdb !” since the latter takes you to the first page of the DuckDuckGo search whereas the former takes you to the IMDb search results page.
When using DuckDuckGo with Bangs, I highly recommend the extension “DuckDuckGo !bangs but Faster” (Chrome, Firefox) which processes the bangs client side.
There is a LessWrong bang (!lw) and an EA Forum bang (!eaf) - both are currently broken but I’ve submitted requests to fix.
Sorry, this is very unclear notation. The is meant to be a random variable exponentially distributed with parameter 0.7.
Mean 0.7
Thanks for your response Robin! I’ve written a reply to you on the EA Forum here
I use Loop Habit Tracker [Android app] for a similar purpose. It’s free and open source and allows notifcations to be set and then habits ticked off. The notifcations can be made sticky too.