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Sewing-Machine comments on Best career models for doing research? - Less Wrong
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What's your P of "the fate of all 80 billion galaxies will be decided on Earth in the next 100 years"?
Some complexities regarding "decided" since physics is deterministic, but hand waving that aside, I'd say 50%.
With high probability, many of those galaxies are already populated. Is that irrelevant?
I disagree. I claim that the probability of >50% of the universe being already populated (using the space of simultaneity defined by a frame of reference comoving with earth) is maybe 10%.
"Already populated" is a red herring. What's the probability that >50% of the universe will ever be populated? I don't see any reason for it to be sensitive to how well things go on Earth in the next 100 years.
I think it is likely that we are the only spontaneously-created intelligent species in the entire 4-manifold that is the universe, space and time included (excluding species which we might create in the future, of course).
I'm curious to know how likely, and why. But do you agree that aliens are relevant to evaluating astronomical waste?
That seems contrary to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Indication_Assumption
Do you have a critique - or a supporting argument?
Yes, I have a critique. Most of anthropics is gibberish. Until someone makes anthropics work, I refuse to update on any of it. (Apart from the bits that are commonsensical enough to derive without knowing about "anthropics", e.g. that if your fising net has holes 2 inches big, don't expect to catch fish smaller then 2 inches wide)
I don't think you can really avoid anthropic ideas - or the universe stops making sense. Some anthropic ideas can be challenging - but I think we have got to try.
Anyway, you did the critique - but didn't go for a supporting argument. I can't think of very much that you could say. We don't have very much idea yet about what's out there - and claims to know such things just seem over-confident.
Basically Rare Earth seems to me to be the only tenable solution to Fermi's paradox.
There are strained applications of anthropics, like the doomsday argument. "What happened here might happen elsewhere" is much more innocuous.
There are some more practical and harmless applications as well. In Nick Bostrom's Anthropic Bias, for example, there is an application of the Self-Sampling Assumption to traffic analysis.
I agree.
Even Nick Bostrom, who is arguably the leading expert on anthropic problems, rejects SIA for a number of reasons (see his book Anthropic Bias). That alone is a pretty big blow to its credibility.
That is curious. Anyway, the self-indication assumption seems fairly straight-forwards (as much as any anthropic reasoning is, anyway). The critical material from Bostrom on the topic I have read seems unpersuasive. He doesn't seem to "get" the motivation for the idea in the first place.
If you think there is a significant probability that an intelligence explosion is possible or likely, then that question is sensitive to how well things go on Earth in the next 100 years.
However likely they are, I expect intelligence explosions to be evenly distributed through space and time. If 100 years from now Earth loses by a hair, there are still plenty of folks around the universe who will win or have won by a hair. They'll make whatever use of the 80 billion galaxies that they can--will they be wasting them?
If Earth wins by a hair, or by a lot, we'll be competing with those folks. This also significantly reduces the opportunity cost Roko was referring to.
About 10% (if we ignore existential risk, which is a way of resolving the ambiguity of "will be decided"). Multiply that by opportunity cost of 80 billion galaxies.
Could you please detail your working to get to this 10% number? I'm interested in how one would derive it, in detail.
I restored the question as asking about probability that we'll be finishing an FAI project in the next 100 years. Dying of engineered virus doesn't seem like an example of "deciding the fate of 80 billion galaxies", although it's determining that fate.
FAI looks really hard. Improvements in mathematical understanding to bridge comparable gaps in understanding can take at least many decades. I don't expect a reasonable attempt at actually building a FAI anytime soon (crazy potentially world-destroying AGI projects go in the same category as engineered viruses). One possible shortcut is ems, that effectively compress the required time, but I estimate that they probably won't be here for at least 80 more years, and then they'll still need time to become strong enough and break the problem. (By that time, biological intelligence amplification could take over as a deciding factor, using clarity of thought instead of lots of time to think.)
My question has only a little bit to do with the probability that an AI project is successful. It has mostly to do with P(universe goes to waste | AI projects are unsuccessful). For instance, couldn't the universe go on generating human utility after humans go extinct?
How? By coincidence?
(I'm assuming you also mean no posthumans, if humans go extinct and AI is unsuccessful.)
Aliens. I would be pleased to learn that something amazing was happening (or was going to happen, long "after" I was dead) in one of those galaxies. Since it's quite likely that something amazing is happening in one of those 80 billion galaxies, shouldn't I be pleased even without learning about it?
Of course, I would be correspondingly distressed to learn that something horrible was happening in one of those galaxies.