And not only Obama. The closer you are to the center of human history, the more likely you are to be on a holodeck. People simulating others should be more likely to simulate people in historically interesting times, and people simulating themselves for fun and blocking their memory should be more likely to simulate themselves as close to interesting events as possible.
And...if Singularity theory is true, the Singularity will be the most interesting and important event in all human history. Now, all of us are suspiciously close to the Singularity, with a suspiciously large ability to influence its course. Even I, a not-too-involved person who's just donated a few hundred dollars to SIAI and gets to sit here talking to the SIAI leadership each night, am probably within the top millionth of humans who have ever lived in terms of Singularity "proximity".
And Michael Vassar and Eliezer are so close to the theorized center of human history that they should assume they're holodecking with probability ~1.
After all, which is more likely from their perspective - that they're one of the dozen or so people most responsible for creating the Singularity and ensuring Friendly AI, or that they're some posthuman history buff who wanted to know what being the guy who led the Singularity Institute was like?
(the alternate explanation, of course, is that we're all on the completely wrong track and that we're simply in the larger percentage of humans who think they're extremely important.)
Note that the alternate explanation is MUCH more probable.
In passing, I said:
And lo, CronoDAS said:
To which I replied:
There's a certain resemblance here - though not an actual analogy - to the strange position your friend ends up in, after you test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
For those unfamiliar with QTI, it's a simple simultaneous test of many-worlds plus a particular interpretation of anthropic observer-selection effects: You put a gun to your head and wire up the trigger to a quantum coinflipper. After flipping a million coins, if the gun still hasn't gone off, you can be pretty sure of the simultaneous truth of MWI+QTI.
But what is your watching friend supposed to think? Though his predicament is perfectly predictable to you - that is, you expected before starting the experiment to see his confusion - from his perspective it is just a pure 100% unexplained miracle. What you have reason to believe and what he has reason to believe would now seem separated by an uncrossable gap, which no amount of explanation can bridge. This is the main plausible exception I know to Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
Pity those poor folk who actually win the lottery! If the hypothesis "this world is a holodeck" is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck. (I.e. to believe that the universe is such that most conscious observers observe ridiculously improbable positive events.)
It's a sad situation to be in - but don't worry: it will always happen to someone else, not you.