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JoshuaZ comments on Pascal's wager re-examined - Less Wrong
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Actually, there's at least one Sid Meier game where the programmers have allowed you to do something sort of like this. In Alpha Centari, when you conquer another faction there's an image of the captured leader being tortured. (Even if you play a character who is nominally fairly peaceful, you still get this image.)
Also, if one is positing that there's a civilization advanced enough to spend time making sims, one can reasonably argue that they will be capable enough such that any of them could program the sim themselves, in a way similar to how anyone can program a Basic program to say "Hello World!" in our world.
But that actually supports my thing about follow-through, I think. I didn't like that video clip. But even when I found the directory the clips were stored in on my disk, I didn't bother to hunt down that specific clip and delete it. How many other people did? How many people made a buying or playing decision based on the video? The simulated beings get whatever the programmer decided to code, and that's that.
Our civilisation is advanced enough to spend time making computer games. This doesn't mean the average person can make a computer game.
Anologously, in the hypothetical highly advanced civilisation, it could be that it's considered basic to program a halo-equivalent, but only very few would be able to program a worldsim.