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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on [Paper] On the 'Simulation Argument' and Selective Scepticism - Less Wrong
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I think it's correct that this makes the simulation argument goes through, but I don't believe the "trivial". As far as I can see, you need the simulation code to literally keep track of will humans notice this -- my intuition is that this would require AGI-grade code (without that I expect you would either have noticeable failures or you would have something that is so conservative about its decisions of what not to simulate that it will end up simulating the entire atmosphere on a quantum level because when and where hurricanes occur influences the variables it's interested in), and I suppose you could call this squabbles over terminology but AGI-grade code is above my threshold for "trivial".
[ETA: Sorry, you did say "for a superintelligence" -- I guess I need to reverse my squabble over words.]
Not necessarily - when you build a particle accelerator you're setting up lots of matter to depend on the exact details of small amounts of matter, which might be detectable on a much more automatic level. But in any case, most plausible simulators have AGI-grade code anyway.
Ok; my point was that, due to butterfly effects, it seems likely that this is also true for the weather or some other natural process, but if there is a relatively simple way to calculate a well-calibrated probability distribution for whether any particular subatomic interaction will influence large amounts of matter, that should probably do the trick. (This works whether or not this distribution can actually detect the particular interactions that will influence the weather, as long as it can reliably detect the particle accelerator ones.)
Fair enough, I think. Also I just noticed that you actually said "trivial for a SI", which negates my terminological squabble -- argh, sorry. ... OK, comment retracted.
Hm. True. I still feel like there ought to be some simple sense in which butterfly effects don't render a well-calibrated statistical distribution for the weather poorly calibrated, or something along those lines - maybe, butterfly effects don't correlate with utility in weather, or some other sense of low information value - but that does amp up the intelligence level required.
I later said "No SI required" so your retraction may be premature. :)
And it was so.