Well, yes, but we have to weight according to the chances of them actually being run. Take movies, for instance. A non-trivial fraction of them are simulations of the past - since we are interested in the past.
As far as I can tell, your argument is that the proportion of simulations of us that are run by our descendents is significant with respect to the total number of simulations of us, because the number of simulations we currently run of our past is significant with respect to the total number of simulations of our past.
I don't think I ever said that. Rather, I was criticising the idea of comparing the number of past simulations with the number of "possible simulations" - by pointing out that considering the number of possible simulations ignored the important issue of motive - and I gave an example illustrating how motive might matter.
Obvious alternatives to ancestor simulations include optimisationverse and the adapted universe. We do have a whole universe worth's of data about which idea is more likely.
Oh, okay. Relevant in comparison to some other ad hoc simulator theory. I can understand that.
Alright, so this is going to sound a bit silly. I'm fairly sure I've read this on the Sequences somewhere, but for the life of me I can't find it. A friend of mine insists that there is a fifty-fifty chance that we live in the Matrix. His argument is that every bit of evidence we have to say that we exist outside of the Matrix is already based off of the idea that we live outside of the Matrix, and that we really have no evidence either way. He says there isn't a way of falsifying that we're not in the Matrix.
Yet I feel like he's wrong, and just can't explain why. I keep repeating that we don't have any evidence to suggest that we live in the Matrix, so why would we bother believing it?
I feel like this could possibly be an analogy for the belief in God or something. >_> I'm tired, and I need help figuring this out.