You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 29 July 2013 10:26PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (381)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Tenoke 30 July 2013 10:27:38AM *  2 points [-]

No. It is unreasonable to think that all simulations are ancestral anyway. Even if no one runs ancestral simulations people will still run simulations of other possible words for a variety of reasons and we will be likely in one of those. And anyway, as soon as you can make a complete ancestral simulation (without knowing of any way to do so without giving consciousnesses/qualia/whatever to the simulated) you can be >99% that you live in a simulation no matter if you run anything yourself or not.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2013 04:57:42PM 8 points [-]

I strongly recommend not using stupid. It's less distracting to just point out mistakes without using insults.

Comment author: Tenoke 30 July 2013 07:53:01PM 1 point [-]

changed to unreasonable if that helps

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 30 July 2013 08:50:55PM 3 points [-]

That is less insulting, and therefore an improvement. A version that's not even a little insulting might look something like "Not all simulations are ancestral." That approach expresses disagreement with the original claim, but doesn't connote anything about the person who made it.

Comment author: Tenoke 30 July 2013 09:08:46PM 1 point [-]

However, your version completely skips what I am actually saying - that I think that whole line of thinking is bad.

Comment author: [deleted] 31 July 2013 10:08:12AM *  0 points [-]

A version that's not even a little insulting might look something like "Not all simulations are ancestral."

There's a difference between “it is unreasonable to think X” and “not X”. (Let X equal “the sixteenth decimal digit of the fine structure constant is 3”, for example.)

(I'd use “There's no obvious good reason to think that all simulations are ancestral.”)

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 30 July 2013 10:20:26PM 0 points [-]

"Unreasonable" is an improvement, but I'd take it further to "mistaken" or "highly implausible".

Actually, I agree with you about the likelihood of numerous sorts of simulations that highly outnumber ancestor simulations.