NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I strongly recommend not using stupid. It's less distracting to just point out mistakes without using insults.
changed to unreasonable if that helps
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.
However, your version completely skips what I am actually saying - that I think that whole line of thinking is bad.
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.”)
"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.