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RaelwayScot comments on Simulations Map: what is the most probable type of the simulation in which we live? - Less Wrong Discussion
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If we are in a simulation, why isn’t the simulation more streamlined? I have a couple of examples for that:
It seems that our simulation hosts would need to have access to vast or unlimited resources. (In that case it would be interesting to consider whether life is sustainable in a world with unlimited resources at all. Perhaps scarcity is somehow required for ethical behavior to develop; malice would perhaps spread too easily.)
I’m a big fan of these infographics by the way.
Video games are one kind of simulation we generally engage in, and the answers to these kind of questions are because they're enjoyable background or optimized for gameplay rather than something else. Games like half-life 2 spend a lot of time simulating really boring physics so that they can exist for the few situations they're actually kind of interesting. Lots of games have worlds where every single entity is hostile to the main player or damages them in some way.
If we're in a simulation, we can't discount that we're being simulated in a specific way for non-obvious motivations.
The quantity of extra computation isn't comparable. Half-life 2 may simulate a few objects falling, but it doesn't simulate e.g. the Sun. Which, in our universe, is a computation trillions of times more complex than everything that's 'interesting', at least from the point of view of simulating intelligent beings.
You're ignoring the possibility for shortcuts. Half-life 2 ALSO simulates the sun! It simulates it as a spot of light in the distance in the game. Similarly, the gravity and friction and motion simulation is hugely simplified compared to reality. If the sun works the way it would work in what we understand of physics, it would be extremely complex. But the same doesn't hold if it's a simulation.
The speed of light also allows simulation domains to by cleanly truncated for parallelization.
How do you know it isn't? Everything off the Earth could be a very simple simulation just designed to emit the right kind of EM radiation to look as if it's there. Likewise, large chunks of dead matter could easily be optimized away until a human interacts with them in sufficient detail. Other than your observation about classical physics, all your points are observations "from the inside" that could be optimized around without degrading our perception of the universe.
The Fermi paradox and quantum physics (as opposed to unlimited layers all the way down) are massive simulation streamlines.
Perhaps the conditions that cause the Fermi paradox are actually crucial for life. If spaceflight was easy, all resources would have been exhausted by exponential growth pretty quickly. This would invalidate the 'big distances' point as evidence for a non-streamlined universe, though.
It could be that the 'external' world is completely different and way, way bigger than our world. Their world might be to our world what our world is to a simple game of life simulation.
If the hypothetical external world in question diverges from our own world by a lot then the ancestor simulation argument loses all force.
Of course, but OTOH, we have simulated a lot of tiny, strange universes, so it's not completely implausible.