philosophytorres comments on A problem in anthropics with implications for the soundness of the simulation argument. - Less Wrong Discussion
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As for your first comment, imagine that everyone "wakes up" in a room with only the information provided and no prior memories. After 5 minutes, they're put back to sleep -- but before this occurs they're asked about which room they're in. (Does that make sense?)
I thought you might like to hear about some of the literature on this problem. Forgive me if you're already aware of this work and I've misunderstood you.
Manfred writes:
In Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy, Nick Bostrom describes a thought experiment known as 'Mr. Amnesiac' to illustrate the desirability of a theory of observation selection effects that takes this kind of temporal uncertainty into account:
Not unlike Manfred's arguments in favor of betting on room B under imperfect recall, Bostrom's solution here is to propose observer-moments, time intervals of observers' experiences of arbitrary length, and reason as though you are a randomly selected observer-moment from your reference class, as opposed to just a randomly selected observer (in philosophy, Strong Self-Sampling Assumption vs. Self-Sampling Assumption). With this assumption and imperfect recall, you would conclude in Mr. Amnesiac that the probability of your being in Room 1 = 2/3 and of being in Room 2 = 1/3, and that you should bet on Room 1.
But I don't think there's anything mysterious there. If I understand correctly, we are surreptitiously asking the room B people to bet 1000 more times per observer than the room A people. Yet again, the relevant consideration is "How many times is this experience occurring?"
Nitpick: If we do include imperfect recall, doesn't this actually just make us indifferent between room A and room B, as opposed to making us prefer room B? Room A people collectively possess 100 trillion observer-moments that belong to 100 trillion observers, room B people collectively possess 1000 observer-moments per observer times 100 billion observers = 100 trillion observer-moments that belong to 100 billion observers. Our credence should be 50/50 and we're indifferent between bets. Or am I confused?
Bostrom published that in 2002? Wow!
With amnesia, in room A there is 1 observer-moment per moment over the total occupied time T => T observer moments, while in room B there are 1000 observer-moments per moment over some other time T' => 1000 T' observer moments.
If the people in room B stick around long enough that T=T', then there are more total observer moments in room B. If each person gets the same amount of time (as suggested in the comment two above), then T'=T/1,000,000 and are more observer moments in room A.
(For more rigor, we might think of "observer-moment" as a density function rather than discrete occurrences).
I always see you commenting on Stuart Armstrong's posts, so I actually just assumed you were alluding to that work in the great-great-grandparent. I wonder if I should start erring on the side of assuming that people do want pointers to the literature.
Yeah, my knowledge of the anthropics literature is pretty slim - thinking about anthropics has driven me to read about probability and causal models, rather than the object-level writings. Pointers to the literature are great :)