Some very large integer.

Is Eliezer alive and well? He's not said anything here (or on Hacker News, for that matter) for a month...

I have given David an abstract, which goes as follows:

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has, in conjunction with Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, pioneered the application of debiasing to predicting the future and making policy suggestions for technology related issues.

The mental skills and traits that everyday folk live their lives with are very different from the skills required to accurately predict the future of technology and human civilization; most importantly prediction of complex future scenarios requires debiasing -- realizing that our brains have in-built weaknesses that prevent us from forming accurate beliefs about the world. 30 years' worth of work on human cognitive biases has been examined and explained on the Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong blogs. Academics from SIAI and FHI have done a significant amount of original work applying our knowledge of human cognitive biases to the issues that futurists and visionaries have traditionally thought about. In particular, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Marcello Herreshoff, Singularity Institute researchers, have outlined the risks that smarter-than-human AI systems pose, and have proposed a research paradigm to counter the risks. SIAI researchers Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk have developed computer models, including The Uncertain Future (web application, www.theuncertainfuture.com), to combine various opinions and beliefs that we have about the future. Often simply taking existing beliefs and showing that they are probabilistically inconsistent can generate insight; inability to check one's beliefs for global consistency is a fearsome human cognitive bias as far as predicting the future goes.

That there is no integer that, when added to one, produces 4.2... (or alternatively, that arithmetic is consistent).

Assume three possible worlds, for simplicity:

A: 1 billion humans. No ETs.

B: 1 billion humans, 1 million ETs

C: 1 billion humans, 1 billion billion billion ETs.

If I am using the anthropic principle and the observation that I am human, these together provide very strong evidence that we are in either world one or world two, with a slightly stronger nudge towards world one. Where we end up after this observation depends on our priors. I agree fully that making additional inferences, such as the probability of other sentient beings increasing due to our own existence, or when we look at the size of the universe, the odds of being alone decrease, affects the end probability.

The inference I described may be unduly restricted, but that is my exact point. The original post made an anthropic inference in isolation - it simply used the fact that there are more animals than humans, and the author is a human, to infer that animals do not have experiences. The form of the argument would not have changed significantly were it used to argue that rocks lack experience. Thus, while the argument is legitimate, it is easily overwhelmed by additional evidence, such as the fact that humans and animals have somewhat similar brains. That was my point: the anthropic principle is easily swamped by additional evidence (as in the ET issue) and so is being overextended here.

"why am I me, rather than an animal?" is not obviously sillier than "why am I me, rather than a person from the far future?".

Well, quite. Both are absurd.

So rot13?

It isn't, at least, not in the sense of being a story whose punchline is "...naq vg jnf nyy n fvzhyngvba". You would already be foreseeing what Roko has mentioned by the end of the second screenful (and crying out, "Ab! Ab! Lbh znq sbbyf, unir V gnhtug lbh abguvat?").

A thought on nanotechnology: considering that biological cells already have most of the capabilities of molecular nanotechnology, and that said cells have been undergoing natural selection for over a billion years, if something better were possible, it probably would have evolved by now. For example, I'd be very surprised if somebody one day makes a machine that's significantly better at protein synthesis than a ribosome is. I suspect that future nanotechnology will look a lot like today's biological systems.

Um... that's a rather odd argument to make, considering steel, wheels, nuclear power, transistors, radio, lasers, books, LEDs...

Proteins are held together by van der Waals forces, which are much weaker than covalent bonds. Preliminary calculations show gargantuan opportunities for improvement (see Drexler's Nanosystems).