Re the habitability of planets, I would not just model that as lifetimes, but would also consider variations in habitability/energy throughput at a given time. As Hanson notes:
Life can exist in a supporting oasis (e.g., Earth’s surface) that has a volume V and metabolism M per unit volume, and which lasts for a time window W between forming and then later ending...the chance that an oasis does all these hard steps within its window W is proportional to (V*M*(W-S))N, where N is the number of these hard steps needed to reach its success level.
Smaller stars may have longer habitable windows but also smaller values for V and M. This sort of consideration limits the plausibility of red dwarf stars being dominant, and also allows for more smearing out of ICs over stars with different lifetimes as both positive and negative factors can get taken to the same power.
I agree. When I model the existence of simulations like us, SIA does not imply doom (as seen in the marginalised posteriors for fGC in the appendix here).
Further, the simulation case, SIA would prefer human civilization to be atypically likely to become a grabby civilization (this does not happen in my model as I suppose all civs have the same transition chance to become grabby).
Re the habitability of planets, I would not just model that as lifetimes, but would also consider variations in habitability/energy throughput at a given time
...
Smaller stars may have longer habitable windows but also smaller values for V and M. This sort of consideration limits the plausibility of red dwarf stars being dominant, and also allows for more smearing out of ICs over stars with different lifetimes as both positive and negative factors can get taken to the same power.
I’d definitely like to see this included in future models (I’m surprised Hanson didn’t write about this in his Loud aliens paper). My intuition is that this changes little for the conclusions of SIA or anthropic decision theory with total utilitarianism, and that this weakens the case for many aliens for SSA, since our atypicality (or earliness) is decreased if we expect habitable planets around longer lived stars to have smaller volumes and/or lower metabolisms.
I hadn’t seen this before, thanks for sharing! I’ve skimmed through and found it interesting, though I’m suspicious that at times it uses SSA -with reference class of observers on planets as habitable as long as Earth - type reasoning.
When I model the existence of simulations like us, SIA does not imply doom (as seen in the marginalised posteriors for fGC in the appendix here).
It does imply doom for us, since we’re almost certainly in a short-lived simulation.
And if we condition on being outside of a simulation, SIA also implies doom for us, since it’s more likely that we’ll find ourselves outside of a simulation if there are more basement-level civilizations, which is facilitated by more of them being doomed.
It just implies that there weren’t necessarily a lot of doomed civilizations in the basement-level universe, many basement-level years ago, when our simulators were a young civilization.
(1) maybe doom should be disambiguated between “the short-lived simulation that I am in is turned of”-doom (which I can’t really observe) and “the basement reality Earth I am in is turned into paperclips by an unaligned AGI”-type doom.
(2) conditioning on me being in at least one short-lived simulation, if the multiverse is sufficiently large and the simulation containing me is sufficiently ‘lawful’ then I may also expect there to be basement reality copies of me too. In this case, doom is implied for (what I would guess is) most exact copies of me.
(1) maybe doom should be disambiguated between “the short-lived simulation that I am in is turned of”-doom (which I can’t really observe) and “the basement reality Earth I am in is turned into paperclips by an unaligned AGI”-type doom.
Yup, I agree the disambiguation is good. In aliens-context, it’s even useful to disambiguate those types of doom from “Intelligence never leaves the basement reality Earth I am on”-doom. Since paperclippers probably would become grabby.
I’d definitely like to see this included in future models (I’m surprised Hanson didn’t write about this in his Loud aliens paper). My intuition is that this changes little for the conclusions of SIA or anthropic decision theory with total utilitarianism, and that this weakens the case for many aliens for SSA, since our atypicality (or earliness) is decreased if we expect habitable planets around longer lived stars to have smaller volumes and/or lower metabolisms.
That’s my read too.
Also agreed that with the basic modeling element of catastrophes (w/ various anthropic accounts, etc) is more important/robust than the combo with other anthropic assumptions,.
Great to see this work! I’ll add a few comments. Re the SIA Doomsday argument, I think that is self-undermining for reasons I’ve argued elsewhere [ETA: and good discussion].
Re the habitability of planets, I would not just model that as lifetimes, but would also consider variations in habitability/energy throughput at a given time. As Hanson notes:
Smaller stars may have longer habitable windows but also smaller values for V and M. This sort of consideration limits the plausibility of red dwarf stars being dominant, and also allows for more smearing out of ICs over stars with different lifetimes as both positive and negative factors can get taken to the same power.
I’d also add, per Snyder-Beattie, catastrophes as a factor affecting probability of the emergence of life and affecting times of IC emergence.
Thanks!
I agree. When I model the existence of simulations like us, SIA does not imply doom (as seen in the marginalised posteriors for fGC in the appendix here).
Further, the simulation case, SIA would prefer human civilization to be atypically likely to become a grabby civilization (this does not happen in my model as I suppose all civs have the same transition chance to become grabby).
I’d definitely like to see this included in future models (I’m surprised Hanson didn’t write about this in his Loud aliens paper). My intuition is that this changes little for the conclusions of SIA or anthropic decision theory with total utilitarianism, and that this weakens the case for many aliens for SSA, since our atypicality (or earliness) is decreased if we expect habitable planets around longer lived stars to have smaller volumes and/or lower metabolisms.
I hadn’t seen this before, thanks for sharing! I’ve skimmed through and found it interesting, though I’m suspicious that at times it uses SSA -with reference class of observers on planets as habitable as long as Earth - type reasoning.
It does imply doom for us, since we’re almost certainly in a short-lived simulation.
And if we condition on being outside of a simulation, SIA also implies doom for us, since it’s more likely that we’ll find ourselves outside of a simulation if there are more basement-level civilizations, which is facilitated by more of them being doomed.
It just implies that there weren’t necessarily a lot of doomed civilizations in the basement-level universe, many basement-level years ago, when our simulators were a young civilization.
I agree with what you say, though would note
(1) maybe doom should be disambiguated between “the short-lived simulation that I am in is turned of”-doom (which I can’t really observe) and “the basement reality Earth I am in is turned into paperclips by an unaligned AGI”-type doom.
(2) conditioning on me being in at least one short-lived simulation, if the multiverse is sufficiently large and the simulation containing me is sufficiently ‘lawful’ then I may also expect there to be basement reality copies of me too. In this case, doom is implied for (what I would guess is) most exact copies of me.
Yup, I agree the disambiguation is good. In aliens-context, it’s even useful to disambiguate those types of doom from “Intelligence never leaves the basement reality Earth I am on”-doom. Since paperclippers probably would become grabby.
That’s my read too.
Also agreed that with the basic modeling element of catastrophes (w/ various anthropic accounts, etc) is more important/robust than the combo with other anthropic assumptions,.