Thanks for your comment athowes. I appreciate your point that I could have done more in the post to justify this “binary” of good and optimal.
Though the simulated minds scenario I described seems at first to be pretty much optimal, it could be much larger if you thought it would last for many more years. Given large enough uncertainty about future technology, maybe seeking to identify the optimal future is impossible.
I think your resources, value and efficiency model is really interesting. My intuition is that values is the limiting factor. I can believe there are pretty strong forces that mean that humanity will eventually end up optimising resources and efficiency, but less confident values will converge to the best ones over time. This probably depends on whether you think a singleton will form at some point, and then it feels like the limit is how good the values of the singleton are.
Thank you very much for this post, I found it very interesting. I remember reading the original paper and feeling a bit confused by it. It’s not too fresh in my mind so I don’t feel too able to try to defend it. I appreciate you highlighting how the method they use to estimate f_l is unique and drives their main result.
A range of 0.01 to 1 for fl in your preferred model seems surprisingly high to me, though I don’t understand the Lineweaver Davis paper well enough to really comment on its result which I think your range is based on. I think they mention how their approach leaves uncertainty in n_e as to what counts as a terrestrial planet. I wonder if most estimates of any one parameter have a tendency to shift uncertainty onto other parameters, so that when combining individual estimates of each of parameter you end up with an unrealistically certain result.