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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Grabby Aliens is a Terrible Model

My understanding of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument is as follows:

  1. Over time, most of the universe will be claimed by Grabby Aliens, leaving less and less room for other alien civilizations

  2. Therefore, most civilizations in the universe will appear near the beginning of the universe, before the Grabby Aliens are so visible and powerful

  3. Therefore, it’s no mystery that we find ourselves near the beginning of the universe, without other aliens in sight

Please let me know if I’ve misunderstood his argument--I’m sure I’ve lost some detail in this summary but the gist of it is that based on outside view it makes perfect sense that aliens are fairly common but that they’re not visible to us yet.

However, this is obviously the wrong perspective through which to view the issue. The outside view works on a civilizational level, yes. If we accept all premises, it makes sense that most civilizations would find themselves “early” in a cosmic sense. But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.

So my argument is:

  1. If Grabby Aliens exist, in time most of the universe will be claimed by grabby aliens of one sort or another

  2. If at least one Grabby Alien civilization doesn’t immediately succumb to AI or a similar thing, the incredibly vast majority of sentient beings will be born under Grabby Alien rule

  3. It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View

  4. Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

  5. (optional) If going by the outside view, I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.

There are of course large weaknesses to using the outside view at all, but I’m just trying to use all the same premises that the original argument did. It frustrates me to see so many rationalists essentially dismiss the issue as solved now that a prominent rationalist has come up with an argument against it, when the argument is so weak.

I’d love to hear what you guys think.

But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.

I actually disagree, if the gist of this argument is supposed to be some version of doomsday argument. The main weakness here I think is vague definition of individual. Who is individual, what traits does it have to have? Even for Earth, I'd say that in one end of the spectrum basically all mammals count as individuals, possibly even every insect is an individual and so forth, so can one argue that we are supposed to be living in the average period of mammalian/life dominance? And on the other hand I can say that individual is as narrow as georgioz at the time he was born. There was no other individual like georgioz ever created and there never will be one. The pool of georgioz individuals is exactly 1, and he was born when he was born so there can be no further argument made out of it.

In the end I find Fermi paradox/Doomsday/Ontological proof of god arguments as faulty way to logic something into existence. Out of all of them, Fermi paradox is at least useful as it tries to identify some parameters and logical assumptions which clarifies thinking. But it cannot be resolved on its own merit or by using other logic.

I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.

To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.

A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.

Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.

I agree, however there is also something to be said about arbitrary selection of the reference class. For instance in doomsday argument it is just assumed that humanity is a reference class. Why not all hominids? Why not just all accounts that are subscribed to The Motte including bots? Using the latter example both bots and human users have something in common - they are subscribed to The Motte. But there is not much else to be said for it or infer from it. It may be the case that even if two concepts are overlapping in certain category, it is erroneous to assume that there may be some meaningful knowledge gained by projecting information you have from one well researched concept (let's say in this case well known human users) onto other concept (in this case bots). Including basic information regarding how many are there to be in the future or some such.

The origin story of doomsday argument is supposed to be WW2 Allied intelligence operation, where they observed number painted on German tanks and ascertained how many of them were likely produced using statistics. But in that case the reference class was well defined and grounded. For instance intelligence agencies were interested in all German tanks already produced - they were not interested in tanks produced in WW1 or Leopard tanks produced in 2020. They probably had some hard intelligence regarding how the numbers were assigned - e.g. that they were assigned sequentially and not randomly as is the case for instance with certain countries/states vehicle license plates. They also had additional data, for instance if they observed a tank numbered 1,000,000,000 they would have known that their methodology is flawed as it was not physically possible for Germans to have one billion tanks.

I think any reasonable definition will include more Grabby Aliens than humans, or mammals on grabby alien planets, etc.. I agree with your point though and find this whole perspective very unconvincing.

This never occurred to me at all, and I doubt Hanson had this in mind.

The model itself is controversial along what could be called culture lines. But more importantly our debates about the what is appropriate child entertainment could use some cosmic horror discussion to remind us of scale. Or, the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin debate could use an occasional check in on the status of invading forces.

We should have a regular nerd talk thread.

Friday Fun Thread

But what if I want to discuss why we will be lucky if we are just exterminated. That's not fun.

People here may have a wider definition of 'fun' than you think. I'd find it fun.

There's not much of one--maybe I should have posted in the Friday Fun thread or something. I do find it frustrating how popular this sort of anthropic reasoning has gotten in rationalist circles. I feel like we (inasmuch as I'm a rationalist anyways) are thinking ourselves into circles with ridiculous speculative thought experiments that direct curiosity away from more productive venues.

there is none. probably belongs in the main forum, not here

For once I have to agree with GE.

It’s more like: we should expect for life to colonize as much of the universe as it can. Since we can’t see other life in our lightcone, we are probably in the early days of universe colonization. A secondary claim would be: you should expect to be born into the most populous point in history. You are born now, so the very plausible interstellar future is somehow less populated than today. A very plausible mechanism is selection towards a singular group or individual that does all of the future colonization.

I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.

I also think we have been born into--well, I basically agree with you word-for-word right up until the very end, where "highly speculative" doesn't describe my views as well as "infringing on the copyright protecting a 2015 Wachowski film."

I mean, if there's a better answer to the Fermi Paradox than "they aren't visiting Earth because our population too small for grinding us all up into a filmy paste and selling it as skin-and-tentacle rejuvenation creams wouldn't break even--by about 20%," I haven't heard it.

Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?

Because no one will be. Grabby civilizations are likely made up of non-sentient robots.

How would that work ? Isn't sentience required to run a civilization ?

Probably not humanlike sentience. We have highly adaptable, general purpose brains. Grabby aliens will probably get expansion down to an exact science which will require only purpose built machines to do specific tasks. It seems unlikely to me that the beings in that civilization would have the general intelligence required to be part of the reference class that wonders about its place in the universe. That would probably get selected out for being a waste of resources.

Sentience isn't intelligence.

Sentience is the capacity to experience qualia, essentially consciousness. (Frogs for example are perfectly sentient as far as we know.) Robots can probably be really smart and capable of making decisions just as complex as any conscious human (maybe, as we don't really fully understand sentience/consciousness at all yet) but without the actual experiencing subjective sensations part.

That might not actually be .. true.

Even Peter Watts, one of the most rabid fans* of the whole consciousness != intelligence thing has come to have some doubts.

I say "rabid fan" because he wrote two terrifying, acclaimed sf books about it.

What they’ve got, as it turns out, is a nifty little proof-of-principle in support of the Free-Energy-Minimization model I was chewing over last April. Back then it was Mark Solms, forcing me to rethink my assertion that consciousness could be decoupled from the survival instinct. The essence of Solms’ argument is that feelings are a metric of need, you don’t have needs unless you have an agenda (i.e., survival), and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious). I wasn’t fully convinced, but I was shaken free of certain suppositions I’d encrusted around myself over a couple of decades.* If Solms was right, I realized, consciousness wasn’t independent of survival drives; it was a manifestation of them*.

Well certainly I admit it's an open question. I just mean that the ideas are wholly conceptually separable and thus theoretically an actual empirical distinction between them is quite possible. Maybe "probably" in my original answer is assuming too much certainty.

and you can’t feel feelings without being subjectively aware of them (i.e., conscious).

.. the thing is, people, at least myself, can have emotions and without consciously feeling them.

It's not common but for example I can be fearful of something without feeling fear.

I honestly don't remember what it likes to feel fear, though I believe I used to feel it. Now there's just sort of .. detached numbness, and a distinct but impossible to explain unwillingness to do what I'm guessing I'm afraid of.

Well that depends what you mean by "civilization".

But if we just mean it as "thing which uses up all the resources in it's light cone", then a paperclipper is that, and a paperclipper doesn't have to be sentient. Some would even argue that it is required not to be sentient, because if it were sentient it would realise paperclipping is a stupid objective.

Robin's view makes sense if we consider ourselves in the reference class of sentient beings experiencing a Fermi paradox. Robin's theory explains why we exist very early in the universe given our reference class. I think if we take our reference class to be sentient beings we should assume we are in a computer simulation run by Hawking radiation since for the vast majority of the time the universe will be capable of sustaining life we will be in the black hole era where the only source of free energy will be Hawking radiation. In the black hole era, the expansion of the universe will have made being a grabby civilization obsolete.

Why should we assume that the simulation is run by Hawking radiation in particular? If indeed we are in a simulation, it could well be the case that the universe containing the "hardware" running the simulation has free energy from sources other than Hawking radiation.

In fact, there is no strong reason a priori to assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator is similar to our (supposedly simulated) universe in any way whatsoever, except for similarities that are required for a simulation to exist in the first place -- so, for example, we can safely assume that the universe-containing-the-simulator has a nonzero amount of free energy ... that is, unless the assumption that computation requires free energy is itself a requirement only in our (simulated?) universe, and not a universal multiversal truth!

I think that panspermia is relatively common, complex life is rare among worlds with life (reference: Nick Lane), intelligent technological civilizations rare among worlds with complex life, and civilizations capable of interstellar travel on any reasonable timeframe are either rare among intelligent technological civilizations or do not exist.

I think the question here isn't "should you, as a person expect to be born into a mostly-empty universe", but rather, "should you expect to be part of a race that has mostly conquered the universe without resistance from other aliens".

In some ways I think people are insufficiently paranoid about the implications of this question, though. I think it's likely that, a few millennia from now, we'll realize that life can be roughly modeled as

Intelligent life forms on a planet, then immediately expands in all directions at the maximum possible travel speed (plus or minus some factors that aren't relevant on an astronomical scale).

And you can kind of use this to break things down into four options.

If humanity is the first species and FTL travel is possible, then we're going to settle the entire universe with no resistance.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel is possible, then this may simply be a paradox; we haven't been settled, therefore our assumptions are wrong.

If humanity is the first species and FTL travel isn't possible, then we will expand in a sphere, roughly at light speed, and eventually meet up with other species that will be less advanced than us and therefore pose little threat.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding, and we will be absolutely crushed when we encounter the first one of them.

This is concerning.

I have nothing to add to the original point, but here's my hobby horse when it comes to interstellar civilizations: As far as we know, you can't go faster than light or even nearly as fast by any practical means, and you can't freeze and thaw people. Assuming that interstellar business isn't entirely relegated to robots and computers, because that would be narratively boring, we're looking at generation ships and a lot of generations. There will need to be social technology, or just technology, to keep people dozens or hundreds of generations down the line aligned with the plans and values of those who launched them. It doesn't matter much whether this refers to colonization or trade or conquest or diplomacy - how would an actual biological species or civilization ensure that the people it sends out to other stars remain even remotely committed to the cause that sent them? And then, how do you ensure that the people who do the sending don't change so much that by the time the mission comes back with whatever returns are expected, they're no longer able to meaningfully interact with them?

I posit that any spacefaring biological civilization will be conformist and conservative to an extreme and probably unimagined degree, by necessity.

'Universe' is big.

Positing galactic colonization, sure. Otherwise..

One possibility I never see represented is that maybe capping out on tech isn't actually that hard on these timescales. Maybe once you get into the rapidly expanding bubble phase everyone has the same tech and there is some defensive advantage asymmetry that robs the first mover of an advantage.

Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.

Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.

Keep in mind that in this analogy, we're probably the Sentinelese.

Theoretically, civilizations which can manage interstellar travel would be locked in MAD because if you can accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds and decelerate it into orbit, you can accelerate a very large rock into relativistic speed to crash into the planet and wipe out all life therein with no possibility of defense, orbital mechanics being generally well understood.

If you have an interstellar civilization based around some manner of FTL travel, whatever exotic technology is in use would also probably provide weapons of mass destruction- Alcubierre drives as currently understood could generate a massive gamma ray burst fairly easily, and that’s assuming that Alcubierre drive operation can’t be used to directly tear planets apart. A civilization which can build krasnikov tubes or artificial wormholes can also probably launch relativistic kinetic weapons, the energy requirements to build the other end being if anything more impressive.

I had considered going into the details of why defense might have some asymmetry, like maybe it's pretty easy to put a dead man's switch type deal that makes a defended star system unusable if threatened. Really it doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd be able to predict with current day physics knowledge, maybe dark matter can be used as a relativistic shield of some sort.

A relativistic bombardment would also make a planet unusable on less-than-geologic timescales, right? It seems like it should(although a gamma ray burst probably wouldn’t, even if it requires a planet get re-terraformed). No doubt sci-fi ftl changes the equation because faster than light sensors can give much more of an early lead time on relativistic bombardments, but any kind of shielding that works against, say, a dinosaur killer at .7 C is beyond physics as commonly understood.

I have to admit, I now kind of want to see the motte coming up with a hard sci-fi universe of its own centered around some kind of interstellar Cold War.

The dark forest looms large in such a discussion, but I do think it got the game theory wrong. I think in general in the space future a lot of civilization leaves the gravity wells and never returns.

Why? Everything a civilization needs is in gravity wells- energy, materials, resources. Given interstellar travel times it makes more sense to stick near a source of fuel and materials when you can.

Gravity wells will be used and mined but they're too easy of targets. And the friction of escaping the well to trade is going to be very important.

Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer.

Incorrect.

Moldbug has a piece on this which I was just reading the other week but now can't retroactively find (the wonders of living life on incognito mode), so you'll have to excuse my paraphrasing of the argument:

The West is perfectly capable of conquering e.g. Afghanistan. Because the West has nuclear weapons and Afghanistan doesn't. A handful of hydrogen bombs, and there are literally no Afghanis left alive to stop you from taking their clay and holding it in perpetuity. The West's failure to conquer Afghanistan is because the West self-restricts itself from deploying its high tech, not because the high tech ain't up to the job.

That being said, while I object to your analogy I think your overall point is sound. I can believe that after a couple more thousand years there will just be no more hyoeradvanced applied physics left to discover; the tech tree of Reality may indeed have an end that soon.

TBH, the west doesn’t have much difficulty conquering things it has strong reasons to conquer. Afghanistan was a failure because we didn’t think it was worth it to keep fighting. Same with Vietnam.

I think what you and @Butlerian are missing is that this is very much how you defend yourself successfully from stronger foes: you turn any fight into a quagmire and retain levels of enthusiasm for wanton slaughter of invaders that they cannot sustain.

The West can not conquer Afghanistan. Not because it lacks materiel, but because it lacks the will and it would destroy western society to try to manifest it. Vociferation about how you could have wiped your adversary off the map if only they didn't use successful tactics are always vacuous, whatever the tactics.

War is the art of making the enemy do what you want. Not of having the best weapons.

I think technological limits could drastically change the shape of the results.

For example, if offensive technologies are really easy and defense is really hard, then you might get a MAD sort of truce.

If creation of valuable resources is easy there might be no benefit to seizing a bunch of solar systems.

If information and entertainment become the most valuable/scarce resources then you'd have a situation where older civilizations foster and grow new ones.

If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding

The second claim doesn't follow from the first. The thing about universe is that it's vast and lack of FTL will immensely slow expansion on a galactic scale. For a "rapidly expanding sphere" to get far, the expansion has to actually be fast and last long enough before the civilization collapses (from galactic scale expansion perspective). Neither of these two are in any way set in stone.

It doesn't have to be very fast, because geological timescales are so large.

Consider colonization of the milky way.

The width of the galaxy is 100,000 light years. Let's say some civilization travelled at .0001 the speed of light between stars (the fastest man made probe is travelling at .0005 the speed of light) . And on average they had to stop every light year to build up, grow crowded, and then expand outward again. These stops take them 1000 years.

It would take them 200 million years to colonize the galaxy if they started at the very edge. Which is a long time for an individual, but short on geological timescales. If Earth2 on the opposite side of the galaxy had dinosaurs with a space program at the same time we had dinosaurs, then they would have already arrived here before humans evolved.

Yeah, but you obtain that result only because you're limiting your consideration to the Milky Way. Why so provincial? There are superclusters out there! Geological timescales are large, but the universe is seemingly infinitely vast. The total wealth a future civilization will be able to claim depends entirely on when they start and how fast they expand.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm getting at; the scale is so huge that everything kinda rounds off to irrelevance.

What would happen if two species-spheres formed at opposite ends of the Milky Way at exactly the same time? Would it be possible to negotiate a partition of the galaxy in half? Or would the equilibrium be so unstable that one side would inevitably win? Would the two species-spheres comingle to become like a single species?

What would happen if two species-spheres formed at opposite ends of the Milky Way at exactly the same time?

We're talking about a multi-million-year timespan where things can happen, where a thousand-year (or perhaps even a hundred-year) gap is enough for total technological dominance. The chance that it happens at exactly the same time is negligable.

For all the other questions, I mean, maybe, we don't really know; the problem is that just one warlike species, with better technology, may be a rather unstoppable threat.

I think attempting to model aliens is vacuous at best and mental masturbation at worst. I'm talking about sincerely trying to discuss whether intelligent nonhuman lifeforms actually exist as the end goal; As opposed to doing so with the purpose of some kind of thought experiment.

Astronomical measurements are so indescribably mind-bendingly large. And that we can't even observe a mere fraction of that, and even if we could those distances are so large that for the overwhelming majority of your search space you would be literally looking into 10^bruh years into the past.

With those numbers, the imagination constrained by "grabbiness" or "society" or "succumbing to AI", just seems like poor epistemic hygiene (or disregard) if discussed earnestly and not as a thought experiment as a proxy for something else.

The [known:unknown:unknown unknown] ratio of sincerely discussing the mechanics of potential aliens is well into discussing the simulation, the existence of Allah other generic "deep" discussions.

I think it's pretty safe to discuss it as a sort of "lower bound." "If we're 100% correct about laws of physics, nothing surprising comes up, and aliens don't get that much more advanced, what will things be like in 10 billion years?" is a fun discussion, or uncharitably it's vacuous. I agree that we don't know enough to be making far-reaching conclusions based on our limited available knowledge, which is part of why I posted this. I'm tired of people thinking that the issue of "we're alone in the universe" has been solved because an influential but misguided paper on it was published.

I think we should withhold judgement of these things until we're more advanced.

Right now, we understand about 5% of the energy in the universe. 'Dark' matter and energy that makes up the overwhelming majority of everything. My pet theory is that these are the aliens we're looking for. I think that Dyson Spheres, Matrioshka brains and black hole harvesting is a suboptimal use of resources, that it's not worthwhile for a truly advanced civilization. True masters manipulate dark matter/energy, they couldn't care less about Baryonic matter. Baryonic matter is for beginners - advanced nations on Earth don't burn animal waste or wood for fuel anymore. It's not efficient. Aliens don't care about the stars. That's my explanation for Fermi.

But I don't know because we aren't wise enough to understand these things. I think a lot of theorists overreach. We don't have quantum gravity. We don't understand 95% of the universe's energy. We're only 300-400 years into the Scientific Revolution, we haven't even developed fusion power! How can we pontificate on the billion-year scale? How can we speculate on the methods of civilizations vastly superior to our own?

For sure, but I do still like disagreeing with people on their terms.

Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

The Simulation Hypothesis has an answer for you: we were.

I don't see that as an answer at all: it just pushes the question down a level. If we're in a simulation, why weren't we born into a Grabby civilization inside it?

That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not. It may be that bespoke single-player experiences better fit the designs of the simulators, and grabby civilizations in their prime aren't the most useful backdrop for those experiences. Or it may be that the simulators are our own descendants trying to learn more about their pre-grabby past.

That isn't a very compelling counterargument unless you have reason to believe that the simulators will simulate more experiences within grabby civilizations than not

Well that's the whole point of my post. Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside, which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that. Positing that we're in a simulation does not change this observation at all.

Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside

Agreed

which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that

No, this is where I disagree. You are claiming that a grabby civilization at its peak will simulate more experiences that appear subjectively from within the simulation to be part of a grabby civilization than that do not. But why? You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.

Look, you're conflating two things here.

  1. Based on our understanding of the universe, it appears that more sentient entities will be born within Grabby civilizations

  2. Grabby civilizations are by definition more capable of simulating vast quantities of entities, meaning that more entities will be simulated by Grabby civilizations

My post focused entirely on #1. I don't think #2 is very logical, since we don't really know what the rules of the reality simulating ours are, or if there really are any rules at all. I think it's a bit of a reach to surmise that they will follow similar rules, but assuming that the rules are similar, then I suppose #2 is correct and it's probably a Grabby civilization simulating us.

The point I'm trying to make is that the truthiness of #2 doesn't strongly affect #1. and our observations (inasmuch as outside view can be trusted) seem to support #1.

You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.

Exactly, so we can safely reason as if we're not in a simulation, in which case my post remains uncontested.

Here was your original question:

Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”

The Simulation Hypothesis demonstrates that we are likely not in the bottom layer of reality. If this universe is real, then it looks like we'll soon be able to (and likely will) simulate a large number of sentiences, which means it would have been massively coincidental that our indexical experience was located in the "real universe." This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer. This suffices to dispatch your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox.

If the Fermi Paradox is even meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then the answer is that we probably were born (simulated) into a grabby civilization at or near its peak. If the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then it has been resolved. Take your pick, but either way your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox isn't paradoxical anymore.

Yeah, but if the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful on that base layer, it could still be meaningful on this current layer, which is the layer I was talking about.

More comments

Well that's the whole point of my post. Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside, which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that.

I don't understand why you think B follows from A.

Our current understanding of physics suggests that amongst IRL, non-simulated beings more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside. But there's no reason to think that Grabbys will predominantly run simulations of other Grabbys. If anything, they should be running simulations of any civilizational stage EXCEPT Grabbyness because if they want to know what being in a Grabby civilization looks like, they need only look out the window, no need to sim it.

We should therefore think it probable to be born as (a) an IRL Grabby or as (b) a simulation by but not of a Grabby.

Simulated civilisations are not subject to the same anthropic logic as non-simulated civilizations, because simulated civilizations don't have to deal with pesky encumbrances like "making chronological sense". A simulated civilization neither has to start low tech to become high tech, not does it have to persist for arbitrary aeons into the timeless depths of the cosmos until it dies out. The IRL Grabby simulator can just go "Uhhh, today I feel like starting at the Hypernegentropic Noosphere stage of civilization and continuing until the discovery of Sanguomaxtic Inversiololology, then I'll turn it off".

Assuming we are in a simulation, I don't think we can draw really any conclusions about our simulators, including whether they're Grabby or not. We have literally no evidence at all about that layer of reality except that they simulated us. I can think of countless reasons why they would simulate other Grabby's--maybe they want to simulate a war, or how history would have unfolded differently, etc.--but they're all worthless because we know nothing at all about our simulators.

And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?". This is all hitting up on the confusing and confused field of Anthropic Reasoning, all of whose results seem to depend quite a lot on the reference classes that we're considering. You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position).

I would seriously doubt any results we obtain from anthropic reasoning until the whole field gets cleared up of all this weirdness. The meditator in me would also protest that these results really depend on the existence of a "person" as an indivisible entity, which doesn't really exist...

Here are some fun lectures on anthropics by Nick Bostrom:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=oinR1jrTfrA

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8kqP1GX1K5E

And as a bonus to "why weren't we born into a Grabby civ at its peak", you can add "why am I not an 80kg blog of hydrogen somewhere in the middle of a star like the vast majority of matter in the universe?".

That would prevent you from being an agent which is capable of observing that it is in a universe. Realizing that life is much more likely to occur on planets is what starts you down the path of, if not rejecting the Copernican principle, at least refining it.

You also get hilarious results like Adam and Eve being able to hunt by just precommiting really hard to having sex (Adam says he will impregnate Eve and start all of humanity if a deer does not appear right this second in front of him, if he does impregnate her, then they are the first humans among trillions, an unbelievably unlikely position, therefore it must be the case that a deer appeared and he didn't impregnate Eve right then and there, which would merely make them the only humans to ever exist, a much less unlikely position)

I don't think I've ever seen anyone seriously suggest that anthropic reasoning works causally like this. I think once you condition on the known information of Adam's commitment, there is no contradiction any more.

Same as the Drake's equation. The impossibility of accurately estimating any of the key parameters makes it useless

Drake's equation has so many sub-factors built in. I hate when people take it seriously.

I agree with your points 1 and 2, but not 3. Knowing the distribution of all civilizations tells us the probability of other aliens, given that we are born early and don't see others. I agree it's surprising that we weren't born later, but given that we weren't, it's likely that there are others being born around the same time as us.

I do think your point 5 has merit, It's pretty similar to the simulation hypothesis. But in that case, it doesn't really matter what we do anyways.

I think it's hard to really say "given that we were born early and don't see others" when the original premises make that impossible for us to determine. We're already surmising godlike alien beings who will conquer and populate galaxies; it can't be that difficult for them to fool us. I think the simulation argument or one like it is inevitable and defeats the original conclusion.

I agree it's likely we're in some kind of simulation, but I'm not sure if that changes anything in terms of expected future observations. We are still early and alone in our universe, whatever level of simulation it happens to be.

Why would they need to fool us?

Well, the religion I follow has an answer to that one. Godlike beings who value agency want to prepare their children before giving them the same godlike power. Therefore they set up a test of sorts, meant to prepare their children morally and sort out the ill-prepared.

Another possibility would just be for kicks and giggles. Maybe there's a planetary development reality show they all tune into. Maybe they just like watching primitive species evolve--who needs videogames when you have the power to accomplish virtually anything near-instantly in reality?

Grabby aliens are likely not very Godlike and would not want to give us the same Godlike power. They just want our resources. They're probably just going to come and kill us.

You seem to have completely missed the point of what grabby aliens are. They are aliens who expand aggressively in all directions at near the speed up light, consuming all available resources in the universe.

More comments

Mass and the energy of the sun, which is the eventual limiting factor for an interstellar civilization. (Realistically, any civilization limited by anything less wouldn't be capable of interstellar travel in the first place)

They wouldn't be spreading across the galaxy for spices, gold, and women.

I'm not sure you understand what I'm saying. In this scenario we are the grabby aliens coming into our own. I also find it unlikely that the grabby aliens wouldn't be godlike--it's been billions of years. We already would appear godlike to cavemen, and the distance between grabby aliens and us is much larger than the distance between us and cavemen.

In this scenario we are the grabby aliens coming into our own.

In what scenario? I don't understand what you're talking about. My comment was in response to yours about not being able to see aliens.

I also find it unlikely that the grabby aliens wouldn't be godlike--it's been billions of years. We already would appear godlike to cavemen, and the distance between grabby aliens and us is much larger than the distance between us and cavemen.

Because, unlike us, they would be very focused on expanding aggressively and would have found a very efficient way of doing so, which would likely be done by purpose built machines, not humanlike beings.

Ah ok. Well those are both pretty plausible. I think even if they mostly use machines, they still probably heavily outnumber us, though.

Which religion is this?

There's an (I think) old SMBC comic that goes something like this:

Priest: People believe in an inherent light and goodness to the world. Perhaps this is true, and there is some entity greater than we can imagine who is doing good in the world.

Skeptic: OK...

Priest: In conclusion, the doctrines of the 3rd Evangelical Orthodox Church are exactly correct.

The religion is LDS, but I have a slightly nonstandard view of our doctrine, and I don't even believe my original post--I was just using it to argue against the Grabby Aliens model. So it's just a fun coincidence; it's pretty far from what we actually believe. Even if I did believe what I was saying (instead of just making an argument using the original argument's premises) I would expect my post to be the furthest thing from convincing because it's so incredibly speculative as to be worthless.

The whole point of grabby aliens is not epistemic but propagandistic – same as with rationalists and certain statistical methods and very low probabilities multiplied by large numbers; it's a fitting aesthetic to slip a message in. The point is, we must grab the Universe by the... clusters before the Eridani Chinese do so; which they luckily cannot for the moment on the account of them being non-existent (or not advanced enough), but who knows for how long. I like the idea of space colonization and agree with Hanson that it ought to be advanced with rhetorics, but outright massaging the truth still rustles my jimmies. It is overwhelmingly likely that no aliens exist, because life is simply very, very hard. I keep referring to Koonin's argument and have yet to find any refutation. Life is hard. What merits explanation via the Anthropic principle is not us being alone, but us being at all.

(In fact I like space colonization specifically because we are alone; not only is it safer since no Dark Forest logic, but the downside of us going extinct, assuming consciousness has inherent value, is that much greater).

It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View

Perhaps but both are essentially worthless, Outside view is another insidious meta-level «tool for thought» that's actually a tool for molding them in a shape amenable to rhetorical interventions. If you assume growing block universe, a perfectly cromulent cosmology for these purposes, all this disappears; non-existent individuals do not find themselves anywhere.

Why shouldn’t we be alone in the universe? Someone declares it arbitrarily unlikely because so many trillions of planets

A steelman of that could be made with the following chain of reasoning.

  • The Universe, the one we are living in, even if it was the only one; Is arbitrarily large. Very very very large.

  • There are a finite number of types of matter, energy, and their combinations and derivatives.

  • There are only so many ways they naturally arrange.

  • Given the arbitrarily large space, it is not all that unlikely that certain combinations could repeat.

  • That repetition includes combinations of matter, energy,{and physics primitives} that arrange into life and consciousness.

  • Howsoever narrow your definition of life is, the universe is larger.

I don't really buy the above because there are also an arbitrarily large number of ways to arrange {physics primitives}.

This whole thought experiment is trying to multiply epsilon and infinity and see which wins. Hence my other comment on the whole mental masturbatory aspect of discussions about this topic.

Why shouldn’t we be alone in the universe? Someone declares it arbitrarily unlikely because so many trillions of planets, except actually we have no idea what ‘the odds are’ and unless you believe a priori that they’re definitionally infinite then they could quite possibly be infinitesimally small.

That's not the only basis for the grabby aliens theory. Hanson has argued before that we really are alone in the universe, and his grabby aliens theory still says that sentient life is extremely rare. The grabby aliens theory also explains why we are so early in the lifetime of the universe. If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.

If we were truly alone, it would be very unlikely that we would have appeared so early.

That's just more Anthropic principle reasoning. If we were truly truly alone, it'd have been very unlikely that we would have appeared at all, and therefore our existence necessitates speculating about multiverses with a vast number of brunches/bubbles (like Koonin does). The difference between scenarios where life is frequent enough for >1 conscious species to exist at the same time, and where we are alone early in history, is very tiny compared to the actual magnitude of uncertainty.

On top of that, we don't know the a priori distribution of opportunities for the emergence of life over time.

I concede this is an improvement on the default Fermi frame.

It seems rather difficult to figure out how likely various replicators "spontaneously emerging" from nucleotide soup is, given the ridiculously large number of configurations, and the plausible complexity of all the intermediate interactions and machines. Enumerating all of the plausible replicators is (only vaguely) reminiscent of counting all the wacky turing machines in the busy beaver problem. So I don't believe that number at all, you could totally imagine a "replicator" that barely works in specific contexts slowly evolving or something.

Figure 12-6 shows that at most ribozymes could spontaneously originate, but not a coupled replication-translation system (the DNA-protein world)

Why couldn't ribozymes evolve into dna-protein interactions? That seems very plausible. Once you have replication and selection going, you can explore complexity much faster - and in a directed way, as existing pressures and increases in complexity can push you towards randomly acquiring a bit of the complex thing, which is in turn more useful, and then develops more, etc.

This has definitely been deeply analyzed somewhere in the literature or something

That said, "life is just really hard" is as plausible as universal aliens

So I don't believe that number at all

That's your right of course but in the final accounting I'd take his word over yours.

you could totally imagine a "replicator" that barely works in specific contexts slowly evolving or something.

Why couldn't ribozymes evolve into dna-protein interactions? That seems very plausible.

Then where is the evidence for that wondrous mechanism? Or for it being workable, even if inefficient?

I like the turn of phrase once used by Land in his «Hell-baked» (on an adjacent topic): «machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable». We can imagine pretty wild stuff, even perpetual motion engines or FTL travel, but it is not clear if your imagination is rigorous by the standards of current biomolecular knowledge. Often things that have been totally unworkable only become obviously unworkable and wild in retrospect; but that doesn't mean we should confuse the degree of our uncertainty about mechanisms and the probability of those things being workable. We do not know the bounds yet. We know the fundamental laws, though.

The entire chapter 11 of the book is devoted to walking through assumptions people can make for the world of plausible common ancestors of the DNA-based life that are substantially much simpler than LUCA or distributed-LUCA, and inherent inconsistencies of those models. In chapter 12 lies the reasoning for why we end up empty-handed when looking for very simple replicators and why the transition ought to have been that sharp. It begins with what sorts of replication can work at all, and the conditions for very basic protein motifs already ubiquitous in the inferred LUCA genome, such as the P-loop. Then it addresses the most simple model of all, RNA world:

Eigen’s theory revealed the existence of the fundamental limit on the fidelity of replication (the Eigen threshold): If the product of the error (mutation) rate and the information capacity (genome size) is below the Eigen threshold, there will be stable inheritance and hence evolution; however, if it is above the threshold, the mutational meltdown and extinction become inevitable (Eigen, 1971). The Eigen threshold lies somewhere between 1 and 10 mutations per round of replication (Tejero, et al., 2011); regardless of the exact value, staying above the threshold fidelity is required for sustainable replication and so is a prerequisite for the start of biological evolution (see Figure 12-1A). Indeed, the very origin of the first organisms presents at least an appearance of a paradox because a certain minimum level of complexity is required to make self-replication possible at all; high-fidelity replication requires additional functionalities that need even more information to be encoded (Penny, 2005).

The crucial question in the study of the origin of life is how the Darwin-Eigen cycle started—how was the minimum complexity that is required to achieve the minimally acceptable replication fidelity attained? In even the simplest modern systems, such as RNA viruses with the replication fidelity of only about 10–3 and viroids that replicate with the lowest fidelity among the known replicons (about 10–2; Gago, et al., 2009), replication is catalyzed by complex protein polymerases. The replicase itself is produced by translation of the respective mRNA(s), which is mediated by the immensely complex ribosomal apparatus. Hence, the dramatic paradox of the origin of life is that, to attain the minimum complexity required for a biological system to start on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required.

…Indeed, comparative-genomic reconstructions of the gene repertoire of LUCA(S) point to a complex translation system that includes at least 18 of the 20 aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS), several translation factors, at least 40 ribosomal proteins, and several enzymes involved in rRNA and tRNA modification. It appears that the core of the translation system was already fully shaped in LUCA(S) (Anantharaman, et al., 2002).

…So an inevitable (even if perhaps counterintuitive) conclusion from the comparative analysis of ancient paralogous relationship between protein components of the translation system is that, with the interesting exception of the core ribosomal proteins, all proteins that play essential roles in modern translation are products of a long and complex evolution of diverse protein domains. Here comes the Catch-22: For all this protein evolution to occur, an accurate and efficient translation system is required. This primordial translation system might not need to be quite as good as the modern version, but it seems a safe bet that is must have been within an order of magnitude from the modern one in terms of fidelity and translation rates to make protein evolution possible.

The unique property of RNA that makes it a credible—indeed, apparently, the best—candidate for the central role in the primordial replicating system is its ability to combine informational and catalytic functions. Thus, it was extremely tempting to propose that the first replicator systems— the first life forms—consisted solely of RNA molecules that functioned both as information carriers (genomes and genes) and as catalysts of diverse reactions, including, in particular, their own replication and pre- cursor synthesis. This bold speculation has been spectacularly boosted by the discovery and subsequent study of ribozymes (RNA enzymes) […] All this progress notwithstanding, the ribozyme polymerases that are currently avail- able are a far cry from processive, sufficiently accurate (in terms of the Eigen threshold) replicases, capable of catalyzing the replication of exogenous templates and themselves. Enzymes with such proper- ties appear to be a conditio sine qua non for the evolution of the hypothetical RNA World. Besides, even the available ribozymes with the limited RNA polymerase capacity are rather complex molecules that consist of some 200 nucleotides and could be nontrivial to evolve in the prebiotic setting.

An estimate based on the functional tolerance of well-characterized ribozymes to mutations suggests that, at a fidelity of 10–3 errors per nucleotide per replicase cycle (roughly, the fidelity of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerases of modern viruses), an RNA “organism” with about 100 “genes” the size of a tRNA (80 nucleotides) would be sustainable. Such a level of fidelity would require only an order of magnitude improvement over the most accurate ribozyme polymerases obtained by in vitro selection. This might be an approximate upper bound of complexity on ensembles of co-evolving “selfish cooperators” that would have been the “organisms” of the RNA World. Even under the best-case scenario, the RNA World hardly has the potential to evolve beyond very simple “organisms.” To attain greater complexity, invention of translation and the Protein Breakthrough (the relegation of most catalytic activities to proteins) were required. […] The main general point about the evolution of translation is that selection for protein synthesis could not have been the underlying cause behind the origin of the translation system. To evolve this com- plex system via the Darwinian route, numerous steps are required, but proteins appear only at the last steps; until that point, an evolving organ- ism “does not know” how good proteins could be. As discussed in Chapter 9, many situations exist in which evolution seems to exhibit some foresight capability; however, these cases are effectively based on extrapolation, whereas, in the case of translation, there is nothing to extrapolate from. […] Thus, the only conceivable route for the emergence of translation seems to be exaptation: Intermediate stages in the evolution of the translation system must have been selected for functions other than protein synthesis. [no exaptation model makes good sense.]

natural flow reactors etc.

Only after a great deal of this review he gets to that lower bound of initial complexity.

I admit that the likelihood of him being wrong is a hell of a lot more than 1 to -1000th, but there is good reason to state that figure without caveats as the best estimate for the likelihood of abiogenesis in a single Hubble volume, given all we know.

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