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Grabby Aliens is a Terrible Model
My understanding of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument is as follows:
Over time, most of the universe will be claimed by Grabby Aliens, leaving less and less room for other alien civilizations
Therefore, most civilizations in the universe will appear near the beginning of the universe, before the Grabby Aliens are so visible and powerful
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:
If Grabby Aliens exist, in time most of the universe will be claimed by grabby aliens of one sort or another
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
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
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?”
(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.
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.
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