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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 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.
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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.
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