On one hand, I never believed the standard “we are almost certainly in a simulation” argument. But since I first learned about Simulation Hypothesis, I thought it made sense to keep an open mind about it, and to keep my priors on this flexible and at a healthy distance from 0 and 1.
Janus’ Simulator Theory did make me update my priors towards Simulation Hypothesis being more plausible, while still keeping my priors on this flexible and at a healthy distance from 0 and 1.
And the reason was that if any inference performed by a sufficiently advanced generative model was somewhat similar to a simulation, this eliminated the need for a specific motivation like a desire to create an ancestral simulation.
Instead, advanced entities would run all kinds of generative models for all kinds of reasons, and creating simulations of various flavors would be a side effect of many of those runs, and suddenly there are way more simulations out there than one would have from a desire to specifically create this or that specific simulation with particular properties...
On one hand, I never believed the standard “we are almost certainly in a simulation” argument. But since I first learned about Simulation Hypothesis, I thought it made sense to keep an open mind about it, and to keep my priors on this flexible and at a healthy distance from 0 and 1.
Janus’ Simulator Theory did make me update my priors towards Simulation Hypothesis being more plausible, while still keeping my priors on this flexible and at a healthy distance from 0 and 1.
And the reason was that if any inference performed by a sufficiently advanced generative model was somewhat similar to a simulation, this eliminated the need for a specific motivation like a desire to create an ancestral simulation.
Instead, advanced entities would run all kinds of generative models for all kinds of reasons, and creating simulations of various flavors would be a side effect of many of those runs, and suddenly there are way more simulations out there than one would have from a desire to specifically create this or that specific simulation with particular properties...