I dunno about 10^-30, but top 5% seems easy. After all, if you posit that it only took about 10K years for civilization from scratch (and long periods of that were stagnant or in reverse, so I think it’s actually much less), and if we take 200K years as the total of human span so far, then we have only about 1 in 20 of the 10K periods we know of in which civilization was developed. If you consider Neanderthals and other hominids separately, it’s lower, and that’s just technological development. I think it’s really peculiar that nuclear weapons and weaponized bio agents haven’t been used more, either one of which has the potential to erase civilization, in theory.
In spite of Eliezer’s apparent optimism about how much better was possible, I think it’s likely that we’re clearly in the successful group.
We don’t accept any scientific explanation that resides on ‘Maybe we’re just in a particularly rare or special configuration in the universe where this particular thing happens.’ We assume we’re in an average position in the universe and understand our observations from that framework because it’s not good science to just assume you are special or unique and settle for that.
The probability of us just happening to be in the top # of universes out of an absolutely Vast number of universes seems highly unlikely if we have an even given chance of being any of those given universes. Given a set so huge, the vast majority of the cases are, by definition, average and we have no reason to assume we are not an average member of the set.
It disturbs me in some way to think of a universe where nobody has ever had a loved one die, been in a car accident or even accidentally spilled milk. But if every possible configuration must be real, that would mean there is not just one of these universes but a Vast number of them where some of them just had their first car wreck today… Living in one of these ridiculous disturbing branches would probably fantastically screw with your idea of reality.
If instead of by political and social organization and unity of purpose we sorted by ‘number of unfortunate events happening’ like above, it’s intuitive to think we seem to be around the average: nothing ridiculously unlikely seems to persist in our universe, probability seems to roll exactly like we’d expect.
i appreciate the interesting response. here’s how I think of it. If you have a one in a million event happen every day you might suspect that something is up with probability. But you can’t neglect the fact that there could very well be a million different one in a million events. I dont think observing unlikely events makes it more likely that something weird is going on with your particular universe. just that the search space of unlikely events is large enough that you’ll wind up seeing quite a few of them.
Assuming that you are typical may turn out to be as bad as assuming you are special. Any “assuming” is approximation, and depending on the problem the approximation may be either adequate or infinitely disastrous. That’s what happens with doomsday argument, for example.
The values of probabilities of specific situations don’t particularly matter if you don’t approximate. The preference is for actions (i.e. areas in state space) with highest average utility (according to probability measure), independently of the probability measure of those areas as whole.
That is, if you have a huge event, something that can be predicted to happen very likely, with a certain average utility (weighted by probability), and a tiny event with significantly higher average utility, the tiny event is preferred. Ignoring the tiny event because of its tiny probability measure leads to losing that opportunity.
I agree, but you still need evidence for the tiny event you are ignoring. Acting on the assumption that you are special/in a unique situation without any justification other than a blind guess and a worry that you are neglecting the opportunity is dangerous. It’s the mediocrity principle: When we tend to assume something amazing about ourselves, like that the Earth is the center of the universe, we end up finding out otherwise.
Contrast with the anthropic principle, in that we know we must account for the universe being capable of supporting at least one type of intelligent life. The number of ways that could go wrong are already gigantic, so we’ve already hit the jackpot at once. How many times in a row do we win the lottery?
I see what you mean with the tiny event with high utility, but I mean compare:
1) Driving or walking slightly out of your way for 1 extra minute a day to check if a certain apartment building has opened up a unit you are looking to rent (Low chance, but no reason to squander the opportunity for small cost.)
2) Picking up every piece of paper you see, on the chance that some number of the pieces of paper could be lottery tickets and some number of those tickets could be winning ones. (Extremely high utility, extremely low chance, and most importantly, you don’t have any reason to assume or guess somebody is around discarding used lottery tickets: You just know that it is possible.)
The chances described here are above and beyond the second. The top 10^-30% is a truly minuscule set out of the whole. (If still a Vast upon imagining set because we are dealing with Everett branches...) If we are in a particularly special branch, how do we take advantage of that? What useful information does that give us? At worst it will mislead our understanding of the universe and at best it is barely noticeable.
we don’t have much of a choice about generalizing from one example in this case.
considering the space of all possible worlds I wouldn’t hesitate to put us in the top 10^-30%
I assume you’re talking about “worlds, whether they include humans or not”, otherwise what you’re saying seems very very dubious.
Eliezer seems to be talking more about “worlds that include humans”, which is a more interesting category.
I dunno about 10^-30, but top 5% seems easy. After all, if you posit that it only took about 10K years for civilization from scratch (and long periods of that were stagnant or in reverse, so I think it’s actually much less), and if we take 200K years as the total of human span so far, then we have only about 1 in 20 of the 10K periods we know of in which civilization was developed. If you consider Neanderthals and other hominids separately, it’s lower, and that’s just technological development. I think it’s really peculiar that nuclear weapons and weaponized bio agents haven’t been used more, either one of which has the potential to erase civilization, in theory.
In spite of Eliezer’s apparent optimism about how much better was possible, I think it’s likely that we’re clearly in the successful group.
This strikes a bad chord with me.
We don’t accept any scientific explanation that resides on ‘Maybe we’re just in a particularly rare or special configuration in the universe where this particular thing happens.’ We assume we’re in an average position in the universe and understand our observations from that framework because it’s not good science to just assume you are special or unique and settle for that.
The probability of us just happening to be in the top # of universes out of an absolutely Vast number of universes seems highly unlikely if we have an even given chance of being any of those given universes. Given a set so huge, the vast majority of the cases are, by definition, average and we have no reason to assume we are not an average member of the set.
It disturbs me in some way to think of a universe where nobody has ever had a loved one die, been in a car accident or even accidentally spilled milk. But if every possible configuration must be real, that would mean there is not just one of these universes but a Vast number of them where some of them just had their first car wreck today… Living in one of these ridiculous disturbing branches would probably fantastically screw with your idea of reality.
If instead of by political and social organization and unity of purpose we sorted by ‘number of unfortunate events happening’ like above, it’s intuitive to think we seem to be around the average: nothing ridiculously unlikely seems to persist in our universe, probability seems to roll exactly like we’d expect.
i appreciate the interesting response. here’s how I think of it. If you have a one in a million event happen every day you might suspect that something is up with probability. But you can’t neglect the fact that there could very well be a million different one in a million events. I dont think observing unlikely events makes it more likely that something weird is going on with your particular universe. just that the search space of unlikely events is large enough that you’ll wind up seeing quite a few of them.
Assuming that you are typical may turn out to be as bad as assuming you are special. Any “assuming” is approximation, and depending on the problem the approximation may be either adequate or infinitely disastrous. That’s what happens with doomsday argument, for example.
The values of probabilities of specific situations don’t particularly matter if you don’t approximate. The preference is for actions (i.e. areas in state space) with highest average utility (according to probability measure), independently of the probability measure of those areas as whole.
That is, if you have a huge event, something that can be predicted to happen very likely, with a certain average utility (weighted by probability), and a tiny event with significantly higher average utility, the tiny event is preferred. Ignoring the tiny event because of its tiny probability measure leads to losing that opportunity.
I agree, but you still need evidence for the tiny event you are ignoring. Acting on the assumption that you are special/in a unique situation without any justification other than a blind guess and a worry that you are neglecting the opportunity is dangerous. It’s the mediocrity principle: When we tend to assume something amazing about ourselves, like that the Earth is the center of the universe, we end up finding out otherwise.
Contrast with the anthropic principle, in that we know we must account for the universe being capable of supporting at least one type of intelligent life. The number of ways that could go wrong are already gigantic, so we’ve already hit the jackpot at once. How many times in a row do we win the lottery?
I see what you mean with the tiny event with high utility, but I mean compare:
1) Driving or walking slightly out of your way for 1 extra minute a day to check if a certain apartment building has opened up a unit you are looking to rent (Low chance, but no reason to squander the opportunity for small cost.)
2) Picking up every piece of paper you see, on the chance that some number of the pieces of paper could be lottery tickets and some number of those tickets could be winning ones. (Extremely high utility, extremely low chance, and most importantly, you don’t have any reason to assume or guess somebody is around discarding used lottery tickets: You just know that it is possible.)
The chances described here are above and beyond the second. The top 10^-30% is a truly minuscule set out of the whole. (If still a Vast upon imagining set because we are dealing with Everett branches...) If we are in a particularly special branch, how do we take advantage of that? What useful information does that give us? At worst it will mislead our understanding of the universe and at best it is barely noticeable.