I don’t understand it, either. I mean, I understand the logic, I just don’t understand how an assumption like that can ever be tested, short of Omega coming down to Earth and introducing a fellow simulation to us. Maybe we could talk about this at a meetup.
Here’s a funny test: if many people flip coins to decide whether to have kids, and SSA is true, then the results should be biased toward “don’t have kids”. Bostrom’s book discusses similar scenarios, I think, but I’m still pretty proud of coming up with them independently :-)
I don’t understand it, either. I mean, I understand the logic, I just don’t understand how an assumption like that can ever be tested, short of Omega coming down to Earth and introducing a fellow simulation to us. Maybe we could talk about this at a meetup.
Here’s a funny test: if many people flip coins to decide whether to have kids, and SSA is true, then the results should be biased toward “don’t have kids”. Bostrom’s book discusses similar scenarios, I think, but I’m still pretty proud of coming up with them independently :-)
Could you elaborate?
See chapter 9 of Bostrom’s book. His analysis seems a little weird to me, but the descriptions of the scenarios are very nice and clear.
Good idea. We can make confusing anthropic stuff a future topic. Perhaps this weekend even.
Huh, I thought the meetups are on hiatus for the summer, since they don’t show up in the regular or irregular LW meetup announcements.
Not at all. I’m just too lazy to post them a lot of the time.
The general rule is every saturday at 15:30 at bennys.