Glancing briefly at this paper, the core idea seems to be that if we are living in a simulation, we don’t have good evidence about the power of computation outside the simulation, which then might not be enough to run lots of simulations. Doesn’t this argument trivially fail as a matter of logic, because assuming ~SH, we do in fact have good evidence about the expected future power of computation, so that if you accept the first two claims the third claim ~SH still becomes inconsistent as the original SA holds, hence SA still goes through? Or did I miss something on account of skimming through a paper which seems rather long for its core argument?
Doesn’t this argument trivially fail as a matter of logic, because assuming ~SH, we do in fact have good evidence about the expected future power of computation, so that if you accept the first two claims the third claim ~SH still becomes inconsistent as the original SA holds, hence SA still goes through?
He’s arguing against the version of SA where instead of SH being one of the options, “most people with experiences like ours are in simulations” is one of them. The section about rejecting “Good Evidence” deals with the version of SA where SH Is an option. He rejects it because the analog of the intuition pump used to justify the kind of anthropic reasoning used in the first version of SA isn’t intuitive to him, but I think it’s right.
Glancing briefly at this paper, the core idea seems to be that if we are living in a simulation, we don’t have good evidence about the power of computation outside the simulation, which then might not be enough to run lots of simulations. Doesn’t this argument trivially fail as a matter of logic, because assuming ~SH, we do in fact have good evidence about the expected future power of computation, so that if you accept the first two claims the third claim ~SH still becomes inconsistent as the original SA holds, hence SA still goes through? Or did I miss something on account of skimming through a paper which seems rather long for its core argument?
Yes.
He’s arguing against the version of SA where instead of SH being one of the options, “most people with experiences like ours are in simulations” is one of them. The section about rejecting “Good Evidence” deals with the version of SA where SH Is an option. He rejects it because the analog of the intuition pump used to justify the kind of anthropic reasoning used in the first version of SA isn’t intuitive to him, but I think it’s right.