If asked to bet about the probability of alien life (with payoffs measured in pleasure rather than dollars), most people would recommend making an anthropic update. That implies a much more likely future filter, as Katja has argued, and the best guess is then that we are in a universe with large amounts of life, and that we are overwhelmingly likely to soon die.
(Of course, taking this line of argument to its extreme, we are even more likely to be in a simulation.)
Action-wise, the main upshot is that we ought to be much more interested in averting apparently-insurmountable local risks than we otherwise would be. For example, one might be tempted to simply write off worlds in which there are incredibly potent information hazards that almost always end civilizations at a certain stage of development, since that seems like a hopeless situation. But the anthropic update suggests that such situations contain so many observers like us that it can roughly cancel out the hopelessness.
More precisely, the great filter argument suggests that increasing your survival probability by 10% in doomed worlds is actually very good, same order of magnitude as decreasing risk by 10% in a “normal” world with doom probabilities <50%.
(The importance of coping with nearly-certain doom still depends on the probability that we assign to settings of background variables implying nearly-certain doom. That probability seems quite low to me, since it’s easy to imagine worlds like ours with strong enough world government that they could cope with almost arbitrary technological risks.)
My intuition is people should actually bet on current anthropic reasoning less than they do. The reason is it is dangerously simple to construct simple examples with some small integer number of universes. I believe there is a significant chance these actually do not generalize to the real system in some non-obvious way.
One of the more specific reasons why I have this intuition is, it is actually quite hard to do any sort of “counting” of observers even in the very non-speculative world of quantum mechanics. When you go more in the direction of Tegmark’s mathematical universe, I would expect the problem to get harder.
If asked to bet about the probability of alien life (with payoffs measured in pleasure rather than dollars), most people would recommend making an anthropic update. That implies a much more likely future filter, as Katja has argued, and the best guess is then that we are in a universe with large amounts of life, and that we are overwhelmingly likely to soon die.
(Of course, taking this line of argument to its extreme, we are even more likely to be in a simulation.)
Action-wise, the main upshot is that we ought to be much more interested in averting apparently-insurmountable local risks than we otherwise would be. For example, one might be tempted to simply write off worlds in which there are incredibly potent information hazards that almost always end civilizations at a certain stage of development, since that seems like a hopeless situation. But the anthropic update suggests that such situations contain so many observers like us that it can roughly cancel out the hopelessness.
More precisely, the great filter argument suggests that increasing your survival probability by 10% in doomed worlds is actually very good, same order of magnitude as decreasing risk by 10% in a “normal” world with doom probabilities <50%.
(The importance of coping with nearly-certain doom still depends on the probability that we assign to settings of background variables implying nearly-certain doom. That probability seems quite low to me, since it’s easy to imagine worlds like ours with strong enough world government that they could cope with almost arbitrary technological risks.)
My intuition is people should actually bet on current anthropic reasoning less than they do. The reason is it is dangerously simple to construct simple examples with some small integer number of universes. I believe there is a significant chance these actually do not generalize to the real system in some non-obvious way.
One of the more specific reasons why I have this intuition is, it is actually quite hard to do any sort of “counting” of observers even in the very non-speculative world of quantum mechanics. When you go more in the direction of Tegmark’s mathematical universe, I would expect the problem to get harder.