It seems to me the obvious outside view of future contact is previous examples of contact. Yes uneaten stars is also an outside stat, which does (weakly) suggest aliens don’t eat stars. I certainly don’t mean to imply there is always a unique inside view.
Why isn’t the obvious outside view to draw a line showing the increased peacefulness of contacts with the increasing technological development of the parties involved, and extrapolate to super-peaceful aliens? Isn’t this more or less exactly why you argue that AIs will inevitably trade with us? Why extrapolate for AIs but not for aliens?
To be clear on this, I don’t simply distrust the advice of an obvious outside view, I think that in cases like these, people perform a selective search for a reference class that supports a foregone conclusion (and then cry “Outside View!”). This foregone conclusion is based on inside viewing in the best case; in the worst case it is based entirely on motivated cognition or wishful thinking. Thus, to cry “Outside View!” is just to conceal the potentially very flawed thinking that went into the choice of reference class.
Yes uneaten stars is also an outside stat, which does (weakly) suggest aliens don’t eat stars.
Weakly? What are your conditional probabilities that we would observe stars being eaten, given that there exist star-eating aliens (within range of our attempts at communication), and given that such aliens do not exist? Or, if you prefer, what is your likelyhood ratio?
This is an excellently put objection—putting it this way makes it clear just how strong the objection is. The likelihood ratio to me sounds like it should be more or less T/F, where for the sake of conservatism T might equal .99 and F might equal .01. If we knew for a fact that there were aliens in our radio range, wouldn’t this item of evidence wash out any priors we had about them eating stars? We don’t see the stars being eaten!
It seems to me the obvious outside view of future contact is previous examples of contact. Yes uneaten stars is also an outside stat, which does (weakly) suggest aliens don’t eat stars. I certainly don’t mean to imply there is always a unique inside view.
Why isn’t the obvious outside view to draw a line showing the increased peacefulness of contacts with the increasing technological development of the parties involved, and extrapolate to super-peaceful aliens? Isn’t this more or less exactly why you argue that AIs will inevitably trade with us? Why extrapolate for AIs but not for aliens?
To be clear on this, I don’t simply distrust the advice of an obvious outside view, I think that in cases like these, people perform a selective search for a reference class that supports a foregone conclusion (and then cry “Outside View!”). This foregone conclusion is based on inside viewing in the best case; in the worst case it is based entirely on motivated cognition or wishful thinking. Thus, to cry “Outside View!” is just to conceal the potentially very flawed thinking that went into the choice of reference class.
Weakly? What are your conditional probabilities that we would observe stars being eaten, given that there exist star-eating aliens (within range of our attempts at communication), and given that such aliens do not exist? Or, if you prefer, what is your likelyhood ratio?
This is an excellently put objection—putting it this way makes it clear just how strong the objection is. The likelihood ratio to me sounds like it should be more or less T/F, where for the sake of conservatism T might equal .99 and F might equal .01. If we knew for a fact that there were aliens in our radio range, wouldn’t this item of evidence wash out any priors we had about them eating stars? We don’t see the stars being eaten!