Will, as per amit’s point, how do you anticipate your decision to tell us about the superintelligent fake stars hypothesis the decision of the superintelligences to create (or otherwise cause to exist) human life on earth with the illusion of living in a free universe?
All things considered (and assuming that hypothesis as a premise) I think you might have just unmade us a little bit. How diabolical!
I agree with your rationale, i.e. assuming they’re actually around then the superintelligences clearly aren’t trying that hard to be quiet, and are instead trying to stay on some sort of edge of influence or detectability. Remember, it’s only atheists who don’t suspect supernatural influence; a substantial fraction of humans already suspects weird shit is going on. Not “the chosen few” so much as “the chosen multitude”. Joke’s only on the atheists. Presumably if they wanted us to entirely discount the possibility that they were around then it would be easy for them to influence memetic evolution such that supernatural hypotheses were even less popular, e.g. by subtly keeping the U.S. from entering WWII and thus letting the Soviet Union capture all of Europe, and so on and so forth in that vein. (I’m not a superintelligence, surely they could come up with better memetic engineering strategies than I can.)
Nitpick: they don’t have to have chosen to create or cause us to exist as such, just left us alone. The latter is more likely because of game theoretic asymmetry (“do no harm”). Not sure if you intended that to be in your scope.
Nitpick: they don’t have to have chosen to create or cause us to exist as such, just left us alone. The latter is more likely because of game theoretic asymmetry (“do no harm”). Not sure if you intended that to be in your scope.
The intended scope was inclusive—I didn’t want to go overboard with making the caveat ‘or’ chain mention everything. The difference in actions and inactions when it comes to superintelligences that are controlling everything around us including giving us an entire fake universe to look at become rather meaningless.
Will, as per amit’s point, how do you anticipate your decision to tell us about the superintelligent fake stars hypothesis the decision of the superintelligences to create (or otherwise cause to exist) human life on earth with the illusion of living in a free universe?
All things considered (and assuming that hypothesis as a premise) I think you might have just unmade us a little bit. How diabolical!
I agree with your rationale, i.e. assuming they’re actually around then the superintelligences clearly aren’t trying that hard to be quiet, and are instead trying to stay on some sort of edge of influence or detectability. Remember, it’s only atheists who don’t suspect supernatural influence; a substantial fraction of humans already suspects weird shit is going on. Not “the chosen few” so much as “the chosen multitude”. Joke’s only on the atheists. Presumably if they wanted us to entirely discount the possibility that they were around then it would be easy for them to influence memetic evolution such that supernatural hypotheses were even less popular, e.g. by subtly keeping the U.S. from entering WWII and thus letting the Soviet Union capture all of Europe, and so on and so forth in that vein. (I’m not a superintelligence, surely they could come up with better memetic engineering strategies than I can.)
Nitpick: they don’t have to have chosen to create or cause us to exist as such, just left us alone. The latter is more likely because of game theoretic asymmetry (“do no harm”). Not sure if you intended that to be in your scope.
The intended scope was inclusive—I didn’t want to go overboard with making the caveat ‘or’ chain mention everything. The difference in actions and inactions when it comes to superintelligences that are controlling everything around us including giving us an entire fake universe to look at become rather meaningless.