I still think that other than just buying freedom to doomed aliens, we should run some non-evolved simulations of our own with inhabitants that are preferably p-zombies or animated by outside actors. If we can do this in the way that the AI doesn’t notice it’s in a simulation (I think this should be doable), this will provide evidence to the AI that civilizations do this simulation game (and not just the alien-buying) in general, and this buys us some safety in worlds where the AI eventually notices there are no friendly aliens in our reachable Universe. But maybe this is not a super important disagreement.
Altogether, I think the private discussion with Nate went really well and it was significantly more productive than the comment back-and-forth we were doing here. In general, I recommend people stuck in interminable-looking debates like this to propose bets on whom a panel of judges will deem right. Even though we didn’t get to the point of actually running the bet, as Nate conceded the point before that, I think the fact that we were optimizing for having well-articulated statements we can submit to judges already made the conversation much more productive.
Thanks to Nate for conceding this point.
I still think that other than just buying freedom to doomed aliens, we should run some non-evolved simulations of our own with inhabitants that are preferably p-zombies or animated by outside actors. If we can do this in the way that the AI doesn’t notice it’s in a simulation (I think this should be doable), this will provide evidence to the AI that civilizations do this simulation game (and not just the alien-buying) in general, and this buys us some safety in worlds where the AI eventually notices there are no friendly aliens in our reachable Universe. But maybe this is not a super important disagreement.
Altogether, I think the private discussion with Nate went really well and it was significantly more productive than the comment back-and-forth we were doing here. In general, I recommend people stuck in interminable-looking debates like this to propose bets on whom a panel of judges will deem right. Even though we didn’t get to the point of actually running the bet, as Nate conceded the point before that, I think the fact that we were optimizing for having well-articulated statements we can submit to judges already made the conversation much more productive.