I probably won’t respond further than this. Some responses to your comment:
I agree with your statements about the nature of UDT/FDT. I often talk about “things you would have commited to” because it is simpler to reason about and easier for people to understand (and I care about third parties understanding this), but I agree this is not the true abstraction.
It seems like you’re imagining that we have to bamboozle some civilizations which seem clearly more competent than humanity in your lights. I don’t think this is true.
Imagine we take all the civilizations which are roughly equally-competent-seeming-to-you and these civilizations make such an insurance deal[1]. My understanding is that your view is something like P(takeover) = 85%. So, let’s say all of these civilizations are in a similar spot from your current epistemic perspective. My guess is that you should think it would be very unlikely that >99.9% of all of these civilizations get taken over. As in, even in the worst 10% of worlds where takeover happens in our world and the logical facts on alignment are quite bad, >0.1% of the corresponding civilizations are still in control of their universe. Do you disagree here? >0.1% of universes should be easily enough to bail out all the rest of the worlds[2].
And, if you really, really cared about not getting killed in base reality (including on reflection etc) you’d want to take a deal which is at least this good. There might be better approaches which reduce the correlation between worlds and thus make the fraction of available resources higher, but you’d like something at least this good.
(To be clear, I don’t think this means we’d be fine, there are many ways this can go wrong! And I think it would be crazy for humanity to . I just think this sort of thing has a good chance of succeeding.)
(Also, my view is something like P(takeover) = 35% in our universe and in the worst 10% of worlds 30% of the universes in a similar epistemic state avoided takeover. But I didn’t think about this very carefully.)
And further, we don’t need to figure out the details of the deal now for the deal to work. We just need to make good choices about this in the counterfactuals where we were able to avoid takeover.
Another way to put this is that you seem to be assuming that there is no way our civilization would end up being the competent civilization doing the payout (and thus to survive some bamboozling must occur). But your view is that it is totally plausible (e.g. 15%) from your current epistemic state that we avoid takeover and thus a deal should be possible! While we might bring in a bunch of doomed branches, ex-ante we have a good chance of paying out.
I get the sense that you’re approaching this from the perspective of “does this exact proposal have issues” rather than “in the future, if our enlightened selves really wanted to avoid dying in base reality, would there be an approach which greatly (acausally) reduces the chance of this”. (And yes I agree this is a kind of crazy and incoherant thing to care about as you can just create more happy simulated lives with those galaxies.)
There just needs to exist one such insurance/trade scheme which can be found and it seems like there should be a trade with huge gains to the extent that people really care a lot about not dying. Not dying is very cheap.
I probably won’t respond further than this. Some responses to your comment:
I agree with your statements about the nature of UDT/FDT. I often talk about “things you would have commited to” because it is simpler to reason about and easier for people to understand (and I care about third parties understanding this), but I agree this is not the true abstraction.
It seems like you’re imagining that we have to bamboozle some civilizations which seem clearly more competent than humanity in your lights. I don’t think this is true.
Imagine we take all the civilizations which are roughly equally-competent-seeming-to-you and these civilizations make such an insurance deal[1]. My understanding is that your view is something like P(takeover) = 85%. So, let’s say all of these civilizations are in a similar spot from your current epistemic perspective. My guess is that you should think it would be very unlikely that >99.9% of all of these civilizations get taken over. As in, even in the worst 10% of worlds where takeover happens in our world and the logical facts on alignment are quite bad, >0.1% of the corresponding civilizations are still in control of their universe. Do you disagree here? >0.1% of universes should be easily enough to bail out all the rest of the worlds[2].
And, if you really, really cared about not getting killed in base reality (including on reflection etc) you’d want to take a deal which is at least this good. There might be better approaches which reduce the correlation between worlds and thus make the fraction of available resources higher, but you’d like something at least this good.
(To be clear, I don’t think this means we’d be fine, there are many ways this can go wrong! And I think it would be crazy for humanity to . I just think this sort of thing has a good chance of succeeding.)
(Also, my view is something like P(takeover) = 35% in our universe and in the worst 10% of worlds 30% of the universes in a similar epistemic state avoided takeover. But I didn’t think about this very carefully.)
And further, we don’t need to figure out the details of the deal now for the deal to work. We just need to make good choices about this in the counterfactuals where we were able to avoid takeover.
Another way to put this is that you seem to be assuming that there is no way our civilization would end up being the competent civilization doing the payout (and thus to survive some bamboozling must occur). But your view is that it is totally plausible (e.g. 15%) from your current epistemic state that we avoid takeover and thus a deal should be possible! While we might bring in a bunch of doomed branches, ex-ante we have a good chance of paying out.
I get the sense that you’re approaching this from the perspective of “does this exact proposal have issues” rather than “in the future, if our enlightened selves really wanted to avoid dying in base reality, would there be an approach which greatly (acausally) reduces the chance of this”. (And yes I agree this is a kind of crazy and incoherant thing to care about as you can just create more happy simulated lives with those galaxies.)
There just needs to exist one such insurance/trade scheme which can be found and it seems like there should be a trade with huge gains to the extent that people really care a lot about not dying. Not dying is very cheap.
Yes, it is unnatural and arbitrary to coordinate on Nate’s personal intuitive sense of competence. But for the sake of argument
Assuming there isn’t a huge correlation between measure of universe and takeover probability.