The strength of the claim being made by Slashdot and the lack of any examination of ways in which it could be false by whoever wrote Slashdot’s summary both invite skepticism.
I’m of the opinion that we are in base reality regardless, though. The reason for this being is that the incentive for running a simulation is so that you can observe the behavior of the system being simulated. If you have some vertical stack of simulations all simulating intelligent agents in a virtual world, and most of these simulations are simulating basically the same thing, that makes simulation very costly because the 0th-level simulators won’t learn anything from a simulation being run by the simulants that they won’t learn from the “base-level” simulation. They would have an incentive to develop ways to starve non-useful simulant activity of computing resources.
The strength of the claim being made by Slashdot and the lack of any examination of ways in which it could be false by whoever wrote Slashdot’s summary both invite skepticism.
I’m of the opinion that we are in base reality regardless, though. The reason for this being is that the incentive for running a simulation is so that you can observe the behavior of the system being simulated. If you have some vertical stack of simulations all simulating intelligent agents in a virtual world, and most of these simulations are simulating basically the same thing, that makes simulation very costly because the 0th-level simulators won’t learn anything from a simulation being run by the simulants that they won’t learn from the “base-level” simulation. They would have an incentive to develop ways to starve non-useful simulant activity of computing resources.