The question is, how much more probable is that than that we end up simulating losing the lottery?
I almost agreed and answered “7 times more” before noticing that this is not quite a right question. We shouldn’t be asking “how much more probable” when it can actually be less probable than ending up simulating losing the lottery and have the “win” observation still be evidence in favor of simulation.
An actual “how much more probable” question that fits—and is the one I was initially trying to answer—seems to be:
How much more probable is it that a given world selected from the expected simulated worlds gives a win than that I would win the real lottery?
It’s hard to specify the question more simply than that (and even that specification is borderline). The language gets ambiguous or misleading when it comes to “but we’ll simulate both!” scenarios.
How much more probable is it that a given world selected from the expected simulated worlds gives a win than that I would win the real lottery?
Yes, very good… I suppose I’m not sure. My heuristic is to imagine that simulations are probable roughly in proportion to the length of their English descriptions, whereas “real worlds” are probable in proportion to physical probability (ie, descriptions in the language of physics). According to that heuristic, the question is how probable the phrase “winning the lottery” is as compared to 10^-8 (which I assume is a sufficiently good estimate of the physical probability of winning the lottery, conditioned on experiences so far). I don’t have a good estimate of this phrase’s frequency. (Anyone have suggestions for how to find one?)
I almost agreed and answered “7 times more” before noticing that this is not quite a right question. We shouldn’t be asking “how much more probable” when it can actually be less probable than ending up simulating losing the lottery and have the “win” observation still be evidence in favor of simulation.
An actual “how much more probable” question that fits—and is the one I was initially trying to answer—seems to be:
How much more probable is it that a given world selected from the expected simulated worlds gives a win than that I would win the real lottery?
It’s hard to specify the question more simply than that (and even that specification is borderline). The language gets ambiguous or misleading when it comes to “but we’ll simulate both!” scenarios.
I’ve missed you!
Agreed with all of this.
Yes, very good… I suppose I’m not sure. My heuristic is to imagine that simulations are probable roughly in proportion to the length of their English descriptions, whereas “real worlds” are probable in proportion to physical probability (ie, descriptions in the language of physics). According to that heuristic, the question is how probable the phrase “winning the lottery” is as compared to 10^-8 (which I assume is a sufficiently good estimate of the physical probability of winning the lottery, conditioned on experiences so far). I don’t have a good estimate of this phrase’s frequency. (Anyone have suggestions for how to find one?)