Jay Olson

Yes, I agree. As you point out, that's a general kind of problem with decision-making in an environment of low probability that something spectacularly good might happen if I throw resources at X. (At one point I actually wrote a feature-length screenplay about this, with an AI attempting to throw cosmic resources at religion, in a low-probability attempt to unlock infinity. Got reasonably good scores in competition, but I was told at one point that "a computer misunderstanding its programming" was old hat. Oh well.)

My pronouncement of "exactly zero" is ju... (read more)

I have described certain limits to communication in an expanding cosmological civilization here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.07871

Assuming a civilization that expands at close to the speed of light, your only chance to influence the behavior of colonies in most distant galaxies must be encoded in what you send toward those galaxies to begin with (i.e. what is in the colonizing probes themselves, plus any updates to instructions you send early on, while they're still en route). Because, the home galaxy (the Milky Way) will never hear so much as a "hello, we'... (read more)

There is social pressure to hide X. So, X turns out to be much more common and much less extreme than one naively imagined. The net effect is already out there, so maybe just chill.

But, the above story exists in equilibrium with the reverse reaction:

There is social pressure to hide X. It turns out that X is much more common than one naively imagined, and although the average instance of X is not so extreme, the system is actually about to collapse under the cumulative weight of X, and almost nobody is aware until it happens.

A story like this is revealed at... (read more)

Toby Ord and I wrote a paper that describes how "expanding cosmological civilizations" (my less-snappy but more descriptive term for "grabby civilizations") update our estimates of any late filters you might want to consider -- assuming SIA as anthropic school: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.13348

Basically, suppose you have some prior pdf P(q) on the probability "q" that we pass any late filter. Then, considering expanding civilizations will tell you to update it to P(q) --> P(q)/q. And this isn't good, since it upweights low values of "q" (i.e. lower survi... (read more)