It's amazing how many people on FB answered this question, "Annihilation, no question." Really, I'm pretty shocked!
“I'm getting kind of despairing at breaking through here, but one more time.” Same here. Because you still haven’t addressed the relevant issue, and yet appear to be getting pissy, which is no bueno.
By analogy: in Scenario 2, everyone who has wandered through room Y but says that they’re in room X is wrong, yeah? The answer they give does not accurately represent reality. The “right” call for those who’ve pass through room Y is that they actually passed through room Y. I hope we can at least agree on this.
Yet, it remains 100% true that if everyone at any given timeslice, when the question “Which room are you in right now, this very moment” is posed, nearly everyone will win some money if they say room X.
Not sure how to make this point clearer to you: if you want to make the argument that you’re making, then you’ll have to say that the new, additional historical/diachronic information of Scenario 2 changes your mind about which room you’re in, from room X to room Y.
The point: diachronic information is irrelevant to winning a bet about whether you're in room X or room Y at Tx. If this logic holds with rooms, it should also hold with simulations: diachronic information is irrelevant to winning a bet about whether you're in a simulation or not, if the number of non-sims far exceeds the number of sims when you answer the question, "Where are you right now?"
"The fact that there are more 'real' at any given time isn't relevant to the fact of whether any of these mayfly sims are, themselves, real." You're right about this, because it's a metaphysical issue. The question, though, is epistemology: what does one have reason to believe at any given moment. If you want to say that one should bet on being a sim, then you should also say that one is in room Y in Scenario 2, which seems implausible.
"Like, it seems perverse to make up an example where we turn on one sim at a time, a trillion trillion times in a row. ... Who cares? No reason to think that's our future." The point is to imagine a possible future -- and that's all it needs to be -- that instantiates none of the three disjuncts of the simulation argument. If one can show that, then the simulation argument is flawed. So far as I can tell, I've identified a possible future that is neither (i), (ii), nor (iii).
"My 5 dollars: maxipoc is mostly not about space colonisation, but prevention of total extinction." But the goal of avoiding an x-catastrophe is to reach technological maturity, and reaching technological maturity would require space colonization (to satisfy the requirement that we have "total control" over nature). Right?
Yes, good points. As for "As result, we only move risks from one side equation to another, and even replace known risks with unknown risks," another way to put the paper's thesis is this: insofar as the threat of unilateralism becomes widespread, thus requiring a centralized surveillance apparatus, solving the control problem is that mush more important! I.e., it's an argument for why MIRI's work matters.
What do you mean? How is mitigating climate change related to blackmail?
I actually think most historical groups wanted to vanquish the enemy, but not destroy either themselves or the environment to the point at which it's no longer livable. This is one of the interesting things that shifts to the foreground when thinking about agents in the context of existential risks. As for people fighting to the death, often this was done for the sake of group survival, where the group is the relevant unit here. (Thoughts?)
Also worth noting: if the onset of global catastrophes is better, then global catastrophes will tend to cluster together, so we might expect another global catastrophe before this one is over. (See the "clustering illusion.")