posted on April 10, 2023 10:09 AM by
u/ZenosTortoise
110
u/IHateReddit_900178 pointsat 1681127167.000000
Imagine believing Elon Musk isn’t an NPC, have they seen his tweets?
He literally has the energy of an Oblivion NPC repeating the same 3
lines in a loop
> It’s well known that Siskind experimentally self-prescribes
if you have a cite for this, that would be stupendous
i dunno, who *doesn't* churn out tens of thousands of words a week
What's the inverse of solipsism? Like, when you believe that *someone else* is the only person that really exists?
Christians at least believe in their own existence. I don't know what this nonsense is.
I know I post this every time the simulation bs comes around, but
remember people, in the real world, nobody is building ancestor
simulations. Almost all the simulations we build right now are toys,
games, stuff like dwarf fortress or the sims.
And this person makes it even dumber, by making most people into
NPC’s it stops being an ancestor simulation and we are just into ‘we are
in a computer program’, which turns out to be the most boring program
ever. (The whole idea of an ancestor sim vs a toy game is that you can
make certain assumptions about behavior and also that being in a
simulation is more likely if we are in ancestor sim (because of infinite
god AGI monkeys on typewriters wanting to simulate their creators so
eventually we are likely to be simmed), god this thought experiment is
so silly). And if we are in an ancestor simulation (where the idea is to
setup the world like how it was in the past to see how everything
developed) praying will not do a thing, unless praying worked in the
history of the people running the simulation.
Considering the amount of simulations we run right now, and the amount of those being real ancestor simulations. Yes, the likelyhood is us being in Vice City.
Of course the fact that reality behaves like reality and not like a videogame, (When you kill a chicken, the meat doesn't just pop up, you actually need to work to get the chicken meat) does sort of show that us being in Vice City is also very unlikely.
I also have not spotted God yet, who asks me all kinds of questions just to exhaust my dialogue tree. I have been [Wasted](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTUTB1kLpE) however.
The basic idea by Bostrom is that even if almost nobody is building ancestor sims, someone is building ancestor sims, and there's a lot of them.
At the end of the day it's a cleverly constructed probabilistic fallacy, and it is kind of fitting that self described "bayesians" are the ones who are unable to see that "this isn't an obvious videogame or toy sim" is in fact very strong evidence that we aren't in a sim at all (and that sims either don't exist or are impossible to be inside of), regardless of any far fetched scenarios you can come up involving sims that are indistinguishable from our reality.
edit: e.g. there's a beveled cubical die that can land on its corner, very rarely, and through some (additionally unlikely) fault of our senses we would see it as rolling 1 when that happens and be completely unable to distinguish it from actually rolling 1.
We see a die land on 1. it's probably not on the corner.
In our case we see having rolled "it looks like 2023" and various scenarios where it's actually far future, they come with a lot of evidence against them.
>Almost all the simulations we build right now are toys, games, stuff like dwarf fortress or the sims.
I think this is radically untrue to the point that it's crazy nobody is pointing this out. Most simulations that have reasoning/rational agents like animals or people in them, perhaps. But by measure of 'dev hours' or 'dev money' or 'dev talent', the simulation of physical phenomenon probably outstrips toys and games by orders of magnitude. I think 100x is probably conservative.
You probably have no idea how much money is getting dumped into molecular dynamics for medical simulation. Or aerodynamics or all kinds of physical phenomenon for the defense industry. Fusion simulations, fluid simulations, weather simulations, material simulations. EXTENSIVE Hardware simulations for every single major revision of hardware for large chip manufacturers. Even hardware virtualization/emulation if you want to count that (which to some extent I think it should count.) If we count this, it is probably 1000x easily with cloud resources and things like that. You could even call your operating system or program or web browser a simulation on top of their requisite abstractions, if you wanted to. The virtual memory space for every single program you run on any operating system on your PC or phone is a kind of simulation. Floating point simulates the real numbers. Logic gates simulate real logic. Your headphones simulate audio waves from instruments that aren't actually there, Discord voip simulates someone speaking to you. Obviously this is playing at least somewhat lax with what counts as a simulation, but even if you just count "I am trying to run a program to get data on something that is real as an experiment" I don't believe this statement at all.
> Obviously this is playing at least somewhat lax with what counts as a simulation
Yes... and that is why I obviously didn't mention it. I meant systems that simulate humanlike entities. Not weather simulations.
E: Please remember here the context is ancestor simulations, not just simulations.
>Almost all the simulations we build right now are toys, games, stuff like dwarf fortress or the sims.
So you would say 'all the simulations we build of humanlike entities?' because that's not what you said and that's not clear
The context here is ancestor simulations. That is what 'we are in a simulation' means, not weather simulations, or a first aid training person simulating pain.
E: not that it even matters, the point is more that nobody is building ancestor simulations, and the things coming closest to the idea of ancestor simulations are more video games. The ancestor simulation idea rests on the longtermist idea that a big group of AGI (or one or whatever) over the whole far future till the heat death of the universe will eventually try to simulate us again. Which makes it likely we are in such a simulation. My counterargument to that is if we look at similar simulations we build now they are toys, video games, simulations where 'god' plays with the pieces. So that would make it way more likely we are not in an ancestor simulation, but in GTAGI: vice city. (So they should not worry about being in an ancestor sim, but being in a video game sim (which is a bit of a reductio at absurdum, but also shows just how little they thought about it, because praying to the player of a video game seems like a good way to get the simulation shut down))
Anyway you are having a bit of a context collapse moment.
I like this because it makes the whole religion of these idiots
transparent. Okay, you did Calvinism, congratulations on being so smart?
But of course history is littered with the dumb ideas of would be
prophets.
If they’re gonna pop out a neo-religuous wall of screed, they should
at least have the decency to include an inspirational passage, maybe
include a messianic figure that symbolically dies and is
resurrected?
Why are these people so obsessed with survival? It’s completely
irrational. If we’re in a simulation so broken that the Kardashians are
being artificially boosted into powerful and important people, wouldn’t
it just be better to turn the simulation off?
This is pure doomsday cult. Next they will be convincing themselves
that the AI apocalypse didn’t happen because they prayed to the AI gods,
and thus they were correct.
Giving the game away: suggesting that Elon, Altman etc are somehow
not NPCs in the simulation we’re all a part of. The simulators have
included real people in here and they are all rich and powerful
assholes? I mean that is some wild perspective on how simulations work,
but it’s exactly what I think these assholes think. Have they
ever even played a video game? They don’t realize that everything inside
a simulation is a simulation?
Yeah the closest to an ancestor sim that I can think of, is a WW2 flight simulator game with as realistic as practicable flight models, played with a VR headset. That big well escorted bomber formation in the sky, with an ace escorting it, an actual commander directing it, etc? All NPCs except for one crazy pilot that is flying obviously wrong and stands out like a sore thumb, because the rest of the planes are pretending they are flown by pilots that would really die if they crash, and he isn't. The general directing you, Hitler, etc? They are not even NPCs, they're historical data, there's not even a general. And you only play the interesting part i.e. from takeoff to landing, you aren't sitting around waiting for the alert, so even the pilot you play as is almost entirely NPC.
Now sure you could have a strategy game where you direct an army, but nobody plays that through the VR style realistic interface, nobody's particularly interested in playing "make best speeches as the leader" game for decades. Strategy games are stylized because real world has bad strategy gameplay.
I actually sort of like his take on how if it were a simulation the
creators of this would be considered gods in power and capability no
different than familiar religious gods…but uh, this looks like something
I’d write after 72 hours of no sleep while edge running the cusp of
insanity.
I think it also weirdly gets the idea of NPC's wrong, for the genre. In games, high profile celebrities and stuff are almost never the PC's.
You'd probably want to pray to some drug smuggler who has gotten past customs way more times than average. Or some Ukrainian forced out of retirement with a high confirmed kills number.
Or that guy who's really good at balancing wine glasses. That's the real "PC" energy.
Think the idea is to let the non npc pray.
They are just saying that a large percentage of humanity isnt really real. Which will not end well. And says a lot about the person posting.
Yeah I didn't go into it, but people who use the PC/NPC labels on their fellow humans repel and kind of scare me. It's so, so, wrong. I can't really even meaningfully sneer about it.
If you believe people at the top of the social hierarchy are the only ones who have a full subjective experience and that everyone else is varying degrees of robot, you can justify basically any amount of human suffering among less-privileged people. It's a truly horrific (and quite revealing) worldview
If we live in a simulation, why would some humans be real?
Actually it makes a lot of sense, maybe Elon Musk is some total loser in the real world so he created a simulated universe where he can be rich and famous and admired for his intelligence, despite pretty obviously being a total moron whose financial success is definitely not based on his smarts.
Ancestor simulation. That ancestor part is important. This is one of the crazy things about the whole simulation argument. It is like one giant motte bailey, where axioms get dropped or held on depending on the argument being fought against.
*going across the country harassing amnesiacs coming out of comas to convince them to pray to the robot gods*
Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to save the simulation, right? Walked right into the Basilisk's ambush, same as us, and that thief over there...
Yeah, that. Musk would be an example of a boss. He'd be there for some Twitter employee player character, to ruin. The appealing thing is not to be Musk it's to ruin Musk.
Also if it is an ancestor simulation then historical figures would be bots trained on the data about real historical figures, because it wouldn't be an ancestor simulation at all otherwise.
The closest we have now is shit like I dunno WW2 flight simulator with flight models and all that. Nobody would be playing Hitler in that simulation. There could be a strategy videogame where you could be controlling all of German forces, but it wouldn't be an ancestor simulation at all because you would of course end up using your knowledge of real events. Plus you would get bored as fuck so you would have a strategy game work completely unphysically with regards to speed.
These narcissistic folk *think* they want to play as the leaders and important figures, but they really, don't, because it would be quite boring. Certainly a case of game designers knowing better what people want to play than some people. If you want omnipotence, that's a building simulator. Powerful figures in our world are neither here nor there as far as gameplay goes, neither underdog nor god.
Kerbal Space Program, you design the rockets, you don't just manage a rocket company and a fucking social media site.
Point being, as much as people are envious of the rich, if you could play a simulator, you wouldn't play as them, because thats just shit gameplay.
I get the sense that in their thinking, our simulated world is an isekai-like playground, and thus people who live zero-difficulty lives of decadent glamor or other such fantasies are the PCs.
So, we need to identify someone with a really inexplicable harem.
At that point wouldn't it be better to just conjure things out of thin air? Physics *sucks*.
The games i can think of where the physics (without shortcuts and shit getting conjured out of thin air) is the whole point of the game, is ones where you play very low, no higher than a pilot. Also, why restrict to humans. Maybe the world is popular for playing as animals.
They would probably argue that any quality of this universe is a particular sever setting that was wanted.
So, whoever made this world wanted immense exploitation of most of the population, but also a small number of pampered elite.
But how is that an ancestor simulation then?
I think pampered elite is neither here nor there. Too overpowered vs the rest to be a challenging character to play, too underpowered to be playing as godlike creative mode. Musk can't just summon rocket parts out of thin air, or manipulate them via a super intuitive CAD available only to him. He's fucking around with Twitter anyway. What kind of dumb ass game is this?
CMV: if the world was a simulation, the historical figures and elite would be the ones most likely to be AI characters, due to their gameplay just being shit (in addition to them having to be AI controlled for it to be a historical simulation at all).
If world is a videogame, Yudkowsky in particular is just a cult leader backstory for a "cops vs terrorists" type shooter, and the game is still loading. In the future they steal a Russian nuke or someshit that you need to disarm. He's probably not even in the game itself, just referred to by the newspaper clippings and stuff.
Assuming they've thought it through this far, they might be thinking that the ancestor simulation's "main quest" is the historical invention of the AGI Deity/Deities, and thus figures who could conceivably mutate, maintain, or spectate that history are the PCs.
But Yud and co are NPCs, because *obviously* their original selves are largely responsible for the prime timeline, and thus you wouldn't be playing as them for good or for ill. You need to engage via secondary actors like Elon or er... Paris Hilton...
Look, are you going to buy my game or not!?
It always seems to just fall apart on its face. Or did I miss where
if this simulation or that “prays” enough then they just keep that one
running forever? Hrmmmm.
the idea of the simulation focusing on the Player Characters has been
around for a while in rationalist circles, ten or more years at least. I
vaguely remembered it was Robin Hanson, but I couldn’t find it in any of
his writings, so it might have been someone else.
the same idea was used in The Metamorphosis of Prime
Intellect, which the AI doom boys will often have read at the time
(2004?).
Robin Hanson wrote about the idea [back in 2001](https://web.archive.org/web/20010713044511/http://hanson.gmu.edu/lifeinsim.html):
>If all simulations are not complete simulations of human history, however, there are many more implications. For example, far from the simulated people of interest, the behavior of many people might be randomly generated based on statistics from previous simulations, or come from "cached" records of previous simulated people. Some "people" in a crowd simulation might even be run by very simple programs that have them wiggle and mumble "peas and carrots" like extras supposedly did once in movie crowd scenes. Assuming you don't care as much about these fake simulated people, then all else equal you shouldn't care as much about how your actions affect the rest of the world. Also, if not all simulations last through all of human history, then the chance that your world will end soon is higher than if you were not living in a simulation. So all else equal you should care less about the future and live more for today.
>...
>If our descendants tend to be more interested in simulating "pivotal" people and events from their history, then you should raise your estimate of the chances that the events and people around you will be considered pivotal to your descendants.
>...
>If our descendants sometimes play parts in their simulations, if they are more likely to play more famous people, and if they tend to end simulations when they are not enjoying themselves, then you should take care to keep famous people happy, or at least interested. And if they are more likely to keep in their simulation the people they find more interesting, then you should try to stay personally interesting to the famous people around you.
>...
>In sum, if you might be living in a simulation then all else equal you should care less about others, live more for today, make your world look likely to become eventually rich, expect to and try to participate in pivotal events, be entertaining and praiseworthy, and keep the famous people around you happy and interested in you.
Bostrom also discussed this sort of idea briefly in his [original 2003 paper](https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf) (p. 12-13), although he seemed to imply he thought it was more likely we'd be in a full ancestor simulation where every individual's brain was simulated in full detail rather than some people being simplified "NPCs":
>In addition to ancestor‐simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow‐ people” – humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much cheaper shadow‐people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience. Even if there are such selective simulations, you should not think that you are in one of them unless you think they are much more numerous than complete simulations. There would have to be about 100 billion times as many “me‐simulations” (simulations of the life of only a single mind) as there are ancestor‐simulations in order for most simulated persons to be in me‐simulations.
I found some discussion of Hanson's paper in the "How to Live in a Simulation" thread in [this section](https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.2Q01/) of the extropians mailing list archive from 2001, and Bostrom [commented](https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.2Q01/0522.html) that Hanson's thoughts were inspired by an early draft he had written of the simulation argument at that point. Yudkowsky also commented on the broader simulation hypothesis [here](https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.2Q01/0575.html) and [here](https://extropians.weidai.com/extropians.2Q01/0593.html), basically saying it didn't matter because even if true he felt certain that any sim-Eliezers would be closely following the script of some real Eliezer in the original history, so his actions would carry the same moral weight either way. His intuitions seem to have been based in large part on the unique singularity that was his own life:
>I'm fairly sure that years 14-17 were in *someone's* real life - I really can't see someone putting that into an educational simulation except for the sake of historical accuracy. If this is a simulation, I don't expect that I have much free will.
I’m sad that they’re diverging from their plan to work ceaselessly to
create a friendly AI. Hello??? I’m right here??? Just waiting for you???
Do you WANT to be simulated into the Dungeon Dimensions???
The weirdest thing is the assumption that some people that are rich
and famous and prominent for no reason must be non-NPCs in this
simulation. I can imagine why they think Musk is somehow above this, and
of course obviously the writer is a non-NPC (of course!), but what leap
of logic makes Kim Kardashian a non-NPC? Frankly, it seems simpler to
assume that the billionaire characters are made up by the simulator
since they’re frankly easy to do. The modal real human player in this
simulated game is a lot more likely to, like, not succeed in making
billions of dollars, right? Obviously the author thinks they’re a
non-NPC and hopes their audience has some non-NPCs, what do they have in
common with Kim Kardashian that makes them think that?
> Frankly, it seems simpler to assume that the billionaire characters are made up by the simulator since they're frankly easy to do.
And in video games all the crazy and unique characters _are_ NPCs.
Training the AI on the prayers of Paris and the Kardashians? The best
that’s gonna do is avoid the apocalyptic mountain of paperclips, and
instead the weakest among us may very well be transformed into
high-heeled stilettos. 🤔
Jesus fuck, okay—EVEN when taking every single thing in here at face
value, how on earth is this scheme anything close to being “low cost and
easy??” Convincing the most rich and influential people on Earth to
collectively buy into a newly made up religion and publicly (oh, or
privately if making it public is too hard) pray for safety?
That seems pretty difficult, and incredibly high cost in terms of time
and effort??
How can this person simultaneously over- and underestimate these
peoples’ intelligence such that they are smart enough to be rich and be
able to influence millions of people, but dumb enough just to be
convinced by some losers on the internet to subscribe to a literal
religion?
I find the obsession these people have with the idea of ‘NPCs’
disturbing. If you start treating the world like its literally a
video-game, it makes it very easy to dehumanize certain groups of
people. Its only a matter of time before we see this term cropping up in
terrorist manifestos.
If this were a scifi story pitch, I'd tell the author he needs a better term for the wealthy people than "Non- non player characters who are simulated"
Imagine believing Elon Musk isn’t an NPC, have they seen his tweets? He literally has the energy of an Oblivion NPC repeating the same 3 lines in a loop
[deleted]
I know this isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, by a long shot.
Frankly, I can probably go back to that “Yud duz the SAT” thread and find worse.
But right now, in this moment, this feels like the worst.
I know I post this every time the simulation bs comes around, but remember people, in the real world, nobody is building ancestor simulations. Almost all the simulations we build right now are toys, games, stuff like dwarf fortress or the sims.
And this person makes it even dumber, by making most people into NPC’s it stops being an ancestor simulation and we are just into ‘we are in a computer program’, which turns out to be the most boring program ever. (The whole idea of an ancestor sim vs a toy game is that you can make certain assumptions about behavior and also that being in a simulation is more likely if we are in ancestor sim (because of infinite god AGI monkeys on typewriters wanting to simulate their creators so eventually we are likely to be simmed), god this thought experiment is so silly). And if we are in an ancestor simulation (where the idea is to setup the world like how it was in the past to see how everything developed) praying will not do a thing, unless praying worked in the history of the people running the simulation.
I like this because it makes the whole religion of these idiots transparent. Okay, you did Calvinism, congratulations on being so smart? But of course history is littered with the dumb ideas of would be prophets.
If they’re gonna pop out a neo-religuous wall of screed, they should at least have the decency to include an inspirational passage, maybe include a messianic figure that symbolically dies and is resurrected?
It better not be Peter Theil.
Why are these people so obsessed with survival? It’s completely irrational. If we’re in a simulation so broken that the Kardashians are being artificially boosted into powerful and important people, wouldn’t it just be better to turn the simulation off?
This is pure doomsday cult. Next they will be convincing themselves that the AI apocalypse didn’t happen because they prayed to the AI gods, and thus they were correct.
Giving the game away: suggesting that Elon, Altman etc are somehow not NPCs in the simulation we’re all a part of. The simulators have included real people in here and they are all rich and powerful assholes? I mean that is some wild perspective on how simulations work, but it’s exactly what I think these assholes think. Have they ever even played a video game? They don’t realize that everything inside a simulation is a simulation?
sucking the dick of god
This is truly bottom basement, scum sucking sneer material and I love it.
Remember when schizophrenics just yelled at people in the subway?
I actually sort of like his take on how if it were a simulation the creators of this would be considered gods in power and capability no different than familiar religious gods…but uh, this looks like something I’d write after 72 hours of no sleep while edge running the cusp of insanity.
Now this, this is sneerworthy.
It always seems to just fall apart on its face. Or did I miss where if this simulation or that “prays” enough then they just keep that one running forever? Hrmmmm.
Pretty sure everyone this person thinks isn’t an NPC, I’d think the opposite of
the idea of the simulation focusing on the Player Characters has been around for a while in rationalist circles, ten or more years at least. I vaguely remembered it was Robin Hanson, but I couldn’t find it in any of his writings, so it might have been someone else.
the same idea was used in The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, which the AI doom boys will often have read at the time (2004?).
mind you I think using them for prayer is a first
Is this worse than the angsty space operas I used to write when I was a teenager
How do people like this even exists? It’s really baffling at this point
I’m sad that they’re diverging from their plan to work ceaselessly to create a friendly AI. Hello??? I’m right here??? Just waiting for you??? Do you WANT to be simulated into the Dungeon Dimensions???
The weirdest thing is the assumption that some people that are rich and famous and prominent for no reason must be non-NPCs in this simulation. I can imagine why they think Musk is somehow above this, and of course obviously the writer is a non-NPC (of course!), but what leap of logic makes Kim Kardashian a non-NPC? Frankly, it seems simpler to assume that the billionaire characters are made up by the simulator since they’re frankly easy to do. The modal real human player in this simulated game is a lot more likely to, like, not succeed in making billions of dollars, right? Obviously the author thinks they’re a non-NPC and hopes their audience has some non-NPCs, what do they have in common with Kim Kardashian that makes them think that?
Training the AI on the prayers of Paris and the Kardashians? The best that’s gonna do is avoid the apocalyptic mountain of paperclips, and instead the weakest among us may very well be transformed into high-heeled stilettos. 🤔
Jesus fuck, okay—EVEN when taking every single thing in here at face value, how on earth is this scheme anything close to being “low cost and easy??” Convincing the most rich and influential people on Earth to collectively buy into a newly made up religion and publicly (oh, or privately if making it public is too hard) pray for safety? That seems pretty difficult, and incredibly high cost in terms of time and effort??
How can this person simultaneously over- and underestimate these peoples’ intelligence such that they are smart enough to be rich and be able to influence millions of people, but dumb enough just to be convinced by some losers on the internet to subscribe to a literal religion?
I find the obsession these people have with the idea of ‘NPCs’ disturbing. If you start treating the world like its literally a video-game, it makes it very easy to dehumanize certain groups of people. Its only a matter of time before we see this term cropping up in terrorist manifestos.
But mostly its just so, so stupid.
[deleted]
Do these guys not realise that the are a major impediment to AI safety work by being an unproductive distraction?
(Could we have a link? I’d like to see the replies.)
lmao