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Comment by halfcat | Hacker News Reader

A flawless predictor would indicate you’re in a simulation, but also we cannot even simulate multiple cells at the most fine-grained level of physics.

But also you’re right that even a pretty good (but not perfect) predictor doesn’t change the scenario.

What I find interesting is to change the amounts. If the open box has $0.01 instead of $1000, you’re not thinking ”at least I got something”, and you just one-box.

But if both boxes contain equal amounts, or you swap the amounts in each box, two-boxing is always better.

All that to say, the idea that the right strategy here is to ”be the kind of person who one-boxes” isn’t a universe virtue. If the amounts change, the virtues change.

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A flawless predictor would indicate you’re in a simulation [...]

No, it does not. Replace the human with a computer entering the room, the predictor analyzes the computer and the software running on the computer when it enters. If the decision program does not query a hardware random source or some stray cosmic particle changes the choice, the predictor could perfectly predict the choice just by accurately enough emulating the computer. If the program makes any use of external inputs, say the image from an attached webcam, the predictor also needs to know those inputs well enough. The same could, at least in principle, work for humans.

I agree with you that it doesn't require that you are in a simulation, but a flawless predictor would be a strong indication that a simulation is possible, and that should raise our assumed probability that we're in a simulation.

I would think that the existence of a flawless predictor is probably more likely to indicate that memories of predictions, and any associated records, have been modified to make the predictor appear flawless.

I would say that if we presume memories of everyone involved have been modified, that is an equally strong predictor that we are in a simulation.

Where does this obsession with the simulation hypothesis come from, it has been so widespread in the last years? It is more or less pointless to think about it, it will not get you anywhere. You only know this universe, to some extend, but you have no idea what a real universe looks like and you have no idea what a simulated universe looks like, so you will never be able to tell which kind our universe is.

But what if we discover that our universe is made from tiny voxels or something like that, that will be undeniable evidence, right? Wrong! Who says that real universes are not made of tiny voxels? It could be [1] the other way around, maybe real universes are discrete but their universe simulations are continuous, in which case the lack of tiny voxels in our universe would be the smoking gun evidence for being in a simulation.

[1] This is meant as an example, I have no idea if one can actually come up with a discrete universe that admits continuous simulations, which probably should also be efficient in some sense.

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