(Reposted from Facebook, on January 17, 2017.)

I am concerned about the number of people I've heard joking about Trump's election being evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis.

Yes, I know it's a joke. I'm still concerned.

Warning: #Essay, #LongEssay

So as not to engage in Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Consequences, before I talk about why this joke is worrying, I shall first discuss why Trump's election does not in fact mean we are living in a simulation. And neither does the Berenstein/Berenstain Bears thing, etcetera.

Because atheism generalizes.

No, I'm not about to commit the Noncentral Fallacy (aka The Worst Argument In The World) by yelling "The Simulation Hypothesis is religious!"

But once upon a decade, there was a time when lots of people believed in God. A time when atheism had to be argued, not just taken for granted. There was a time when believing in atheism made you one of those weird, loud people with arguments that only people with unusually good epistemology could follow, and other people talked about you exactly the way that the anti-LessWrong tumblrsphere now talks about LessWrong.

Today, of course, atheism is just something that everyone in your filter bubble believes. But back then atheism had to be argued, and assessing the validity of those arguments required unusually good epistemology that left a lot of the audience behind, and other people laughed at those weird atheists and their snooty yet flawed epistemology on their primitive equivalents of Tumblr.

A certain key atheistic argument is so obvious as to be boring, which is of course a good sign for its validity:

"We don't see any sign of God's presence. Therefore there is no God."

"Ah," says the theist, retreating to their motte, "that's because God doesn't usually intervene in His creation. Now go away so I can resume telling people to pray for earthquake victims."

"Okay," says the atheist, "I'll be more precise: the argument shows that there's no interventionist God. And if we're not playing motte-and-bailey then that kicks hell out of most religions. All the scriptural religions record interventions. If we're not inventing elaborate excuses, then yes a powerful and benevolent God would stop earthquakes that randomly kill lots of innocent people in developing countries."

"Maybe He wouldn't," says the theist. "Who are we to know the mind of God?"

"You can only avoid that conclusion by overcomplicating things," says the atheist. "Ask a six-year-old whether a good person with superpowers would cure malaria. The six-year-old will say yes. The six-year-old is RIGHT. Since malaria is still here, there is no good person with superpowers who can act on our Solar System; and this argument doesn't suddenly go away when somebody invokes the word 'God'." The atheist pauses, thinking. "In fact, this argument generalizes to many other hypothetical entities with desires and superpowers. If there are potatoes in the world, we can rule out the existence of a sufficiently powerful comic-book supervillain who hates potatoes. If to every appearance our world just follows simple mathematical laws, this is strong evidence against every class of superpowered being whose utility function wants anything more than It wants our universe following simple mathematical laws. If there are other places, other parts of Reality, under the dominion of superpowerful beings running around optimizing those places to meet various desires as much as possible, those places really don't look like our part of the universe! The six-year-old knows that, and the six-year-old is right."

"Ah," the theist says wisely, "but what if God wants the world to look exactly like it's following mathematical laws?"

"Well," says the atheist, "as an instrumental strategy, I can imagine that we are figments of the imagination of some superbeing who for whatever reason wants to know a more exact probability distribution about what happens in universes like this one. Say, somebody in a universe like this one has hidden a buried treasure, and the superbeing is mentally simulating many different imaginary versions of our universe to refine its guess as to where the treasure might have been hidden. In this case, to intervene inside the imagined universe would make the imaginary world unrealistic, and thereby invalidate the imagination's information-value for the real-world question the superbeing is trying to answer. This would produce a superbeing that was consistently noninterventionist with respect to its imagination of our dreamed universe; and we must also suppose that the superbeing doesn't care when imagined people die of malaria. This hypothesis is compatible with our observations. In fact it is exactly as compatible with our observations, as our universe not being imaginary. And it is no coincidence that this story consistently implies that we will also not observe any miracles in the future."

"Well, what about the election of Donald Trump?" says the theist. "It's not proof, I know, but isn't that at least some evidence that there's an interventionist God?"

"Why on Earth would it be?" says the atheist.

"Because God could have made Trump be elected," says the theist, "and therefore, worlds in which Trump is elected are more likely given the God Hypothesis."

"A person with superpowers who cares about electoral results also could have made Hillary Clinton be elected," says the atheist. "The superbeing hypothesis class can't make every outcome more probable. The probabilities still have to sum to one."

"Okay," says the theist, "but the prediction markets thought that Trump being elected was unlikely, presumably under the implicit assumption of our universe running under mathematical laws. If the universe doesn't have to follow those strict mathematical laws, if those laws can sometimes be violated, doesn't that move the extreme probability of Trump not being elected back toward the middle? Then Trump's election is more probable given the God Hypothesis than not."

The atheist throws up their hands. "What kind of interventionist superbeing cares enough to intervene to make Trump win an election, and doesn't care about a million other aspects of the world that they could be intervening on?"

"Truly the ways of Heaven are mysterious," the theist says.

"The ways of science are not mysterious," says the atheist, "and they say that we don't just get to throw up our hands and say 'the ways of the experimental apparatus are mysterious' when observation fails to accord with the obvious prediction. It's just a generic excuse to blur out all the failed predictions of the theory, and if you apply it evenhandedly, you shouldn't be using that theory to predict anything else either."

"Anyway," says the theist, "I'm asking if you agree that the God Hypothesis predicted with at least slightly greater probability that Trump would be elected."

"I'm frankly not sure of that in this case," says the atheist. "When I actually try to envision that tiny fraction of weird possibilities in which some superbeing who never intervened on any definitely visible occasion, cares enough to intervene in the US Presidential election, it's not clear to me that they favor Trump over Clinton."

"I'm not saying that God, as I understand Him, would favor Trump over Clinton," says the theist. "It's just that I, in my mortal limitation, don't have reason to believe that the ineffable God is 4 times as likely to favor Clinton over Trump. If in my own imagination God would be twice as likely to favor Clinton over Trump in his ineffable plan--that is, given that God intervened, I would have guessed 2:1 odds for Him intervening for Clinton--then to the extent one believes God might intervene in the US election, and that prediction markets have not already taken this into account, one ought to shift the market odds of 4 : 1 for Clinton : Trump towards the less extreme 2 : 1 odds of God favoring Clinton over Trump. Maybe just a little, but even so, it would be some little bit of evidence."

The atheist crosses their arms, looking skeptical. "I'm a little suspicious that you would maybe have given God stronger odds than 2 : 1 of favoring Clinton over Trump, if asked in advance. But I suppose, when I envision weird beings with superpowers intervening there and nowhere else, I don't imagine them swinging strongly for Clinton. So the point carries for me, if not for you."

"So you agree, then," the theist says, "that Trump's election was to some small degree evidence for the existence of God."

The atheist thinks. "I'm not sure that's valid reasoning," the atheist says slowly. "To get a higher predicted probability that Trump wins the election, it's not enough to hypothesize a superbeing. We have to hypothesize a superbeing that cares about Trump winning the election, but doesn't care about malaria, and doesn't care about making planets move in perfectly circular orbits instead of elliptical orbits, and so on. I'm worried that you're pulling some equivalent of seeing a coin come up heads-heads-tails and saying, 'Ah, that's evidence that a superbeing made the coin come up heads-heads-tails, because the coin would be more likely to come up HHT if a superbeing wanted it to.'"

"But we're not talking about a random-looking bitstring," says the theist. "Let's say there's some event which has as simple description, but is incredibly unlikely assuming the universe runs on physics as we know it. Like, you flip a coin 1024 times and the resulting bitstring has a SHA256 hash of exactly zero. Would you not agree that this result is much more probable given the God Hypothesis?"

"Okay," the atheist says after a moment, "I think I accept that, and in that sense, I accept that the Exists Some Rarely Interventionist Superbeing Hypothesis nudges extreme probability assignments over any simply describable outcome back toward 50-50. Now conversely, by the law of Conservation of Expected Evidence, we must say the Superbeing Hypothesis is disconfirmed to some small degree every time we see a rock fall down. After all, a superbeing could have made the rock fall upward, or hover in the air; and if that did happen you would no doubt shout 'Ah, that is more likely in worlds where there is a God!' So when it does not happen, that is a tiny little bit more evidence against an interventionist God."

"So you do concede that Trump's election is evidence for God's existence!" the theist says, smiling.

The atheist throws up their hands. "There ought to be a name for the fallacy of taking a coin that comes up heads-heads-tails, looking at just the tails coinflip, and saying, 'Aha, that's evidence for the coin being biased towards tails!' Yes! Yes if you consider just that single coinflip as an isolated event, it is from a strict Bayesian standpoint a small unit of evidence for the coin being biased tails! But when a prediction market says something has a probability of 20%, it ought to happen around one time in 5! If we're all inside the strictly realistic imagination of a superbeing who is imagining many different versions of universes like this one in order to gain more information about some real-world variable, then most of those worlds, just like the real world, look back and see a big class of events in which 20%-probable events are happening about 1 time in 5. And 4 times out of 5 they don't happen. Trump's election was not so unlikely that it outweighs every other dog not barking, every other observation of the world following strict physics. Trump's election was not the sort of thing that only ever happens in the unfettered imaginations of superbeings who don't care about strict realism. It doesn't happen only in worlds with active superpowered villains."

"But it is more likely if the God Hypothesis is true," says the theist.

The atheist sighs. "By every rule of the ordinary meanings of ordinary words, and irrespective of some technical interpretation you could make of the Bayesian import of isolated events, we do not say that Trump's election shows there is a God--at least, no more than a flipped coin coming up heads three times in a row shows there is a God."

===

No, the Simulation Hypothesis is not just the revenge of religious reasoning.

But the reasoning against interventionist supernatural deities goes through unchanged for interventionist naturalistic simulators, and I'm a little bit worried about this not being obvious.

You know how it's a bad sign when scientists leave the laboratory and suddenly forget that beliefs require evidence?

I'm worried if the anti-interventionist-superbeing argument suddenly isn't obvious, once the argument is no longer about that God thingy that nobody inside your filter bubble believes in anyway, and is instead about that cool-sounding simulation thingy.

Epicurus (or whoever) was right to deduce the absence of an interventionist benevolent God by observing suffering. Later atheists were right to further to deduce the absence of any kind of interventionist God with desires such that the world could obviously be improved further with respect to those desires. Atheists were right to look around them and see a world where, so far as they could tell, no verifiable miracle had ever occurred. Naturalistic philosophers were right to see a world where, so far as they could tell, improbable things happened around as often as they should, and no more often than that. And it was valid reasoning to conclude by induction that we shouldn't expect miracles, or disproportionately frequent improbabilities, in the future.

There are arguments against noninterventionist Gods that don't go through for noninterventionist simulators, such as "God sure sounds like an ontologically basic mental entity, and minds are made of parts", or "This does not sound like a hypothesis we would naturally trip over by starting from only the observable world and extending our generalizations from there."

But all the arguments against interventionist Gods--every way the universe does not look like there is a God running around inside it fiddling with things--that all goes through without a hitch for any other kind of interventionist being with superpowers. If there are perfectly normal interstellar aliens watching us from Jupiter, they're noninterventionist aliens; they didn't intervene on Earth and they also didn't enclose all the stars in Dyson shells. Not all of the arguments against God are arguments against the existence of naturalistic aliens; but the arguments against interventionist Gods are arguments against interventionist naturalistic aliens being here in this Solar System.

So if this is a simulation, it's a realistic simulation. And the obvious reason why that some superintelligence would be rolling a realistic simulation, is that this is a simulation meant to gain information about a lower-level universe that is very similar to this one.

In which case there will be no miracles now or ever, nor is it a coincidence that this is what the obvious hypothesis ends up saying.

As we once looked around ourselves and saw a universe that runs only on math, we should, by the same and unchanged eyes, look around and see a simulation that is perfectly faithful to the kind of universe that runs only on math.

Regardless of the absolute proportion of people in simulated universes, and people in basement universes, I think we are licensed to expect that the vast majority of simulated universes where the simulators are messing around with the simulation or filtering its conditions in weird and unrealistic ways, do not look like this seemingly untouched universe. It also seems probable that there would be a large class of simulated universes which are trying to gain information about an object of simulation, and which are therefore realistic up to the limits of realism. So whatever proportion of people like you are in simulations--whether that proportion is large or small compared to the proportion in basement universes--among the versions of you that are simulated, the vast majority of people exactly like you are in realistic simulations. These proportions are not nudged more than infinitesimally by conditioning on Donald Trump having been elected President.

Similarly, the hypothesis of a realistic simulation does not even help explain anything that still seems weird and mysterious. The Fermi Paradox is that we look around and see an empty universe with seemingly uninhabited stars and frequent planets, even though the stars are old enough for life to have evolved long before now. Well, the Realistic Simulation Hypothesis doesn't help explain the Fermi Paradox any more than it explains Trump's election. If this is a sim, it's a realistic one meant to gain information about a similar basement universe, so why would that universe have a Fermi Paradox?

It must all add up to normality in the end. And the normality that it must all add up to hasn't changed since someone thought up the Simulation Hypothesis.