All of Alex Williams's Comments + Replies

The idea is that it seems like we are in a position to make ancestor simulations, which could contain organised life, i.e. "civilisations" (civs for short). Moreover, both simulated reality and base reality might be similar in that respect. Sorry to say this, but do you actually not follow, or are you doing the analytic philosopher move of saying "what do you mean" because you will only accept a rigorous/watertight argument (or just don't like the argument)?

Assume that base reality is similar to our own world, and that each civ have many descendant "simulated" civs. Although each civ knows it is not one of its own sims, so do all of them, so it is still plausible that we should be indifferent between them - most of which are simulated. Plenty of room to object at basically every stage of the argument; my point is just that you might still want to be indifferent between civs that all know they aren't their own sim.

This is really important and valid, but there's a lot going on in this question! For clarity, note that your first question seemed to be one about statistics or math. This new question is valid too.   The short answer is that there is no way to be certain if the universe is good or bad in expectation (and this also depends on what you value, for example, “negative utilitarians” are worried about suffering more than other people). Yes, many people have this belief. There are principled answers why. For example, if you think humans are basically good, and can get more organized, good human activity and values could spread and produce better things in the future, as opposed to there being a lot of rocks in the universe or something.   Maybe what you are getting at is some topics or focuses of “Longtermism”, which focuses on the long term future and longtermists often talks positively about its value.    Yes, this is valid to believe. Note that actually, longtermism doesn’t need a positive future, just a future we can impact meaningfully. For example, some people focus on “s-risk”, because even a tiny chance of some system of suffering spreading across the universe seems incredibly important.  For those people, or people who have “very short timelines”, they actually put zero or maybe negative value on the future. But there still seems like ways to impact the future for many of them.