Embracing Chaos

There’s been a lot of fuss lately about Nick Bostrom’s ideas that we live in a simulation as a result of an article in the New York Times.  Here I’ll provide some analysis of Bostrom’s bold claim, including a proposed mechanism to explain my grandfather’s assertion that mathematical simplicity and beauty were indicators of underlying truth.  I’ll also explore the implications of this possibility to our daily lives, and show why this is another reason to follow Transhuman Morality.

Simplified Simulation or Complete, Accurate Model?

The simulations Bostrom describes would not be precise to the subatomic level, but rather use abstractions to simplify the computation.  Instead of simulating every electron, proton, neutron, quark, etc in each person’s body and everything around us, it might only simulate synapses and neurons in our brains.  Such short-cuts would be extremely useful to accomplish the goals he describes of virtually resurrecting ancestors.  (A convenient version of heaven.)  Just simulating the brains of the inhabitants of a virtual world is drastically easier than accurately simulating an entire universe down to the subatomic level.  For many purposes, including the ones we are likely to engage in anytime soon, it is sufficient. 

The software to run a simplified simulation like this would put its designer in an interesting predicament whenever the simulatees decide to build a new particle accelerator or perform some other experiment that pushes the limits of their understanding of fundamental physics.  Would a dialog box appear on the simulation screen asking the designer to make decisions about how to treat a new class of quark that had never been observed?  Then once the designer answers this question the simulation moves on?  Moreover, so many trappings of modern life are the result of applications of scientific breakthroughs like this?  For example, we could have never built semiconductors and thus computers without a solid understanding of quantum mechanics since they take advantage of quantum effects.  So closing the dialog box would require not only require describing the results of this experiment, but also coding up a bunch of new high-level abstractions that represent things like semi-conductors.  The simulation would need to know when it could use the molecular mechanics model, and when it would have to substitute a more detailed model or a coding abstraction that simplifies the results of more base laws.

If we lived in such a simplified simulation, it seems likely that chinks in the armor of reality would periodically appear.  Modern science has few inconsistencies like this.  (The big bang and quantum randomness being the two biggest two exceptions IMHO.)  I would wager that if we live in a simulation it is a completely accurate physical model that started with the big bang and covers the entire universe including our own evolution from primordial soup.  It’s not clear to me whether or not our universe has enough matter/energy to build a computer powerful enough to run such a simulation.  I should dig up my notes from Yael Maguire’s excellent talk at Foo Camp on the fundamental limits of computation to be sure, but I know it would chew through at least solar systems worth of our universe if not galaxies or more to simulate a comparable universe.  It seems more likely to me that if our world is simulated then the “host world” is governed by a different set of physical laws.  This point is debatable and important, but I’ll assume from here that the host world is governed by different laws.

Motivations of the Simulation Designers and Implications for Personal Morality

As the NY Times article points out, the simulators might just be bored, doing the equivalent of playing video games with us.  Or they might be scientific researchers investigating how changes to fundamental laws affect how worlds evolve.  Whatever their goals are in running a simulation of this scale, they are almost certainly interested in the complexity that we are creating here and now.  But how should we behave?

Robin Hanson suggests that as individuals living in a simulation we should try to lead the most interesting, impactful lives that we can.  This goal attempts to optimize for the case that the simulators will pick individuals from this simulated society to do something special with.  I think it extremely unlikely that the designers care about individuals at all.  If they’re looking at anything, I’d bet it’s entire societies.  So, if we are living in a simulation, I argue that we should do our best to advance technology as an insurance policy against extinction.  I have written a fair bit about the transhuman morals that such a guiding principal implies, but basically it boils down to being a geek and/or a hippie – advance technology as fast as possible and conserve natural resources so that the world doesn’t end before we reach the next level of technology.  Thinking that somebody might hit the “stop” button on the entire simulation puts a new twist on the idea of the world ending because as a society we failed to reach a certain level of technological sophistication.

A Simulation Argument for Truth in Mathematical Beauty and Simplicity

If our world is a simulation running inside a massive computing device, then something must have programmed this simulation.  The programmers of the simulation chose the physical laws that we live by, perhaps to see what would happen.  This puts an interesting spin on evaluating fundamental physical laws.  Which of these two equations below is more likely to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation designer wrote the code?  These are two different mathematical representations of P.A.M. Dirac’s eponymous equation, which is AFAIK believed to be a completely accurate representation of our physical world.

By this logic, the second one is almost certainly closer to how the simulation programmer understood the concept.  This perspective puts an interesting twist on Occam’s razor – the principal that the simpler explanation is probably true.  My grandfather believed that the simpler a physical law was, the more likely it was to be correct.  In this way he saw a certain beauty in math and physics.  If our world exists only as a simulation, then the simpler a physical law is, the more likely it is to be an accurate representation of the way the simulation was coded.

A trend in modern successful websites is the democratization of information and decision making.  The so-called wisdom of the crowds is at the heart of what makes a web 2.0 company successful.  I’m going to compare how three companies have democratized the process of making product development decisions.

Amazon makes extensive use of so-called A/B testing to try out new UI’s and optimize the user flow.  This works very well for them because their end goal is very well defined: they want people to buy stuff.  They are facing a very hard optimization problem, but their objective function is clear and easy to measure.  So they can try out new UI’s for 1% of users, and if it does well according to this well-defined metric, roll it out to a broader audience.  This is essentially best practice for any modern successful online company.

Google has done a lot to democratize the internet — notably by democratizing search through PageRank which allows anybody to implicitly vote on the relative merit of a web page.  They have also democratized the way some product development choices are made through through their policy of encouraging developers to build whatever they want in 20% of their time.  The result is that everything you can possibly imagine is probably being worked on by at least one googler, and the ideas with merit gain momentum and get built into real services.  But before they get launched to the public they still must be approved by a central authority.  Sure Google does A/B testing like everybody else, which is great for UI tweaks and to verify that new services won’t crash when hit with massive traffic.  But it’s extremely difficult to do A/B testing on major changes to functionality.  For example, it’s hard to imagine testing a change to how g-mail delivers mail through this kind of test.  Moreover, depending on how the test goes, the change is either rolled out to the entire user base or not at all.

Facebook’s platform offers another alternative.  ISV’s have the opportunity to offer major new kinds of functionality to Facebook users in a very democratic way.  Users can try out the new features, and if they like it, they’ll tell their friends about it, and the feature will spread.  Some features which are only appropriate for a certain segment of a user base can naturally find that segment.  This mechanism doesn’t really lower the cost of adding new functionality compared to how Google does it — Google is always launching new features that you’d never know about without reading their dozens of product blogs.  But it democratizes the process of figuring out which of these new features are valuable enough for a mass audience.  To continue with the democracy analog, these decisions are still made by a communist-style central-planning committee in Google’s world, whereas Facebook users can vote with their keyboards on what features are worth using.  This will make the Facebook platform very competitive in the arena of user’s attention.

Last night I cooked a chicken the really old-fashioned way: by roasting it over an open wood fire.  My buddy Mez and I made many observations about how much of an evolutionary throwback our dinner was.  Open fire cooking clearly precedes the invention of the oven.  It is incredibly inefficient in its use of fuel.  Most of the heat goes up into the air.  The food must be balanced at an appropriate distance to get the right amount of heat without burning to a crisp.

There’s an evolutionary advantage to cooking food — it kills parasites, bacteria and other food-borne diseases while doing little to decrease the nutritional value of the food.  So it makes sense that we would have evolved a predisposition to eating cooked food, and it seems likely this happened in the form of liking the taste of smoked food.  The genome helped to encourage food-safety rules for us that our brains hadn’t yet worked out.  The fact that smoky food is carcinogenic is a little sad.  I’m guessing it points to the fact that we’ve been subtly encouraged to eat this food for maybe only a couple hundred of thousands of years, which isn’t long enough for our digestive systems to learn how to render safe the multitude of different compounds found in smoke.  That and the fact that most cancers like this happen so late in life as to be essentially irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint — once you’ve had your kids and raised them, it doesn’t much matter what happens to your body.

This also hearkens back to a time when humans knew how to use fire, but had not fully mastered it.  I’m convinced this is why we love to stare at a fire for hours on end. It is pacifying in a lizard-brain kind of way.  (How many times have you watched that chicken go around just now?)  There almost certainly was a time when humans knew how to use fire, but not make it.  They gained benefits from it through cooking or heating, but had to get very lucky to capture it from the wild say  after a natural lightning strike.  As such, it was extremely important to the whole tribe that somebody was always watching the fire to make sure it didn’t go out.

If you’d like to follow along the antics of cooking large mammals over open flames, I’ll be posting regular updates to my food and recipe blog, Add Garlic.  There’s also a "recipe" for spit-roast chicken here.

Here’s my deck from my recent Ignite/Gnomedex talk, hosted in web-viewable format by slideshare.net.  Thanks for the tip, Dave!  If you’d like to read what I said to go along with the slides, download the PPT and read along in the notes section.

I’m really pleased that a bunch of people seem to have found this talk useful.  I’m not trying to give away any secrets, and I’m definitely not saying either side is good or bad in these situations.  But by explaining how things work, I’m trying to move a little bit in the direction of openness in these financial transactions, which economically speaking pretty much always makes things more efficient and prosperous.  I’m hearing an increasing cry for showing more graphs in term sheets to explain what’s going on.  I think this is a fabulous idea.

Thanks to everybody who came out to Ignite last night to hear me talk.  And extra thanks to everybody who voted for me.  Looks like I’ll be giving my talk at Gnomedex on Saturday during the Ignite section.

As promised, here is my slide deck from last night about VC Term Sheets.  But I’m afraid after looking through my spreadsheets I’ve decided they’re not really ready to share yet.  I put together some nice tools for visualizing waterfall charts, but they need a little work to make them user friendly.  So stay tuned — I will post them.  In 1996 parlance "check back often" or in 2006 parlance "subscribe to the feed for immediate updates."  I’ll try to get them up in the next few days but realistically it’ll likely take me a week.

[Thanks to Randy Stewart for the photo of me looking extra scruffy.]

My talk about Venture Capital Term Sheets that I mentioned earlier has been accepted for the next Ignite Seattle which is tomorrow night at the CHAC.  If just you want to come hear me talk, I’ll be speaking sometime after 9:45 PM.  But the rest of the night (schedule here) looks fabulous so I plan to show up at the beginning at 6:30 PM.  I’m doing my best to make this talk slower and more sane than my last talk.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

Here’s a shout out to my friends — this weekend I’m making my third attempt to climb Mt. Rainier.  (The first two were successful.)  But we’re in for a challenge since the glaciers are really broken up.  I’m trying to focus this blog on more technology and business issues, so I won’t be talking much about it here.  If you’d like to follow along, check out my ironically named outdoors blog Safety Fourth.  (Look good, act cool, have fun… Safety fourth!)