Simulationist sympathetic magic

Blog each time you have sex. This makes you more likely to remember histories in which you had sex, and possibly even makes you more likely to experience future occasions where you had sex. If a friend gets sick, don't mention anything anywhere an electronic record can find it, or the whole thing might very well have been your fault! And for a different variant on the same principle, wait for a large lottery jackpot, buy a ticket using a quantum random number generator, use a webcam to record yourself watching the numbers being drawn, and precommit that if you win, you will donate 10% of the money to workshops on timeless decision theory providing that they agree to play the video at the opening session of that conference.

And since it seems more likely than not that someone will ask: No I've never tried using such simulationist sympathetic magic myself, and since I still question the basic assumptions behind such mass-simulation in the first place, I have no intention of trying it in the future, either.

I see what you did there.

I would expect that if their simulation is accurate enough for you to precommit to the same test, you're not going to fool it with a journal entry.

Also, if they simulate many worlds, you'll almost certainly end up in an Everett branch that precommitted to a different test, and if they simulate Copenhagen, you'll almost certainly end up with the wrong random numbers.

If our universe is more likely to be a simulation, a reconstruction of the past by our descendants than the base level of reality; then that reconstruction is likely to be imperfect, based mainly on surviving records (and memories of anyone whose brain survives intact long enough for upload-style scanning). Therefore, if somebody precommits to only leave behind records which correspond to particular events... then it seems plausible (to within the bounds of 'the brain is a quantum computer' levels of plausibility) that those events become more likely to be experienced.

How does this cope with simulation dynamics? They may seed the simulation with lots of old real-world data, but once it starts running, there are going to be tons of micro and macro divergences which make data dated after the simulation start less than useful. (eg. imagine the simulation run starts at a point in 2000; by the time it reaches its version of today, it likely will have diverged significantly - it doesn't matter if you write that you had dinner with your girlfriend because in the simulation you just barely missed meeting her a year ago etc.)

I assume that if a statistically significant number of people noticed that they were trying sympathetic magic and it was working, then the simulation would have to be restarted or tweaked since it could alter the history of the world in significant ways. So you might want to plan out that aspect of your strategy before collecting any data.

Wow, those "Law of Attraction" dumbasses might actually have been on to something! ;)

Maybe that's what Will_Newsome meant by “generalized pseudo-anthropic selection effect”.

Nice, you've figured out a way to make testable predictions regarding at least some varieties of the simulation argument.

Now let's use what you hypothesize about to disprove it, and finally move on already from all the simulationist idiocy...

Is the idea that some group has confounded the knowledge base used to maintain said simulation for the express purpose of bestowing superpowers upon their progeny or all of future humanity?

If that's what you're going for, then I'd refer to that group as either crazy or a bunch of really fun people that were having a laugh, knowing the probability of their efforts paying off to be extremely slim, who coincidentally were absolutely spot on.

I imagine the most effective approach would be propagating reports of small, odd phenomena that hint at the universe having (had) features not (yet) identified by the laws of physics. Then the descendants could exploit the resulting uncertainty of the simulation through heroic journeys of super-power discovery. The descendants would either be protagonists, or all of humanity; I think the latter more ambitious but also permissive of a larger scope and greater intrigue than the former.

No I've never tried using such simulationist sympathetic magic myself, and since I still question the basic assumptions behind such mass-simulation in the first place, I have no intention of trying it in the future, either.

Ha! But are you saying that because you really never tried or because you tried and it worked? :p

However, about your thoughts on the whole mass-simluation affair: if we live in a faithful simulation and we discover we are living in it, then this raises the probability that even our ancestors found out that they were living in a simulation.

ETA: you could also try to outsmart your simulators by leaving uncorrelated notes about all your life, and producing false evidence about everything you do or that happens to you, so that future archaeologist will have a hard time reconstructing your life. That will either cause your death (due to the excessive complexity of your reconstruction) or they will need a reliable source of information... that yourself will have constructed!