Generalized atheism rules out "inaccurate simulation"-ism.

(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. "I