An icebreaker
A philosopher argued in 2003 that at least one must be true: civilizations rarely reach the stage of running realistic ancestor-simulations, those that reach it choose not to, or we are almost certainly living in one. He accepts the logic, not the conclusion.
In his 2003 paper he argued that at least one of three propositions must be true about advanced civilizations and simulation, and stated he accepts that logical structure while remaining agnostic about which of the three options actually holds.
In 2020 he applied Bayesian statistics to the trilemma, weighing its options evenly, and found the odds of living in a simulation come out just under fifty-fifty, slightly favoring an unsimulated reality.
He has argued it would be physically impossible to simulate a meaningful portion of the universe from within itself, since processing information carries an unavoidable minimum energy cost that no simulating system could escape.
In a 2019 opinion piece he argued that experiments aimed at revealing whether this is a simulation could be extremely dangerous, reasoning that if detected, whoever runs the simulation might end it, and concluded the risk wasn't worth taking.