Ah, I see. You meant that consequentialists can't use simplified or extreme hypothetical scenarios to talk about consequentialist morality as applied to real decisions, not that they can't do it at all. That was implicit in your ticking-time-bomb example but not explicit in your opening, and I missed it.

(I agree.)

There's another issue too, which is that it is extraordinarily complicated to assess what the ultimate outcome of particular behavior is. I think this opens up a statistical question of what kinds of behaviors are "significant", in the sense that if you are choosing between A and B, is it possible to distinguish A and B or are they approximately the same.

In some cases they won't be, but I think that in very many they would.

One assumes that either their universe does run on QM and has additional principles laid on top of it, or the spell operated as a physiology translator. I assumed the latter, and yes, thank you, I worked it out in advance.

He was suddenly very aware that he hadn't checked his lipstick in three hours.

Moral rules are about actions, but in consequentalism are judged strictly according to their consequences. Real world is what connects actions to consequences, otherwise we couldn't talk about morality at all.

If you assume some vast simplification of the real world, or assume least-convenient-world, or something like that, the connection between actions and consequences completely changes, and so optimal moral rules in such case have no reason to be applicable to the real world.

Also if the real world changes significantly - let's say we develop a fully reliable lie detector and start using it all the time (something I consider extremely unlikely in the real world). In such case the same actions would have different consequences, so consequentialism would say our moral rules controlling our actions should change. For example if we had lie detectors like that it would be a good idea to get every person routinely tested annually if they committed a serious crime like murder or bribery - something that would be a very bad idea in our real world.

Yes, it does work, and the answer to the latter question is arguably "both".

What prevents a consequentialist from accepting various hypothetical conditions arguendo and working out their consequences?

I'd consider it a possibly bad idea to actually do so, what with the known cognitive biases that might skew future decision making; but accepting arguendo that a particular consequentialist has overcome these biases, I can't see a reason for her to refuse to consider least-convenient-world scenarios.

One thing that I've been wondering about (but not enough to turn it into a proper thread) is how to talk about consequentialist morality. Deontologists can use thought experiments, because they're all about rules, and getting rid of unnecessary real world context makes it easier for them.

Consequentialists cannot use tricks like that - when asked if it's ok to torture someone in a "ticking bomb" scenario, answering that real world doesn't work like that due to possibility of mistakes, how likely is torture to work, slippery slope, potential abuse of torturing power once granted etc. is a perfectly valid reply.

So if we cannot really use thought experiments, how are we supposed to talk about it?

Hm. I see. Thanks for pointing that out. Embarrassingly, I completely ignored mixed strategies above -- implicitly assumed that the constructions of G_M and G_S would be over pure strategies of G, and analyzed only pure strategy profiles of G_M and G_S.

I do see how constructing G_M and G_S over mixed strategies of G would make the two values equal by the minimax theorem, but I think there are complications when we analyze mixed strategies. Mixed Nash equilibria of G_S can enforce correlated play in G, even without relying on cryptography, as follows: Have the pure strategies in the equilibrium correspond to a common quined program (as before) plus a natural number < n, for some given n. Then the program adds the different players' numbers modulo n, and uses the result to determine the strategy profile in G. If a player chooses their number with uniform probability through a mixed strategy of G_S, then they know that all sums modulo n are equally likely, no matter how the other players choose their numbers. So everybody choosing their numbers uniformly at random can be a Nash equilibrium, because no player can change the expected result by unilaterally switching to a different way of choosing their number.

But G_M, as defined above (whether over pure or mixed strategies), can, as far as I can see, not enforce correlated play in G.

A natural way to rectify this is to define the first component of G_M to be neither just a pure nor just a mixed strategy profile of G, but an arbitrary distribution over pure strategy profiles of G -- a "correlated strategy profile." Can the earlier proof then be used to show that G_M has a mixed strategy profile realizing a certain outcome ⇔ G has "correlated strategy profile" realizing that outcome that pays each player at least their security value ⇔ G_S has a mixed strategy profile realizing that outcome?

The question of "what gender is", when you strip away the purely anatomical, is a topic of great interest to me.

It seems to me that while Aerhien's gender wasn't essential to the story, there were certain aspects of her personality that hinted at it (and I'm not talking about the eyelashes) -- but I wouldn't go beyond that; if she had been written as male, I don't think I would have sensed any incongruity.

Without further biasing the discussion by mentioning what I think those personality aspects might be, I'm curious to find out what attributes other people thought made her essentially female -- among those who hold this position, that is.

What's the difference between the Dust and entropy?

Whenever something new comes into existance, there are new ways of breaking possible. The space of entropic possibility is large, so even old things can occasionally break in new ways.

Less direct point: How can you tell how improbable/aesthetic your universe is?

Y'know, every comment has your name right at the top. You don't need to mimic IRC labels.

The first human player to use e.g. "md5(3891*seq) odd", wins. You can quibble over how long it should take to describe how a sequence is encoded into a bitstring, but even sets where every sequence is of length 1 can be infinite.

Or heck, how about just the binary representation of pi? You don't even need any functions beyond basic arithmetic (eg. if all the famous constants are well known, just pick the decimal expansion of some suitable rational).

Errr... no it doesn't? Heads means 'live'.

And yet, 'fiction writer' and 'anthropic principle' are incredibly alike in nature. In both cases we select universes from among the potential space based on the desired or implied survival of the protagonist. All else being roughly equal I would advocate the anthropic principle over a hypothesised external 'creator'.

By, for example, acknowledging their weaknesses and managing their environment such that it doesn't waste valuable willpower on trivialities.

I guess you just didn't communicate the essential female-ness of Aerhien very effectively (at least to me), because it didn't seem to me like it was very important to what limited character development she got.

The background story that was alluded to came across quite clearly. Not only did the character emerge sufficiently that a sex change would have felt awkward, it left me grasping for the tantalising details that couldn't quite be fit into the short story format.

But there would be just as many other worlds, even instances of the exact same world, which have developed their own superstitions about what defeats the evil. They each carry out their rituals, and in each case, it works - for the survivors. We just choose to eavesdrop on a world which had a particularly interesting and amusing superstition.

It's a fascinating anecdote, but not relevant. They did everything they could to combat the overwhelming odds. And the anthropic principle suggests that we should expect to find ourselves in a world that does just that. Particularly when facing an enemy that learns from its failures. As Peter alludes to, those worlds that don't do something remarkable yet still manage to survive would be sliced incredibly thin.

Aw. I like the Einstein bit.

"Always the Dust is defeated, always it takes a new shape" --> Any destruction of entropy is counterbalanced by its increase somewhere else (e.g. life, control systems).

Dust, as is, strikes me as underspecified. It may take a shape immune to its last defeater, but nothing there prevents cycles - eg, I defeat it with A, it turns to B, I defeat it with C, it turns back to A...