Aurini comments on Exterminating life is rational - Less Wrong

17 Post author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2009 04:17PM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2009 09:09:06PM *  10 points [-]

Here's a possible problem with my analysis:

Suppose Omega or one of its ilk says to you, "Here's a game we can play. I have an infinitely large deck of cards here. Half of them have a star on them, and one-tenth of them have a skull on them. Every time you draw a card with a star, I'll double your utility for the rest of your life. If you draw a card with a skull, I'll kill you."

How many cards do you draw?

I'm pretty sure that someone who believes in many worlds will keep drawing cards until they die. But even if you don't believe in many worlds, I think you do the same thing, unless you are not maximizing expected utility. (Unless chance is quantized so that there is a minimum possible possibility. I don't think that would help much anyway.)

So this whole post may boil down to "maximizing expected utility" not actually being the right thing to do. Also see my earlier, equally unpopular post on why expectation maximization implies average utilitarianism. If you agree that average utilitarianism seems wrong, that's another piece of evidence that maximizing expected utility is wrong.

Comment author: Aurini 06 August 2009 10:56:07PM 0 points [-]

This is completely off topic (and maybe I'm just not getting the joke) but does Many Worlds necessarily imply many human worlds? Star Trek tropes aside, I was under the impression that Many Worlds only mattered to gluons and Shrodinger's Cat - that us macro creatures are pretty much screwed.

...

You were joking, weren't you? I like jokes.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 August 2009 11:14:01PM 0 points [-]

"Many worlds" here is shorthand for "every time some event happens that has more than one possible outcome, for every possible outcome, there is (or comes into being) a world in which that was the outcome."

As far as the truth or falsity of Many Worlds mattering to us - I don't think it can matter, if you maximize expected utility (over the many worlds).

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 August 2009 11:19:00AM 2 points [-]

That is not what Many Wolds says. It is only about quantum outcomes, not "possible" outcomes.