Wei_Dai comments on Fair Division of Black-Hole Negentropy: an Introduction to Cooperative Game Theory - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Wei_Dai 16 July 2009 04:17AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 16 July 2009 12:59:10PM 8 points [-]

I'd have to disagree with that. It's a far-future science example and an obvious default one given the current model of physics for anyone who understands thermodynamics. Okay, it may take some explaining before it's equally obvious to everyone, but it is, in fact, obvious. Especially if you want value that scales nonlinearly with material. I find it difficult to put into mere words just how obvious this is - it far exceeds the obviousness of, say, using gold to talk about inflation, when the choice of those particular atoms is completely arbitrary in a grand physical sense.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 17 July 2009 12:24:35AM 9 points [-]

Yes, in some sense it's an obvious default, which seems to go largely unrecognized (even by those who understand thermodynamics), maybe due to a bias towards thinking that value scales linearly with material. But I don't want to claim too much. There are a number of caveats I didn't mention in my post:

  • Some space-time geometries may have better entropy dumps than black holes. In an open universe without dark energy, for example, the cosmological background temperature goes to 0 and negentropy is essentially infinite.
  • Why make negentropy the object of fair division, instead of value created from using up negentropy, which might not be a linear function of it?
  • Why should individuals own matter? If they don't, then our intuition about what constitutes fair division would change drastically.
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