CronoDAS comments on You have just been Counterfactually Mugged! - Less Wrong

4 Post author: CronoDAS 19 August 2009 10:24PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 August 2009 11:08:16PM 11 points [-]

I will if Michael Vassar judges that any reputational damage from the comment has an expected value less than $14.

You did it wrong on two counts: First, you need to ask me to pay you money, so the two utilities are easily commensurable and there's no question of interpreting the results. Second, repeating the Counterfactual Mugging more than once tends to obscure the point, especially given the implication that you had a stopping algorithm rather than a fixed number of iterations. Of course it is now too late to do it over again correctly.

But with a trusted witness of the original die roll, or say paying $20 if the 100th decimal digit of pi (unknown to me currently) is 0, and otherwise demanding $1, we could totally mug, say, Derek Parfit and see what happens. Actually, I think I'll forward this suggestion to Anders Sandberg and see what happens if he mugs Nick Bostrom. No one tell Bostrom before then, please.

Comment author: CronoDAS 20 August 2009 06:06:17PM 1 point [-]

But if I had stopped at just one roll of 5, I wouldn't have been able to make this post, and that wouldn't have been any fun!

Anyway, I thought that making a silly comment would be less painful than giving up actual money. It's not like we've been trying hard to present ourselves in a particularly dignified manner on this blog, anyway. What's wrong with wearing the clown suit once in a while?

Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 20 August 2009 09:49:57PM 1 point [-]

It's not like we've been trying hard to present ourselves in a particularly dignified manner on this blog, anyway.

I place importance on the opinions of outsiders who stumble across the site and see the things I say associated with my real name. Maybe we need an invite-only Lesswrong Premiumâ„¢ where we sit around in clown suits discussing our sex lives (or lack thereof).