PlatypusNinja comments on The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 September 2009 01:47AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (218)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Nubulous 27 September 2009 07:43:10PM *  6 points [-]

When you wake up, you will almost certainly have won (a trillionth of the prize). The subsequent destruction of winners (sort of - see below) reduces your probability of being the surviving winner back to one in a billion.

Merging N people into 1 is the destruction of N-1 people - the process may be symmetrical but each of the N can only contribute 1/N of themself to the outcome.

The idea of being (N-1)/N th killed may seem a little odd at first, but less so if you compare it to the case where half of one person's brain is merged with half of a different person's (and the leftovers discarded).

EDIT: Note that when the trillion were told they won, they were actually being lied to - they had won a trillionth part of the prize, one way or another.

Comment author: PlatypusNinja 02 October 2009 12:25:49AM 2 points [-]

Note that when the trillion were told they won, they were actually being lied to - they had won a trillionth part of the prize, one way or another.

Suppose that, instead of winning the lottery, you want your friend to win the lottery. (Or you want your random number generator to crack someone's encryption key, or you want a meteor to fall on your hated enemy, etc.) Then each of the trillion people would experience the full satisfaction from whatever random result happened.