Wei_Dai comments on Shock Level 5: Big Worlds and Modal Realism - Less Wrong

15 [deleted] 25 May 2010 11:19PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 May 2010 05:12:10AM 6 points [-]

I spent a lot of time in the late 90s trying to work out a coherent system of thinking about probabilities that involved things like "your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch" but could not make it work out.

Eventually I gave up and went down the road of UDASSA and then UDT, but "your subjective experience has an equal chance of continuing down any branch" seems to be the natural first thing that someone would think of when they think about probabilities in the context of multiple copies/branches. I wish there is a simple and convincing argument why thinking about probabilities this way doesn't work, so people don't spend too much time on this step before they move on.

Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 29 May 2010 05:29:16AM 4 points [-]

The implied difference between making N copies straight away, and making two copies and then making N-1 copies of one of them, might be a simple convincing argument that something really odd is going on.

Comment author: Mitchell_Porter 29 May 2010 05:22:23AM 2 points [-]

I wish there is a simple and convincing argument why thinking about probabilities this way doesn't work

It doesn't? If I flip a fair coin, I can think of the outcomes as "my subjective experience goes down the branch where heads comes up" and "my subjective experience goes down the branch where tails comes up", and the principle works.