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mattnewport comments on The Fundamental Question - Less Wrong
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While we're being off topic, I'm of the opinion that if you are someone who accepts you should one-box then you should also accept Pascal's wager. I think both are wrong but most people here seem to accept one-boxing is correct but not accept Pascal's wager. I don't care enough about either to work the argument out in detail though.
Newcomb's problem is just a case of making decisions when someone else, who "knows you very well" has already made a decision based on expectation of your decision. There are numerous real-world examples of this. Newcomb's problem only differs in that it takes the limit of the "how well they know you" variable as it approaches "perfect". There needn't be an actual Omega, just a decision theory that is robust for all values of the variable up to and including perfect.
Which sounds a lot like Pascal's wager to me, when your decision is whether to believe in god and god is the person who "knows you very well" and is deciding whether to let you into heaven based on whether you believe in him or not.
There are situations which I guess are what you would describe as 'Newcomb-like' where I would do the equivalent of one-boxing. If Omega shows up this evening though I will be taking both his boxes, because there is too big an epistemic gap for me to cross to reach the point of thinking that one-boxing is sensible in this universe.
But the plausibility of a hypothetical is unrelated to the correct resolution of the hypothetical. One could equally say that two-boxing implies that you should push the man off the bridge in the trolley problem - the latter is just as unphysical as Newcomb. The proper objection to unreasonable hypotheticals is to claim that they do not resemble the real-world situations one might compare them to in the relevant aspects.
I actually think that implausible hypotheticals are unhelpful and probably actively harmful which is why I usually don't involve myself in discussions about Omega. I wish I'd stuck with that policy now.
Why do you think implausible hypotheticals are unhelpful and probaby harmful? It seems to me that they're a lot of work for no obvious reward, but I don't have a more complex theory.
Anyone have an example of the examination of an implausible hypothetical paying off?
I think implausible hypotheticals are often intuition pumps. If they are used as part of an attempt to convince the audience of a certain point of view I automatically get suspicious. If the point of view is correct, why can't it be illustrated with a plausible hypothetical or a real world example? They often seem to be constructed in a way that tries to move attention away from certain aspects of the situation described and thus allow for dubious assumptions to be hidden in plain sight.
Basically, I always feel like someone is trying to pull a philosophical sleight of hand when they pull out an implausible hypothetical to make their case and they often seem to be used in arguments that are wrong in subtle or hard to detect ways. I feel like I encounter them far more in arguments for positions that I ultimately conclude are incorrect than as support for positions I ultimately conclude to be correct.
That's interesting, and might apply to the trolley problem which implies that people can have much more knowledge of the alternatives than they are ever likely to have.
Ethical principles and empathy (as a sort of unconscious ethical principle) are needed when you don't have detailed knowledge, but I haven't seen the trolley problem extended to the usual case of not knowing very many of the effects.
It might be worth crossing the trolley problem with Protected from Myself.
Taking a look at ethical intuitions with specifics: Sex, Drugs, and AIDS: the desire to only help when it will make a big difference and the desire to not help unworthy people add up to worse effects than having a less dramatic view of the world. Having AIDS drugs doesn't mean it makes sense to slack off on prevention as much as has happened.
Yes, the trolley problems are another example of harmful implausible hypotheticals in my opinion. The different reaction many people have to the same underlying ethical question framed as a trolley problem vs. an organ donor problem is I think illustrative of the pernicious influence of implausible hypotheticals on clear thought.
Well, the fact that they're implausible pretty much means the cash rewards are going to have to wait until they are plausible. But don't we think clear thinking is its own reward?
I've found that such things are incredibly crucial for getting people to think clearly about personal identity. In fact I don't know if I have any way of explaining or defending my views on personal identity to the philosophically untrained without implausible hypotheticals. Same goes for understanding skepticism, causality, maybe induction, problems with causal decision theory (obviously), anthropics, simulation...
I'm all about being aware that using implausible hypotheticals can generate error but I am bewildered by the sudden resistance to them on this thread: we use them all the time here!
I would be dead chuffed to talk about the wisdom of considering implausible hypotheticals instead, if that's what you'd prefer to do. (:
Edit: I would be equally happy to drop the thread entirely, if that's what you prefer.
Ok, let me try and nail down my true objection here. Is Pascal's wager a good reason to believe in God? No. Hypothetically, if you had good reason to believe that the hypothesis of the christian god existing were massively more likely than other hypotheses of similar complexity, would it be a good reason to believe in god? Well, not really - it doesn't add much in that case.
Similarly, if Omega showed up at my apartment this evening would I one-box? No. Hypothetically, if I had good reason to believe that an Omega-like entity existed and did this kind of thing (which is the set up for Newcomb's problem) would I one-box? Well, probably yes but you've glossed over the rather radical change to my epistemic state required to make me believe such an implausible thing.
I guess I have a general problem with a certain kind of philosophical thought experiment that tries to sneak in a truly colossal amount of implausibility in its premises and ask you not to notice and then whenever you keep pointing to the implausibility telling you to ignore it and focus on the real question. Well I'm sorry, but the staggering implausibility over there in the corner is more significant than the question you want me to focus on in my opinion... (Forgive the casual use of 'you' here - I'm not intending to refer to you specifically).
I don't understand. A hypothetical can be dangerous if it keeps us from attending to aspects of the problem we're trying to analyze- like the Chinese Room which fails to convey properly the powers it would have to have for us to declare it conscious. The fact that a hypothetical is implausible might make it harder for us to notice that we're not attending to certain issues, I guess. That hardly seems grounds for rejecting them outright (indeed, Dennett uses plenty of intuition pumps). And the implausibility itself really is irrelevant. No one is claiming that the hypothetical will occur, so why should the probability of its occurrence be an issue?
Using Newcomb's problem as an example, it seems like it glosses over important details of how much evidence you would actually need to believe in an Omega like entity and as a result confuses more than it illuminates. Re-reading some of Eliezer's posts on it I get the impression that he is hinting that his resolution of the issue is connected to that problem. It seems to me that it causes a lot of unnecessary confusion because humans are susceptible to stories that require suspension of disbelief in highly implausible occurrences that they would not actually suspend their disbelief for if encountered in real life. This might be an example of Robin Hanson's near/far distinction.
Tyler Cowen's cautionary tale about the dangers of stories covers some of the same kinds of human biases that I think are triggered by implausible hypotheticals.
It certainly does gloss over that... I mean it has to, you'd require a lot of evidence. But the reason it does so is because the question isn't could Omega exists or how can we tel when Omega shows up... the details are buried because they aren't relevant. How does Newcomb's problem confuse more that illuminate? It illustrates a problem/paradox. We would not be aware of that paradox were it not for the hypothetical. I suppose it confuses in the sense that one becomes aware of a problem they weren't previously- but that's the kind of confusion we want.
It's a great video and I'm grateful you linked me to it but I don't see where the problems with the kind of stories Cowen was discussing show up in thought experiments.
Curiously, what is the average utility you would estimate for belief in God? Or do you feel that trying to estimate this forces suspended disbelief in implausible scenarios?
Which god? The God Of Abraham, Isaac, And Jacob? The Christian, Muslim or Jewish flavour? It would seem this is quite important in the context of Pascal's wager. Some gods are notoriously specific about the form my belief should take in order to win infinite utility. I don't see any compelling evidence to prefer any of the more popular god hypotheses over any other, nor to prefer them over the infinitude of other possible gods that I could imagine.
Some of the Norse gods were pretty badass though, they might be fun to believe in.
... if I may put the question differently: what average utility do you estimate for not believing in any God?
That looks like a good heuristic you are using - it seems related to the idea of the intuition pump.
...wow, that was a short time-to-agreement. :D
Yeah, I think I was always averse to this sort of philosophical sophistry but reading Consciousness Explained probably crystallized my objection to it at a relatively early age.
I think you're mistaken, therefore I would like to see your proof. It would be a shame if I missed an opportunity to be more correct. ;)
They both have an element of privileging the hypothesis. If I had some reason to think I lived in a universe with an Omega/God then I might agree I should one-box/believe in god but since I don't have any reason to think I live in such a universe why am I wasting my time even considering this particular implausible scenario?
I see what you mean, but there exists one of two problems with the symmetry.
First, the most annoying form of Pascal's Wager is the epistemological version: "Believing that God exists has positive expected utility, so you should do so". This argument fails logically, for reasons SilasBarta listed, and it is usually this form being refuted when people say, "Pascal's Wager fails".
Second, the form of Pascal's Wager concerning worship, "Believing in God, who is known to exist, has positive utility", has moral complexities which are absent from Newcomb's dilemma. Objections in this case usually arise from the normative argument that you should not believe things which are false.
I disagree that it fails logically. The argument, written modus ponens, is:
"If believing in God has positive expected utility, then you should do so".
If you don't believe that believing in God has positive expected utility, then this is not a disagreement in the logic of Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager would equally say, "If believing in God has negative expected utility, then you should not do so".
Okay, now I think I'm starting to see the miscommunication: PW does not simply say what you've quoted there. It's typically associated with an argument about how the possibility of infinite utility from believing (and perhaps infinite disutility from not believing) outweights the small probability of it being true, and the utility of other courses of action, on account of its infinite size.
You're taking "Pascal's Wager" to refer only to certain premises the argument uses, not the full argument itself.
It occurred to me that you might not agree that my distillation of PW contained all the salient features. (For example, there are no infinitesimals and no infinities written in). However, I think it must have been my more general argument that PeerInfinity was referring to, because he was applying it to atheism.