Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: komponisto 01 July 2010 09:20PM

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Comment author: Douglas_Knight 06 July 2010 02:56:57AM 2 points [-]

Silly: we're living in a simulation, there are infinitely many identical copies of all of us, "status" as a number on an FRP character sheet, any Omega conundrum that depends on Omega being absolutely known to be absolutely reliable....Utilitarianism of all types.

There's an odd inconsistency in how you labeled these. The last is identified by name and the first seems similarly neutral, but the third and fourth (and maybe the second - there are a lot of things that could be referring to) are phrased to make it clear what you think is silly about them. This seems tactically poor, if you want to avoid discussion of these issues. (or maybe the first and are the mistake, but tactical diversity seems weird to me)

Moreover, it seems hard for me to imagine that you pay so little attention to these topics that you believe that many people here support them as you've phrased them. Not that I have anything to say about the difference in what one should do in the two situations of encountering people who (1) endorse your silly summary of their position; vs (2) seem to make a silly claim, but also claim to distinguish it from your silly summary. Of course, most of the time silly claims are far away and you never find out whether the people endorse your summary.