Contrived infinite-torture scenarios: July 2010

PlaidX

This is our monthly thread for collecting arbitrarily contrived scenarios in which somebody gets tortured for 3^^^^^3 years, or an infinite number of people experience an infinite amount of sorrow, or a baby gets eaten by a shark, etc. and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions. As everyone knows, this is the most rational and non-obnoxious way to think about incentives and disincentives.

Please post all infinite-torture scenarios separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
No more than 5 infinite-torture scenarios per person per monthly thread, please.

Please post all infinite-torture scenarios separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
No more than 5 infinite-torture scenarios per person per monthly thread, please.

Whoa. That's gotta be the most interesting comment I read on LW ever. Did you just give an evolutionary explanation for the concept of probability? If Eliezer's ideas are madness, yours are ultimate madness. It does sound like it can be correct, though.

But I don't see how it answers my question. Are you claiming I have no chance of ending up in a rescue sim because I don't care about it? Then can I start caring about it somehow? Because it sounds like a good idea.

Did you just give an evolutionary explanation for the concept of probability?

It is much worse, this seems to be an evolutionary "explanation" for, say, particle physics, and I can't yet get through the resulting cognitive dissonance. This can't be right.

1Vladimir_Nesov16y

As applied to your comment, it means that you can only use observations epistemically where you expect to be existing according to the concept of anticipated experience as coded by evolution. Where you are instantiated by artificial devices like rescue simulations, these situations don't map on anticipated experience, so observations remembered in those states don't reveal your prior, and can't be used to learn how things actually are (how your prior actually is). You can't change what you anticipate, because you can't change your mind that precisely, but changing what you anticipate isn't fundamental and doesn't change what will actually happen - everything "actually happens" in some sense, you just care about different things to different degree. And you certainly don't want to change what you care about (and in a sense, can't: the changed thing won't be what you care about, it will be something else). (Here, "caring" is used to refer to preference, and not anticipation.)

-1[anonymous]16y

This has been much discussed on LW. Search for "updateless decision theory" and "UDT."

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