steven0461 comments on Transparency and Accountability - Less Wrong

16 Post author: multifoliaterose 21 August 2010 01:01PM

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Comment author: steven0461 21 August 2010 07:34:52PM *  2 points [-]

If the Pascal's mugging issue is with exerting a small force on a big thing and therefore having a small probability of succeeding, I don't think that's even a coherent objection; in a chaotic universe, anything you do may save or destroy individual people and human civilization by redrawing from the distribution, and shifting the distribution of the number of saved lives up by one through e.g. aid or buying someone cryo doesn't seem fundamentally different from e.g. shifting the distribution of election outcomes. This is more clearly true if you believe in a multiverse such as MWI, but I don't think it requires that.

ETA: if your distribution on people killed is uniform for say 6 through 10, then definitely saving one person and having a 1 in 5 chance of turning a 10-death situation into a 5-death situation are the same thing except for maybe the identity of the victims, right?