Ah, Pascal's mugging is easy, decision theoretically speaking: cultivate the disposition of not negotiating with terrorists.
I understand this idea--in fact, I just learned it today reading the comments section of this post. I would like to see it formalized in UDT so I can better grasp it, but I think I understand how it works verbally.
But other kinds of Pascalian reasoning are valid, like in the case of cryonics. I don't give Pascal's mugger any money, but I do acknowledge that in the case of cryonics, you need to actually do the calculation: no decision theoretic disposition is there to invalidate the argument.
This is what I was afraid of: we can't do anything about Pascal's Mugging with respect to purely epistemic questions. (I'm still not entirely sure why, though--what prevents us from treating cryonics just like we would treat the mugger?)
I'm almost never there anymore... I know this is a dick thing to say, but it's not a great intellectual environment for really learning, and I can get better entertainment elsewhere (like Reddit) if I want to. It was a cool place though; Trent actually introduced me to Bayes with his essay on it, and I learned some traditional rationality there. But where RW was a cool community of fun, like-minded people, I now have a lot of intellectual and awesome friends IRL at the Singularity Institute, so it's been effectively replaced.
Ha, Trent's essay was what introduced me to Bayes as well! And unless I remember incorrectly RW introduced my to LW because someone linked to it somewhere on a talk page. I know what you mean, though--LW and RW have very different methods of evaluating ideas, and I'm suspicious of the heuristics RW uses sometimes. (I am sometimes suspicious here too, but I realize I am way out of my depth so I'm not quick to judge.) RW tends to use labels a bit too much--if an idea sounds like pseudoscience, then they automatically believe it is. Or, if they can find a "reliable" source claiming that someone is a fraud, then they assume he/she is.
I understand this idea--in fact, I just learned it today reading the comments section of this post. I would like to see it formalized in UDT so I can better grasp it, but I think I understand how it works verbally.
Eliezer finally published TDT a few days ago, I think it's up at the singinst.org site by now. Perhaps we should announce it in a top level post... I think we will.
...This is what I was afraid of: we can't do anything about Pascal's Mugging with respect to purely epistemic questions. (I'm still not entirely sure why, though--what prevents us fr
Please read the post before voting on the comments, as this is a game where voting works differently.
Warning: the comments section of this post will look odd. The most reasonable comments will have lots of negative karma. Do not be alarmed, it's all part of the plan. In order to participate in this game you should disable any viewing threshold for negatively voted comments.
Here's an irrationalist game meant to quickly collect a pool of controversial ideas for people to debate and assess. It kinda relies on people being honest and not being nitpickers, but it might be fun.
Write a comment reply to this post describing a belief you think has a reasonable chance of being true relative to the the beliefs of other Less Wrong folk. Jot down a proposition and a rough probability estimate or qualitative description, like 'fairly confident'.
Example (not my true belief): "The U.S. government was directly responsible for financing the September 11th terrorist attacks. Very confident. (~95%)."
If you post a belief, you have to vote on the beliefs of all other comments. Voting works like this: if you basically agree with the comment, vote the comment down. If you basically disagree with the comment, vote the comment up. What 'basically' means here is intuitive; instead of using a precise mathy scoring system, just make a guess. In my view, if their stated probability is 99.9% and your degree of belief is 90%, that merits an upvote: it's a pretty big difference of opinion. If they're at 99.9% and you're at 99.5%, it could go either way. If you're genuinely unsure whether or not you basically agree with them, you can pass on voting (but try not to). Vote up if you think they are either overconfident or underconfident in their belief: any disagreement is valid disagreement.
That's the spirit of the game, but some more qualifications and rules follow.
If the proposition in a comment isn't incredibly precise, use your best interpretation. If you really have to pick nits for whatever reason, say so in a comment reply.
The more upvotes you get, the more irrational Less Wrong perceives your belief to be. Which means that if you have a large amount of Less Wrong karma and can still get lots of upvotes on your crazy beliefs then you will get lots of smart people to take your weird ideas a little more seriously.
Some poor soul is going to come along and post "I believe in God". Don't pick nits and say "Well in a a Tegmark multiverse there is definitely a universe exactly like ours where some sort of god rules over us..." and downvote it. That's cheating. You better upvote the guy. For just this post, get over your desire to upvote rationality. For this game, we reward perceived irrationality.
Try to be precise in your propositions. Saying "I believe in God. 99% sure." isn't informative because we don't quite know which God you're talking about. A deist god? The Christian God? Jewish?
Y'all know this already, but just a reminder: preferences ain't beliefs. Downvote preferences disguised as beliefs. Beliefs that include the word "should" are are almost always imprecise: avoid them.
Additional rules: