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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Counterfactual Mugging - Less Wrong
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Had the coin come up differently, Omega might have explained the secrets of friendly artificial general intelligence. However, he now asks that you murder 15 people.
Omega remains completely trustworthy, if a bit sick.
Raising the stakes in this way does not work, because of the issue described in Ethical Injunctions: it is less likely that Omega has presented you with this choice, than that you have gone insane.
So imagine yourself in the most inconvenient possible world where Omega is a known feature of the environment and has long been seen to follow through on promises of this type; it does not particularly occur to you or anyone that believing this fact makes you insane.
When I phrase it that way - imagine myself in a world full of other people confronted by similar Omega-induced dilemmas - I suddenly find that I feel substantially less uncomfortable; indicating that some of what I thought was pure ethical constraint is actually social ethical constraint. Still, it may function to the same self-protective effect as ethical constraint.