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army1987 comments on The Power of Positivist Thinking - Less Wrong
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Huh?
Imagine a lottery with a $500 prize, 100 tickets sold for a dollar each. The rational thing to do is buy every ticket you can. But you get to the sales office too late, and one ticket has already been sold. You buy the remainder, but don't win the lottery. You ended up losing money, but you did everything right, didn't you?
On the other hand, you should expect such a thing to only happen 1% of the times in average, so if you're consistently unlucky for a long period of time, odds are you're doing something wrong.
It is not in principle possible to do better in that scenario. It is in principle possible to do better than, say, two-boxing on Newcomb's problem, even though a CDT agent always does that.
If I randomly get hit by a meteor, there isn't a lot I could have done to avoid it. If I willingly drive faster than the speed limit and get myself killed in an accident, there isn't a lot of excuses for why not to abide by the speed limit and survive.