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Desrtopa comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong
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Part of me wants to say that it was foolish of Tony to take so much less money than he could have gotten simply for getting the guy to profess that it was a piece of quartz rather than a power crystal, but I'm not sure I would feel comfortable exploiting a guy's delusions to that degree either.
There's no guarantee the guy would have bought it at all for $150. The impression I get is that this was ultimately a case of belief in belief, Tony knew he couldn't get much more than $15 and just wanted to win the argument.
I doubt he would have bought it for $150, but after making a big deal of its properties as a power crystal, he'd be limited in his leverage to haggle it down; he'd probably have taken it for three times the asking price if not ten.
I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.
Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn't a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn't a power crystal he'd save $135?
Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?
I would guess it's guilt-avoidance at work here.
(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)
And with that in mind, how would it have affected the sanity waterline if Tony had donated that $135 to an institution that's pursuing the improvement of human rationality?
Look, sometimes you've just got to do things because they're awesome.
But would you feel comfortable with that maxim encoded in an AI's utility function?
For a sufficiently rigorous definition of "awesome", why not?
If its a terminal value then CEV should converge to it.
I think he would have been better off taking the money and donating it to a good charity.