Constant comments on We are not living in a simulation - Less Wrong

-9 Post author: dfranke 12 April 2011 01:55AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 13 April 2011 05:47:14PM 4 points [-]

I'm slightly saddened that you were so rapidly upvoted for lazily mis-applying Eliezer cites as a substitute for doing your own thinking.

I'll take the cites one by one.

The first cite (which you badly paraphrased) concerns people who fail to follow Bayesian rationality and who attempt to excuse this by saying that they followed some social-custom-based rationality. His point in this article is that rationality, true rationality, is not a matter of social rules.

You have mis-applied this. True rationality does not preclude having false factual beliefs on occasion. It is possible, for example, for the evidence to temporarily mislead an ideally rational person.

The second cite is an improvement on the first since you are providing a quote but still does not apply in the way you want it to. His point is that rationalists should win. This does not mean that rationalists will necessarily win every time. Rather, rationalists will win more often than non-rationalists. In Newcomb's Problem Omega has a historical record of being wrong 1 times out of 100, so even if all players have so far been making the correct, rational choice (which is the one-box choice), then 1 out of 100 of them have still been losing. This does not demonstrate that those who picked the one-box and still lost were not, in fact, being rational on those occasions. That they were being rational is demonstrated by the fact that the ones who adopted their exact same strategy won 99 times out of 100.