gwern comments on On the Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong

33 Post author: KatjaGrace 19 May 2011 07:30PM

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Comment author: gwern 24 May 2011 09:08:32PM *  2 points [-]

What is meant is n tickets are sold, and then you do something like 'each ticket bought a particular plutonium atom out of n atoms; whichever atom decays first is a winning ticket'. Many Worlds says that each atom decays first in some world-line.

The idea is to, like the least convenient possible world, to avoid a cheap rhetorical escape like 'I deny the trilemma because in my world the possibility of winning has already been foreclosed by my buying a predetermined losing ticket! Hah!'

Comment author: virtualAdept 24 May 2011 09:13:23PM 0 points [-]

Ahh, that makes sense. Thank you.