Vivid comments on Pascal's wager re-examined - Less Wrong

-8 Post author: PhilGoetz 05 October 2011 08:43AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (117)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: PhilGoetz 04 October 2011 02:44:53PM *  0 points [-]

The most popular PC games ever are The Sims and The Sims 2. Then World of Warcraft which is a multiplayer game.

I didn't know that about the Sims. That's what Wikipedia says also. But the number of video-game console games sold is several times the number of PC games sold. The next-best-selling games appear to be Wii Sports and Tetris. But, Wii sports was bundled with the console and often never played; and tetris is a phone game which has very little CPU power - there are reasons this is important, but I don't have time to explain.

So p(ego|...) needs revision - probably to somewhere between .5 and .9.

p(ego) and p(follow-thru) might not be independent. The demographics of players playing what I call 'ego' games is heavily skewed towards adolescent males, as is the demographics of people who enjoy torturing small animals.

But I upvoted because it is kind of interesting and not deserving of -7, though I predict it will go much lower than that.

Thanks! I do think I deserve some credit for coming up with what may be a better argument for Christianity and for Islam than all the Christians and Muslims in the world working together have managed to come up with in 2000 years. :)

Comment author: Vivid 05 October 2011 05:43:41PM *  0 points [-]

deleted

Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 October 2011 02:32:34AM *  -1 points [-]

The iterated lossy cross-scale Keynesian beauty contest is a big attractor.

What is the iterated lossy cross-scale Keynesian beauty contest?

I can't tell whether anything you said is supposed to imply that there is a flaw in my reasoning. "Supporting whatever agentic information cascades have already most effectively burrowed themselves into the most salient cultural-political sphere" is not obviously wrong. When I provide a step-by-step argument that assigns a probability to each step and then multiplies them together, it has a limited number of places to attack; and you didn't mention any of them.

I don't understand much of what you wrote; but my impression is that you are trying to pull the discussion back into vague, subjective regions that provide endless opportunities for rhetorical displays, and no danger of making progress.