This is why Eliezer always uses hyperlinks, even when sometimes it seems strange. :D The LessWrong site is too big, and many people are not here from the beginning. With so many articles even people who seriously try to read the Sequences can miss a few ideas.
Thank you for this advise. I will definitely try to hyperlink a lot more in the future.
By your metric, I fear this may sound as dismissive as the rest of what I wrote. Does it?
No it doesn't. I feel I understand this comment completely.
There's a good chance I went back and edited a few things after writing this sentence. :)
Thanks for not being angry for my comment, because by standard metric it was impolite. Somehow I felt the information is more important... and I am happy you took it this way.
I think this type of feedback should be the norm here. It might just be me, but I think the number of LWers who would appreciate this type of constructive criticism is greater than the number who would be offended, especially after weighting based on commenting frequency.
This type of feedback can be invited explicitly in a comment. It was suggested that LW users should be able to invite it permanently through a user profile, but this suggestion was not implemented yet.
Imagine it's the future, and everything has gone according to plan. Humanity has worked out its own utility function, f0, and has worked out a strategy S0 to optimize it.
Humanity has also run a large number of simulations of how alien worlds evolve. It has determined that of those civilizations which reach the same level of advancement - that know their own utility function and have a strategy for optimizing it - there is an equal probability that they will end up with each of 10 possible utility functions. Call these f0...f9.
(Of course, these simulations are coarse-grained enough to satisfy the nonperson predicate).
Humanity has also worked out the optimal strategy S0...S9 for each utility function. But they just happen to score poorly on all of the others:
fi(Si) = 10
fi(Sj) = 1 for i != j
In addition, there is a compromise strategy C:
fi(C) = 3 for all i.
The utility functions, f0 through f9, satisfy certain properties:
They are altruistic, in the sense that they care just as much about far-away aliens that they can't even see as they do about members of their own species.
They are additive: if one planet implements Sj and another implements Sk, then:
fi(Sj on one planet and Sk on the other) = fi(Sj) + fi(Sk).
(This is just to make things easier - the problem I'm describing will still apply in cases where this rule doesn't hold).
They are non-negotiable. They won't "change" if that civilization encounters aliens with a different utility function. So if two of these civilisations were to meet, we would expect it to be like the humans and the babyeaters: the stronger would attempt to conquer the weaker and impose their own values.
In addition, humanity has worked out that it's very likely that a lot of alien worlds exist, i.e. aliens are really really real. They are just too far away to see or exist in other Everett branches.
So given these not entirely ridiculous assumptions, it seems that we have a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma even though none of the players has any causal influence on any other. If the universe contains 10 worlds, and each chooses its own best strategy, then each expects to score 19. If they all choose the compromise strategy then each expects to score 30.
Anyone else worried by this result, or have I made a mistake?