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mwengler comments on Open Thread, February 15-29, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Give me $5 or I will torture 3^^^^3 sentient people across the omniverse for 1,000 years each and then kill them. using my undetectable magical powers. You can pay me by paypal to mwengler@gmail.com. Unless 20 people respond (or the integrated total I receive reaches $100) then I will carry out the torture.
Now you may think I am making the above statement to make a point. Indeed it seems probable, but what if I am not? How do you weigh the very finite probability that I mean it against 3^^^^3 sentient lives
I feel confident that the amount of money I recieve by paypal will be a more meaningful statement about what people really think of
(ininitesimal probability) * (nearly infinite evil) = well over $5 worth of utilons
Do others agree? Or do they think these comments which cost nothing bu another 15 minutes away from reading a different post are what really mean something?
The issue is how to program a decision theory (or meta-decision theory, perhaps) that doesn't fall victim to Pascal's mugging and similar scenarios, not to show that humans mostly don't fall victim to it.
However, it's probably worth figuring out what processes people use which cause them to not be very vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging.
Or is it just that people aren't vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging unless they're mentally set up for it? People will sometimes give up large amounts of personal value to prevent small or dubious amounts of damage if their religion or government tells them to.
I think there is not enough discussion of the quality of information. Conscious beings tell you things to increase their utility functions, not to inform you. Magicians trick you on purpose and (most of us) realize that, and they are not even above human intelligence. Scammers scam us. Well meaning idiots sell us vitamins and minerals and my sister just aked me about spending a few $1000 on a red light laser to increase her well being!
The whole one-box vs two-box thing, if someone claiming to be a brilliant alien had pulled this off 100 times and was now checking in with me, I would find it much more believable that they were a talented scam artist than that they could do calculations to do predictions that required a ^ to express relative to any calculations we know of now that can be done.
Real intelligences don't believe anywher near everything they hear. And they STILL are gullible.