nshepperd comments on Forked Russian Roulette and Anticipation of Survival - Less Wrong

7 Post author: FeepingCreature 06 April 2012 03:57AM

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Comment author: nshepperd 07 April 2012 05:05:15AM 2 points [-]

One easy way to demonstrate this is to chain ten boxes and put a thousand dollars at the end. The person that anticipates dying with 50% probability (so over all the boxes, 1/1024 chance of surviving) would stay well outside. The person that anticipates surviving just walks through and comes away $1000 richer. "But at least my anticipation was correct", in this scenario, reminds me somewhat of the cries of "but at least my reasoning was correct" on the part of two-boxers.

If the person who anticipates dying (with 1023/1024 probability) actually does die (1023/1024 of the time), then they actually gained something by not walking through the box, namely not dying! There's no analogy to two-boxing, where the supposed benefit is simply "having had correct reasoning".