(Negative points? Anyone care to explain?)
I did not vote one way or the other, but if I had to vote I would vote down. Reasonings below.
This is to value your own "rationality" over that which is to be protected: the billion lives at stake.
"Rationality", as best as I can tell, is pointing toward the belief that cooperating is the rationalistic approach to the example. Instead of giving a reason that it is not rational you dismiss it out of hand. This is not terribly useful to the discussion.
If it is actually pointing to the player's beliefs about the age of the universe, than the statement also has ambiguity against it.
(We may add: such a "rationality" fetish isn't really rational at all.)
This is somewhat interesting but not really presented in a manner that makes it discussible. It basically says the same thing as the sentence before it but adds loaded words.
"Why give us even more to weep about?" implies that you may have missed the entire point of the original article. The point was that it is rational to cooperate even though you are weeping. The explanation is given in the previous post. Your comment simply states that you disagree but do not address the author's reasonings and do not give reasonings of your own.
If I had to rewrite your post I would probably do something like this:
Choosing to cooperate because it could result in a larger outcome is not rationality since the other player is not likely to do the same. Doing it anyway because you are "supposed" to cooperate in a prisoner's dilemma just sends billions of people to their death.
You would also have to give a good excuse for the other player not cooperating. I think a few others around here have presented some.
The point was that it is rational to cooperate even though you are weeping. The explanation is given in the previous post.
I am far from convinced that superrationality applies between you or me and humans in general, let alone humans with epistemic processes that permit them to be creationists. At least, it's obvious that my decision process is not correlated in any relevant sense with that of someone who hasn't heard/thought of or doesn't subscribe to superrationality.
I spoke yesterday of the epistemic prisoner's dilemma, and JGWeissman wrote:
To which I said:
And lo, JGWeissman saved me a lot of writing when he replied thus:
I make one small modification. You and your creationist friend are actually not that concerned about money, being distracted by the massive meteor about to strike the earth from an unknown direction. Fortunately, Omega is promising to protect limited portions of the globe, based on your decisions (I think you've all seen enough PDs that I can leave the numbers as an excercise).
It is this then which I call the true epistemic prisoner's dilemma. If I tell you a story about two doctors, even if I tell you to put yourself in the shoes of one, and not the other, it is easy for you to take yourself outside them, see the symmetry and say "the doctors should cooperate". I hope I have now broken some of that emotional symmetry.
As Omega lead the creationist to the other room, you would (I know I certainly would) make a convulsive effort to convince him of the truth of evolution. Despite every pointless, futile argument you've ever had in an IRC room or a YouTube thread, you would struggle desperately, calling out every half-remembered fragment of Dawkins or Sagan you could muster, in hope that just before the door shut, the creationist would hold it open and say "You're right, I was wrong. You defect, I'll cooperate -- let's save the world together."
But of course, you would fail. And the door would shut, and you would grit your teeth, and curse 2000 years of screamingly bad epistemic hygiene, and weep bitterly for the people who might die in a few hours because of your counterpart's ignorance. And then -- I hope -- you would cooperate.