Vladimir_Nesov comments on Your existence is informative - Less Wrong

2 Post author: KatjaGrace 30 June 2012 02:46PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 July 2012 08:17:36AM 2 points [-]

But that's still the only framework I know for reasoning about big universes, splitting brains, and the born probabilities.

I get by with none...

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 03 July 2012 05:36:30PM 0 points [-]

Are you sure?

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 03 July 2012 09:57:26PM *  0 points [-]

Consequentialist decision making on "small" mathematical structures seems relatively less perplexing (and far from entirely clear), but I'm very much confused about what happens when there are too "many" instances of decision's structure or in the presence of observations, and I can't point to any specific "framework" that explains what's going on (apart from the general hunch that understanding math better clarifies these things, and it does so far).

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 03 July 2012 10:06:06PM 1 point [-]

If X has a significant probability of existing, but you don't know at all how to reason about X, how confident can you be that your inability to reason about X isn't doing tremendous harm? (In this case, X = big universes, splitting brains, etc.)