Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

I can't change the fundamental amount of goodness, I can just push it around.

Wrong (even when assuming there is an exact definition of goodness).

You can't fix all branches of the universe, because (1) in most branches you don't exist, and (2) in a very few branches totally random events may prevent your actions. But this does not mean that your actions don't increase the amount of goodness.

First, you are responsible only for the branches where you existed, so let's just remove the other branches from our moral equation. Second, the exceptionally random events happen only in exceptionally small proportion of branches. So even if some kind of Maxwell's demon can ruin your actions in 0.000 ... ... ... 001 of branches, there are stil 0.999 ... ... ... 999 of branches where your actions worked normally. And improving such majority of branches is a good thing.

More info here:

In each world, people choose the course that seems best to them. Maybe they happen on a different line of thinking, and see new implications or miss others, and come to a different choice. But it's not that one world chooses each choice. It's not that one version of you chooses what seems best, and another version chooses what seems worst. In each world, apples go on falling and people go on doing what seems like a good idea.

In all the worlds, people's choices determine outcomes in the same way they would in just one single world. The choice you make here does not have some strange balancing influence on some world elsewhere. There is no causal communication between decoherent worlds. In each world, people's choices control the future of that world, not some other world. If you can imagine decisionmaking in one world, you can imagine decision-making in many worlds: just have the world constantly splitting while otherwise obeying all the same rules.

Well, lets say we posit some starting condition, say the condition of the universe on the day I turned 17. I am down one path from that initial condition, and a great many other worlds exist in which things went a little differently. I take it that it's not (unfortunately) a physical or logical impossibility that in one or more of those branches, I have ten years down the line committed a murder.

Now, there are a finite number of murder-paths, and a finite number of non-murder-paths, and my path is identical to one of them. But it seems to me that whether o... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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