faul_sname comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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I guess this is my main issue with the whole sequence. No way to settle a wager means in my mind that there is no way to ascertain the truth of a statement, no matter how much physics, math and logic you throw at it.
EDIT: Trying to steel-man the game of counterfactuals: One way to settle the wager would be to run a simulation of the world as is, watch the assassination happen in every run, then do a tiny change which leads to no measurable large-scale effects (no-butterflies condition), except "Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't shot John F. Kennedy".
But what does "Lee Harvey Oswald hadn't shot John F. Kennedy" mean, exactly? He missed? Kennedy took a different route? Oswald grew up to be an upstanding citizen?
One can imagine a whole spectrum of possible counterfactual Kennedy-lives (KL) worlds, some of which are very similar to ours up to the day of the shooting, and others not so much. What properties of this spectrum would constitute a winning wager? Would you go for "every KL world has to be otherwise indistinguishable (by what criteria? Media headlines?) from ours"? Or "there is at least one KL world like that"? Or something in between? Or something totally different?
Until one drill down and settles the definition of a counterfactual, probably in a way similar to the above, I see no way to meaningfully discuss the issue.
You don't have to construct the model at that level of detail to meaningfully discuss the issue. Just look at the base rate of presidential assassinations and update that to cover the large differences with the Kennedy case. If you're trying to simulate a universe without Lee Harvey Oswald, you're probably overfitting, particularly if you're a human. Your internal model of how Kennedy was actually shot doesn't contain a high-fidelity of the world in which Oswald grew up and went through a series of mental states that culminated with him shooting Kennedy (or at least, you're not simulating each mental state to come to the outcome). Instead, you have a model of the world in which Lee Harvey Oswald shoots JFK, and otherwise doesn't really factor into your model. While removing Oswald from the real world would have large effects, removing him from your model doesn't.
I think that you ask "what are the chances that Kennedy would have been shot if Oswald hadn't done it?" you're probably asking something along the lines of "If I build the best model I can of the world surrounding that event, and remove Oswald, does the model show Kennedy getting shot, and if so, with what confidence?" So in order to settle the wager, you would have to construct a model of the world that both of you agreed made good enough predictions (probably by giving it information about the state of society at various times and seeing how often it predicts a presidential assassination) and seeing what the answer it spits out is. There might be a problem of insufficient data, but it seems pretty clear to me that when we talk about counterfactuals, we're talking about models of the world that we alter, not actual, existing worlds. If many worlds was false and there was only one, fully deterministic universe (that contained humans), we would still talk about counterfactuals. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
Well, my model has Oswald in the Marines with Kerry Thornley — aka Lord Omar, of Discordian legend — and a counterfactual in which a slightly more tripped-out conversation between the two would have led to Oswald becoming an anarchist instead of a Marxist; thus preventing his defection to the Soviet Union ....