Rationality Quotes January 2013

katydee

Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please

Happy New Year! Here's the latest and greatest installment of rationality quotes. Remember:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LessWrong or Overcoming Bias
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please

Suppose you had the chance to save the life of one sparrow, but doing so kills you with probability p. For what values of p would you do so?

If the answer is only when p=0, then your value of sparrows should never affect your choices, because it will always be dominated by the greater probability of your own welfare.

A strong argument, well done.

This indeed puts me in a conundrum: If I answer anything but p=0, I'm giving a kind of weighting factor that destroys the supposedly strict separation between tiers.

However, if I answer p=0, then indeed as long as there is anything even remotely or possibly affecting my top tier terminal values, I should rationally disregard pursuing any other unrelated goal whatsoever.

Obviously, as evident by my writing here, I do not solely focus all my life's efforts on my top tier values, even though I claim they outweigh any combination of... (read more)

0ArisKatsaris13y

Not sure that holds. Surely there could be situations where you can't meaningfully calculate whether acting to preserve the life of a sparrow increases or decreases the probability of your death, therefore you act to preserve its life because though you consider it a fundamentally lesser terminal value, it's still a terminal value.

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Rationality Quotes January 2013

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Rationality Quotes January 2013

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