DanielLC comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong
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Mugger: Give me five dollars, and I'll save 3↑↑↑3 lives using my Matrix Powers.
Me: I'm not sure about that.
Mugger: So then, you think the probability I'm telling the truth is on the order of 1/3↑↑↑3?
Me: Actually no. I'm just not sure I care as much about your 3↑↑↑3 simulated people as much as you think I do.
Mugger: "This should be good."
Me: There's only something like n=10^10 neurons in a human brain, and the number of possible states of a human brain exponential in n. This is stupidly tiny compared to 3↑↑↑3, so most of the lives you're saving will be heavily duplicated. I'm not really sure that I care about duplicates that much.
Mugger: Well I didn't say they would all be humans. Haven't you read enough Sci-Fi to know that you should care about all possible sentient life?
Me: Of course. But the same sort of reasoning implies that, either there are a lot of duplicates, or else most of the people you are talking about are incomprehensibly large, since there aren't that many small Turing machines to go around. And it's not at all obvious to me that you can describe arbitrarily large minds whose existence I should care about without using up a lot of complexity. More generally, I can't see any way to describe worlds which I care about to a degree that vastly outgrows their complexity. My values are complicated.
Me: Actually no. I'm just not sure I care as much about your 3↑↑↑3 simulated people as much as you think I do.
Mugger: So then, you think the probability that you should care as much about my 3↑↑↑3 simulated people as I thought you did is on the order of 1/3↑↑↑3?
After thinking about it a bit more I decided that I actually do care about simulated people almost exactly as the mugger thought I did.