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drnickbone comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong
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I don't like to be a bearer of bad news here, but it ought to be stated. This whole leverage ratio idea is very obviously an intelligent kludge / patch / work around because you have two base level theories that either don't work together or don't work individually.
You already know that something doesn't work. That's what the original post was about and that's what this post tries to address. But this is a clunky inelegant patch, that's fine for a project or a website, but given belief in the rest of your writings on AI, this is high stakes. At those stakes saying "we know it doesn't work, but we patched the bugs we found" is not acceptable.
The combination of your best guess at picking the rigtht decision theory and your best guess at epistemology produces absurd conclusions. Note that you allready know this. This knowledge which you already have motivated this post.
The next step is to identify which is wrong, the decision theory or the epistemology. After that you need to find something that's not wrong to replace it. That sucks, it's probably extreamly hard, and it probably sets you back to square one on multiple points. But you can't know that one of your foundations is wrong and just keep going. Once you know you are wrong you need to act consistently with that.
I'm not sure that the kludge works anyway, since there are still some "high impact" scenarios which don't get kludged out. Let's imagine the mugger's pitch is as follows. "I am the Lord of the Matrix, and guess what - you're in it! I'm in the process of running a huge number of simulations of human civilization, in series, and in each run of the simulation I am making a very special offer to some carefully selected people within it. If you are prepared to hand over $5 to me, I will kindly prevent one dust speck from entering the eye of one person in each of the next googleplex simulations that I run! Doesn't that sound like a great offer?"
Now, rather naturally, you're going to tell him to get lost. And in the worlds where there really is a Matrix Lord, and he's telling the truth, the approached subjects almost always tell him to get lost as well (the Lord is careful in whom he approaches), which means that googleplexes of preventable dust specks hit googleplexes of eyes. Each rejection of the offer causes a lower total utility than would be obtained from accepting it. And if those worlds have a measure > 1/googleplex, there is on the face of it a net loss in expected utility. More likely, we're just going to get non-convergent expected utilities again.
The general issue is that the causal structure of the hypothetical world is highly linear. A reasonable proportion of nodes (perhaps 1 in a billion) do indeed have the ability to affect a colossal number of other nodes in such a world. So the high utility outcome doesn't get suppressed by a locational penalty.