[SEQ RERUN] Bayesians vs. Barbarians

MinibearRex

Today's post, Bayesians vs. Barbarians was originally published on 14 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Suppose that a country of rationalists is attacked by a country of Evil Barbarians who know nothing of probability theory or decision theory. There's a certain concept of "rationality" which says that the rationalists inevitably lose, because the Barbarians believe in a heavenly afterlife if they die in battle, while the rationalists would all individually prefer to stay out of harm's way. So the rationalist civilization is doomed; it is too elegant and civilized to fight the savage Barbarians... And then there's the idea that rationalists should be able to (a) solve group coordination problems, (b) care a lot about other people and (c) win...

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Collective Apathy and the Internet, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Bayesians vs. Barbarians was originally published on 14 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Suppose that a country of rationalists is attacked by a country of Evil Barbarians who know nothing of probability theory or decision theory. There's a certain concept of "rationality" which says that the rationalists inevitably lose, because the Barbarians believe in a heavenly afterlife if they die in battle, while the rationalists would all individually prefer to stay out of harm's way. So the rationalist civilization is doomed; it is too elegant and civilized to fight the savage Barbarians... And then there's the idea that rationalists should be able to (a) solve group coordination problems, (b) care a lot about other people and (c) win...

A team of rational egoists could invent ways to make their precommitments credible. Then they could e.g. organize a lottery to randomly choose a few of them to sacrifice for the benefit of others.

Assuming that (a) participating in the lottery is better on average than not participating in the lottery, and (b) the precommitments are credible, which means that once you have been chosen by the lottery, it would be worse or impossible to not sacrifice yourself for the benefits of other lottery participants, and (c) it is impossible to get the benefits of the lottery as positive externalities while not participating in the lottery... then a rational egoist would choose to participate in the lottery.

Yeah, the three assumptions would be extremely difficult to fulfill. But there is no law of physics saying that it is impossible.

And as DanielLC suggests, if people have other values beyong their personal profit, that only makes the solution easier.

An egoist can do what they can do, including be on teams and make agreements. But an egoist is not always and only guided by personal profit. That would make a spook, a wheel in the head, of personal profit.

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