ialdabaoth comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Tyrrell_McAllister 01 June 2014 08:32PM

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Comment author: ialdabaoth 17 June 2014 05:51:32PM 2 points [-]

Update not upon fictional evidence.

One man's fictional evidence is another man's thought experiment, and another's illustrative story.

To me, the lesson is "square dice are physical objects which imperfectly embody the process 'choose a random whole number between one and six'".

If you make the map-territory error and assume that "whatever the dice roll, is what we accept" while simultaneously assuming that "the dice can only each roll whole numbers between one and six; other outcomes such as 'die breaks in half' or 'die rolls into crack in floor' or 'die bursts into flame' or 'die ends up in Eliezer Yudkowsky's pants and travels unexpectedly to Washington DC' are out-of-scope", you're gonna have a bad time when one of those out-of-scope outcomes occurs and someone else capitalizes on it to turn a pure game-of-chance into a game-of-rhetoric-and-symbolcrafting.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 June 2014 08:42:18PM 0 points [-]

I shall cheerfully bet at very high odds against this happening the next time I roll a standard die.

Comment author: VAuroch 06 July 2014 05:11:39AM 3 points [-]

If you are actually offered this bet, you probably should not take it.

When I was a young man about to go out into the world, my father says to me a very valuable thing. He says to me like this... "Son," the old guy says, "I am sorry that I am not able to bank roll you to a very large start, but not having any potatoes which to give you, I am now going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand new deck of cards on which (Sky snaps fingers) the seal has not yet been broken. This man is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of that deck and squirt cider in your ear. Now son, you do not take this bet, for as sure as you stand there, you are going to wind up with an earful of cider."

Comment author: ialdabaoth 17 June 2014 08:54:24PM 3 points [-]

I shall cheerfully bet at very high odds against this happening the next time I roll a standard die.

I almost said "so shall I, but... " - but then caught myself, because I may very well NOT bet at very high odds against this happening the next time I roll what I perceive to be a standard die.

If I believe my opponent is motivated to cheat, and capable of cheating in a manner that turns "roll a standard die" into "listen to my narrative interpretation of why whatever-just-happened means I won", then I'm apparently willing to take some of the resources I would have otherwise put on that bet, and instead put them on "watch out for signs of cheating and/or malfunctioning dice".

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