= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
taryneast comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (334)
That's not the point. None of those probabilities are as strong as 3^^^3. Maybe big, buy not THAT big.
The point is that no more than 1/3^^^3 people have sole control over the life or death of 3^^3 people. This improbability, that you would be one of those very special people, IS big enough.
(This answer fails unless your ethics and anthropics use the same measure. That's how the pig example works.)
So you're saying that the implausibility is that I'd run into a person that just happened to have that level of "power" ?
Is that different in kind to what I was saying?
If I find it implausible that the person I'm speaking to can actually do what they're claiming, is that not the same as it being implausible that I happen to have met a person that can do what this person is claiming/ (leaving aside the resource-question which is probably just my rationalisation as to why I think he couldn't pull it off).
Basically I'm trying to taboo the actual BigNum... and trying to fit the concepts around in my head.
It's implausible that you're the person with that power. We could easily imagine a world in which everyone runs into a single absurdly powerful person. We could not imagine a world in which everyone was absurdly powerful (in their ability to control other people), because then multiple people would have control over the same thing.
If you knew that he had the power, but that his action wasn't going to depend on yours, then you wouldn't give him the money. So you're only concerned with the situation where you have the power.
Ok, sure thing. I get what you're saying. I managed to encompass that implausibility also into the arguments I made in my restatement anyway, but yeah, I agree that these are different kinds of "unlikely thing"