quinsie comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 11:37PM

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Comment author: quinsie 01 October 2011 10:56:26PM 2 points [-]

Changing "matrix" to "light cone changes little, since I still don't expect to ever interact with them. The light cone example is only different insofar as I expect more people in my light cone to (irrationally) care about people beyond it. That might cause me to make some token efforts to hide or excuse my apathy towards the 3^^^3 lives lost, but not to the same degree as even 1 life lost here inside my light cone.

If you accept that someone making a threat in the form of "I will do X unless you do Y" is evidence for "they will do X unless you do ~Y", then by the principle of conservation of evidence, you have evidence that everyone who ISN'T making a threat in the form of "I will do X unless you do Y" will do X unless you Y. For all values of X and Y that you accept this trickster hypothesis for. And that is absurd.