Wei_Dai2 comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (334)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Wei_Dai2 21 October 2007 02:36:00AM 1 point [-]

I'll respond to a couple of other points I skipped over earlier.

Eliezer> It's hard to see why I would consider this the right thing to do - where does this mysterious "measure" come from?

Suppose you plan to measure the polarization of a photon at some future time and thereby split the universe into two branches of unequal weight. You do not treat people in these two branches as equals, but instead value the people in the higher-weight branch more, right? Can you answer why you consider that to be the right thing to do? That's not a rhetorical question, btw. If I knew the answer to that question I think I'd also know why discounting people by algorithmic complexity (or some other function) might be the right thing to do.

Stephen> Mentioning quantum mechanics serves only as a distraction.

In classical physics, the universe doesn't branch, but instead everything is predetermined by the starting conditions and laws of physics. There is no issue of people in unequal-weight branches, which I think might be analogous to people with different algorithmic complexities. That's why I brought up QM.