Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

OpenThreadGuy

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

From the last thread:

From Costanza's original thread (entire text):

"This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant."

Meta:

How often should these be made? I think one every three months is the correct frequency.

Costanza made the original thread, but I am OpenThreadGuy. I am therefore not only entitled but required to post this in his stead. But I got his permission anyway.

Meta:

I still haven't figured out a satisfactory answer to the previous meta question, how often these should be made. It was requested that I make a new one, so I did.
I promise I won't quote the entire previous threads from now on. Blockquoting in articles only goes one level deep, anyway.

Well, lets say we posit some starting condition, say the condition of the universe on the day I turned 17. I am down one path from that initial condition, and a great many other worlds exist in which things went a little differently. I take it that it's not (unfortunately) a physical or logical impossibility that in one or more of those branches, I have ten years down the line committed a murder.

Now, there are a finite number of murder-paths, and a finite number of non-murder-paths, and my path is identical to one of them. But it seems to me that whether or not I murder someone, the total number of murder-paths and the total number of non-murder-paths is the same? Is this totally off base? I hope that it is.

Anyway, if that's true, then by not murdering, all I've done is put myself off of a murder-path. There's one less murder in my world, but not one less murder absolutely. So, fine, live in my world and don't worry about the others. But whence that rule? That seems arbitrary, and I'm not allowed to apply it in order to localize my ethical considerations in any other case.

So, fine, live in my world and don't worry about the others. But whence that rule? That seems arbitrary

That feeling of arbitrariness is, IMHO, worth exploring more carefully.

Suppose, for example, it turns out that we don't live in a Big World... that this is all there is, and that events either happen in this world or they don't happen at all. Suppose you somehow were to receive confirmation of this. Big relief, right? Now you really can reduce the total amount of whatever in all of existence everywhere, so actions have meaning again.

But then you meet ... (read more)

5Viliam_Bur14y

On a macro level, a Many Worlds model should be mathematically equal to One World + Probabilities model. Being unhappy that in 0.01% of Many Worlds you are a murderer, is like being unhappy that with probability 0.01% you are a murderer in One World. The difference is that in One World you can later say "I was lucky" or "I was unlucky", while in the Many Worlds model you can just say "this is a lucky branch" or "this is an unlucky branch". [...] At this point it seems to me that you are mixing a Many Worlds model with a naive determinism, and the problem is with the naive determinism. Imagine saying this: "on the day I turned 17, there is one fixed path towards the future, where I either commit a murder or don't, and the result is the same whatever I do". Is this right, or wrong, or confused, or...? Because this is what you are saying, just adding Many Worlds. The difference is that in One World model, if you say "I will flip a coin, and based on the result I will kill him or not" and you mean it, then you are a murderer with probability 50%, while in Many Worlds you are a murderer in 50% of branches. (Of course with the naive determinism the probability is also only in mind -- you were already determined to throw the coin with given direction and speed.) Simply speaking, in Many Worlds model all probabilities happen, but higher probabilities happen "more" and lower probabilities happen "less". You don't want to be a murderer? Then behave so that your probability of murdering someone is as small as possible! This is equally valid advice for One World and Many Worlds. [...] Because you can't influence what happen in the other branches. However, if you did something that could lead with some probability to other person's death (e.g. shooting at them and missing them), you should understand that it was a bad thing which made you (in some other branch) a murderer, so you should not do that again (but neither should you do that again in One World). On the other hand

3pragmatist14y

Good news! It is totally off base. There is nothing in quantum mechanics requiring that the number of branches corresponding to an arbitrary macroscopic event and its negation must be equal.

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 3

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