Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

lukeprog

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.

Ask away!

Previously: round 1, round 2, round 3

From the original thread:

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.

Ask away!

I don't think Aumann's agreement theorem is the problem here.

If QI is true, the only outcome I can observe is surviving.

What does it mean for QI to be true or false? What would you expect to happen differently? Certainly, whether or not QI is true, the only outcome you can observe is surviving, so I don't see how you're updating your belief.

If QI is true, I expect to observe myself surviving. If QI is false, I expect not to be able to observe anything. I don't know exactly what that means, but I don't feel like this confusion is the problem. I think that surviving thousand-to-one odds must be strong evidence that I am somehow immortal (if you disagree, we can make it 3^^^^3-to-one), and QI is the only form of immortality that I currently assign non-neglible probability to.

I briefly thought that this made QI a somehow priveleged hypothesis, because I can't observe the strongest evidence agains... (read more)

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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Stupid Questions Open Thread Round 4

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