You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

shminux comments on Is our continued existence evidence that Mutually Assured Destruction worked? - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: jkaufman 18 June 2013 02:40PM

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

Comments (67)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: shminux 18 June 2013 09:25:38PM 0 points [-]

I don't understand it, either. I mean, I understand the logic, I just don't understand how an assumption like that can ever be tested, short of Omega coming down to Earth and introducing a fellow simulation to us. Maybe we could talk about this at a meetup.

Comment author: cousin_it 18 June 2013 10:34:15PM *  3 points [-]

Here's a funny test: if many people flip coins to decide whether to have kids, and SSA is true, then the results should be biased toward "don't have kids". Bostrom's book discusses similar scenarios, I think, but I'm still pretty proud of coming up with them independently :-)

Comment author: jkaufman 19 June 2013 08:46:40PM 1 point [-]

the results should be biased toward "don't have kids"

Could you elaborate?

Comment author: cousin_it 20 June 2013 09:07:38AM *  1 point [-]

See chapter 9 of Bostrom's book. His analysis seems a little weird to me, but the descriptions of the scenarios are very nice and clear.

Comment author: [deleted] 19 June 2013 12:05:25AM 1 point [-]

Maybe we could talk about this at a meetup.

Good idea. We can make confusing anthropic stuff a future topic. Perhaps this weekend even.

Comment author: shminux 21 June 2013 06:00:01PM *  -1 points [-]

Huh, I thought the meetups are on hiatus for the summer, since they don't show up in the regular or irregular LW meetup announcements.

Comment author: [deleted] 23 June 2013 09:23:58PM *  0 points [-]

Not at all. I'm just too lazy to post them a lot of the time.

The general rule is every saturday at 15:30 at bennys.