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.

ygert comments on Another problem with quantum measure - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 November 2013 11:03AM

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

Comments (33)

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

Comment author: ygert 18 November 2013 06:23:34PM 0 points [-]

Clarification: The probability is orders of magnitude less. This is a difference more than maintained under exponential growth. Example: if p=0.1, q=0.01, then p^n=1/10^n, while q^n is 1/10^(2n). Thus for all n>0, p is at least 10 times q, and in fact is 10^n times q, a difference that rapidly grows as n grows. As you can see, far from making short work of it, exponential growth only broadens the gap.

Comment author: philh 19 November 2013 01:00:09AM 2 points [-]

What are analogs of p, q and n here?

It feels to me like you're assuming that P(the universe is increasing in measure) is a function of the universe's current measure, which seems odd. But if it's not, then (I believe Stuart's claim is) no matter how small the probability, an increasing universe eventually has enough value to make it a dominant hypothesis in terms of EV.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 20 November 2013 10:49:05AM *  0 points [-]

I am working on the assumption that we have a theory (of low probability) that posits that the universe is continually increasing its measure, rather than having an independent low probability of measure increase at every moment.