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.

Lumifer comments on Should we go all in on existential risk? - Considering Effective Altruism - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Capla 10 November 2014 11:23PM

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

Article Navigation

Comments (43)

Comments (43)

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

Comment author: Lumifer 16 November 2014 08:01:33PM *  0 points [-]

But when you consider your subjective credence about the event "the next toss will come up heads", and integrate the conditional probabilities over the range of parameter values, what you end up with is a constant. No uncertainty.

Really? You can estimate your subjective credence without any uncertainty at all? You integration of the conditional probabilities over the range of parameter values involves only numbers you are fully certain about?

I don't believe you.

Approximately none of the decision theory corpus applies to this case

So this decision theory corpus is crippled and not very useful. Why should we care much about it?

So decision theory with imprecise credence is currently unsolved.

Yes, of course, but life in general is "unsolved" and you need to make decisions on a daily basis, not waiting for a proper decision theory to mature.

I think you overestimate the degree to which abstractions are useful when applied to reality.

Comment author: AlexSchell 16 November 2014 10:42:44PM -1 points [-]

The fact that the assumptions of an incredibly useful theory of rational decisionmaking turn out not to be perfectly satisfied does not imply that we get to ignore the theory. If we want to do seemingly crazy things like diversifying charitable donations, we need an actual positive reason, such as the prescriptions of a better model of decisionmaking that can handle the complications. Just going with our intuition that we should "diversify" to "reduce risk", when we know that those intuitions are influenced by well-documented cognitive biases, is crazy.

This has been incredibly unproductive I can't believe I'm still talking to you kthxbai

Comment author: Lumifer 17 November 2014 12:29:03AM -1 points [-]

I can't believe I'm still talking to you kthxbai

Ah.

Thank you for clarity.

Comment author: Capla 17 November 2014 11:58:37PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure what I'm should take away from that exchange.

Comment author: AlexSchell 21 November 2014 05:49:15PM 0 points [-]

Ignore the last sentence and take the rest for what it's worth :) I did the equivalent of somewhat tactlessly throwing up my hands after concluding that the exchange stopped being productive (for me at least, if not for spectators) a while ago.

Comment author: Lumifer 18 November 2014 02:23:36AM 0 points [-]

Anything in particular you are wondering about? :-)

Comment author: Capla 18 November 2014 03:03:40AM 0 points [-]

Just my original question. I'm not sure if diversification to mitigate charitable risk is a matter of preference or numeric objectivity.

Comment author: Lumifer 18 November 2014 05:25:35AM -1 points [-]

Try making up your own mind..? :-)

Comment author: Capla 18 November 2014 09:31:40PM *  0 points [-]

Someone told me not to.

(this is a joke)

Comment author: Lumifer 18 November 2014 09:36:18PM 0 points [-]

At this point you're supposed to fry your circuits and 'splode.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit