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OrphanWilde comments on Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong Discussion

20 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 September 2015 10:45AM

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Comment author: Sebastian_Hagen 17 September 2015 01:12:16PM *  4 points [-]

Thus, I can never be more than one minus one-in-ten-billion sure that my sensory experience is even roughly correlated with reality. Thus, it would require extraordinary circumstances for me to have any reason to worry about any probability of less than one-in-ten-billion magnitude.

No. The reason not to spend much time thinking about the I-am-undetectably-insane scenario is not, in general, that it's extraordinarily unlikely. The reason is that you can't make good predictions about what would be good choices for you in worlds where you're insane and totally unable to tell.

This holds even if the probability for the scenario goes up.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 17 September 2015 02:57:32PM 1 point [-]

In the I-am-undetectably-insane scenario, your predictions about the worlds where you're insane don't even matter, because your subjective experience doesn't actually take place in those worlds anyways.