I was genuinely, truly, sincerely, honestly not able to distinguish you from someone who hadn't even heard of compatibilism.
If you think that's a problem, you probably should fix it :-) Or at least take this datapoint into consideration :-P
about what you were communicating to me
Actually, I was having a reasonable conversation with entirelyuseless when you jumped in and sneered at that "sort of people", those uncough peasants whose presence pollutes the rarefied air of LW with crass ignorance...
and sneered at that "sort of people", those uncough peasants whose presence pollutes the rarefied air of LW with crass ignorance...
Well, see, you understood I was sneering at you.
I on the other hand, still don't understand whether you were pretending at ignorance of compatibilism as a weird debating tactic ("1. Pretend that I don't know there exist people who think determinism is compatible with free will, 2. ??? 3.Profit!") or I just misread you that way.
You're given the option to torture everyone in the universe, or inflict a dust speck on everyone in the universe. Either you are the only one in the universe, or there are 3^^^3 perfect copies of you (far enough apart that you will never meet.) In the latter case, all copies of you are chosen, and all make the same choice. (Edit: if they choose specks, each person gets one dust speck. This was not meant to be ambiguous.)
As it happens, a perfect and truthful predictor has declared that you will choose torture iff you are alone.
What do you do?
How does your answer change if the predictor made the copies of you conditional on their prediction?
How does your answer change if, in addition to that, you're told you are the original?