orthonormal comments on You're in Newcomb's Box - LessWrong

40 Post author: HonoreDB 05 February 2011 08:46PM

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Comment author: wedrifid 01 February 2011 09:07:25AM 7 points [-]

You weren't created by Prometheus; you were created by Azathoth, The God That is Evolution by Natural Selection. You are the product of an ongoing optimization process that is trying to maximize reproductive fitness. Azathoth wants you to maximize your number of descendants; if you fail to have descendants, Azathoth will try not to have created you. If your intelligence reduces your reproduction rate, Azathoth will try not to grant you intelligence. If the Darwinian-optimal choice conflicts with the moral one, Azathoth wants you to choose evil.

It would seem, then, that any decision theory that demands that you one-box (or that allows you to survive the similar Parfit's Hitchhiker problem), also demands that you try to maximize your reproductive fitness. In many cases this injunction would be benign: after all, Azathoth created our morality. But in far too many, it is repugnant; there can be no doubt that in many commonplace situations, Azathoth wants you to cheat, or rape, or murder. It seems that in such cases you should balance a decreased chance of having existed against the rest of your utility function. Do not worship Azathoth, unless you consider never having existed to be infinitely bad. But do make sacrifices.

Creating something that you predict will work is a different thing to killing things that don't work. In the case of a lot of evolutionary reasoning we can more or less get away with equating the two (as well as personifying) because the evolution happened over a large time scale with a relatively stable gradient. The individual generations can kind of be blurred in together. But when considering what we want to do we can't take this kind of short cut.

Doing the things that you describe as "what Azeroth wants" would, if all else was equal, lead us to expect that it is more likely that people similar to us will exist in the future. But when looking in the other direction we don't conclude that submitting to Azeroth makes you more likely exist but rather that the people who do exist are less likely to betray Azeroth.

All of this is basically an elaboration of "No, part two is not a Newcomblike decision task".

Comment author: orthonormal 05 February 2011 10:52:59PM 3 points [-]

NB: Azathoth, not Azeroth.

Comment author: wedrifid 06 February 2011 05:34:29AM *  1 point [-]

cough

I loved Warcraft III. Apparently it shows.