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In response to
[suggestion] New Meetup Tab
Also, assuming you assign utility to lifetime as a function of life quality in such a way that for any constant quality longer life has strictly higher (or lower) utility than shorter life, then either you can't assign any utility to actually infinite immortality, or you can't differentiate between higher-quality and lower-quality immortality, or you can't represent utility as a real number.
Could you explain that? Representing the quality of each day of your life with a real number from a bounded range, and adding them up with exponential discounting to get your utility, seems to meet all those criteria.
Sadly, that only works on a natural-selection basis, so the ethics boards forbid us from doing this. If they never see anyone actually failing to survive, they won't change their behavior.
Can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Videotape the whole thing so the next one has even more evidence.
No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
I have some friends who do... At least insofar as things like "I don't have to worry about finances because God is watching over me, so I won't bother trying to keep a balanced budget." Then again, being financially irresponsible (a behaviour I find extremely hard to understand and sympathize with) seems to be common-ish, and not just among people who think God will take care of their problems.
I think that's mostly because money is too abstract, and as long as you get by you don't even realize what you've lost. Survival is much more real.
In response to
Rationality Quotes February 2013
Judge a book by its cover. The author and publisher selected that design to represent the book's content and tone. #MoreSensibleSayings
You don't "judge" a book by its cover; you use the cover as additional evidence to more accurately predict what's in the book. Knowing what the publisher wants you to assume about the book is preferable to not knowing.
But that would mean that the utility of 50% chance of 1 day and 50% chance of 3 days is 0.5*1+0.5*1.75=1.375, which is different from the utility of two days that you would expect.
You can't calculate utilites anyway; there's no reason to assume that u(n days) should be 0.5 * (u(n+m days) + u(n-m days)) for any n or m. If you want to include immortality, you can't assign utilities linearly, although you can get arbitrarily close by picking a higher factor than 0.5 as long as it's < 1.
In response to
Rationality Quotes February 2013
If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence? If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?
--Sam Harris
Put them in a situation where they need to use logic and evidence to understand their environment and where understanding their environment is crucial for their survival, and they'll figure it out by themselves. No one really believes God will protect them from harm...
In response to
The Blue-Minimizing Robot
What is the difference between a smart 'shoot lasers at "blue" things' robot and a really dumb 'minimize blue' robot with a laser?
A really smart 'shoot lasers at "blue" things' robot will shoot at blue things if there are any, and will move in a programmed way if there aren't. All its actions are triggered by the situation it is in; and if you want to make it smarter by giving it an ability to better distinguish actually-blue from blue-looking things, then any such activity must be triggered as well. If you program it to shoot at projectors that project blue things it won't become smarter, it will just shoot at some non-blue things. If you paint it blue and put a mirror in front of it it will shoot at itself, and if you program it to not shoot at blue things that look like itself it won't become smarter, it will just shoot at fewer blue things. If anything it shoots at doesn't cease to be blue or you give it a blue laser or camera lens, it will just continue shooting because it doesn't care about blue things or shooting; it just shoots when it sees blue. It certainly won't create blue things to shoot at.
A really dumb 'minimize blue' robot with a laser will shoot at anything blue it sees, but if shooting at something doesn't make it stop being blue, it will stop shooting at it. If there's nothing blue around it will search for blue things. If you paint it blue and put a mirror in front of it it will shoot at itself. If you give it a blue camera lens it will shoot at something, stop shooting, shoot at something different, stop shooting, move around, shoot at something, stop shooting, etc, and eventually stop moving and shooting altogether and weep. If instead of the camera lens you give it a blue laser it will become terribly confused.
Yeah, it can. You still run into the problem that a one in a zillion chance of actual immortality is more valuable than any amount of finite lifespan, though, so as long as the probability of actual immortality isn't zero, chasing after it will be the only thing that guides your decision.
Actually, it seems you can solve the immortality problem in ℝ after all, you just need to do it counterintuitively: 1 day is 1, 2 days is 1.5, 3 days is 1.75, etc, immortality is 2, and then you can add quality. Not very surprising in fact, considering immortality is effectively infinity and |ℕ| < |ℝ|.
Suppose that you die, and God offers you a deal. You can spend 1 day in Hell, and he will give you 2 days in Heaven, and then you will spend the rest of eternity in Purgatory (which is positioned exactly midway in utility between heaven and hell). You decide that it's a good deal, and accept. At the end of your first day in Hell, God offers you the same deal: 1 extra day in Hell, and you will get 2 more days in Heaven. Again you accept. The same deal is offered at the end of the second day.
This isn't a paradox about unbounded utility functions but a paradox about how to do decision theory if you expect to have to make infinitely many decisions. Because of the possible failure of the ability to exchange limits and integrals, the expected utility of a sequence of infinitely many decisions can't in general be computed by summing up the expected utility of each decision separately.
This isn't a paradox about unbounded utility functions but a paradox about how to do decision theory if you expect to have to make infinitely many decisions.
I believe it's actually a problem about how to do utility-maximising when there's no maximum utility, like the other problems. It's easy to find examples for problems in which there are infinitely many decisions as well as a maximum utility, and none of those I came up with are in any way paradoxical or even difficult.
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