Beluga

One of the more speculative solutions of the Fermi paradox is that all civilizations decide to stay home, thereby meta-cause other civilizations to stay home too, and thus allow the Fermi paradox to have a nice solution. (I remember reading this idea in Paul Almond’s writings about evidential decision theory,...

Consider Nick Bostrom's Incubator Gedankenexperiment, phrased as a decision problem. In my mind, this provides the purest and simplest example of a non-trivial anthropic decision problem. In an otherwise empty world, the Incubator flips a coin. If the coin comes up heads, it creates one human, while if the coin...