I disagree with this. The reason you shouldn't assign 50% to the proposition "I will win the lottery" is because you have some understanding of the odds behind the lottery. If a yes/no question which I have no idea about is asked, I am 50% confident that the answer is yes. The reason for this is point 2: provided I think a question and its negation are equally likely to have been asked, there is a 50% chance that the answer to the question you have asked is yes.

That's only reasonable if some agent is trying to maximize the information content of your answer. The vast majority of possible statements of a given length are false.

The logic requires that your donations are purely altruistically motivated and you only care for good outcomes.

E. g. take donating to one of the organizations A, or B for cancer research. If your donations are purely altruistic and the consequences are the same you should have no preference on which of the organizations finds a new treatment. You have no reason to distinguish the case of you personally donating $ 1000 to both organizations and someone else doing the same from you donating $2000 to A and someone else donating $2000 to B. And once the donations are made you should have no preference between A or B finding the new treatment.

So the equivalent to your personal portfolio when making investments aren't your personal donations, but the aggregate donations of everyone. And since you aren't the only one making donations the donations are already diversified, so you are free to pick something underrepresented with high yield (which will almost certainly still be underrepresented afterwards). If you manage 0.1% of a $ 10,000,000 portfolio with 90% in government bonds it makes no sense to invest any of that 0.1% in government bonds in the name of diversification.

That thought experiment doesn't make much sense. If the experiences were somehow switched, but everything else kept the same (i .e all your memories and associations of red are still connected to each other and everything else in the same way) you wouldn't notice the difference; everything would still match your memories exactly. If there even is such a thing as raw qualia there is no reason to suppose they are stable from one moment to the other; as long as the correct network of associations is triggered there is no evolutionary advantage either way.

Are you sure you aren't just pattern matching to similarity to known types of blackmail? Do you think it would be useful for an AI to classify it the same way (which was the starting point of this thread)?

Your link doesn't go into much detail, but it seems like he was convicted because he was lying and making up the negative consequences he threatened her with, and like he was going out of his way to make the consequences of selling to someone else as bad as possible rather than maximizing revenue (or at least making her believe so). That would qualify this case as blackmail under the definition above, unlike either of our hypothetical examples.

That's not blackmail at all. It seems like blackmail because of the questionable morality of selling secretly recorded sex tapes, but giving the movie star the chance to buy the tape first doesn't make the whole thing any less moral than it would be without that chance, and unlike real blackmail the movie star being known not to respond to blackmail doesn't help in any way.

Consider this variation: Instead of a secret tape the movie star voluntarily participated in an amateur porno that was intended to be publicly released from the beginning, but held up for some reason, and all that happened before the movie star became famous in the first place. The producer knows that releasing the tape will hurt her career and offers her to buy the tape to prevent it from being released. This doesn't seem like blackmail at all, and the only change was to the moral (and legal) status of releasing the tape, not to the trade.

Cheaper by enough to make up for the extra years you pay premiums in? E. g. getting life insurance at 25 will have cost less than getting life insurance at 40 by the time you are 60? If so, why would insurance companies set the rates that way? Are people who get life insurance early so much more responsible that they are significantly less likely to die even at higher ages?

You mostly talk about your new blog instead of the idea the post claims to be about, and the post largely sounds like an advertisement. Two paragraphs summarizing your idea and one sentence talking about the blog (preferably worded as a disclaimer instead of an advertisement) would have been better.

(Not Will, but I think I mostly agree with him on this point)

There is no such thing as an uniquely specified "next experience". There are going to be instances of you that remember being you and consider themselves the same person as you, but there is no meaningful sense in which exactly one of them is right. Granted, all instances of you that remember a particular moment will be in the future of that moment, but it seems silly to only care about the experiences of that subset of instances of you and completely neglect the experiences of instances that only share your memories up to an earlier point. If you weight the experiences more sensibly then in the case of a rigorously executed quantum suicide the bulk of the weight will be in instances that diverged before the decision to commit quantum suicide. There will be no chain of memory leading from the QS to those instances, but why should that matter?

Mere dualism isn't enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?

At a cursory glace the date you cite seems to be for the time the population they are descended from split from African populations, not for when they arrived in Australia. Genetic evidence cannot show where your ancestors lived, only how they were related to other populations (which might imply things about where they lived provided you already know that for the other populations)