I do find it annoying because I'll likely never be able to got to one for geographical reasons, but on the other hand I can see why it makes sense given how large a part of the readers DO live in the US.

When should you punish someone for a crime they will commit in the future?

Easy. When they can predict you well enough and they think you can predict them well enough that if you would-counterfactually punish them for committing a crime in the future, it influences the probability that they will commit the crime by enough to outweigh the cost of administering the punishment times the probability that you will have to do so. Or when you want to punish them for an unrelated reason and need a pretext.

Not every philosophical question needs to be complicated.

I sought out the dangerous idea right after I heard about the commotion, and I was disappointed. I discussed the idea, and thought about it hard, I'm still a bit unsure if I figured out why people think of the idea as dangerous, but to me it seems to be just plain silly.

I don't regret knowing it. I figured right from the start that the probability of it actually being dangerous was low enough that I don't need to care about it, and seems that my initial guess was right on the spot. And I really do dislike not knowing about things that everybody says are really dangerous and can cause me and my loved ones much agony for reasons no one is allowed to tell

I'm curious.

I am in the following epistemic situation: a) I missed, and thus don't know, BANNED TOPIC b) I do, however understand enough of the context to grasp why it was banned (basing this confidence on the upvotes to my old comment here

Out of the members here who share roughly this position, am I the only one who - having strong evidence that EY is a better decision theorist than me, and understanding enough of previous LW discussions to realise that yes, information can hurt you in certain circumstances - is PLEASED that the topic was censored?

I mean, seriously. I never want to know what it was and I significantly resent the OP for continuing to stir the shit and (no matter how marginally) increasing the likelihood of the information being reposted and me accidentally seeing it.

Of course, maybe I'm miscalibrated. It would be interesting to know how many people are playing along to keep the peace, while actually laughing at the whole thing because of course no mere argument could possibly hurt them in their invincible mind fortresses.

(David Gerard, I'd be grateful if you could let me know if the above trips any cultishness flags.)

Although Nahuel has sisters in canon, their details are made up, including Allirea'a power and therefore how Allirea interacts with Demetri, Eleazar, et al.

Note that Eleazar did get a reading off Bella, albeit a brief and incomplete one.

Chapter 11:

Is Allirea + Eleazar thing canon? It sure doesn't seem to follow from what we've seen before, unless Eleazar lied to Bella.

Sure it's true. Thats just Meaningless(Sliar())... I guess I don't seen why the selected portion would imply otherwise.

The Liars Paradox appears to be a special case of infinite recursion.

liar() {

NOT liar()

}

Straight forward. A debugging tool would detect an infinite recursion. An English speaking logician could call it 'meaningless'. Now consider the 'strengthened paradox':

"Everything written on the board in Room 33 is either false or meaningless."

This isn't translatable as a function. 'Meaningful' and 'meaningless' aren't values bivalent functions return so they shouldn't be values in our logic. Instead they should be thought of as flags for errors detected by our brain's debugging tool. But our debugging tool is embedded into the semantics of our language. We talk about sentences having the property of 'meaninglessness' instead of our brains not knowing what to do with the string of letters shown to it. You could probably build a language that returned a pseudo-value of "Meaningless" for infinitely recursive functions. It wouldn't "really" be a value, the program would just output a line that read "x = Meaningless" (not, and this is crucial, assign the variable the value of the string 'Meaningless') when asked to find Liar(x). That is basically what the human brain does.

When we get confused by the strengthened liar paradox we're committing a category error, thinking "meaningless" is a value when it is really an error message. In fact both versions of the paradox are meaningless (assuming 'meaningless' can be taken to mean something like 'Can't compute').

Of course it gets hairy since error messages have truth values too. But

Meaningless(Sliar()) = 1

Is not the same as

Sliar() =1

Thus there is no contradiction. Same will go for Meaningless(Meaningless(Sliar())).

Humans seem to have a built-in solution to this dilemma, in that if I were presented with this situation and another human, where the payoff was something like minus ten, zero, or plus ten cents for me, versus insta-death, nothing, or ten billion dollars for the other human, I would voluntarily let the other person win and I would expect the other person to do the same to me if our situations were reversed. This means humans playing against other humans will all do exceptionally well in these sorts of dilemmas.

So this seems like an intelligent decision theoretic design choice, along the lines of "Precommit to maximizing the gains of the agent with the high gains now, in the hope of acausally influencing the other agent to do the same, thus making us both better off if we ever end up in a true prisoner's dilemma with skewed payoff matrix."

If I believe the alien to be sufficiently intelligent/well-programmed, and if I expect the alien to believe me to also be sufficiently intelligent/well-programmed, I would at least consider the alien graciously letting me win the first option in exchange for my letting the alien win the second. Even if only one of the two options is ever presented, and the second is the same sort of relevant hypothetical as a Counterfactual Mugging.