PhilGoetz

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Stop right there at "Either abiogenesis is extremely rare..."  I think we have considerable evidence that biogenesis is rare--our failure to detect any other life in the universe so far.  I think we have no evidence at all that biogenesis is not rare.  (Anthropic argument.)

Stop again at "I don't think we need to take any steps to stop it from doing so in the future".  That's not what this post is about.  It's about taking steps to prevent people from deliberately constructing it.

If there is an equilibrium, It will probably be a world where half the bacteria is of each chirality. If there are bacteria of both kinds which can eat the opposite kind, then the more numerous bacteria will always replicate more slowly.

Eukaryotes evolve much more slowly, and would likely all be wiped out.

Yes, creating mirror life would be a terrible existential risk. But how did this sneak up on us? People were talking about this risk in the 1990s if not earlier. Did the next generation never hear of it?

All right, yes.  But that isn't how anyone has ever interpreted Newcomb's Problem.  AFAIK is literally always used to support some kind of acausal decision theory, which it does /not/ if what is in fact happening is that Omega is cheating.

But if the premise is impossible, then the experiment has no consequences in the real world, and we shouldn't consider its results in our decision theory, which is about consequences in the real world.

That equation you quoted is in branch 2, "2. Omega is a "nearly perfect" predictor.  You assign P(general) a value very, very close to 1."  So it IS correct, by stipulation.

But there is no possible world with a perfect predictor, unless it has a perfect track record by chance.  More obviously, there is no possible world in which we can deduce, from a finite number of observations, that a predictor is perfect.  The Newcomb paradox requires the decider to know, with certainty, that Omega is a perfect predictor.  That hypothesis is impossible, and thus inadmissible; so any argument in which something is deduced from that fact is invalid.

I appreciated this comment a lot.  I didn't reply at the time, because I thought doing so might resurrect our group-selection argument.  But thanks.

What about using them to learn a foreign vocabulary?  E.g., to learn that "dormir" in Spanish means "to sleep" in English.

PhilGoetz4-2

To reach statistical significance, they must have tested each of the 8 pianists more than once.

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