It is not obvious at all to me that the closeness (emotionally or physically) to someone changes the weight of their suffering.

Where they are does not change their suffering, but perhaps it changes the weight of your obligation to do something about it?

Maybe relevant to this post: the googolplex dust specks issue seems to be settled by nonlinearity/proximity.

Other people's suffering is non-additive because we value different people differently. The pain of a relative matters more to me than the pain of a stranger. A googolplex people can't all be important to me because I don't have enough neural circuitry for that. (Monkeysphere is about 150 people.) This means each subsequent person-with-dust-speck means less to me than the previous one, because they're further from me. The infinite sum may converge to a finite value that I feel is smaller than 50 years of torture.

It seems that to shut up and multiply, an altruist/rationalist needs to accept a non-obvious axiom that each person's joy or suffering carries equal weight regardless of proximity to the altruist. I for one refuse to accept this axiom because it's immoral to me; think about it.

I would have made this into a longer post, but it works much better appended to this one:

It's clear that you can't just make willpower appear with a snap of your fingers, so I consider fuzzies to be utilons for many human utility functions. However, utilitarians have it even better -- if they get fuzzies by giving fuzzies to someone else, they get to count all of the fuzzies generated as utilons. I urge people focused on being effective utilitarians to keep this in mind if they feel like they're running low on fuzzies.

Generate a fantasy world with certain rules of magic. The goal is to figure out precisely what those rules are, all the while working towards some end goal. Perhaps this could be run by a handful game masters who know exactly what the rules are supposed to be, or magics are input into a computer program, so no one knows for sure. One would promise to keep the rules secret once figure out. This would encourage proper hypothesis testing and thoughtful use of evidence, especially if resources are limited. I suspect this wouldn't just be a one-off, but a repeatable exercise if one had multiple worlds or the ability to arbitrarily generate the system. Perhaps one could engage in duels using the uncovered magics, and would be able to encourage creativity by applying these in different ways. I'd imagine one could use systems much like those in role playing games, but but qualitatively based perhaps?

There was a card game based around hypotheses in a class I took once which I've improved upon somewhat here: https://lordregexrationalist.wordpress.com/2015/09/29/rationalist-belief-card-game/

While developing a rationality metric is obviously crucial, I have this nagging suspicion that what it may take is simply a bunch of committed wanna-be rationalists to just get together and, well, experiment and teach and argue, etc with each other in person regularly, try to foster explicit social rules that support rather than inhibit rationality, and so on.

From there, at least use a fuzzy this "seems" to work/not work type metric, even if it's rather subjective and imprecise, as a STARTING POINT, until one can more precisely do that, until one gets a better sense of exactly what to look for, explicitly.

But, my main point is my suspicion that "do it, even if you're not entirely sure yet what you're doing, just do it anyways and try to figure it out on the fly" may actually be what it takes to get started. If nothing else, it'll produce some nice case study in failure that at least one can look at and say "okay, let's actually try to work out what we did wrong here"

EDIT: hrm... maybe I ought reconsider my position. Will leave this up, at least for now, but with the added note that now I'm starting to suspect myself of basically just trying to "solve the problem without having to, well, actually solve the problem"

<MRAmes> I want a sensory modality for regular expressions.

I approve.

Near as I can tell, you're describing the same conjunction rule from your previous comment!

This conjunction rule says that a claim like 'The laws of physics always hold,' has less probability than, 'The laws of physics hold up until September 25, 2015 (whether or not they continue to hold after).'

Solomonoff Induction is an attempt to find a rule that says, 'OK, but the first claim accounts for nearly all of the probability assigned to the second claim.'

As Richard Kennaway has said, this only deals with cases where one hypothesis is a conjunction including another (e.g., "There is a god" and "There is a god called Bill"), but most cases in which we actually want to apply OR aren't like that; they're more like "geocentric astronomy with circular orbits plus epicycles" and "heliocentric astronomy with elliptical orbits".

Could you not argue Occam's Razor from the conjunction fallacy? The more components that are required to be true, the less likely they are all simultaneously true. Propositions with less components are therefore more likely, or does that not follow?

If I missed something along the line, I'm really willing to learn.

kamenin on Collapse Postulates