Do you mind telling me how you think he's being uncharitable? I agree mostly with your first two statements. (If you don't want to put it on this public forum because hot debated topic etc I'd appreciate it if you could PM; I won't take you down the 'let's argue feminism' rabbit-hole.)

(I've always wondered if there was a way to rebut him, but I don't know enough of the relevant sciences to try and construct an argument myself, except in syllogistic form. And even then, it seems his statements on feminists are correct.)

I think this is a good argument. Thanks.

After some thought on why your argument sounded unsatisfatory to me, I decided that I have a much more abstract, much less precise argument, to do with things like the beginning of epistemology.

In the logcial beginning, I know nothing about the territory. However, I notice that I have 'experiences.' However, I have nore ason for believing that these experiences are 'real' in any useful sense. So, I decide to base my idea of truth on the usefulness of helping me predict further experiences. 'The sun rises every morning,' in this view, is actually 'it will seem to me that every time there's this morning-thing I'll see the sun rise.' All hypotheses (liike maya and boltzmann brains) that say that these experiences are not 'real,' as long as I have no reason to doubt 'reality,' form part of this inscrutable probability noise in my probability assignments. Therefore, even if I was randomed into existence a second ago, it's still rational to do everything and say "I have no issues with being a boltzmann brain - however it's just part of my probability noise.'

I haven't fleshed out precisely the connection between this reasoning and not worrying about Carroll's argument - it seems as if I'm viewing myself as an implementation-independent process trying to reason about its implementation, and asking what reasoning holds up in that view.

I'm interested in your calling it 'paying in sanity.' Are you referring to the insanity of believing in Bengali babus, or the fact that they're preserving their own sanity in some way by not going to a real doctor for things they know they can't afford?

Indeed, 'being poor is expensive' is related to how they frame this fact. From the end of the same chapter:

The poor seem to be trapped by the same kinds of problems that afflict the rest of us—lack of information, weak beliefs, and procrastination among them. It is true that we who are not poor are somewhat better educated and informed, but the difference is small because, in the end, we actually know very little, and almost surely less than we imagine. Our real advantage comes from the many things that we take as given. We live in houses where clean water gets piped in—we do not need to remember to add Chlorin to the water supply every morning. The sewage goes away on its own—we do not actually know how. We can (mostly) trust our doctors to do the best they can and can trust the public health system to figure out what we should and should not do. We have no choice but to get our children immunized—public schools will not take them if they aren’t—and even if we somehow manage to fail to do it, our children will probably be safe because everyone else is immunized. Our health insurers reward us for joining the gym, because they are concerned that we will not do it otherwise. And perhaps most important, most of us do not have to worry where our next meal will come from. In other words, we rarely need to draw upon our limited endowment of self-control and decisiveness, while the poor are constantly being required to do so. We should recognize that no one is wise, patient, or knowledgeable enough to be fully responsible for making the right decisions for his or her own health. For the same reason that those who live in rich countries live a life surrounded by invisible nudges, the primary goal of health-care policy in poor countries should be to make it as easy as possible for the poor to obtain preventive care, while at the same time regulating the quality of treatment that people can get. An obvious place to start, given the high sensitivity to prices, is delivering preventive services for free or even rewarding households for getting them, and making getting them the natural default option when possible. Free Chlorin dispensers should be put next to water sources; parents should be rewarded for immunizing their children; children should be given free deworming medicines and nutritional supplements at school; and there should be public investment in water and sanitation infrastructure, at least in densely populated areas. As public health investments, many of these subsidies will more than pay for themselves in the value of reduced illness and death, and higher wages—children who are sick less often go to school more and earn more as adults. This does not mean that we can assume that these will automatically happen without intervention, however. Imperfect information about benefits and the strong emphasis people put on the immediate present limit how much effort and money people are willing to invest even in very inexpensive preventive strategies. And when they are not inexpensive, there is of course always the question of money. As far as treatment is concerned, the challenge is twofold: making sure that people can afford the medicines they need (Ibu Emptat, for one, clearly could not afford the asthma medicine that her son needed), but also restricting access to medicines they don’t need as a way to prevent growing drug resistance. Because regulating who sets up a practice and decides to call himself a doctor seems to be beyond the control of most governments in developing countries, the only way to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistance and the overuse of high-potency drugs may be to put maximal effort into controlling the sale of these drugs. All this sounds paternalistic, and in a way, it certainly is. But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren’t we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it? It not only ensures that we take care of ourselves better than we would if we had to be on top of every decision, but also, by freeing us from having to think about these issues, it gives us the mental space we need to focus on the rest of our lives. This does not absolve us of the responsibility of educating people about public health. We do owe everyone, the poor included, as clear an explanation as possible of why immunization is important and why they have to complete their course of antibiotics. But we should recognize—indeed assume—that information alone will not do the trick. This is just how things are, for the poor, as for us.

Thanks for your comment.

My issue is much 'earlier' in terms of logic. When I started reading that post, the Boltzmann brain problem seemed like a non-problem; an inevitable conclusion that people were unwilling to accept for reasons of personal bias - analogous to how most LWers would view someone who insists on metaphysical free will.

Even if certain facts about the universe didn't solve the issue, it seems to me that Carroll would still want to find reasons that we weren't Boltzmann brains. Now, from my own interest in entropy and heat death, I had long ago concluded that I might, right now, be part of a random fluctuation that is gone the next moment; in fact, I had concluded that every moment of my existence turns up somewhere during heat death. That's not an issue, as far as I can see - whatever fact we see about the universe, that would just be part of this fluctuation (I don't know about this acceleration thing - my technical understanding of the issue is not good enough, but I'm willing to take your and Carroll's words for it). At this level, 'we're part of a random fluctuation' is one of those uninteresting hypotheses like maya that could very well be true but are unverifiable. (Continued adherence to ordered laws can't really be considered evidence, since we may have just popped into existence a second ago with memories as we have. It truly can predict everything.)

But then, Carroll argues that believing you're a Boltzmann brain is inconsistent, since you can't trust your own brain which is a product of a random fluctuation. Of course, I don't believe I'm a Boltzmann brain, I just note that no experience (modulo expanding universe) contradicts the hypothesis and therefore I should reason without giving a shit about it. However, Carroll's argument gives me pause, and I can't really see whether I should consider it seriously.

From Poor Economics by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Bannerjee

There is potentially another reason the poor may hold on to beliefs that might seem indefensible: When there is little else they can do, hope becomes essential. One of the Bengali doctors we spoke to explained the role he plays in the lives of the poor as follows: “The poor cannot really afford to get treated for anything major, because that involves expensive things like tests and hospitalization, which is why they come to me with their minor ailments, and I give them some little medicines which make them feel better.” In other words, it is important to keep doing something about your health, even if you know that you are not doing anything about the big problem. In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors.

I should have been clearer, sorry. Facebook is less inconvenient on two non-trivial counts: there are other reasons to open it (whereas a birthday diary will only have information related to birthdays and similar stuff), and it records the birthdays without any effort on your part.

Quite well, I thought. We were talking for four or so hours.