I don't know how to respond to this or Morendil's second comment. I feel like I am missing something obvious to everyone else but when I read explanations I feel like they are talking about a completely unrelated topic.

Things like this:

You seem to be confused about free will. Keep reading the Sequences and you won't be.

Confuse me because as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with free will. I don't care about free will. I care about what happens when a perfect predictor enters the room.

Is such a thing just completely impossible? I wouldn't have expected the answer to this to be Yes.

If you do know what the prediction is, then the way in which you react to that prediction determines which prediction you'll hear. For example, if I walk up to someone and say, "I'm good at predicting people in simple problems, I'm truthful, and I predict you'll give me $5," they won't give me anything. Since I know this, I won't make that prediction. If people did decide to give me $5 in this sort of situation, I might well go around making such predictions.

Okay, yeah, so restrict yourself only to the situations where people will give you the $5 even though you told them the prediction. This is a good example of my frustration. I feel like your response is completely irrelevant. Experience tells me this is highly unlikely. So what am I missing? Some key component to free will? A bad definition of "perfect predictor"? What?

To me the scenario seems to be as simple as: If Omega predicts X, X will happen. If X wouldn't have happened, Omega wouldn't predict X.

I don't see how including "knowledge of the prediction" into X makes any difference. I don't see how whatever definition of free will you are using makes any difference.

"Go read the Sequences" is fair enough, but I wouldn't mind a hint as to what I am supposed to be looking for. "Free will" doesn't satiate my curiosity. Can you at least tell me why Free Will matters here? Is it something as simple as, "You cannot predict past a free will choice?"

As it is right now, I haven't learned anything other than, "You're wrong."

ISTM the problem of Boltzmann brains is irrelevant to the 50%-ers. Presumably, the 50%-ers are rational--e.g., willing to update on statistical studies significant at p=0.05. So they don't object to the statistics of the situation; they're objecting to the concept of "creating a billion of you", such that you don't know which one you are. If you had offered to roll a billion-sided die to determine their fate (check your local tabletop-gaming store), there would be no disagreement.

Of course, this problem of identity and continuity has been hashed out on OB/LW before. But the Boltzmann-brain hypothesis doesn't require more than one of you--just a lot of other people, something the 50%-ers have no philosophical problem with. It's a challenge for a solipsist, not a 50%-er.

[Rosencrantz has been flipping coins, and all of them are coming down heads]

Guildenstern: Consider: One, probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two, probability is not operating as a factor. Three, we are now held within un-, sub- or super-natural forces. Discuss.

Rosencrantz: What?

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

If you are responding to a hypothetical that tests a mathematical model, and your response doesn't use math, and doesn't hinge on a consciousness, infinity, or impossibility from the original problem domain, your response is likely irrelevant.

"The model used in this hypothetical does not meaningfully correspond to reality" seems relevant and not to fall under those categories, though it may count as impossibility. A lot of objections to hypotheticals, from what I've seen, stem from this conceptual problem but people rarely come out and say this bluntly.

you need to do some formatting on that link. looks like your (] got switched around.

I may be in the minority in this respect, but I like it when Less Wrong is in crisis. The LW community is sophisticated enough to (mostly) avoid affective spirals, which means it produces more and better thought in response to a crisis. I believe that, e.g., the practice of going to the profile of a user you don't like and downvoting every comment, regardless of content, undermines Less Wrong more than any crisis has or will.

Furthermore, I think the crisis paradigm is what a community of developing rationalists ought to look like. The conceit of students passively absorbing wisdom at the feet of an enlightened teacher is far from the mark. How many people can you think of, who mastered any subject by learning in this way?

That said... both "sides" of the gender crisis are repeating themselves, which strongly suggests they have nothing new to say. So I say Eliezer is right. If you can't understand the other side's perspective by now--if you still have no basis for agreement after all this discussion--you need to acknowledge that you have a blind spot here and either re-read with the intent to understand rather than refute, or just avoid talking about it.

Thanks but no thanks. I do know this really really basic stuff - I just don't agree. Instead of just postulating that all explanations have to be tied to prediction, why don't you try to rebut the argument. Again: Inhabitants of a Hume world are right to explain their world with this Hume-world theory. They just happen to live in a world where no prediction is possible. So explanation should be conceived independently of prediction. Not every explanation needs to be tied to prediction.

Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers.

well, being a consequentialist is a particular adaptation you can execute. "Consequentialist" is a subset of "Adaption Excecuter"

Humans certainly come much closer to pure consequentialism - of explicitly representing a goal and calculating optimal actions based upon the environment you observe to achieve that goal - than any other creature does.

All animals except for humans had no explicit notion of maximizing the number of children they had, or looking after their own long-term health. In humans, it seems evolution got close to building a consequentialist agent...

Clarification: evolution did not build human brains from scratch. Humans, like all known life on earth, are adaptation executers. The key difference is that thanks to highly developed frontal lobes, humans can predict the future more powerfully than other animals. Those predictions are handled by adaptation-executing parts of the brain in the same way as immediate sense input.

For example, consider the act of eating bacon. A human can extrapolate from the bacon to a pattern of bacon-eating to a future of obesity, health risks, and reduced social status (including greater difficulty finding a mate). This explains why humans can dither over whether to eat bacon, while a dog just scarfs it down--dogs can't predict the future that way. (The frontal lobes also distinguish between bad/good/better/best actions--hence the vegetarian's decision to abstain from bacon on moral grounds.)

Eliezer's body of writing on evolutionary psychology and P.J. Eby's writing on PCT and personal effectiveness seem to be regarded as incompatible by some commenters here (and I don't want to hijack this thread into yet another PCT debate), but they both support the proposition that akrasia and other "sub-optimal" mental states result from a brain processing future-predictions with systems that evolved to handle data from proximate environmental inputs and memory.

But is it true? Do young folks have more of an ability to unlearn falsehoods than old folks?