I'll keep this quick: In general, the problem presented by the Mugging is this: As we examine the utility of a given act for each possible world we could be in, in order from most probable to least probable, the utilities can grow much faster than the probabilities shrink. Thus...
I'm interested in how easy it would be to simulate just one present-day person's life rather than an entire planet's worth of people. Currently our chatbots are bad enough that we could not populate the world with NPC's; the lone human would quickly figure out that everyone else was... different,...
I recently realized that, encouraged by LessWrong, I had been using a heuristic in my philosophical reasoning that I now think is suspect. I'm not accusing anybody else of falling into the same trap; I'm just recounting my own situation for the benefit of all. I actually am not 100%...
I play Starcraft:BW sometimes with my brothers. One of my brothers is much better than the rest of us combined. This story is typical: In a free-for-all, the rest of us gang up on him, knowing that he is the biggest threat. By sheer numbers we beat him down, but...
I am about to graduate from one of the only universities in the world that has a high concentration of high-caliber analytic philosophers who are theists. (Specifically, the University of Notre Dame, IN) So as not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I have sent out emails asking many of them...
This post is to raise a question about the demographics of rationality: Is rationality something that can appeal to low-IQ people as well? I don't mean in theory, I mean in practice. From what I've seen, people who are concerned about rationality (in the sense that it has on LW,...