Wasn't one of the conclusions we arrived at in the quantum mechanics sequence that "observer" was a nonsense, mystical word?
After surviving a few hundred rounds of quantum suicide the next round will probably kill you.
Are you familiar with the story of the man who got the winning horse race picks in the mail the day before the race was run? Six times in a row his mysterious benefactor was right, even correctly calling a victory for a horse with forty-to-one odds. Now he gets an envelope in the mail from the same mysterious benefactor asking for $1,000 in exchange for the next week's picks. Are you saying he should take the deal and clean up?
I think it's is more akin to saying that "easy" could just as well mean difficult in some alien language, and so words don't mean anything and language is a farce. That's the true linguistic relativist position.
If you've ever taken a mathematics course in school, you yourself may have been introduced to a situation where it was believed that there were right and wrong ways to factor a number into primes. Unless you were an exceptionally good student, you may have disagreed with your teacher over the details of which way was right, and been punished for doing it wrong.
It strikes me as plainly apparent that math homework is not morality.
To say that Eliezer is a moral relativist because he realizes that a primality sorter might care about primality rather than morality, is equivalent to calling him a primality relativist because he realizes that a human might care about morality rather than primality.
It seems like it should be impossible to calculate a fudge factor into your calculations to account for the possibility that your calculations are totally wrong, because once you calculate it in it becomes part of your calculations, which could be totally wrong. Maybe I'm missing something here that would become apparent if I actually sat down and thought about the math, so if anybody has already thought about the math and can save me the time, I would appreciate it.
Argument #2 strikes me as eminently reasonable. I won't be voting.
Way to get trolled, Eliezer. The fact that OC's comment had nothing to do with the post it was attached to should really have tipped you off that he's really only interested in pushing your buttons.
This is pretty much your and Robin's blog, write whatever you want. You don't have to make excuses.
It seems like the people who are not happily married get a pretty good deal out of this, though? I'm not sure I understand how 90% of humanity ends up wishing death on the genie. Maybe 10% of humanity had a fulfilling relationship broken up, and 80% are just knee-jerk luddites.