All of BenP's Comments + Replies

BenP10

Ah thanks. I should've been able to figure that out from your third thought experiment anyways.

BenP60

I'm unfamiliar with the terminology "2-sampling", "2-world", "3-world", etc. and a quick internet search has not turned up anything useful. Could you summarize what they mean or direct me to a place that explains them?

2cousin_it
I'd imagined these terms would be self-explanatory from the post :-) The numbers refer to variants of the Born rule where the exponent doesn't necessarily equal 2. For example, see page 6 of this paper by Aaronson.
BenP30

I'm confused here -- if the coin's randomness really is fundamental, and not a property of our ignorance, then it doesn't make sense to say that a being is too computationally weak to predict it -- no amount of computational strength would allow prediction

He stated that the randomness is being provided by a pseudorandom number generator.

BenP80

This model is missing a plausible evolutionary explanation for how U and C may have evolved. That's a pretty gaping hole because if we don't constrain U and C to being plausible under evolution then they can be given whatever motives, responsibilities, etc. that are convenient to fit the model to existing data (see Psychohistorian's epicycle comment).

3Scott Alexander
What do you mean? Do you mean the genetic explanation (as in "it was a mutation on the long arm of chromosome 20?") or do you mean the evolutionary pressures that were behind it? I tried to explain the evolutionary pressures behind it - eg a person who couldn't signal would be unsuccessful, a person who signaled but never acted on those signals would be unconvincing. If you think those pressures wouldn't be sufficient, why not? I don't have a play-by-play genetic explanation, but neither do a lot of well-established things.
1xamdam
yep