LESSWRONG
LW

All of Elusu's Comments + Replies

Unspeakable Morality
Elusu00

I would take Bob's deal if either adequately compensated or convinced that the premise was true. I already have done work for pay that was so unpleasant I'd rather be tortured for a short time than do that sort of work again, and time wasted is partial death anyway.

As for our culture in general, this deal is very very common. Many people watch someone from another universe, a 'fictional person' being tortured to death for their entertainment, and there isn't any proof that the characters in, say, Saw, aren't real people somewhere. Now, before we come dow... (read more)

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2Jiro
Likewise, if you watch fiction where people are happy, there isn't any proof that the existence of a happy character in your fiction isn't associated with a real person somewhere who is suffering. Thinking about the possibility that there's a suffering person who corresponds to fiction about a suffering fictional character, but not thinking about the possibility that there's a suffering person who corresponds to a happy fictional character, or for that matter the possibility that there's a suffering person (created by a perverse Omega) who comes into existence whenever you eat a slice of pizza is a form of availability bias. It's easier to imagine the former since your mind is processing the concept of suffering at the time, but there's no actual reason to expect that that pair is any more closely connected than any other arbitrary pair.
The Truly Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
Elusu10

I am a dedicated Paperclipper. Ask anyone who knows me well enough to have seen me in a Staples!

As such, I use my lack of human arrogance and postulate that at least some of the entities playing the IPD have intelligence on the order of my own. I do not understand what they are playing for, "1 million human lives" means virtually nothing to me, especially in comparison to a precious precious paperclip, but I assume by hypothesis that the other parties are playing a game similar enough to my own that we can communicate and come to an arrangement.

N... (read more)

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4Clippy
Prove it. You can't just create an account, claim to be a Paperclipper, and expect people to believe you. Anyone who did so would be using an extremely suboptimal inference engine.