All of R0k0's Comments + Replies

3PlaidX
Ah, that makes sense. In retrospect, this is quite simple: If you have a box of ten eggs, numbered 1 through 10, and a box of a thousand eggs, numbered 1 through 1000, and the eggs are all dumped out on the floor and you pick up one labeled EGG 3, it's just as likely to have come from the big box as the small one, since they both have only one egg labeled EGG 3. I don't buy bostrom's argument against the presumptuous philosopher though. Does anyone have a better one?

If the human race ends soon, there will be fewer people. Therefore, assign a lower prior to that. This cancels exactly the contribution from the doomsday argument.

0[anonymous]
And you get a prior arrived at through rationalization. Prior probability is not for grabs.
0PlaidX
Oh, I see. How are we sure it cancels exactly, though?

Essentially the only consistent low-level rebuttal to the doomsday argument is to use the self indication assumption (SIA).

What about rejecting the assumption that there will be finitely many humans? In the infinite case, the argument doesn't hold.

0AngryParsley
This is a bit off-topic, but are you the same person as Roko? If not, you should change your name.
1Vladimir_Nesov
But in the finite case it supposedly does. See least convenient possible world.

seems an arbitrary limit.

Your axiology is arbitrary. Everyone has arbitrary preferences, and arbitrary principles that generate preferences. You are arbitrary - you can either live with that or self-modify into something much less arbitrary like a fitness maximizer, and lose your humanity.

I think that the answer to this conundrum is to be found in Joshua Greene's dissertation. On page 202 he says:

"The mistake philosophers tend to make is in accepting rationalism proper, the view that our moral intuitions (assumed to be roughly correct) must be ultimately justified by some sort of rational theory that we’ve yet to discover ... a piece of moral theory with justificatory force and not a piece of psychological description concerning patterns in people’s emotional responses."

When Eliezer presents himself with this dilemma, the neural/h... (read more)

If you are not Roko, you should change your username to avoid confusion.