There are, apparently, certain Eastern philosophies that permit and even celebrate logical contradiction. To what extent this is metaphorical I couldn't say, but I recently spoke to an adherent who quite firmly believed that a given statement could be both true and false. After some initial bewilderment, I verified that she wasn't talking about statements that contained both true and false claims, or were informal and thus true or false under different interpretations, but actually meant what she'd originally seemed to mean.
I didn't at first know how to argue such a basic axiom -- it seemed like trying to talk a rock into consciousness -- but on reflection, I became increasingly uncertain... (read more)
It seems to me that you are predicting the path of the pinball, but quickly enough that you don't realize you're doing it. It's such a fundamental axiom that if there is a clear downward path to a given position, this position will be reached, that it's easy to forget that it was originally reasoning about intermediate steps that led to this axiom. At most points the pinball can reach, it is expected to move down. At the next point, it's expected to move down again. You would inductively expect it to reach a point where it cannot move down anymore, and this point is the hole (or sometimes a fault in the machine).
Contrast with the hole being upraised, or blocked by some barrier. All of the paths you envision lead to a point other than the hole, so you conclude that the ball will land instead on some other array of points. There it's easier to see that gravity still requires path-based reasoning.
In case you're still active, I'm curious what your child's reasoning was for placing God in the pretend category. Like, did she know about Occam's Razor, or was she pattern matching God with other fantasies she's heard? I'm mostly curious because I don't think I've ever heard a perspective as undiluted as an Untheist's.
You forgot about MetaOmega, who gives you $10,000 if and only if No-mega wouldn't have given you anything, and O-mega, who kills your family unless you're an Alphabetic Decision Theorist. This comment doesn't seem specifically anti-UDT -- after all, Omega and No-mega are approximately equally likely to exist; a ratio of 1:1 if not an actual p of .5 -- but it still has the ring of Just Cheating. Admittedly, I don't have any formal way of telling the difference between decision problems that feel more or less legitimate, but I think part of the answer might be that the Counterfactual Mugging isn't really about how to act around superintelligences: It illustrates... (read more)
Gotcha. So, assuming that the actual Isaac Newton didn't rise to prominence*, are you thinking that human life would usually end before his equivalent came around and the ball got rolling? Most of our existential risks are manmade AFAICT. Or you think that we'd tend to die in between him and when someone in a position to build the LHC had the idea to build the LHC? Granted, him being "in a position to build the LHC" is conditional on things like a supportive surrounding population, an accepting government, etcetera; but these things are ephemeral on the scale of centuries.
To summarize, yes, some chance factor would def prevent us from building... (read more)
Are you responding to "Unless human psychology is expected to be that different from world to world?"? Because that's not my position, I'd think that most things recognizable as human will be similar enough to us that they'd build an LHC eventually. I guess I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at.
I'd agree that certain worlds would have the building of the LHC pushed back or moved forward, but I doubt there would be many where the LHC was just never built. Unless human psychology is expected to be that different from world to world?
I am extremely satisfied with this description; I hadn't personally thought of it in such specific terms, and this would be a perfect way to say it. I'll admit I'm a bit confused why you would pay before but not after, considering that either one is done by a person to whom the prophecy is given 50% less often.
The kind of person who pays to fight an infallible prophecy is the same kind of person to whom infallible prophecies are given 50% less often. In this case.
Edit as of June 13th, 2016: I no longer believe this to be easier to understand than traditional CM, but stand by the rest of it. Minor aesthetic edits made.
First post on the LW discussion board. Not sure if something like this has already been written, need your feedback to let me know if I’m doing something wrong or breaking useful conventions.
An alternative to the counterfactual mugging, since people often require it explained a few times before they understand it -- this one I think will be faster for most to comprehend because it arose organically, not seeming specifically contrived to create a dilemma between decision theories:
Pretend you live in a world... (read 347 more words →)
That second paragraph was hard for me. Seeing "a)" and "b)" repeated made me parse it as a jigsaw puzzle where the second "a)" was a subpoint of the first "b)", but then "c)" got back to the main sequence only to jump back to the "b)", the second subpoint of the first "b)". That didn't make any sense, so I tried to read each clause separately, and came up with "1. You are never safe. 2. You must understand. 3. On an emotional basis..." before becoming utterly lost. Only after coming back to it later did I get that repeated letters were references to previous letters.