I didn’t really read much of the post, but I think you are rejecting weighting people by simplicity unfairly here.
Imagine you flip a fair coin until it comes up tails, and either A) you suffer if you flip >100 times, or B) you suffer if you flip <100 times. I think you should prefer action A.
However if you think about there as being a countable collection of possible outcomes, one for each possible number of flips, you are are creating “infinite” suffering rather than “finite” suffering, so you should prefer B.
I think the above argument for B is wrong and similar to the argument you are giving.
Note that the choice of where we draw the boundary between outcomes mattered, and similarly the choice of where we draw the boundary between people in your reasoning matters. You need to make choices about what counts as different people vs same people for this reasoning to even make sense, and even if it does make sense, you are still not taking seriously the proposal that we care about the total simplicity of good/bad experience rather than the total count of good/bad experience.
Indeed, I think the lesson of the whole infinite ethics thing is mostly just grappling with we don’t understand how to talk about total count in the infinite case. But I don’t see the argument for wanting to talk about count in the first place. It feels like a property of where you are drawing the boundaries, rather than what is actually there. In the simple cases, we can just draw boundaries between people and declare that our measure is the uniform measure on this finite set, but then once we declare that to be our measure, we interact with it as a measure.
Sure, we should put more weight on the suffering from flipping a single tail in B than the suffering from flipping a thousand heads followed by a tail in A (by a factor of 21000 times). But (at least intuitively) that’s because the former is more probable; there’s (roughly speaking) 21000 universes in which we flip a single tail for every one where we flip a thousand heads followed by a tail. This doesn’t generally seem relevant to the scenarios described in the post, where we’re specifying possibilities to compare, but of course it’s worth tracking in general, where simple phenomena are more likely.
there’s (roughly speaking) 21000 universes in which we flip a single tail for every one where we flip a thousand heads followed by a tail
This follows only if you assume that all probability measures must derive from some underlying uniform measure over a finite set, but there’s no reason that this has to be the case. In quantum mechanics, for instance, there’s no obvious underlying set on which the uniform measure gives the Born probabilities. Or if we’re considering an infinite set of possibilities like in this post, there is no uniform probability measure we can use. That’s arguably the source of the paradoxes, and one possible resolution is to allow non-uniform measures such as the simplicity prior.
I didn’t really read much of the post, but I think you are rejecting weighting people by simplicity unfairly here.
Imagine you flip a fair coin until it comes up tails, and either A) you suffer if you flip >100 times, or B) you suffer if you flip <100 times. I think you should prefer action A.
However if you think about there as being a countable collection of possible outcomes, one for each possible number of flips, you are are creating “infinite” suffering rather than “finite” suffering, so you should prefer B.
I think the above argument for B is wrong and similar to the argument you are giving.
Note that the choice of where we draw the boundary between outcomes mattered, and similarly the choice of where we draw the boundary between people in your reasoning matters. You need to make choices about what counts as different people vs same people for this reasoning to even make sense, and even if it does make sense, you are still not taking seriously the proposal that we care about the total simplicity of good/bad experience rather than the total count of good/bad experience.
Indeed, I think the lesson of the whole infinite ethics thing is mostly just grappling with we don’t understand how to talk about total count in the infinite case. But I don’t see the argument for wanting to talk about count in the first place. It feels like a property of where you are drawing the boundaries, rather than what is actually there. In the simple cases, we can just draw boundaries between people and declare that our measure is the uniform measure on this finite set, but then once we declare that to be our measure, we interact with it as a measure.
Sure, we should put more weight on the suffering from flipping a single tail in B than the suffering from flipping a thousand heads followed by a tail in A (by a factor of 21000 times). But (at least intuitively) that’s because the former is more probable; there’s (roughly speaking) 21000 universes in which we flip a single tail for every one where we flip a thousand heads followed by a tail. This doesn’t generally seem relevant to the scenarios described in the post, where we’re specifying possibilities to compare, but of course it’s worth tracking in general, where simple phenomena are more likely.
This follows only if you assume that all probability measures must derive from some underlying uniform measure over a finite set, but there’s no reason that this has to be the case. In quantum mechanics, for instance, there’s no obvious underlying set on which the uniform measure gives the Born probabilities. Or if we’re considering an infinite set of possibilities like in this post, there is no uniform probability measure we can use. That’s arguably the source of the paradoxes, and one possible resolution is to allow non-uniform measures such as the simplicity prior.