I don’t think people realise how much astronomically more likely it is to truthfully be told “God created this paradise for you and your enormous circle of friends to reward an alien for giving him his wallet with zero valid reasoning whatsoever” than to be truthfully asked by that same Deity for your stuff in exchange for the distant unobservable happiness of countless strangers.
Why is this? I’m not immediately seeing why this is necessarily the case.
You’re far more likely to be a background character than the protagonist in any given story, so a theory claiming you’re the most important person in a universe with an enormous number of people has an enormous rareness penalty to overcome before you should believe it instead of that you’re just insane or being lied to. Being in a utilitarian high-leverage position for the lives of billions can be overcome by reasonable evidence, but for the lives of 3^^^^3 people the rareness penalty is basically impossible to overcome. Even if the story is true, most of the observers will be witnessing it from the position of tied-to-the-track, not holding the lever, so if you’d assign low prior expectation to being in the tied-to-the-track part of the story, you should assign an enormous factor lower of being in the decision-making part of it.
Sounds like you’re trying to argue from the anthropic principle that very important games are unlikely, but that’s some really fallacious reasoning that asserts a lot of things about what your utility function is like. “Protagonist” is a two-piece word. A very pain averse and unempathetic person might reasonably subjectively consider themselves the most important person in the universe, and assign negative ${a lot} points to them getting tortured to death, but that doesn’t mean they’re not getting tortured to death.
The apriori unlikelihood of finding oneself at the crux of history (or in a similarly rare situation) is a greatly underrated topic here, I suppose because it works corrosively against making any kind of special effort. If they had embraced a pseudo-anthropic expectation of personal mediocrity, the great achievers of history would presumably have gotten nowhere. And yet the world is also full of people who tried and failed, or who hold a mistaken idea of their own significance; something which is consistent with the rarity of great achievements. I’m not sure what the “rational” approach here might be.
Why is this? I’m not immediately seeing why this is necessarily the case.
You’re far more likely to be a background character than the protagonist in any given story, so a theory claiming you’re the most important person in a universe with an enormous number of people has an enormous rareness penalty to overcome before you should believe it instead of that you’re just insane or being lied to. Being in a utilitarian high-leverage position for the lives of billions can be overcome by reasonable evidence, but for the lives of 3^^^^3 people the rareness penalty is basically impossible to overcome. Even if the story is true, most of the observers will be witnessing it from the position of tied-to-the-track, not holding the lever, so if you’d assign low prior expectation to being in the tied-to-the-track part of the story, you should assign an enormous factor lower of being in the decision-making part of it.
Sounds like you’re trying to argue from the anthropic principle that very important games are unlikely, but that’s some really fallacious reasoning that asserts a lot of things about what your utility function is like. “Protagonist” is a two-piece word. A very pain averse and unempathetic person might reasonably subjectively consider themselves the most important person in the universe, and assign negative ${a lot} points to them getting tortured to death, but that doesn’t mean they’re not getting tortured to death.
The apriori unlikelihood of finding oneself at the crux of history (or in a similarly rare situation) is a greatly underrated topic here, I suppose because it works corrosively against making any kind of special effort. If they had embraced a pseudo-anthropic expectation of personal mediocrity, the great achievers of history would presumably have gotten nowhere. And yet the world is also full of people who tried and failed, or who hold a mistaken idea of their own significance; something which is consistent with the rarity of great achievements. I’m not sure what the “rational” approach here might be.