Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn’t a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn’t a power crystal he’d save $135?
Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?
I would guess it’s guilt-avoidance at work here.
(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)
And with that in mind, how would it have affected the sanity waterline if Tony had donated that $135 to an institution that’s pursuing the improvement of human rationality?
I thank Tony for not taking the immediately self-benefiting path of profit and instead doing his small part to raise the sanity waterline.
Was the buyer sane enough to realise that it probably wasn’t a power crystal, or just sane enough to realise that if he pretended it wasn’t a power crystal he’d save $135?
Is that amount of raising-the-sanity waterline worth $135 to Tony?
I would guess it’s guilt-avoidance at work here.
(EDIT: your thanks to Tony are still valid though!)
And with that in mind, how would it have affected the sanity waterline if Tony had donated that $135 to an institution that’s pursuing the improvement of human rationality?
Look, sometimes you’ve just got to do things because they’re awesome.
But would you feel comfortable with that maxim encoded in an AI’s utility function?
For a sufficiently rigorous definition of “awesome”, why not?
If its a terminal value then CEV should converge to it.
I think he would have been better off taking the money and donating it to a good charity.