Knowing X and being able to do something about X are quite different things. A death-row prisoner might be able to make the correct prediction that he will be hanged tomorrow, but that does not “enable goal-accomplishing actions” for him—in the Bayes’ world as well. Is the Cassandra’s world defined by being powerless?
Powerlessness seems like a good way to conceptualize the Cassandra alternative. Perhaps power and well-being are largely random and the best-possible predictions only give you a marginal improvement over the baseline. Or else perhaps the real limit is willpower, and the ability to take decisive action based on prediction is innate and cannot be easily altered. Put in other terms, “the world is divided into players and NPCs and your beliefs are irrelevant to which of those categories you are in.”
I don’t particularly think either of these is likely but if you believed the world worked in either of those ways, it would follow that optimizing your beliefs was wasted effort for “Cassandra World” reasons.
Alternately, in such a world, it could be that improving your predictive capacity necessarily decreases your ability to achieve your goals.
Hence the classical example of Cassandra, who was given the power of foretelling the future, but with the curse that nobody would ever believe her. To paraphrase Aladdin’s genie: “Phenomenal cosmic predictive capacity … itty bitty evidential status.”
Yes, a Zelazny or Smullyan character could find ways to subvert the curse, depending on just how literal-minded Apollo’s “install prophecy” code was. If Cassandra took a lesson in lying from Epimenides, she mightn’t have had any problems.
Powerlessness seems like a good way to conceptualize the Cassandra alternative. Perhaps power and well-being are largely random and the best-possible predictions only give you a marginal improvement over the baseline. Or else perhaps the real limit is willpower, and the ability to take decisive action based on prediction is innate and cannot be easily altered. Put in other terms, “the world is divided into players and NPCs and your beliefs are irrelevant to which of those categories you are in.”
I don’t particularly think either of these is likely but if you believed the world worked in either of those ways, it would follow that optimizing your beliefs was wasted effort for “Cassandra World” reasons.
So then the Cassandra’s world is essentially a predetermined world where fate rules and you can’t change anything. None of your choices matter.
Alternately, in such a world, it could be that improving your predictive capacity necessarily decreases your ability to achieve your goals.
Hence the classical example of Cassandra, who was given the power of foretelling the future, but with the curse that nobody would ever believe her. To paraphrase Aladdin’s genie: “Phenomenal cosmic predictive capacity … itty bitty evidential status.”
Yes, a Zelazny or Smullyan character could find ways to subvert the curse, depending on just how literal-minded Apollo’s “install prophecy” code was. If Cassandra took a lesson in lying from Epimenides, she mightn’t have had any problems.