What if all of the worlds with the lowest EU are completely bizarre (like, boltzmann brains, or worlds that have somehow fallen under the rule of fantastical devils with literally no supporters).
The Boltzmann brain issue is addressed in infra-Bayesian physicalism with a “fairness” condition that excludes worlds from the EU calculation where you are run with fake memories or the history of your actions is inconsistent with what your policy says you would actually do. Vanessa talks about this in AXRP episode 14. The “worlds that have somehow fallen under the rule of fantastical devils” thing is only a problem if that world is actually assigned high measure in one of the sa-measures (fancy affine-transformed probability distributions) in your prior. The maximin rule is only used to select the sa-measure in your convex set with lowest EU, and then you maximize EU given that distribution. You don’t pick the literal worst conceivable world.
Notably, if you don’t like the maximin rule, it’s been shown in Section 4 of this post that infra-Bayesian logic still works with optimism in the face of Knightian uncertainty, it’s just that you don’t get worst-case guarantees anymore. I’d suspect that you could also get away with something like “maximize 10th percentile EU” to get more tempered risk-averse behavior.
Solomonoff inducting, producing an estimate of the measure of my existence (the rate of the occurrence of the experience I’m currently having) across all possible universe-generators weighted inversely to their complexity seems totally coherent to me. (It’s about 0.1^10^10^10^10)
I’m not sure I follow your argument. I thought your view was that minds implemented in more places, perhaps with more matter/energy, have more anthropic measure? The Kolmogorov complexity of the mind seems like an orthogonal issue.
Maybe you’re already familiar with it, but I think Stuart Armstrong’s Anthropic Decision Theory paper (along with some of his LW posts on anthropics) do a good job of “deflating” anthropic probabilities and shifting the focus to your values and decision theory.
I’ll address your points in reverse order.
The Boltzmann brain issue is addressed in infra-Bayesian physicalism with a “fairness” condition that excludes worlds from the EU calculation where you are run with fake memories or the history of your actions is inconsistent with what your policy says you would actually do. Vanessa talks about this in AXRP episode 14. The “worlds that have somehow fallen under the rule of fantastical devils” thing is only a problem if that world is actually assigned high measure in one of the sa-measures (fancy affine-transformed probability distributions) in your prior. The maximin rule is only used to select the sa-measure in your convex set with lowest EU, and then you maximize EU given that distribution. You don’t pick the literal worst conceivable world.
Notably, if you don’t like the maximin rule, it’s been shown in Section 4 of this post that infra-Bayesian logic still works with optimism in the face of Knightian uncertainty, it’s just that you don’t get worst-case guarantees anymore. I’d suspect that you could also get away with something like “maximize 10th percentile EU” to get more tempered risk-averse behavior.
I’m not sure I follow your argument. I thought your view was that minds implemented in more places, perhaps with more matter/energy, have more anthropic measure? The Kolmogorov complexity of the mind seems like an orthogonal issue.
Maybe you’re already familiar with it, but I think Stuart Armstrong’s Anthropic Decision Theory paper (along with some of his LW posts on anthropics) do a good job of “deflating” anthropic probabilities and shifting the focus to your values and decision theory.