Nice. Much of this has been covered implicitly in various comments, but having it all in one place is lovely.
Something that is perhaps obvious but seems worth saying explicitly is that these techniques aren’t mutually exclusive, and using several of them can help contrast their relative weaknesses and strengths.
For example, if I want to put a number on my estimate that I will die tomorrow (D), I can prepare for revelation and observe that, if I imagine Omega appearing and offering to tell me whether D, I’d become very anxious. So I might conclude that my estimated probability of D is significant enough to worry about… on the order of 10%, say.
But I can also look at the reference class of people like me and see how many of them die on any given day. Ideally I’d look up my age and other factors on an actuarial table, but I don’t feel like bothering, so instead I take the less reliable reference class of humans… ~150000 deaths per day out of 6.8 billion people is something on the order of 2e-5.
And I can also convert to a frequency… I’ve lived ~15,000 days without dying, which gets me ~7e-5.
And now I can compare these techniques. [EDIT: I mean, compare them in the specific context of this question.]
Converting to a frequency has the bizarre property that my dying becomes less and less likely as I get older, when common sense tells me the opposite is true. Reference class of humans probably has the same property, but to a lesser degree. Actuarial reference class doesn’t have this property, which is a point in its favor (no surprise there). Preparing for revelation relies on some very unreliable intuitions. And so forth.
(I conclude, incidentally, that I have a poorly calibrated fear of dying. This is unsurprising; after my recent stroke it was a major post-traumatic problem. I’ve worked it down to a tolerable level, but it does not surprise me at all that it’s still orders of magnitude higher than it should be.)
Nice. Much of this has been covered implicitly in various comments, but having it all in one place is lovely.
Something that is perhaps obvious but seems worth saying explicitly is that these techniques aren’t mutually exclusive, and using several of them can help contrast their relative weaknesses and strengths.
For example, if I want to put a number on my estimate that I will die tomorrow (D), I can prepare for revelation and observe that, if I imagine Omega appearing and offering to tell me whether D, I’d become very anxious. So I might conclude that my estimated probability of D is significant enough to worry about… on the order of 10%, say.
But I can also look at the reference class of people like me and see how many of them die on any given day. Ideally I’d look up my age and other factors on an actuarial table, but I don’t feel like bothering, so instead I take the less reliable reference class of humans… ~150000 deaths per day out of 6.8 billion people is something on the order of 2e-5.
And I can also convert to a frequency… I’ve lived ~15,000 days without dying, which gets me ~7e-5.
And now I can compare these techniques. [EDIT: I mean, compare them in the specific context of this question.]
Converting to a frequency has the bizarre property that my dying becomes less and less likely as I get older, when common sense tells me the opposite is true. Reference class of humans probably has the same property, but to a lesser degree. Actuarial reference class doesn’t have this property, which is a point in its favor (no surprise there). Preparing for revelation relies on some very unreliable intuitions. And so forth.
(I conclude, incidentally, that I have a poorly calibrated fear of dying. This is unsurprising; after my recent stroke it was a major post-traumatic problem. I’ve worked it down to a tolerable level, but it does not surprise me at all that it’s still orders of magnitude higher than it should be.)