I just stumbled back into LessWrong after many months, very pleased to see that you completed this journey with such seriousness! Looking forward to your thoughts and comments in the postmortem post.
Re: Sunk Meaning, immediately after reading this, my brain sent strong signals that *something else is going on here* with regards to making the cow’s death mean something and there’s some Chesterton’s fence that you shouldn’t break. I think the error you’re making is basically the same error that causal decision theorists make two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem. You do not get to choose whether or not to honor a dead cow in this specific instance. You only get to choose (for all time) whether or not your source code implements an algorithm which honors the dead. Being able to do this is really really useful for all sorts of Newcomblike situations that occur in real life.
I just stumbled back into LessWrong after many months, very pleased to see that you completed this journey with such seriousness! Looking forward to your thoughts and comments in the postmortem post.
Re: Sunk Meaning, immediately after reading this, my brain sent strong signals that *something else is going on here* with regards to making the cow’s death mean something and there’s some Chesterton’s fence that you shouldn’t break. I think the error you’re making is basically the same error that causal decision theorists make two-boxing in Newcomb’s problem. You do not get to choose whether or not to honor a dead cow in this specific instance. You only get to choose (for all time) whether or not your source code implements an algorithm which honors the dead. Being able to do this is really really useful for all sorts of Newcomblike situations that occur in real life.