This post caused me to read up on UD+ASSA, which helped me make sense of some ideas that were bouncing around in my head for a long time. Hopefully my thoughts on it make sense to others here.
against UD+ASSA, part 1 (9/26/2007) [bet on d10 rolling a zero or not-zero, but you’ll be copied 91 times if it lands on zero...]
I think under UD+ASSA, having exact copies made doesn’t necessarily increase your measure, which would mostly sidestep this problem. But I think it’s still conceptually possible to have situations under UD+ASSA that increase one’s measure, so the rest of my post here assumes that the madman copies you in some kind of measure-increasing rather than a measure-splitting way.
This scenario doesn’t seem like a contradiction with UD+ASSA if you believe that the probability that 0 would be a good answer based on the outcome to pre-commit to saying (10%) does not need to equal to the subjective probability that you will see 0 as the answer (91%). The fact that the subjective probability doesn’t line up with the way that you should answer in order to get a certain outcome doesn’t need to mean that the subjective probability doesn’t exist or is invalid. The chance that 0 is a good answer to pre-commit to (10%) is equal to the madman’s and your family’s subjective probability that 0 ends up being the answer (10%). I think Quantum Mechanics and maybe also the Anthropic Trilemma imply that different people can have different subjective probabilities and have different proportions of their measure go to different results, and UD+ASSA seems to be compatible with that in my understanding.
The madman is just putting the player in a cruel situation: you can bet on 0 and have most of your measure and a minority of everyone else’s measure go to the outcome where your family benefits, or you can bet on not-0 and have a minority of your measure and a majority of everyone else’s measure go to the outcome where your family benefits. This situation is made a little easier to reason about by the detail that you won’t get to personally experience and interact with the outcome of your family benefiting, so it feels somewhat obvious to prioritize everyone else’s measure in that outcome rather than your own measure in that outcome. Reasoning about preferences in situations where different people have different measures over the outcomes feels extremely unintuitive and paints a very alien picture of reality, but I don’t think it’s ruled out.
This post caused me to read up on UD+ASSA, which helped me make sense of some ideas that were bouncing around in my head for a long time. Hopefully my thoughts on it make sense to others here.
I think under UD+ASSA, having exact copies made doesn’t necessarily increase your measure, which would mostly sidestep this problem. But I think it’s still conceptually possible to have situations under UD+ASSA that increase one’s measure, so the rest of my post here assumes that the madman copies you in some kind of measure-increasing rather than a measure-splitting way.
This scenario doesn’t seem like a contradiction with UD+ASSA if you believe that the probability that 0 would be a good answer based on the outcome to pre-commit to saying (10%) does not need to equal to the subjective probability that you will see 0 as the answer (91%). The fact that the subjective probability doesn’t line up with the way that you should answer in order to get a certain outcome doesn’t need to mean that the subjective probability doesn’t exist or is invalid. The chance that 0 is a good answer to pre-commit to (10%) is equal to the madman’s and your family’s subjective probability that 0 ends up being the answer (10%). I think Quantum Mechanics and maybe also the Anthropic Trilemma imply that different people can have different subjective probabilities and have different proportions of their measure go to different results, and UD+ASSA seems to be compatible with that in my understanding.
The madman is just putting the player in a cruel situation: you can bet on 0 and have most of your measure and a minority of everyone else’s measure go to the outcome where your family benefits, or you can bet on not-0 and have a minority of your measure and a majority of everyone else’s measure go to the outcome where your family benefits. This situation is made a little easier to reason about by the detail that you won’t get to personally experience and interact with the outcome of your family benefiting, so it feels somewhat obvious to prioritize everyone else’s measure in that outcome rather than your own measure in that outcome. Reasoning about preferences in situations where different people have different measures over the outcomes feels extremely unintuitive and paints a very alien picture of reality, but I don’t think it’s ruled out.