If his interest resulted in actions that would provide evidence of his existence, then yes. Also, if libertarian free will existed then the world would be an even more different place.
aceofspades
Karma: −70
Arguing about the existence of a god is like arguing about free will. The only worthwhile argument concerns differences in anticipated experience, notably things like “Does prayer work?”.
I am curious why your posts tend to treat questions like this (“Does free will exist?”) as being substantially different from questions like “Does some god exist?”
Does the reductionist model give different predictions about the world than the non-reductionist model? If so, are any easily checked?
I’m not sure that this terminology about entanglement and such forth actually helps understanding. Reading this post unlikely to cause me to win more bets (make better predictions).
I’m not convinced that this post actually says anything. If seeking the truth is useful for any specific reason, then people who see some benefit from it will do so and if it isn’t useful then they won’t. Actually writing this out has made me think both this post and my comment haven’t really said much, but I think that’s because this discussion is too abstract to have any real use/meaning. Ideas which are true/work will work, ideas that aren’t won’t, and that’s all that needs to be said, never mind this business about rationality and truth and curiosity.
Some people who upvoted the post may think it is one of the best-written and most important examples of instrumental rationality on this site.
I think this post would benefit from a link to some article about the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, since the beginning of this post requires some knowledge about it to be valuable.
“FWIW” == “For What It’s Worth,” to save a few person-minutes for other passive readers here.
It’s not clear to me whether I should spend this sum of money (considering opportunity cost etc.) on potentially cryopreserving myself or reducing existential risk or making some other charitable contribution or actually passing on substantially more of my money to my relatives or whatever else. Namely, I’m not sure how to estimate the probability of actually being revived at some point. It might help to determine the probability of legally “dying” in such a way as to be around people during death or “dying” only a short time before while still being possible to preserve (for example this might include the chance of “dying” in a hospital). This would seemingly have a large effect on my chances of being revived, but maybe not. The technology for reviving those thought “dead” would already require such major advances in technology that even days of not being discovered (and thus an enormous difference in bodily decay) that perhaps even such large differences in decay could be trivial. Or, this could be entirely wrong, depending on how technology does progress. But even after such differences of time of pre-preservation “death” are accounted for, it is not then clear how to estimate the likelihood of ever being revived or a number of other things that would be necessary at a minimum to establish a reasonable method of determining the proper amount of money to allocate to the aforementioned potential uses.
Basically, this issue is far more difficult to resolve than a simple pseudo-Pascal’s Wager (here the response is not to the article in question but rather in a more general form to a few arguments I have seen even on this site including some comments)
I just find it very unlikely that the specifics of how this post is constructed have much of an effect on correcting this issue.