the core concern of avoiding a human extinction scenario.
That is not the core concern of this site. We are in a human extinction scenario so long as the problem of death remains unsolved. Our interest is in escaping this scenario as quickly as possible. The difference is urgency; we are not trying to avoid a collision, but are trying to escape the burning wreckage.
So ten seconds isn’t enough time to create a significant difference between the RobinZs, in your opinion. What if Omega told you that in the ten seconds following duplication, you, the original RZ, would have an original thought that would not occur to the other RZs (perhaps as a result of different environments)? Would that change your mind? What if Omega qualified it as a significant thought, one that could change the course of your life—maybe the seed of a new scientific theory, or an idea for a novel that would have won you a Pulitzer, had original RZ continued to exist?
I think the problem with this scenario is that saying “ten seconds” isn’t meaningfully different from saying “1 Planck time”, which becomes obvious when you turn down the offer that involves ten hours or years. Our answers are tied to our biological perception of time—if an hour felt like a second, we’d agree to the ten hour option. I don’t think they’re based on any rational observation of what actually happens in those ten seconds. A powerful AI would not agree to Omega’s offer—how many CPU cycles can you pack into ten seconds?
Would you still say yes if there was more than 10 seconds between copying you and killing you—say, ten hours? Ten years? What’s the maximum amount of time you’d agree to?
An en dash is defined by its width, not the spacing around it. In fact, spacing around an em dash is permitted in some style guides. On the internet, though, the hyphen has generally taken over from the em dash (an en dash should not be used in that context).
Now, two hyphens—that’s a recipe for disaster if I’ve ever heard one.
If the defending party is only required to match the litigating party’s contribution, the suits will never proceed because the litigating bums can’t afford to pay for a single hour of a lawyer’s time. And while I don’t know if this is true, it makes sense that funding the bums yourself would be illegal.
So you steal a movie, which means the next homeless guy you see gets change in his cup, which lets you slam the front door in a girl scout’s face, the memory of which drives you to volunteer at a soup kitchen, which in turn assuages your conscience when you buy incandescent light bulbs because they look better than CFLs, so you help an old lady across the street, which relieves you of all responsibility for the other old lady who just got hit by a truck, who haunts you in your dreams, so you adopt a child, who grows up to become a mad scientist who destroys the world, thus ending the vicious cycle once and for all.
And that’s why piracy is wrong.
When you write “If the others continue to cooperate, their bid is lower and they get nothing” you imply an iterated game. It seems clear from Hamermesh’s account that players were only allowed to submit one bid.
Ashley won, but she didn’t maximize her win. The smartest thing to do would be to agree to collude, bid higher, and then divide the winnings equally anyway. Everyone gets the same payout, but only Ashley would get the satisfaction of winning. And if someone else bids higher, she’s no longer the sole defector, which is socially significant. And, of course, $20 is really not a significant enough sum to play hardball for.
Well, I don’t feel bad at all, so obviously you haven’t won this argument yet. Unless I’m wrong, of course.
Well, if you want to pick nits, a vacuum cleaner sucks more than realizing you’re wrong in an argument.
Also, in general, the quote is accurate. While it is intellectually useful to be proven wrong, it is not really a pleasant feeling, because it’s much nicer to have already been right. This is especially true if you are heavily invested in what you are wrong about, eg. a scientist who realizes his research was based on an erroneous premise will be happy to stop wasting time but will also feel pretty crappy about the time he’s already wasted. It’s not in our nature to be purely cerebral about such a devastating thing as being wrong can be.
It isn’t that winning the lottery is better than being born rich, it’s that winning the lottery is better than not winning the lottery. Even if you’re already rich, winning the lottery is good. Presumably you weren’t born right about everything, which means it’s more useful to lose arguments than win them. After all, if you never lose an argument, what’s more likely: that you are right about everything, that you’re the best arguer ever, or that you simply don’t argue things you’re wrong about?
Wouldn’t ignoring thoughts known to be erroneous despite immense physical pressure to listen to them be a display of extreme rationality?
Thanks, it’s been a while since I wasted a whole morning on TvTropes. Please link responsibly, people!
It looks unlikely, I’m afraid. The timing conflicts with my Answers in Genesis study group… haha, nah, just kidding. But I probably have to work. C’est la vie.
I didn’t know about this event but I’m interested now. Waterloo is pretty close, so consider this an “I’ll get back to you.”
What leads you to suggest Aumann isn’t thinking that? Are you saying he is unaware that his ideological beliefs conflict with evidence to the contrary? Of course he is aware he could update on rational evidence and chooses not to, that’s what smart religious people do. That’s what faith is. The meaning of “capable but unwilling” should be clear: it is the ability to maintain belief in something in the face of convincing evidence opposing it. The ability to say, “Your evidence supporting y is compelling, but it doesn’t matter, because I have faith in x.” And that’s what I think crazy is.
Are you sure? It seems to me that having an intellectual problem that you are capable of solving but are unwilling to update on due to ideological reasons or otherwise (eg Aumann) is the sense in which Eliezer is using the word “crazy”. Of course, I could just be stupid.
Stupid is when you are unable to solve a problem. Lazy is when you are able to solve a problem but don’t care to. Crazy is when you are able to solve a problem but don’t want to.
Ah, of course. No, English was my only language at the time. I studied French in grade school but have no more than a few words of it left—that said, the underlying grammar, which is similar to Spanish, probably didn’t just disappear. I also took a couple Latin courses in high school, but never became very proficient and again, only retained a few words and a rough understanding of structure. When I began learning Spanish it was all very new and quite difficult at first. I do think my strategy was a good one, though. The week I spent taking private lessons was devoted to grammar and grammar alone, on my insistence, and it paid off. En mis viajes fue muy útil.
If we can’t stop dying, we can’t stop extinction. Logically, if everyone dies, and there are a finite number of humans, there will necessarily be a last human who dies.
[edit] To those down-voting me: I take my lumps willingly, but could you at least tell me why you think I’m wrong?