Hmm, I didn’t intend for the prophet to contradict himself. (Based on your comments and others, I seem to have tripped and fallen hard into the illusion of transparency.) Would you mind elaborating on the contradictory statement he makes? And, had he not said anything apparently contradictory, then would you have paid $100?
We’ve talked about this before, right? He claims there is a something that you cannot prevent in your future, like ever ever. Like “even if we chain you to the wall in a dungeon all locked up with locks”-ever. I don’t know what happens if you suicide in the example; I guess the point is moot in that case.
But! He has THE CURE! It only has a 50% chance of working, and if you pay $100, he will give you the cure.
I detect a slight personal bias here; I treat Omega as “an entity” and this prophet as “a person, who may or may not be out to scam me”… but whatever, supposed to override that.
We’ll assume THE CURE is informational in nature, because if it was physical, there exist futures in which I slam the prophet to the ground and just take THE CURE without paying $100. Or I convince the prophet that, look, I don’t have $100 on me right now, how about I give you just $50 for it? To which the prophet responds “it’s okay, you can pay in installments”. (This is why “Omega” solves a lot of problems, when you agree to pay $100, he will wire it for you. This prophet can’t plausibly have hacked the worlds banking systems, Omega can. The prophet cannot withhold your income, Omega can.)
At that point… well, yes, I’d pay by axiom. The prophet is trustworthy. Like, 100% trustworthy. That’s the whole premise. Omega isn’t, but if you want proof, he’ll generate it for you.
I could be wrong about this (one part of me says “Yes, you’re wrong! Wrong wrong wrong wrong!” and the other says “Nah, this is fine”), but I think you’d be more likely to run into Omega-like entities than truly honest prophets, because we’ve had SO MANY people already claiming to be able to see the future (and failing; how many times has the world been supposed to end already?) that when a man comes up to me and says such a thing, the first I think is “scammer”.
More points (not all of them fair and most of them arguing against the example which is normally not the goal); Omega can generate proof so fast that if I wanted to know if it was likely that he did what he did, I could learn such proof in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe he’s been playing this game with other people. Maybe he made a pledge somewhere public on a blockchain somewhere. He could help me out; I’d be willing to engage him in detail if he could arrange for a faster transport home than the bus. The prophet is someone I’d encounter somewhere on the streets. When I’m outside, I am going somewhere. Rarely am I waiting. When I’m outside, I don’t have $100 on me (nor the equivalent in euros). So when a man walks up to me and starts a story like this my first reaction is “I don’t have time for this”. “But wait! There is a great doom lurking in your future!” Yeah, right… - I’m supposed to trust this person by axiom, but this is so opposite of my regular reaction that I’m bound by the scenario anyway. “If I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t act like me.” Right. I knew that already.
Well, there’s a whole lot of words; basically what you’re encountering here is a mix of “all powerful AI can fix problems if they occur, thus there are no problems if you could think of a solution yourself” and “my prior for people walking up to me telling me there is some reason that I should give them money that doesn’t involve unpaid bills is to ignore them”.
We can reframe the situation, though; Maybe I just missed my bus and have to wait 15 minutes before the next one shows up, and then the prophet comes up to me. Now I have time. Maybe the prophet is my friend, who I’ve always known to be pretty rational. Maybe the prophet is my dad or my mom.
Here’s a version you might enjoy more:
You take your car to the mechanics for the yearly checkup. He calls you up and says “mate, there’s a slight problem with your car. There’s some corrosion on the fuel valve according to this sensor—its not a big problem, and your car passes the yearly inspection, so it’s cleared for the road, but I worry about this—if that corrosion continues then bits of the valve could end up in the fuel mixture, throughly wrecking your engine whilst you’re driving, and you’d have an accident for sure. We can fix it, no problem, but we’d have to add $100 to the bill for parts and hours worked.”
Would you pay?
Maybe you don’t have a car. Maybe you think selling the car off and buying a new one is better. Maybe you’d get a second opinion first. But there’s plenty people I can think of that would say “sure, do it”—I mean, if the dealership you’ve been at for a few years tells you something like this, then, well, I’d feel unsafe driving it on the highway.
Other versions of this same problem: A minor crack in your wall. Mom tells you “you should really get that looked at, you know. You know that old couple two streets over? They have a minor crack too, and later during the summer it had torn the entire wall in two due the ground drying out” (or something). Fees for a building inspector are $100… do you ignore or pay?
These scenarios differ in that you can gather intel about the likelihood of the future bad event in greater detail (albeit you might have to spend something for that as well—letting your uncle who works in construction come by for coffee and a short look at that crack costs you at least a coffee and some time, and googling for “corroded fuel valve scam” also takes you a bunch of time).
And yet I’d totally do that. I’d call up my uncle and have him take a look. I’d let them fix my car. But that prophet of yours is not giving me any details. He’s engaging in fear mongering. There’s a lot of fear mongering in the world already and not all of it is true. So my prior for paying people based on fear mongering is lower than my prior for paying people who tell me my car might break down...
There’s a problem with these scenarios, though; if you take a careful look and play with the numbers, you’ll see that the chance of having to pay $10000 is not 100% certain—maybe the car will be fine, maybe the wall will be fine. And if you pay, it’s either fixed or you’ll know if it is a problem.
So enter the prophet.
You’re outside of a restaurant, busy with dessert, when you get the call from the mechanic. He explains about the possible corroded fuel valve. You tell him you want to enjoy your dessert first; you’ll call him up in an hour or so with your answer.
You’ve finished your meal—when the prophet walks up to you and says you’ll DEFINITELY crash if you don’t get your car fixed, but if you fix your car then there’ll only be a 50% chance.
...
Yeah, sorry, but this case is scary for me too. Say what, prophet? Thanks for telling me I’m doomed to crash if I don’t get it fixed, that’s valuable information. But what do you mean with “50% chance”? Is there something ELSE wrong with my car? And the prophet loses credibility again. I wish I could get some answers out of this prophet so that I could trust him some more. (Bias here; I’m allowing Omega to answer questions and I’m not giving the prophet the same opportunity. This is of course a major difference, but it stems from my personal feelings where crystal ball prophecies tend to be “I’ve said there is such a chance so there is, no further questions allowed” and Omega to be answering things like “over how many years is that crash chance calculated?”—to which the answer would be very interesting to hear.)
wafflepudding is saying something similar to this:
You can suffer the $10,000 damage in two ways, Path A and Path B. Normally these two things happen equally often. If you pay the $100, you can prevent Path A from happening, with a 100% chance. That means if you pay, Path B will definitely happen. But it also means that since you’re the sort of person who would pay in this situation, you will receive that prophecy only 50% as often, in general, as a person who would not pay; this happens because you only get the prophecy when path B is going to happen, instead of either Path A or path B.
I am not the sort of person who would pay in that situation, and I do not want to be. But I am the sort of person who might very well pay the $100 before hearing any prophecy, and therefore I will get the prophecy 50% as often anyway.
I am extremely satisfied with this description; I hadn’t personally thought of it in such specific terms, and this would be a perfect way to say it. I’ll admit I’m a bit confused why you would pay before but not after, considering that either one is done by a person to whom the prophecy is given 50% less often.
Hmm, I didn’t intend for the prophet to contradict himself. (Based on your comments and others, I seem to have tripped and fallen hard into the illusion of transparency.) Would you mind elaborating on the contradictory statement he makes? And, had he not said anything apparently contradictory, then would you have paid $100?
We’ve talked about this before, right? He claims there is a something that you cannot prevent in your future, like ever ever. Like “even if we chain you to the wall in a dungeon all locked up with locks”-ever. I don’t know what happens if you suicide in the example; I guess the point is moot in that case.
But! He has THE CURE! It only has a 50% chance of working, and if you pay $100, he will give you the cure.
I detect a slight personal bias here; I treat Omega as “an entity” and this prophet as “a person, who may or may not be out to scam me”… but whatever, supposed to override that.
We’ll assume THE CURE is informational in nature, because if it was physical, there exist futures in which I slam the prophet to the ground and just take THE CURE without paying $100. Or I convince the prophet that, look, I don’t have $100 on me right now, how about I give you just $50 for it? To which the prophet responds “it’s okay, you can pay in installments”. (This is why “Omega” solves a lot of problems, when you agree to pay $100, he will wire it for you. This prophet can’t plausibly have hacked the worlds banking systems, Omega can. The prophet cannot withhold your income, Omega can.)
At that point… well, yes, I’d pay by axiom. The prophet is trustworthy. Like, 100% trustworthy. That’s the whole premise. Omega isn’t, but if you want proof, he’ll generate it for you.
I could be wrong about this (one part of me says “Yes, you’re wrong! Wrong wrong wrong wrong!” and the other says “Nah, this is fine”), but I think you’d be more likely to run into Omega-like entities than truly honest prophets, because we’ve had SO MANY people already claiming to be able to see the future (and failing; how many times has the world been supposed to end already?) that when a man comes up to me and says such a thing, the first I think is “scammer”.
More points (not all of them fair and most of them arguing against the example which is normally not the goal); Omega can generate proof so fast that if I wanted to know if it was likely that he did what he did, I could learn such proof in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe he’s been playing this game with other people. Maybe he made a pledge somewhere public on a blockchain somewhere. He could help me out; I’d be willing to engage him in detail if he could arrange for a faster transport home than the bus. The prophet is someone I’d encounter somewhere on the streets. When I’m outside, I am going somewhere. Rarely am I waiting. When I’m outside, I don’t have $100 on me (nor the equivalent in euros). So when a man walks up to me and starts a story like this my first reaction is “I don’t have time for this”. “But wait! There is a great doom lurking in your future!” Yeah, right… - I’m supposed to trust this person by axiom, but this is so opposite of my regular reaction that I’m bound by the scenario anyway. “If I wasn’t me, I wouldn’t act like me.” Right. I knew that already.
Well, there’s a whole lot of words; basically what you’re encountering here is a mix of “all powerful AI can fix problems if they occur, thus there are no problems if you could think of a solution yourself” and “my prior for people walking up to me telling me there is some reason that I should give them money that doesn’t involve unpaid bills is to ignore them”.
We can reframe the situation, though; Maybe I just missed my bus and have to wait 15 minutes before the next one shows up, and then the prophet comes up to me. Now I have time. Maybe the prophet is my friend, who I’ve always known to be pretty rational. Maybe the prophet is my dad or my mom.
Here’s a version you might enjoy more:
You take your car to the mechanics for the yearly checkup. He calls you up and says “mate, there’s a slight problem with your car. There’s some corrosion on the fuel valve according to this sensor—its not a big problem, and your car passes the yearly inspection, so it’s cleared for the road, but I worry about this—if that corrosion continues then bits of the valve could end up in the fuel mixture, throughly wrecking your engine whilst you’re driving, and you’d have an accident for sure. We can fix it, no problem, but we’d have to add $100 to the bill for parts and hours worked.”
Would you pay?
Maybe you don’t have a car. Maybe you think selling the car off and buying a new one is better. Maybe you’d get a second opinion first. But there’s plenty people I can think of that would say “sure, do it”—I mean, if the dealership you’ve been at for a few years tells you something like this, then, well, I’d feel unsafe driving it on the highway.
Other versions of this same problem: A minor crack in your wall. Mom tells you “you should really get that looked at, you know. You know that old couple two streets over? They have a minor crack too, and later during the summer it had torn the entire wall in two due the ground drying out” (or something). Fees for a building inspector are $100… do you ignore or pay?
These scenarios differ in that you can gather intel about the likelihood of the future bad event in greater detail (albeit you might have to spend something for that as well—letting your uncle who works in construction come by for coffee and a short look at that crack costs you at least a coffee and some time, and googling for “corroded fuel valve scam” also takes you a bunch of time).
And yet I’d totally do that. I’d call up my uncle and have him take a look. I’d let them fix my car. But that prophet of yours is not giving me any details. He’s engaging in fear mongering. There’s a lot of fear mongering in the world already and not all of it is true. So my prior for paying people based on fear mongering is lower than my prior for paying people who tell me my car might break down...
There’s a problem with these scenarios, though; if you take a careful look and play with the numbers, you’ll see that the chance of having to pay $10000 is not 100% certain—maybe the car will be fine, maybe the wall will be fine. And if you pay, it’s either fixed or you’ll know if it is a problem.
So enter the prophet.
You’re outside of a restaurant, busy with dessert, when you get the call from the mechanic. He explains about the possible corroded fuel valve. You tell him you want to enjoy your dessert first; you’ll call him up in an hour or so with your answer.
You’ve finished your meal—when the prophet walks up to you and says you’ll DEFINITELY crash if you don’t get your car fixed, but if you fix your car then there’ll only be a 50% chance.
...
Yeah, sorry, but this case is scary for me too. Say what, prophet? Thanks for telling me I’m doomed to crash if I don’t get it fixed, that’s valuable information. But what do you mean with “50% chance”? Is there something ELSE wrong with my car? And the prophet loses credibility again. I wish I could get some answers out of this prophet so that I could trust him some more. (Bias here; I’m allowing Omega to answer questions and I’m not giving the prophet the same opportunity. This is of course a major difference, but it stems from my personal feelings where crystal ball prophecies tend to be “I’ve said there is such a chance so there is, no further questions allowed” and Omega to be answering things like “over how many years is that crash chance calculated?”—to which the answer would be very interesting to hear.)
(Too many words)
wafflepudding is saying something similar to this:
You can suffer the $10,000 damage in two ways, Path A and Path B. Normally these two things happen equally often. If you pay the $100, you can prevent Path A from happening, with a 100% chance. That means if you pay, Path B will definitely happen. But it also means that since you’re the sort of person who would pay in this situation, you will receive that prophecy only 50% as often, in general, as a person who would not pay; this happens because you only get the prophecy when path B is going to happen, instead of either Path A or path B.
I am not the sort of person who would pay in that situation, and I do not want to be. But I am the sort of person who might very well pay the $100 before hearing any prophecy, and therefore I will get the prophecy 50% as often anyway.
I am extremely satisfied with this description; I hadn’t personally thought of it in such specific terms, and this would be a perfect way to say it. I’ll admit I’m a bit confused why you would pay before but not after, considering that either one is done by a person to whom the prophecy is given 50% less often.