More of this. I don’t find you worth addressing, but as for your audience:
These arguments are -just- ignorant enough to sound plausible while getting subtle, but critical, details wrong. Namely, the use of infinities (period, at all) as if they were real numbers is invalid and produces “undefined” in all the mathematics in which they’re (invalidly) inserted, and the concept of “utility” utilized here is leaning heavily on the fact that “utility” isn’t actually defined. Additionally, the author imports ideas of rational behavior from this universe and tries to apply them to poorly-self-defined universes where the preconditions that made that behavior rational in this universe don’t apply, and believes the failure of rationality to be context-independent is a failure of rationality more broadly.
Summed up, his argument comes down to this: Rationality can’t come up with an answer to the question “What’s the largest integer”, therefore rationality is impossible. All of his problems are some variant on this, as the author works to make sure there -isn’t- a correct answer, and if an answer is found anyways, will accuse you of fighting the hypothesis. Which is entirely true, as his hypothesis is that rationality cannot answer every question, and treats this as a failure of rationality, rather than the more fundamental issue of designing questions to have no answer.
More of this. I don’t find you worth addressing, but as for your audience:
These arguments are -just- ignorant enough to sound plausible while getting subtle, but critical, details wrong. Namely, the use of infinities (period, at all) as if they were real numbers is invalid and produces “undefined” in all the mathematics in which they’re (invalidly) inserted, and the concept of “utility” utilized here is leaning heavily on the fact that “utility” isn’t actually defined. Additionally, the author imports ideas of rational behavior from this universe and tries to apply them to poorly-self-defined universes where the preconditions that made that behavior rational in this universe don’t apply, and believes the failure of rationality to be context-independent is a failure of rationality more broadly.
Summed up, his argument comes down to this: Rationality can’t come up with an answer to the question “What’s the largest integer”, therefore rationality is impossible. All of his problems are some variant on this, as the author works to make sure there -isn’t- a correct answer, and if an answer is found anyways, will accuse you of fighting the hypothesis. Which is entirely true, as his hypothesis is that rationality cannot answer every question, and treats this as a failure of rationality, rather than the more fundamental issue of designing questions to have no answer.
It more subtle than that and I don’t utilitise actual infinities, just unbounded finite numbers.
It’s not more subtle than that. That’s exactly what you’re doing. And implying infinities is, in fact, utilizing them.