No. It’s way, way easier to save one. According to the Disease Control Priorities Project (http://tinyurl.com/y9wpk5e) you can save lives for about $3 per year. That’s, what, $225 for a whole life? Creating a life requires nine months of pregnancy, during which you can’t work as well, and you have to pay for food while you’re eating for two, and that’s just assuming you give the child up for adoption. You also can only do it once every nine months, and you have to be a girl, whereas you can save a life every time you earn $225.
DanielLC
I noticed you changed units between the average distance of another you and the average distance of another identical universe. That seems rather pointless. A lightyear is only 16 orders of magnitude larger than a meter, and is lost in rounding compared to 10^115 orders of magnitude.
You mentioned a portion of people. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the universe is this big but still finite, and if it is infinite, there’s no way to measure a fraction of people. There are infinity people who’s lives are worth living and infinity who’s lives are not. If you add it together, the result depends on what order you add them in. Dividing is similarly nonsensical. You can’t change the proportion of people who are happy because there is no proportion of people who are happy.
“But on the whole, it looks to me like if we decide to implement a policy of routinely killing off citizens to replace them with happier babies … We’re just setting up the universe to contain the same babies, born predominantly into regions where they lead short lifespans not containing much happiness.”
That would mean more happiness. Also, I don’t see the problem with short lifespans. My instinct is that you think consciousness ending is bad, but that happens every time you go to sleep, and I don’t see you complaining about that.
I don’t believe egalitarianism has value in itself. Tell me, would you rather get all your wealth continuously throughout the year, or get a disproportionate amount on Christmas?
If wealth is evenly distributed, it will lead to more total happiness, but I don’t see any advantage in happiness being evenly distributed.
I don’t see how your comment relates to this post.
Can you compare apples and oranges? You certainly don’t seem to have much trouble when you decide how to spend your money at the grocery store.
It was rather clear from the context that the “dust in the eye” was a very, very minor torture. People are not going blind. They are perfectly capable of dealing with it. It’s just not 3^^^3 times as minor as the torture.
If you were to torture two people in exactly the same way, they’d suffer about equally. Why do you imply that’s some sort of unanswerable question?
If you weren’t talking about the ethical side, what were you talking about? He wasn’t trying to compare everything about the two choices, just which was more ethical. It would be impossible if he didn’t limit it like that.
I doubt anybody’s going to read a comment this far down, but what the heck.
Perhaps going from nothing to a million dust specks isn’t a million times as bad as going from nothing to one dust speck. One thing is certain though: going from nothing to a million dust specks is exactly as bad as going from nothing to one dust speck plus going from one dust speck to two dust specks etc.
If going from nothing to one dust speck isn’t a millionth as bad as nothing to a million dust specks, it has to be made up somewhere else, like going from 999,999 to a million dust specks being more than a millionth as bad.
What if the 3^^^3 were also horribly tortured for fifty years? Would going from that to that plus a dust speck change everything? It’s now the worst dust speck you’re adding, right?
Phlogiston exists. We call it “absence of oxygen”. Nobody acted like positive charge wasn’t real when they found out it was the absence of electrons.
The point isn’t to give a reason for everything. The point is to be able to make a model. It’s not about “Why do things fall down?” “Gravity.”, but “Why do things fall down?” “They have a force exerted on them by every object proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance.”. The second one actually lets you make predictions. General Relativity (the exact formulae, not just the general idea of curved spacetime) makes the model a little more accurate. It’s not an answer to “Why gravity?” It’s just a slightly better answer to the original question.
Nitrogen would be phlogiston-saturated air, in which nothing would burn. Coal would be full of phlogiston and burn easily in any air that isn’t phlogiston-saturated.
I think he’s using worship to mean that you believe it’s beyond explanation. If you consider something to be the end of the recursion, you are worshipping it. Ignoring it would be if you hit that button before considering whether or not there’s any explanation.
Each time you hit Explain, it tells how it’s a special case of a more general, more accurate, and hopefully simpler problem. There are two possibilities: At some point you get a model that explains everything with perfect accuracy. When you have that in simplest form, there’s no way to Explain. You have to Worship. The other possibility is that the model keeps getting slightly more accurate and slowly gets more complex. There is simply no way to explain everything perfectly with a finite model. You just have to eventually hit Ignore. That said, if you hit Ignore because you believe it’s this possibility, and not because you’re just tired of looking, then, in a way, you really hit Worship. I suspect the first possibility, that it just ends and you have to hit Worship.
If I know something, I’m probably not thinking it at the moment. It’s in my brain somewhere, where I can look it up if it comes up, but it doesn’t effect what I’m currently experiencing.
If someone else knows something, I’m not thinking it at the moment. It’s on the internet somewhere where I can look it up if it comes up, but it doesn’t effect what I’m currently experiencing.
If you gave him almost anything else that complex, it actually would be false. Once something gets even moderately complex, there is a huge number of other things that complex.
Technically, he should figure that there’s just a one in 10^somethingorother chance that it’s true, but you can’t remember all 10^somethingorother things that are that unlikely, so you’re best off to reject it.
And now that we know that we’re going to be more biased. Why’d you have to say that?
He never said selfish spending has zero utility or less. He just implied it was less than charity. If you find a really good charity, it tends to be orders of magnitude better than keeping the money. For example, for $25 you could either see a couple of movies, or allow someone else to see the rest of their life. http://www.hollows.org/
There’s nothing wrong with watching a movie. It’s just not nearly as good as being able to see in general.
This isn’t some theoretical limit of the human brain; it’s just what they’ve found from testing (or something they just made up, now that I think about it). Whoever they were testing was alive, and was taking full advantage of their soul.
I had the same problem.
I think it would need some genetic algorithm in order to figure out about how “close” it is to the solution, then make a tree structure where it figures out what happens after every combination of however many moves, and it does the one that looks closest to the solution.
It would update the algorithm based on how close it is to the closest solution. For example, if it’s five moves away from something that looks about 37 moves away from finishing, then it’s about 42 moves away now.
The problem with this is that when you start it, it will have no idea how close anything is to the solution except for the solution, and there’s no way it’s getting to that by chance.
Essentially, you’d have to cheat and start by giving it almost solved Rubik’s cubes, and slowly giving it more randomized ones. It won’t learn on its own, but you can teach it pretty easily.
In order to figure out if it’s made by intelligence, you need to figure out how likely it is that natural processes would result in it, and how likely it is that intelligence would result in it. Working out the former, though far from trivial, isn’t as interesting and isn’t what he’s wondering about. He’s wondering about how to do the latter.
2+2=4 is part of the definition of +. The question isn’t why we think 2+2=4. The question is why we’re so obsessed with addition. 2 << 2 = 8, but you don’t hear people talking about how 2 and 2 makes eight.
You simply can’t do anything without something being a priori. Is the universe orderly? Maybe it looks orderly by coincidence. The probability that it looks this way given that it’s random is simple enough, but we also need to know the probability that it looks this way and it’s not orderly. We need some a priori probability that it isn’t orderly, or we simply can’t work it out. Occam’s Razor isn’t just there to tell you that A is more likely than B. It’s there to tell you how likely A and B are, which you’ll need if you want to know how likely they are given C.
Infinite regress is still a semantic stopsign. If all chickens came from eggs, and all eggs came from chickens, the obvious next question is “Why is there an infinite regress of chickens and eggs?”
There are certainly possible infinite regressions that don’t exist, so it can’t exist simply because of an infinite regress.
I don’t feel like reading through 166 comments, so sorry if this has already been posted.
I did get far enough to find that brianm posted this: “The doomsday assumption makes the assumptions that:
We are randomly selected from all the observers who will ever exist...”
Since we’re randomly selecting, let’s not look at individual people. Let’s look at it like taking marbles from a bag. One marble is red. 99 are blue. A guy flips a coin. If it comes up heads, he takes out the red marble. If it comes up tails, he takes out the blue marbles. You then take one of the remaining marbles out at random. Do I even need to say what the probability of getting a blue marble is?