“But all this is only one idea. Let us devise another.”
Chaser of shininess, just-doer of things. To the equitable distribution of our cosmic endowment. Reborn at age 21, I’m working to become an AI saftey researcher; I hope to solve as much of the problem as I can myself. We all deserve our own personalized utopia, and I won’t stop wishing, hoping, thinking, and working until I’m deadly confident we’ll all make it there. May the adventure induce growth.
My guess is that this post was going over well-trodden ground, being mostly wrong yet taking kind of an authoratiative tone anyway, and doing so in a format that suggested it lacked any revision at all? I think the topics you’re grappling with are understandable things to be confused about, but on LessWrong, it’s generally treatead as better to express one’s uncertainty in a tone of uncertainty; and if the topic seems like one people should definitely have already poured some resources into exploring, e.g. probability theory, then asking if those explorations exist + where they might be seems like an obviously better approach to your confusion than a confident, free-form ramble. (Then, if those resources themselves leave you with confusion, you can express it and work on the problem from there. Alternatively, you could work through the whole problem yourself from first principles, and potentailly provide a novel and correct take on the topic; just, you did neither, which is probably where the downvotes came from.)
I guess, for existing resources which cover probabilitty theory, I’ve personally found explanations that spring out of attempts to build rational, probabalistic agents out of computers to be the most useful? Maybe read some of the articles linked on this page.
Sorry if this came off as condescending.
Edit: Actually, if talking to another sapient would be helpful here, I either recommend talking to chat-gpt about your probability confusions, or extend an offer to chat personally in private.