I get the feeling that I missed a lot of prediscussion to this topic. I am new here and new to these types of discussions, so if I am way off target please nudge me in the right direction. :)
If the statistics of winning a lottery are almost none, they are not none. As such, the chances of a lottery winner existing as time goes on increases with each lottery ticket purchased. (The assumption here is that “winner” simply means “holding the right ticket”.)
Furthermore, it seems like the concept of the QTI is only useful if you already know what the probability of it being true /and/ find it helpful to consider yourself in the other variations as an extension of your personal identity. Otherwise, you are just killing yourself to prove a point to someone else.
But I really do not understand this:
“If the hypothesis ‘this world is a holodeck’ is normatively assigned a calibrated confidence well above 10-8, the lottery winner now has incommunicable good reason to believe they are in a holodeck.”
Why are the probabilities of the world being a holodeck tied to the probability of guessing a number correctly? It seems like this is the same reasoning that leads people to believing in Jesus just because his face showed up on their potato chip. It just sounds like a teleological argument with a different target. Or was that the point and I missed it?
PS) Is it better to post once with three topics, or three times with one topic each?
Is the value of an action determined from the recipient or the giver? Using the example of telling someone their trunk is open, your cost in the action is 60 seconds and the benefit to them was… what? I suppose that would depend on the rest of the context. (Was it about to rain? Valuables in the car?) The example with the lawyer has more numbers available but the starting point of “worth” needs to be determined before the correct action can be determined.
This is only slightly relevant to this post, however. If warm fuzzies are the desired benefit, the cost/benefit ratio can completely ignore the recipient. (Technically, you are the recipient?) The same goes for status.