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I’ve been arguing about this with a friend recently [well, a version of this—I don’t have any problems with arbitrarily large number of people being created and killed, unless the manner of their death is unpleasant enough that the negative value I assign to it exceeds the positive value of life].
He says that he can believe the person we are talking to has Agent Smith powers, but thinks that the more the Agent Smith promises, the less likely it is to be true, and this decreases faster the more that is promised, so that the probability that Agent Smith has the powers to create and kill [in an unpleasant manner] Y people multiplied by Y tends to zero as Y tends to infinity. . So the net expectancy tends towards zero. I disagree with this: I believe that if you assign probability X to the claim that the person you are talking to is genuinely from outside the Matrix [and that you’re in the Matrix], then the probability that Agent Smith has the powers to create and kill [in an unpleasant manner] Y people multiplied by Y tends to infinity as Y tends to infinity.
Now, I think we can break this down further to find the root cause of our disagreement [this doesn’t feel like a fundamental belief]: does anyone have any suggestions for how to go about doing this? We began to argue about entropy and the chance for Agent Smith to have found a way [from outside the Matrix = all our physics doesn’t apply to him] to reverse it, but I think we went downhill from there.
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For example, a Christian might give away all their possessions, rejoice at the death of their children in circumstances where they seem likely to have gone to heaven, and generally treat their chances of Heaven vs Hell as their top priority.
Steven Landsburg used this reasoning, combined with the fact that Christians don’t generally do this, to conclude not that Christians don’t act on their beliefs, but that Christians don’t generally believe what they claim to believe. I think the different conclusion is reached because he assigns a lot more rationality to people than you do. But certainly there are, for some people, very strong incentives against admitting that you’ve stopped believing in God.
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“Will the Artist win the Best Picture Oscar?” would probably have fit your criteria in the runup to the Academy Awards. Not sure what the current analogy is—probably some similarly ‘unimportant’ yet highly publicised award/reality show exit.
As an afterthought, I don’t actually care about the “popular and important” part of it—I usually ask someone for the population of Indonesia, and then to make me a confidence interval. So if he says 2 million, I ask him for a 98% confidence interval and then show him that he was wrong. If you’re interested in trying this, make your own 98% confidence interval [two numbers X,Y such that you are 98% sure that X < population of Indonesia < Y] and then Google it.
Upvote this comment if your X<Pop(indonesia)<Y. [i.e. you made a good confidence interval].
Upvote this comment if your confidence interval was too tight and either Pop(Indonesia) < your X or Pop(Indonesia) > your Y.
For those who think like gjm, downvote this comment once you’ve upvoted the other one.
[though as a side point, if you found the poll worth taking part in, then you found it worthwhile enough to a) read, b) do some [admittedly trivial] research, c) respond to. I think that means I’ve earned a karma point from you]
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