Followup to: Sunk Cost Fallacy Related to: Rebelling Against Nature, Shut Up and Do the Impossible! (expanded from my comment) "The world is weary of the past— O might it die or rest at last!" — Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "Hellas" Probability theory and decision theory push us in opposite...
Related to: Just Lose Hope Already, The Allais Paradox, Cached Selves In economics we have this concept of sunk costs, referring to costs that have already been incurred, but which cannot be recouped. Sunk cost fallacy refers to the fallacy of honoring sunk costs, which decision-theoretically should just be ignored....
From Tversky and Khaneman's "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice" (Science, Vol. 211, No. 4481, 1981): > The following problem [...] illustrates the effect of embedding an option in different accounts. Two versions of this problem were presented to different groups of subjects. One group (N =...
Followup to: Sunk Cost Fallacy
Related to: Rebelling Against Nature, Shut Up and Do the Impossible!
(expanded from my comment)
"The world is weary of the past—
O might it die or rest at last!"
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "Hellas"
Probability theory and decision theory push us in opposite directions. Induction demands that you cannot forget your past; the sunk cost fallacy demands that you must. Let me explain.
An important part of epistemic rationality is learning to be at home in a material universe. You are not a magical fount of originality and free will; you are a physical system: the same laws that bind the planets in their orbits, also bind you; the same sorts of regularities in... (read 700 more words →)
Related to: Just Lose Hope Already, The Allais Paradox, Cached Selves
In economics we have this concept of sunk costs, referring to costs that have already been incurred, but which cannot be recouped. Sunk cost fallacy refers to the fallacy of honoring sunk costs, which decision-theoretically should just be ignored. The canonical example goes something like this: you have purchased a nonrefundable movie ticket in advance. (For the nitpickers in the audience, I will also specify that the ticket is nontransferable and that you weren't planning on meeting anyone.) When the night of the show comes, you notice that you don't actually feel like going out, and would actually enjoy yourself more at... (read 472 more words →)
From Tversky and Khaneman's "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice" (Science, Vol. 211, No. 4481, 1981): The following problem [...] illustrates the effect of embedding an option in different accounts. Two versions of this problem were presented to different groups of subjects. One group (N = 93) was given the values that appear in parentheses, and the other group (N = 88) the values shown in brackets. [...] Imagine that you are about to purchase a jacket for ($125) [$15], and a calculator for ($15) [$125]. The calculator salesman informs you that the calculator you wish to buy is on sale for ($10) [$120] at the other branch of the store,
... (read 270 more words →)
which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position
See Furcas's comment.
that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself
I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan's Law.
And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words "very roughly the same reason" instead of "exactly the same reason".
I disagree; if it had been obvious, I wouldn't have had to point it out explicitly. Maybe the cognitive history would help? I had originally typed "the same reason," but added... (read more)
I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn't a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for "your own" future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for "your own" future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don't know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don't understand consciousness.
I was trying to be cute.
Following Nominull and Furcas, I bite the third bullet without qualms for the perfectly ordinary obvious reasons. Once we know how much of what kinds of experiences will occur at different times, there's nothing left to be confused about. Subjective selfishness is still coherent because you're not just an arbitrary observer with no distinguishing characteristics at all; you're a very specific bundle of personality traits, memories, tendencies of thought, and so forth. Subjective selfishness corresponds to only caring about this one highly specific bundle: only caring about whether someone falls off a cliff if this person identifies as such-and-such and has such-and-these specific memories and such-and-those personality traits: however close a correspondence you need to match whatever you define as personal identity.
The popular concepts of altruism and selfishness weren't designed for people who understand materialism. Once you realize this, you can just recast whatever it was you were already trying to do in terms of preferences over histories of the universe. It all adds up to, &c., &c.
I count 6+ comments from others on meta-talk, 8+ down-mods, and 0 [sic] explanations for the errors in my solution. Nice work, guys.
If it is in fact the case that your complaints are legitimately judged a negative contribution, then you should expect to be downvoted and criticized on those particular comments, regardless of whether or not your solution is correct. There's nothing contradictory about simultaneously believing both that your proposed solution is correct, and that your subsequent complaints are a negative contribution.
I don't feel like taking the time to look over your solution. Maybe it's perfect. Wonderful! Spectacular! This world becomes a little brighter every time someone solves a math problem. But... (read more)
Right, so of course I'm rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I'm not ontologically fundamental; I'm just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So "I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs" is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said "very roughly the same reason" and not "exactly the same reason"; that was intentional.)
But all the resulting observers who see the coin come up tails aren't you. You just specified that they weren't. Who cares what they think?
On reflection, I'm actually going to start spelling my first name again.
I don't throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don't throw other people off cliffs.
Oops. I goofed.