NoisyEmpire

Good point; you're right that his reasoning would be correct if he knew that, e.g., I had used a random number generator to randomly-generate a number between 1 and (total # of beans) and resolved to ask him, only on that numbered bean, to guess the upper bound on the total.

Perhaps to make the bean-game more similar to the original problem, I ought to ask for a guess on the total number after every bean placed, since every bean represents an observer who could be fretting about the Doomsday Argument.

Analogously, it would be misleading to imagine that You the Observer were placed in the human timeline at a single randomly-chosen point by, say, Omega, since every bean (or human) is in fact an observer.

Unfortunately I'm getting muddled and am not clear what consequences this has. Thoughts?

Surveyed.

This is a really excellent technique in a lot of contexts.

I offer a word of caution about actually using it with theists, even those less Biblically literate than Yvain's friend: the catch-all excuse that many (not all) theists make for Biblical atrocities is precisely that they were commanded by God, and thus on some version of Divine Command Theory are rendered okay - not that the atrocities are in some observable way actually less bad than those committed by other groups or religions.

Thanks! At the risk of falling prey to the planning fallacy, I should have some draft-worthy stuff next month.

I'm kind of thrilled to find this discussion occurring. I've just managed to actually start writing my long-planned, akrasia-blocked series of rationalist adventures for kids (say, smart-7-year-olds through 12-year-olds). It's a fantasy-adventure, a little bit zany, a little bit dark, and will be intended to promote basic virtues like curiosity, empiricism, changing your mind, and admitting when you don't know.

If and when I have drafts of a few stories, would there be interest in me writing a post explaining the project in more depth and requesting criticism/feedback?

I will note that though consequentialism is a fine ideal theory, at some point you really do have to implement a procedure, which means in practice, all consequentialists will be deontologists.

Agreed. This is usually called “rule utilitarianism” – the idea that, in practice, it actually conserves utils to just make a set of basic rules and follow them, rather than recalculating from scratch the utility of any given action each time you make a decision. Like, “don’t murder” is a pretty safe one, because it seems like in the vast majority of situations taking a life will have a negative utility. However, its still worth distinguishing this sharply from deontology, because if you ever did calculate and find a situation in which your rule resulted in lesser utility – like pushing the fat man in front of the train – you’d break the rule. The rule is an efficiency-approximation rather than a fundamental posit.

Much for the same reasons that people can be mistaken about their own desires, people can be mistaken about what they would actually consider awesome if they were to engage in an accurate modeling of all the facts. E.g. People who post flashing images to epileptic boards or suicide pictures to battered parents are either 1) failing to truly envision the potential results of their actions and consequently overvaluing the immediate minor awesomeness of the irony of the post or whatever vs. the distant, unseen, major anti-awesomeness of seizures/suicides, or 2) they’re actually socio- or psychopaths. Given the infrequency of real sociopathy, it’s safe to assume a lot of the former happens, especially over the impersonal, empathy-sapping environment of the Internet.