The vision of heaven stands at 37 karma, that of hell, 133. (But the former is two days younger. It will be interesting to see where it stands in the days to come.)
Two days later, the vision of heaven has actually gone down to 33, while hell is now at 165.
Apparently, people prefer five to one to be told they are powerless trash than that anything else is possible. I am reminded of Eric Raymond's essay on good porn vs. bad porn, and why the latter sort is the overwhelming majority.
I am sad about this but not surprised. People in the rationalsphere lap up tales that they have no choice about anything, that they are scum floating on the surface of unconscious forces they are powerless to affect, that they do nothing, only observe what their body has done, that nothing is true, all is a lie, X is never about X, status has you, and you don't exist.
I didn't invent any of these memes, only turned up to 11 what runs in the bloodstream of the rationalsphere.
A few more remarks about the contrast.
The vision of heaven is individual, spoken by "I". The vision of hell is all couched in terms of a general "you". The sufferer is unable to contemplate the idea that this is their own, individual state, but insists that this must be the condition of all.
The vision of heaven looks outward at the world, a place to find and create joy in. The vision of hell is turned in on itself. The character is curled up in a ball with eyes tightly shut, screaming forever at a world they refuse to see.
The vision of heaven is hopeful. The vision of hell is hopeless, at the end denying that any other state is possible for anyone.
The vision of heaven stands at 37 karma, that of hell, 133. (But the former is two days younger. It will be interesting to see where it stands in the days to come.)
When you say "you", are you talking about yourself, or is the monologist an imaginary victim of the utility egregore?
without any action in this engagement being able to be appropriately labeled “deliberate”
Well, there's the root of it. Who is to be in charge, you or the soul-eating shoggoth that wants to nest behind your smiley face?
This post makes a striking contrast to this one by yourself two days ago.
The vision of heaven is written in the first person, while the vision of hell is written in the second. Are you saying that your life is like the first, while everyone else's is like the second?
Or... what? Is either of these an account of reality, of what someone would see if they followed you around all day?
You can just not do things.
The uncertainties that will always be present for a real gamble make the Kelly bet rash, uncertainties about not only the numbers, but about whether the preconditions for the criterion obtain.
Because of this, Zvi recommends that Kelly is the right way to think, and you should evaluate the Kelly recommendation as best you can, but you should then bet no more than 25% to 50% of that amount. Further elaboration here.
Kelly bets only apply to the situation where you have a choice to gamble or not, and not gambling leaves your wealth unaffected. When the Kelly bet is negative, that means you should decline the bet.
If the mugger is capable of confiscating 99.999999999999999% of your wealth, why is he offering the bet?
1Option 10: Kelly betting.
If you bet repeatedly on a gamble in which with probability you win times what you bet, and otherwise lose your bet, the fraction of your wealth to bet that maximises your growth rate is . This implies that no matter how enormous the payoff, you should never bet more than of your wealth. The probability you assign to unsubstantiated promises from dodgy strangers should be very small, so you can safely ignore Pascal's Wager.
McGee's argument is akin to the following piece of mathematics, separate from utility theory. What is ?
Clearly, it is equal to , which equals , which is .
Clearly, it is equal to , which equals , which is .[1]
We do not respond to this paradox by supposing there must be a maximum and a minimum integer. We cannot, because mathematics, even more than physics, is a coherent whole in which we cannot change one thing without changing everything. We must instead accept the fact that not all sequences converge.
It may seem like one can answer McGee's paradox by saying "oh well, I guess my utility function's bounded", but coherence problems will still arise, which I was alluding to in asking how you might find the bounds and what sort of magnitude you imagine for them. What happens in someone's quest for maximising utility when they begin to succeed? To approach the maximum possible utility they could ever have? One would have to find oneself caring less and less about every new thing, until one's future is the torpor of "utility death", jaded beyond all caring. This is indeed a standard trope in fiction, but if death is a solvable problem, I would expect utility death to be so also.
By choosing different sequences, one can produce examples where either or both of the limits of the regrouped sequences is finite. ↩︎
Is The Sort another name for [the rat race](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_race)?