Schlega

I'm not a fan of Evangelion or Doctor Who, but I've been enjoying Shinji and the Doctor

I'm in the under-qualified but interested camp. I'll plan on coming.

In my experience, trying to choose what I care about does not work well, and has only resulted in increasing my own suffering.

Is the problem that thinking about the amount of suffering in the world makes you feel powerless to fix it? If so then you can probably make yourself feel better if you focus on what you can do to have some positive impact, even if it is small. If you think "donating to science" is the best way to have a positive impact on the future, than by all means do that, and think about how the research you are helping to fund will one day reduce the suffering that all future generations will have to endure.

I was thinking that using (length of program) + (memory required to run program) as a penalty makes more sense to me than (length of program) + (size of impact). I am assuming that any program that can simulate X minds must be able to handle numbers the size of X, so it would need more than log(X) bits of memory, which makes the prior less than 2^-log(X).

I wouldn't be overly surprised if there were some other situation that breaks this idea too, but I was just posting the first thing that came to mind when I read this.

Edit: formatting fixed. Thanks, wedrifid.

My response to the mugger:

• You claim to be able to simulate 3^^^^3 unique minds.
• It takes log(3^^^^3) bits just to count that many things, so my absolute upper bound on the prior for an agent capable of doing this is 1/3^^^^3.
• My brain is unable to process enough evidence to overcome this, so unless you can use your matrix powers to give me access to sufficient computing power to change my mind, get lost.

My response to the scientist:

• Why yes, you do have sufficient evidence to overturn our current model of the universe, and if your model is sufficiently accurate, the computational capacity of the universe is vastly larger than we thought.
• Let's try building a computer based on your model and see if it works.

This has changed my mind. Including examples that require slightly different thought patterns seems to be a good idea.

I agree that if the numbers given in the example were trustworthy, then it would be a good example. The part that confused me was that there would be no incentive to start the project unless the original estimate of the cost was significantly less than $7000. It seems reasonable to expect that the next $4000 you spend will have a similar effect on your expected cost to finish. If you perpetually think "Just another $5000 and I will be done", then you are no better off than if you think "I already spent so much, I can't just quit now."

The more money that is sunk into it, the stronger the evidence that you are bad at estimating the cost. I assume that this evidence is implied to be included in the new cost estimate, but I think a general audience would not immediately notice this.

Thank you for replying. This showed up just as I was editing the parent.