Now I tend not to follow this form very much, so please excuse me if this has been suggested before. Still, I don't know that there's anyone else on this board who could actually carry out these threats. If anyone accepts a pascals mugging style trade off with full knowledge...
> IMPACT is conducting original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. These models will be used to develop and evaluate a prototype of an innovative argumentation toolbox for supporting open, inclusive and...
In this case my judgement of the probabilities is that we are completely justified in ignoring the threat.
Do you consider my pascals mugging to be less likely then the general examples of the genre, or do you think that all pascals muggings" probabilities are that we are completely justified in ignoring the threat."
One of which is in a temporally advantaged position in which he can do anything you can do and do more in addition to that - a strictly superior position.
Sorry, explain to me how this hypothetical god-being can exceed my threat consistently? Presuming we are both from the same privileged outside-your-time perspective?
Your strategy doesn't work. Deal with it.
I'm afraid you still haven't shown me enough evidence. If you'll bear with me a moment longer, I'll try to explain it better.
But then the mugger can just toss in a Turing machine to his offer, and now your attempt to analyze his offer is equivalent to solving a halting problem
I want you to think of exactly the consequences of that. Now you have two omnipotent god entities, each offering you a more or less random result. All you know about the result is that it's going to be positive or negative. One offers you a random positive result if you kill a baby, one offers you a random negative result if you kill a baby. Do you get, on average and over a very large sample size, more utility from killing the baby or not killing her?
Fair enough. Would you mind explaining your intent then?
Well it depends. Is the likelihood of it affecting reality around the same likelihood as me torturing everybody with my god powers? If it's significantly higher then that, I'd argue it's not an actual pascals mugging. Hard to know exactly where to draw the line though.
If it's not significantly higher then that, then you have to balance against my threat to torture everybody.
Well done. Roryokane mentioned it up here however.
And their claim afterwards? Any threat you can make, they can make. You see why this is a dead end?
That's kind of what I'm trying to point out here. It is a dead end, but I'm actually claiming the below. Sure, someone else can also claim the below as well. We can both make the claims. Now, who do you believe more?
But lets formalize my claim. My claim is that I will make n+1 utilitons happen if n is positive or n-1 utilitons happen is n is negative, as long as you do the opposite of what they tell you to do.
Where n is how many utilitons they offer given any result.
I'm outside of your conception of time. So if they make the threat after this is of no concern to me.
Err, yes. Maybe it is. That's what I'm trying to find out...
Are you saying that I should take some action with the knowledge that it might just be a quirk in the system? Like not posting my hypothesis?
Ahh, makes sense. I actually found many different and interesting solutions to pascals mugging with my search terms though. Just not this "counter" solution.
This thread already shows up pretty close to the top for searches of "pascals mugging solutions" that I've attempted. For that exact phrase it's number 3, and has been before you posted this. I don't know that this particular solution needs to be more closely associated with the search terms then it already is.
Now I tend not to follow this form very much, so please excuse me if this has been suggested before. Still, I don't know that there's anyone else on this board who could actually carry out these threats.
If anyone accepts a pascals mugging style trade off with full knowledge of the problem, then I will slowly torture to death 3^^^^3 sentient minds. Or a suitably higher number if they include a higher (plausible, from my external viewpoint) number. Rest assured I can at least match their raw computing power from where I am. Good luck.
EDIT: I'm told that Eleizer proposed a similar solution over here, although more eloquently then I have.
IMPACT is conducting original research to develop and integrate formal, computational models of policy and arguments about policy, to facilitate deliberations about policy at a conceptual, language-independent level. These models will be used to develop and evaluate a prototype of an innovative argumentation toolbox for supporting open, inclusive and transparent deliberations about public policy.
The IMPACT project, funded by the EU, is building a tool to make debates easier to keep track of, and presumably more rational. It look sort of like an AI, where all the dirty work and low level stuff is done by humans, but the actual result is determined by the structure of the machine. Certainly you could subvert it by placing incorrect standards of evidence on particular papers/arguments, but on the whole it looks interesting.
Sort of a wiki-decision framework.
What do you think about this type of project? Are there any existing argument modelling languages, like UML for arguments? Is this the best approach?
I understand that a lot of issues are solved, like the existence of god and so on, but I for one still haven't gotten an appropriate explanation as to why my claim, which seems perfectly valid to me, is incorrect. That proposal is going to further hinder this kind of discussion and debate.
And as far as I can tell, I'm correct. It's honestly very concerning to me that a bunch of lesswrongers have failed to follow this line of reasoning to its natural conclusion. Maybe I'm just not using the correct community-specific shibboleths, but the only one who's actually followed through on the logic is gwern. I look forward to seeing his counter reply to this.