From: Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 27 1997 - 15:24:20 MST
Eliezer Yudkowsky writes:
>I've always thought that there's probably a sizable amount of
>personality duplication going on; maybe no more than a million or two
>unique belief systems. Firefly and its ilk will make that apparent,
>perhaps causing a thousand people who all think alike to collapse into a
>single super-person, with a thousand distinct levels of attention, with
>each person being able to take advantage of the decisions of all
>others. Even if there are two many dimensions for points to coincide, a
>hundred thousand people who all think exactly the same way about laundry
>could collapse into a super-laundry-decider that could spend/distribute
>several days a week keeping track of all the various detergent
>companies, their pricing, their ethical behavior...
You suggest an interesting theory, but is there any evidence to
suggest it? Identical twins don't have identical beliefs, so this has
to be an argument about the belief space, not about genetic reductions
of that space. But why would there be only 1M points in belief space,
a space defined finely enough to specific laundry preferences?
Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/
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