From: Thomas McCabe (pphysics141@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Mar 16 2008 - 19:19:57 MDT
On Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Peter de Blanc
<peter@spaceandgames.com> wrote:
>
> The "special cases" are not as special as you may think. I have one for
> you. There's a bomb in some populated area. You believe that cutting the
> red wire will detonate it, and cutting the blue wire will disarm it.
>
> So, to summarize your beliefs:
>
> Red -> detonate
> Blue -> disarm
>
> Alf and Beth both believe:
>
> Red -> disarm
> Blue -> detonate
>
> Alf wants to detonate the bomb, and Beth wants to disarm it. Which one
> would you rather have standing next to the bomb with wire-cutters?
>
>
I should mention conjecture #1,783: "on average, you always get a
higher expected utility with rational beliefs than irrational
beliefs".
Anyway, unless the situation is rather extreme (eg, the bomb is filled
with high explosive and shrapnel and it'll kill people), it should
take a huge number of these incidents to offset the 'benefits' of
utility function replacement. The monetary value of all the work Alf
and Beth do over an average lifetime could easily total several
million dollars.
-- - Tom http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:02 MDT