ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
9hr ago
There's a lot of haranguing about who "won" and who "lost", as though there is some pigeonhole principle with those two possibilities. It's entirely possible that the US did not (or will not) accomplish its objectives (paying costs along the way) while Iran also was badly damaged. War is generally a negative-sum affair. That is not to say that some years from now, we will look back and think that such a case became reality; either side could still sufficiently "win". Just to say that it's also possible that neither party really "wins".
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I don't actually care all that much about the actual process you use for evaluation of things like probabilities/payoffs (honestly, I don't even care that much about Pascal's wager). The point is that, in principle, one could conceivably do such. Obviously, any particular process is subject to a variety of scrutinies.
to actually do this you would have to go through and compare every religion on earth.
There's always going to be some limitation. When I'm coming to my personal beliefs about my own academic field, for example, I certainly don't read every single paper that is published, even though some might be amazing. That doesn't mean I can't ever come to beliefs.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
See, you say
Well yes.
But then you try to argue for no. Both on the probabilistic argument and beyond. You seemed to have embraced the idea that there's no way for you to assess probabilities, but then you say
I can find arguments that make established religions less likely to be true.
Even going beyond probabilities, you had said
there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct.
But now you seem to think there are ways to conclusively show that a religion is false.
Perhaps you'd like to take a chance to try to reconcile some apparent contradictions? I'd be interested in getting to the decision theory question possibly posed by your final sentence, but the contradictions above may make it impossible for us to construct a well-posed decision theory problem.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Interestingly, the base Pascal wager makes sense without any infinite suffering at all. Regardless, there are a variety of ways of handling it, especially if your concern is that Roko (a person) is just making up a basilisk.
It is just not sustainable as there is no way to distinguish between a religion that is made up by humans and one that is actually correct.
This seems to be your real objection, not the multiple religion concern. You think it's just impossible to actually assess anything involved, including probabilities. Presumably, that means it's also impossible for you to assess the probability that atheism is true.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
As they say, "unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved"... or something like that.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
Pascal's wager is nearly the earliest example of decision theory, and it hardly makes sense to say that the many religions concern simply breaks decision theory. One can do a variety of things to analyze the probability space as well as the payoff space. For an example simplification, suppose there are two possible mutually exclusive levers you could pull, each with some chance of giving you massively large/infinite utility, and P(A pays out)=0.999 while P(B pays out)=0.001. (This is obviously an extreme case, but that's just to build intuition.) Alternatively, one can adjust probabilities such that maybe there's a third mutually exclusive lever that you can pull which has a guaranteed payoff of 1 or whatever. One can make further refinements.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Most of their edge in other markets comes from cheating (buying secret data) and grinding (trading all the time and trading with more capital than they deserve, because it was handed to them). My analysis should be superior to them in a live sports game where they can't pull these dirty tricks.
You should just cheat yourself. Scale up. Way way way up. Start your own sports betting ETF. Or possibly recognize that if betting on sports with capital that was handed to them, more than they deserve, is cheating, then some folks are about to start cheating against you in sports betting, too.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
It is a binary state though.
This is quite the claim about a concept that is known to be rather messy. Multiple entire books have been written by philosophers of ethics trying to explore the nature of consent, because it is, indeed, rather messy. One may desire to collapse all the messiness down to a binary state, but that is a significant enough of a claim that it likely requires yet another one of those books written by a philosopher of ethics to argue for. Probably not something that's going to be settled in a MottePost.
To be clear, I think that for some situations (many situations), there is a clean enough mapping from the complex mental state that was present in that situation to a binary consent state. But that mapping is not always clean. One can hold as an axiom that, in theory, such a mapping must always exist, but that would either be an axiom or a claim. If it's a claim, I think it's hard to look at the existing academic work and believe that it has been conclusively shown.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
There's a pretty long history of dirty theists making arguments along the lines of, "Let's compute how inconceivably improbable it is for intelligent life to spontaneously develop out of simple dead matter." I don't really subscribe to such arguments, but that is neither here nor there. It may be the case that you are unaware of the typical battle lines that have been drawn when they do so. Not being aware of such would be a reasonable explanation for your confusion.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I must admit, I did not have "intra-atheist squabble over aliens results in arguments that intelligent life may be extremely improbable" on my bingo card. Handwavy BigNum arguments are a typical part of the arsenal. Isn't the entire point of the unfalsifiable multiverse idea to construct a handwavy BigNum argument?
I would say that I began my career doing more problem solving, and I try to retain some of that, but I do a lot more problem setting now. Do you have any specific questions?
Not being sure what you're looking for, I'd maybe say, "You can just do things." Nothing is really stopping you from thinking deeply about the "why" of what you're doing. The scope of your thinking may be limited by the number of folks you can influence into working on the problems you think should be set. There are more formal ways to be able to exert such influence (e.g., you're given some sort of formal authority over resources/people who pretty much have to follow the direction you set), but informal methods work pretty well, too (e.g., you persuade others over time that they should pay attention to the concerns you pose, especially as they see examples of how you posed a problem and it led to important results).
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