On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 11:56:46AM -0500, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> The mathematical pattern of a goal system or decision may be instantiated 
> in many distant locations simultaneously.  Mathematical patterns are 
> constant, and physical processes may produce knowably correlated outputs 
> given knowably correlated initial conditions.  For non-deterministic 
> systems, or cases where the initial conditions are not completely known 
> (where there exists a degree of subjective entropy in the specification of 
> the initial conditions), the correlation estimated will be imperfect, but 
> nonetheless nonzero.  What I call the "Golden Law", by analogy with the 
> Golden Rule, states descriptively that a local decision is correlated with 
> the decision of all mathematically similar goal processes, and states 
> prescriptively that the utility of an action should be calculated given 
> that the action is the output of the mathematical pattern represented by 
> the decision process, not just the output of a particular physical system 
> instantiating that process - that the utility of an action is the utility 
> given that all sufficiently similar instantiations of a decision process 
> within the multiverse do, already have, or someday will produce that 
> action as an output.  "Similarity" in this case is a purely descriptive 
> argument with no prescriptive parameters.

Ok, I see. I think I agree with this. I was confused by your phrase 
"Hofstadterian superrationality" because if I recall correctly, Hofstadter 
suggested that one should always cooperate in one-shot PD, whereas you're 
saying only cooperate if you have sufficient evidence that the other side 
is running the same decision algorithm as you are.

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