Why make it an ethical problem? What if you estimate is A you have 60%
chance of surviving and B your have 40% chance of surviving.
Brent
On 12/22/2018 9:48 PM, Mason Green wrote:
So I thought of an interesting problem in decision theory and/or ethics. Maybe
someone’s thought along these lines before, but if so I haven’t encountered it.
Suppose you have to make a decision between two options, A and B. Your credence
that option A is the more ethical one is 60%, and your credence that option B
is the more ethical one is 40%.
Is it more ethical to....
1. Automatically pick A because it has the higher credence.
2. Pick randomly between A and B with the probability of each one matching your
credence. For example, generate a random number between 0 and 1 and pick B iff
your number is over 0.6.
If one subscribed to the MWI, the second option could even be phrased as “make
sure 60% of your future selves pick A and 40% pick B”.
The second option could be called the diverse-futures ethic, since it would
lead to a more varied future if everyone consistently followed it, while option
A could be called the winner-take-all ethic.
One interesting fact is that it’s less costly (in terms of entropy and energy)
for an agent to follow the diverse-futures ethic. This is because noise can be
recycled from the environment to use to make the decision. However the
difference in cost is very small (less than 1 bit of entropy in the above case,
or less than kT ln 2 of energy). Maybe that should factor into the relative
ethical merit of the two strategies, if only a tiny bit.
The human brain seems to follow the diverse-futures ethic since it calculates
probabilistically, using ambient noise to its advantage.
-Mason
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
