Dumheter från rymden

När jag läser SSC:s senaste post, och når stycket om moralisk-filosofiska dilemman, tänker jag:

Är inte alla väldigt osannolika situationer fusk?

SSC skriver:

"My intuition (most authoritative source! is never wrong!) says that we should be very careful reversing the usual law-trumps-morality-trumps-axiology order, since the whole point of having more than one system is that we expect the systems to disagree and we want to suppress those disagreements in order to solve important implementation and coordination problems. But I also can’t deny that for enough gain, I’d reverse the order in a heartbeat. If someone told me that by breaking a promise to my friend (morality) I could cure all cancer forever (axiology), then f@$k my friend, and f@$k whatever social trust or community cohesion would be lost by the transaction." (Antropofagis fetstil.)

Hur sannolikt är det att exakt den (fetstilade) situationen uppkommer?

Khalifen frågar: "Where did the improbability come from?"

Eller närmare bestämt:

"When you get a little older, you learn that energy is conserved, never created or destroyed, so the notion of using up energy doesn't make much sense. You can never change the total amount of energy, so in what sense are you using it?

So when physicists grow up, they learn to play a new game called Follow-The-Negentropy—which is really the same game they were playing all along; only the rules are mathier, the game is more useful, and the principles are harder to wrap your mind around conceptually.

Rationalists learn a game called Follow-The-Improbability, the grownup version of "How Do You Know?" The rule of the rationalist's game is that every improbable-seeming belief needs an equivalent amount of evidence to justify it. (This game has amazingly similar rules to Follow-The-Negentropy.)

Whenever someone violates the rules of the rationalist's game, you can find a place in their argument where a quantity of improbability appears from nowhere; and this is as much a sign of a problem as, oh, say, an ingenious design of linked wheels and gears that keeps itself running forever.

The one comes to you and says: "I believe with firm and abiding faith that there's an object in the asteroid belt, one foot across and composed entirely of chocolate cake; you can't prove that this is impossible." But, unless the one had access to some kind of evidence for this belief, it would be highly improbable for a correct belief to form spontaneously. So either the one can point to evidence, or the belief won't turn out to be true. "But you can't prove it's impossible for my mind to spontaneously generate a belief that happens to be correct!" No, but that kind of spontaneous generation is highly improbable, just like, oh, say, an egg unscrambling itself.

In Follow-The-Improbability, it's highly suspicious to even talk about a specific hypothesis without having had enough evidence to narrow down the space of possible hypotheses. Why aren't you giving equal air time to a decillion other equally plausible hypotheses? You need sufficient evidence to find the "chocolate cake in the asteroid belt" hypothesis in the hypothesis space—otherwise there's no reason to give it more air time than a trillion other candidates like "There's a wooden dresser in the asteroid belt" or "The Flying Spaghetti Monster threw up on my sneakers."

In Follow-The-Improbability, you are not allowed to pull out big complicated specific hypotheses from thin air without already having a corresponding amount of evidence; because it's not realistic to suppose that you could spontaneously start discussing the true hypothesis by pure coincidence."

Den specifika Lesswrong-posten handlar om medvetandet (är det väsenskilt från våra neuroner, typ), men i min mening tillämpligt på alla typer av filosofiska dilemman.

Extremt osannolika situationer kostar. Det går inte att helt gratis anta en situation av typen som SSC viftar med.

Jag kan inte på rak arm säga vad detta har för implikationer på specifika dilemman, men det kan vara en vägledning i att förstå hur lite en behöver bry sig om dessa dilemman i vardagen.

Med detta dock inte förnekat att extremt renodlade situationer kan vara nyttiga som exempel för att belysa brister i resonemang.