From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 02:01:33 MST
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:12:24PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> It seems to me that taking such an extremely skeptical position has
> some of the same problems as solipsism: it can't be refuted, but it's
> not useful in practice.
Perhaps a better analogy is this: trying to decide whether re-runs are
good is like trying to decide whether solipsism is correct. Today
solipsism can be refuted, by Occam's Razor (or Kolmogorov's Razor to
borrow Eliezer's term), but realizing this required the invention of
algorithmic information theory (which includes a definition of simplicity
that is mathematically rigorous and more or less self-evident). Before
that, different people had different intutions about what was simplier:
that only I exist, or that the whole universe exists? And there was no way
to convince someone whose intuition differed from you.
We need the equivalent of algorithmic information theory for moral
philosophy. Until we have one, I doubt that the debate of whether re-runs
are valuable can ever get beyond the dueling-intuitions stage. I think
being agnostic at this point is not defeatist, just realistic. It means we
need to consider all possibilities when planning for the future.
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