From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Thu May 29 2003 - 13:07:02 MDT
On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 07:34:02PM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> The main reason for being an averagist is that you live in an infinite
> universe and hence cannot be a totalist.
If the universe is infinite, you can't be a naive averagist either,
because otherwise you'd be trying to maximize something that is infinity
divided by infinity. Obviously both positions need to be more
sophisticated in an infinite universe. For example you can have a measure
over all objects and try to maximize a weighted average happiness,
weighted by measure. Then the difference between the averagist and the
totalist would be that the former normalizes the measure so that the sum
of measures of all living (or otherwise qualified) beings sums to one,
whereas the latter normalizes the measure so that the sum of measures of
all objects sums to one.
> If so, then observer-instants
> are not things that either exist or do not exist; the question is where
> they predominantly exist. What you want to do is arrange for as many
> observer-instants as possible to lead to the happiest possible future
> instants with the strongest possible probabilities.
How is this different from the totalist position? Can you give a concrete
scenario where your brand of altruism would lead to a different course of
action from totalism?
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