corhocysen

RAL 6011 'Reseda green'

i want to become mediocre at everything.
i speak πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§πŸ‡³πŸ‡± well, i'm currently learning πŸ‡―πŸ‡΅, and i can maybe read some other stuff


mastodon (defunct)
hsnl.social/@corhocysen
twitter (defunct)
twitter.com/corhocysen

stu
@stu

a foundation of formal logic is "if your premise is false, you can prove literally anything"

i don't know if the simulation theory is provably false, but it has a similar property of letting you spin out endless "severe implications". sure, we can imagine the simulation is in some sense hostile. we can also imagine it's benign.

assuming it's malicious, we can now imagine an infinite number of scenarios

  • we must "fight back"
  • we must not "fight back" or we will be shut down
  • every possible scenario is equally likely to it's opposite and we can always imagine new ones

since the premise is unproven and there's nothing to suggest we should assume it's true, we don't need to lose sleep over the implications.

this is also related to effective altruism/longtermism. they pull a similar trick by saying "consider the possibility that the future will include trillions of people. even if that possibility is very slim, when you multiply it by trillions of people, the math works out that helping those trillions of people is more important than helping anyone alive today".

they then focus their attention on incredibly unlikely "existential risks" because small probability x small probability x infinity people = infinite importance

in reality though, it's easy to construct an infinite number of scenarios where the math turns out to demand infinite importance, so probably we have made an error somewhere to land on focusing on "existential risk"

in summary, it's ok to not lose sleep over a theory some guy came up with until someone establishes a stronger grounding in reality than a claimed non-zero probability


You must log in to comment.