Thanks for the links! They were interesting and I’m happy that philosophers, including ones close to EA, are trying to grapple with these questions.
I was confused by SIA, and found that I agree with Bostrom’s critique of it much more than with the argument itself. The changes to the prior it proposes seem ad hoc, and I don’t understand how to motivate them. Let me know if you know how to motivate them (without a posteriori arguments that they—essentially by definition—cancel the update terms in the DA). It also seems to me to quickly lead to infinite expectations if taken at face value, unless there is a way to consistently avoid this issue by avoiding some kind of upper bound on population?
Anthropic decision theory seems more interesting to me, though I haven’t had a chance to try to understand it yet. I’ll take a look at the paper you linked when I get a chance.
Thanks for the links! They were interesting and I’m happy that philosophers, including ones close to EA, are trying to grapple with these questions.
I was confused by SIA, and found that I agree with Bostrom’s critique of it much more than with the argument itself. The changes to the prior it proposes seem ad hoc, and I don’t understand how to motivate them. Let me know if you know how to motivate them (without a posteriori arguments that they—essentially by definition—cancel the update terms in the DA). It also seems to me to quickly lead to infinite expectations if taken at face value, unless there is a way to consistently avoid this issue by avoiding some kind of upper bound on population?
Anthropic decision theory seems more interesting to me, though I haven’t had a chance to try to understand it yet. I’ll take a look at the paper you linked when I get a chance.
But I agree with your meta-point that I implicitly assumed SSA together with my “assumption 5” and SSA might not follow from the other assumptions