Never go outside without your Uber Walking Buddy, so that arguably they would’ve saved the child if you hadn’t.
Don’t worry about it and save the child because the optimal (infinite EV) action would’ve been to give your expensive shoes to a normie in return for being your counterparty in a St. Petersburg Game.
Offset every saved child with a donation to a marine habitat conservation charity.
Save the child but tell it that there is no God thereby defecting in an acausal moral trade with Calvinists centuries ago.
Save all children but on the shore cunningly arrange them in a spatiotemporal pattern that actually reduces overall value according to the value-density and hyperreal remedies to infinite ethics.
Save children who eat meat.
Corollary: Complex cluelessness means the EV of all actions is undefined/unknowable, so you’re free to save all the children you want.
Don’t worry about it because whatever you think is maximally good probably isn’t because of the Optimizer’s Curse.
Counterfactuals are logically inconsistent in a deterministic world, so you might as well save the child and compare that action against a counterfactual where you prevented them from falling into the pond in the first place.
Save the child but don’t tell them about cryonics.
Buy the expensive shoes to ruin at an unnecessarily high price.
Drench your clothes in a mild poison every morning so that by jumping into the water you contaminate it and expose the child to a low chance of death by poisoning.
Save the child while keeping your eyes open or not plugging your ears – you thereby force the simulation to simulate the stressful drowning process in detail, which is not optimal.
Use a quantum random number generator for all sorts of decisions every day to decorrelate yourself from your selves on other Everett branches: Now you’re free to save the child because on many branches you’re not even passing by the pond.
Assume Omega predicted your actions: If it predicted that you would save the child, it put the child in the pond; if it predicted you wouldn’t save the child, it let the child play by the shore in peace. By being the sort of person who would save the child, you’ve already caused the child a lot of unnecessary stress, so saving them now doesn’t risk being optimal anymore.
More options:
Save the child but then let your clothes dry, thereby killing thousands of zooplankton, rotifers, and nematodes.
Never go outside without your Uber Walking Buddy, so that arguably they would’ve saved the child if you hadn’t.
Don’t worry about it and save the child because the optimal (infinite EV) action would’ve been to give your expensive shoes to a normie in return for being your counterparty in a St. Petersburg Game.
Offset every saved child with a donation to a marine habitat conservation charity.
Save the child but tell it that there is no God thereby defecting in an acausal moral trade with Calvinists centuries ago.
Save all children but on the shore cunningly arrange them in a spatiotemporal pattern that actually reduces overall value according to the value-density and hyperreal remedies to infinite ethics.
Save children who eat meat.
Corollary: Complex cluelessness means the EV of all actions is undefined/unknowable, so you’re free to save all the children you want.
Don’t worry about it because whatever you think is maximally good probably isn’t because of the Optimizer’s Curse.
Counterfactuals are logically inconsistent in a deterministic world, so you might as well save the child and compare that action against a counterfactual where you prevented them from falling into the pond in the first place.
Save the child but don’t tell them about cryonics.
Buy the expensive shoes to ruin at an unnecessarily high price.
Drench your clothes in a mild poison every morning so that by jumping into the water you contaminate it and expose the child to a low chance of death by poisoning.
Save the child while keeping your eyes open or not plugging your ears – you thereby force the simulation to simulate the stressful drowning process in detail, which is not optimal.
Use a quantum random number generator for all sorts of decisions every day to decorrelate yourself from your selves on other Everett branches: Now you’re free to save the child because on many branches you’re not even passing by the pond.
Assume Omega predicted your actions: If it predicted that you would save the child, it put the child in the pond; if it predicted you wouldn’t save the child, it let the child play by the shore in peace. By being the sort of person who would save the child, you’ve already caused the child a lot of unnecessary stress, so saving them now doesn’t risk being optimal anymore.