ektimo's Shortform

Should you cooperate with your almost identical twin in the prisoner's dilemma? 

The question isn't how physically similar they are, it's how similar their logical thinking is. If I can solve a certain math problem in under 10 seconds, are they similar enough that I can be confident they will be able to solve it in under 20 seconds? If I hate something will they at least dislike it? If so, then I would cooperate because I have a lot of margin on how much I favor us both to choose cooperate over any of the other outcomes so even if my almost identical twin doesn't favor it quite as much I can predict they will still choose cooperate given how much I favor it (and more-so that they will also approach the problem this same way; if I think they'll think "ha, this sounds like somebody I can take advantage of" or "reason dictates I must defect" then I wouldn't cooperate with them).

How about a voting system where everyone is given 1000 Influence Tokens to spend across all the items on the ballot? This lets voters exert more influence on the things they care more about. Has anyone tried something like this?

(There could be tweaks like if people are avoiding spending on winners it could redistribute margin of victory, or if avoiding spending on losers it could redistribute tokens when losing, etc. but I'm not sure how much that would happen. The more interesting thing may be how does it influence everyone's sense of what they are doing?)

We can be virtually certain that 2+2=4 based on priors.  This is because it's true in the vast multitude of universes. In fact all the universes except the one universe that contains all the other universes.  And I'm pretty sure that one doesn't exist anyway.

Imagine you have a button and if you press it, it will run through every possible state of a human brain. (One post estimates a brain may have about 2 to the sextillion different states. I mean the union of all brains so throw in some more orders of magnitude if you think there are a lot of differences in brain anatomy.) Each state would be experienced for one instant (which I could try to define and would be less than the number of states but let's handwave for now; as long as you accept that a human mind can be represented by a computer imagine the specs of the components and all the combinations of memory bits and one "stream of consciousness" quantum).

If you could make a change would you prioritize:

1. Pruning the instances to reduce negative experiences
2. Being able to press the button lots of times
3. Making the experiences more real (For example an experience could be "one instant of reminiscing over my memories of building a Dyson Sphere" but nothing like that ever happened. One way to make it more real would be to create the set of all the necessary universe starting conditions to be able to create the set of all unique experiences; each universe will create duplicate experiences among its various inhabitants but it will contain at least the one unique experience it is checking off, which would include the person reminiscing over building a Dyson Sphere and they actually did build it. Or at least the ones that can be generated in this fashion.)
4. This is horrible, stop the train I want to get off.

(I'd probably go with 4 but curious if people have different opinions.)