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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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A list of steps I disagree with (edit: fixed list formatting):

1. There's probably millions of words on Less Wrong about dealing with Pascal's wager, because precisely formulating a consistent decision theory that deals with it is is extremely difficult. At yet every human manages to operate under one - as AhhhTheFrench's examples show, everyone is already rejecting infinitely many such wagers at every point in their lives. The big problem for your argument is that most of these difficulties don't really require infinities, basically every stupid gotcha works about the same with just extremely big rewards for extremely low probabilities. You're also not giving him money if he promises he's invented life extension technology that will allow you and your family billions of years of happy (and fully-christian-compliant for all you afterlife worries) life. One rejects that offer by the same internal mechanism as the infinite version. But your steps 2.-4. rely precisely on the infinite.

5. Technically true in that there's no reason to think any way is likely, but this doesn't lead into the following steps.

6. This isn't even an argument, just a baseless assertion. If I had to pick one I'd say hallucinogens have stronger standing than religion here, but I don't actually have to pick.

7.1. You smuggled in some christian assumptions in the formulation in this statement - many religions involve a multitude of supernatural forces with differing agendas and power levels. Large religions could be such because they are led by evil forces or whatever.

7.2. Even assuming monotheism, that may be how a reasonable god would operate, but so much evidence from our world shows that, were there a god, it would be very far from a reasonable one.

8. Straightforwardly false. Especially when you nicely worded it to include nirvana.

9. If you're going for appeasing multiple religions at once, there's an infinity to choose from, so why stop at judaism and christianity?

10. As others have already mentioned, this one is very weak if you haven't already bought into a christian worldview.

1. The problem of handling many wagers virtually goes away once you accept one: the infinites involved in pursuing that one more or less perfectly are free to outweigh the others. It's actually pretty simple to make a decision theory that accepts it. Including hyperreals, and then doing the usual shut-up-and-multiply, works. LessWrong has written at length because they have no good way to reject the wager—I don't know that there's any real consistent way to do so—and so they just try to reject it while changing nothing else, which is just inconsistent. At least, so far as I have seen; I haven't looked in a while. (Especially funny in light of the EA shift somewhat in favor of longtermism: you know what else cares a lot about things with low chances of effective changes but extremely high rewards? This, but more.)

5. Doesn't it lead into them?

6. Fair enough. I mean, I do think you should pick, but if you think hallucinogens are more likely, then that would be the right move.

7.1. Then judge accordingly. In any case, if they're large because they're more powerful, wouldn't the more powerful be more likely to win in whatever cosmic battles we're talking about? Maybe you should worried that they might be evil forces, but if they're going to win, that doesn't sound good for anyone, not just their devotees.

7.2. Maybe that's how a reasonable god would act, and we shouldn't necessarily expect that, but we should make the best guess we can, and I don't exactly have a better one to offer.

8. Fair enough. Nirvana is cessation from suffering through infinite lives, right? Well, if those lives are finite in suffering each, and there are an ℵ0 number of lives to live through, well, there are larger infinities that could be promised by the other religions. (Yes, I didn't want to mention this messiness before, but there's no reason it wouldn't be present. It's unclear how they relate to each other, but most religions do not put an upper bound on how good their benefit/how harmful their cost, unlike what I just characterized nirvana as.)

9. Because large religions are more likely, assuming 7 is right. Combine that with prohibitions in said large religions on worshipping other gods, and so you shouldn't seek out more. (I gave Judaism a pass on that, because there are at least arguments to be made that Abrahamic religions worship the same God.)

10. Sure, this point is currently weak.

Edit: This doesn't matter, but I'm not currently convinced that by billions you've reached the point that the increase in benefit outweighs the decrease in probability enough to make it worth it. But at some point that does start happening, so, as I said, this point doesn't matter.

can you escape the list autoformatting?

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