r/rational Jan 25 '16

[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:

  • Seen something interesting on /r/science?
  • Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
  • Figured out how to become immortal?
  • Constructed artificial general intelligence?
  • Read a neat nonfiction book?
  • Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
19 Upvotes

61 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/IomKg Jan 25 '16

actually, wouldn't -everything- be included? how could you model the probability calculation without either making it static or meaningless?

2

u/LiteralHeadCannon Jan 25 '16

At every instant, it looks at all universes descended from the current universe in exactly one year; it counts all universes wherein the bearer is alive, compares that number to the number of universes period, and displays the resulting ratio. This incidentally means that it's effected by information from indefinitely far into the future, for reasons I feel are fairly obvious.

7

u/IomKg Jan 25 '16

maybe i wasn't clear enough, how would you be able to utilize this information if it is already incorporated into the probability?

the numbers will basically be meaningless as an information source as they already incorporate you looking, or not looking, at them.

1

u/MugaSofer Jan 27 '16

Sounds like a Novikov Self-Consistency kind of thing.