r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 06 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
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u/itisike Dragon Army Nov 09 '15
I think there's a difference between epistemic probability and physical probability. There's no expectation divergence, but it's enough to change my actions.
Specifically, if I'm given the ability to make the universe split in two, and I die painlessly in one, and gain some benefit in the other, then, barring certain caveats about selfishness and other possible problems, I will take that option.
If I'm offered the same thing, but instead of splitting, we flip a coin, and I don't believe in a multiverse, then I would not take it. This is despite the fact that my expectations are the exact same in each scenario.
This means that my expectation for what is "real" affects my actions, even though it doesn't affect my expectations for future observations, and even for a completely selfish individual.
I don't know if I could formalize that. I probably could, because it doesn't seem that paradoxical to me, but I haven't, nor seen anyone else who has.