Tag: philosophy

Immortality Philosophy

Imagine that some sort of “fountain of youth” were discovered, which was not too difficult to reach, and which would grant true immortality to the first 12000 people to reach it.

What sort of people would compete most fiercely to reach that fountain, and what would their motivations be? Which motivations would you judge to be good versus bad, and what would the ratio be? Of the 12000 people who made it to the fountain, how many would you be comfortable with having as immortal?

Arrow’s Theorem

What Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice. Suppose that a person is rational and that we observe their choices. After some time we will come to understand their choices in terms of their underlying preferences (assume stability–this is a thought experiment). We will be able to say, “Ah, I see what this person wants. I understand now why they are choosing in the way that they do. If I were them, I would choose in the same way.”

this is why we can’t have nice things: even rational actors lead to absurd group choices.
2022-03-24:

When people make mistakes, they usually try to make better decisions subsequently. To do this, you have to acknowledge that you made a wrong choice. Next, you have to examine the process by which you made the choice, in order to theorize about what would have produced a better outcome. The next time you face a similar decision, you try to correct your decision-making process.

People can experience bad outcomes when they vote. Your preferred candidate or policy could lose. Or your side could win and produce bad results. But chances are, you will not go through an error-correction process. Very rarely will a voter say, “I made a mistake. What went wrong? I need to review how I made my choice, so that I do things differently the next time.”

There are 2 reasons that voters do not engage in error correction. One reason is that 1 person’s vote almost never affects the outcome of an election. It does not pay to invest effort in figuring out what went wrong and trying to correct it. Another reason is that political outcomes are more complex than personal outcomes.

Leggett inequality

A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: Do we create the world just by looking at it? Leggett’s theory was more powerful than Bell’s because it required that light’s polarization be measured not just like the second hand on a clock face, but over an entire sphere. In essence, there were an infinite number of clock faces on which the second hand could point. For the experimenters this meant that they had to account for an infinite number of possible measurement settings. So Zeilinger’s group rederived Leggett’s theory for a finite number of measurements. There were certain directions the polarization would more likely face in quantum mechanics. This test was more stringent. In mid-2007 Fedrizzi found that the new realism model was violated by 80 orders of magnitude; the group was even more assured that quantum mechanics was correct.