Makeshift_Swahili posted:

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:


this will take a sec, but i'm not even talking about anything particularly controversial in science, either. like, according to Rationalism, let's say a man comes up to you and give me one dollar or i will torture one gazillion simulations of you in the Matrix for a gazillion years. obviously the chances of the Matrix existing and this guy really being an AI and having the ability to torture anybody in it is extremely small, but then you balance that against the gazillion years of a gazillion yous' torture and the likelihood that you're really one of the simulations and it seems Logical and moral to give him a dollar to prevent it. this is a serious thing they think and talk about.

isnt that just pascal's wager ?

I used to read crypto-NRx stuff and it gave me the same kind of paranoid fear of a torturous Matrix afterlife that the conservative interpretation of Pascal's Wager gave me so they at least have a similar impact