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Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds: Potential Objections & FAQ — EA Forum

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This post is a companion piece to recent posts on evidential cooperation in large worlds (ECL). We’ve noticed that in conversations about ECL, the same few initial confusions and objections tend to be brought up. We hope that this post will be useful as the place that lists and discusses these common objections. We invite the reader to advance additional questions or objections of their own. This FAQ does not need to be read in order. The reader is encouraged to look through the section headings and jump to those they find most interesting. We don’t think so. ECL, at its core, takes two reasonable ideas that by themselves are considered quite plausible by many—albeit not completely uncontroversial—and notices that when you combine them, you get something quite interesting and novel. Specifically, ECL combines “large world” with “noncausal decision theory.” Many people believe the universe/multiverse is large, but that it might as well be small because we can only causally influence, or

Michael St Jules 🔸 2y 7 0 0 1 I would add that acausal influence is not only not Pascalian, but that it can make other things that may seem locally Pascalian or at least quite unlikely to make a positive local difference — like lottery tickets, voting and maybe an individual's own x-risk reduction work — become reasonably likely to make a large difference across a multiverse, because of variants of the Law of Large Numbers or Central Limit Theorem. This can practically limit risk aversion. See Wilkinson, 2022 ( EA Forum post ). Reply

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