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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

What is this post? 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 get brought up: we hope that this post will be useful as the place that lists and discusses these common objections. We also 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. ECL seems very weird.…

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