All you rationality mavens, with/without prefixes (vanilla, bounded-, biased-, post-, meta-)...
Has anyone ever properly studied mortal-rationality? Reasoning bounded by the belief that you will certainly die within a period T, as will your descendants?
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Example: if you know you’ll die tomorrow, it is rational to defect in a tit-for-tat game today. That’s a mortal-rational result.
If you care 0.5 times about your kids as yourself, and 0.25 about your grandkids etc., you still get a near-finite horizon boundary condition.
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In Tempo, I explicitly framed my models as “all life choices are among options that end with our individual deaths”
Providing a reasonable account of why we care about “posterity” and “legacy” is a basic problem in mortal rationality.
Suicide is of course the e. coli problem.
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Big life project to-do... need to do a 2nd edition of Tempo. I haz significant updates 😐
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Hmm... are you saying Vanilla-Rational is a viable lifestyle choice. I thought lifestyle/authenticity was dead? My wife has a habit of blurting out what is written on my tombstone(s). #tombstonetwitter
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I have no opinion on that. "Rationalist" seems to be a label many adopt and live under, so I presume it means something coherent to them.
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Not sure there’s anything such as mortal rationality
Our decisions on how to live are gently nudged by billion years of evolutionary programming as a result of our ancestors escaping mortality
How do you bound something that exists precisely to escape those bounds?
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I've felt this in my relationship with my aging parents off late
I talk in terms of my life ending when I die
They talk sometimes in terms of "living on" or "meeting again" and "faith"
They are not religious and did not do this before
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Gawande's book, Mortality, addresses this and has a lot of good ideas
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