Conversation

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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Emotions are a present condition, and are not under our control. I can’t prevent myself from thinking about the world I’ll leave for my kids and grandkids. Rationally I know it doesn’t matter, but my emotions still make me feel like shit if I imagine being a nihilistic ass.
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“Suicide is of the course the e. coli problem” Get a load of Albert Camus here 👆 is •this close• to refactoring existentialism (now mediocre, and with TV) from his office in LA
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