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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Replying to
Hey Venkat, I bought 'tempo' after reading 'the office' series. I read a lot, had high expectations. I didn't like the book at all! It's a completely different style. Any chance you would do more books in the style of the blog series for 'the office' ?
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Replying to
Sorry you didn't like it, but I'm afraid you're going to be repeatedly disappointed if you expect me to stick to one style. I like to try out a new style for every major idea I explore, so I basically only do one thing per style.
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