Eliezer Yudkowsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But just like watching it, not as a sort of change in your probabilities, but just watching it concretely happen, what has that been like? Like continuing to play out a video game you know you’re going to lose. Because that’s all you have. If you wanted some deep wisdom from me, I don’t have it. I don’t know if it’s what you’d expect, but it’s what I would expect it to be like. Where what I would expect it to be like takes into account that. I guess I do have a little bit of wisdom. People imagining themselves in that situation raised in modern society, as opposed to being raised on science fiction books written 70 years ago, will imagine themselves being drama queens about it. The point of believing this thing is to be a drama queen about it and craft some story in which your emotions mean something. And what I have in the way of culture is like, your planet’s at stake. Bear up. Keep going. No drama. The drama is meaningless. What changes the chance of victory is meaningful. The drama is meaningless. Don’t indulge in it. Do you think that if you weren’t around, somebody else would have independently discovered this sort of field of alignment?…

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