timtyler comments on The Domain of Your Utility Function - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Peter_de_Blanc 23 June 2009 04:58AM

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Comment author: pjeby 23 June 2009 06:14:40PM 2 points [-]

People who claim humans are not expected utility maximizers usually seem to be making a much weaker claim: humans are irrational, human's don't optimise economic or fitness-based utility functions - or something like that - not that there exists no utility function that could possibly express their actions in terms of their sense history and state.

PCT and Ainslie actually propose that humans are more like disutility minimizers and appetite satisficers. While you can abuse the notion of "utility" to cover these things, it leads to wrong ideas about how humans work, because the map has to be folded oddly to cover the territory.

Comment author: timtyler 24 June 2009 08:52:48PM *  2 points [-]

Utility maximisation is not really a theory about how humans work. AFAIK, nobody thinks that humans have an internal representation of utility which they strive to maximise. Those that entertain this idea are usually busy constructing a straw-man critique.

It is like how you can model catching a ball with PDEs. You can build a pretty good model like that - even though it bears little relationship to the actual internal operation.

[2011 edit: hmm - the mind actually works a lot more like that than I previously thought!]

Comment author: pjeby 24 June 2009 10:30:57PM 0 points [-]

It is like how you can model catching a ball with PDEs. You can build a pretty good model like that - even though it bears little relationship to the actual internal operation.

That's kind of ironic that you mention PDE's, since PCT actually proposes that we do use something very like an evolutionary algorithm to satisfice our multi-goal controller setups. IOW, I don't think it's quite accurate to say that PDE's "bear little relationship to the actual internal operation."

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