Vladimir_Nesov comments on Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 August 2009 01:10AM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 19 August 2009 11:38:24PM 2 points [-]

One thing I don't understand is that both you and Eliezer talk confidently about how agents would make use of logical dependencies/correlations. You guys don't seem to think this is a really hard problem.

But we don't even know how to assign a probability (or whether it even makes sense to do so) to a simple mathematical statement like P=NP. How do we calculate and/or represent the correlation between one agent and another agent (except in simple cases like where they're identical or easily proven to be equivalent)? I'm impressed by how far you've managed to push the idea of updatelessness, but it's hard for me to process what you say, when the basic concept of logical uncertainty is still really fuzzy.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 19 August 2009 11:49:01PM 0 points [-]

Conceptually, I treat logical uncertainty as I do prior+utility, a representation of preference, in this more general case over mathematical structures. The problems of representing this preference compactly and extracting human preference don't hinder these particular explorations.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 20 August 2009 12:02:42AM 0 points [-]

I don't understand this yet. Can you explain in more detail what is a general (noncompact) way to representing logical uncertainty?