taw comments on Evolved Bayesians will be biased - Less Wrong

22 Post author: taw 20 August 2009 02:54PM

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Comment author: taw 21 August 2009 07:17:24PM 0 points [-]

If you buy into fundamentalist interpretations of utility functions then it's not. If you don't, then it is - to me there should be some difference in something "meaningful" for there to be difference in preferences, otherwise it's not a good utility function.

Even with fundamentalist interpretation you get known inconsistencies with probabilities, so it doesn't save you.

Comment author: SforSingularity 22 August 2009 12:15:06PM 1 point [-]

I think that the strongest critique of D is that most people choose things that they later honestly claim were not "what they actually wanted", i.e. D acts something like a stable utility function Du with a time and mood dependent error term Derror added to it. It causes many people much suffering that their own actions don't live up to the standards of what they consider to be their true goals.

Probabilistic inconsistencies in action are probably less of a problem for humans, though not completely absent.