mjgeddes comments on Outlawing Anthropics: An Updateless Dilemma - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 September 2009 06:31PM

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Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 10 September 2009 03:56:24AM *  1 point [-]

This committal is what you wish to optimise over from TDT/UDT, and clearly this requires knowledge about the likelyhood of different decision making groups.

I was influenced by the OP and used to think that way. However I think now, that this is not the root problem.

What if the agents get more complicated decision problems: for example, rewards depending on the parity of the agents voting certain way, etc.?

I think, what essential is that the agents have to think globally (categorical imperative, hmmm?)

Practically: if the agent recognizes that there is a collective decision, then it should model all available conceivable protocols (but making apriori sure that all cooperating agents perform the same or compatible analysis, if they can't communicate) and then they should choose the protocol with best overall total gain. In the case of the OP: the second calculation in the OP. (Not messing around with correction factors based on responsibilities, etc.)

Special considerations based on group sizes etc. may be incidentally correct in certain situations, but this is just not general enough. The crux is that the ultimate test is simply the expected value computation for the protocol of the whole group.

Comment deleted 10 September 2009 09:11:55AM *  [-]
Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 10 September 2009 06:00:51PM 0 points [-]

It's not about complexity, it is just expected total gain. Simply the second calculation of the OP.

I just argued, that the second calculation is right and that is what the agents should do in general. (unless they are completely egoistic for their special copies)