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cousin_it comments on The utility curve of the human population - Less Wrong
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A minute ago I finally understood why this site has adopted expected utility as a prescriptive theory (it's certainly not descriptive) and what real-world meaning we're supposed to assign to questions about "utility of one human life" and such. Basically, we're working out the kinks of yet another new moral code. Once you realize that, you can get with the project or leave it. Personally, I'd like to see people abandon it en masse.
The project of moving morality from brains into tools is the same project as moving arithmetic from brains into calculators: you are more likely to get a correct answer, and you become able to answer orders of magnitude more difficult questions. If the state of the tool is such that the intuitive answer is better, then one should embrace intuitive answers (for now). The goal is to eventually get a framework that is actually better than intuitive answers in at least some nontrivial area of applicability (or to work in the direction of this goal, while it remains unattainable).
The problem with "moral codes" is that they are mostly insane, in their overconfidence considering rather confused raw material as useful answers. Trying to finally get it right is not the same as welcoming insanity, although the risk is always there.
Formally, it's trivially true even as you put it, as you can encode any program with an appropriately huge utility function. Therefore, whatever way of doing things is better than using ape-brains, can be represented this way.
It's not necessarily useful to look at the problem in a way you stated it: I'm at this point doubtful of "expected utility maximization" being the form of a usefully stated correct solution. So I speak of tools. That there are tools better than ape-brains should be intuitively obvious, as a particular case of a tool is just an ape-brain that has been healed of all ills, an example of a step in the right direction, proving that steps in the right directions are possible. I contend there are more steps to be taken, some not as gradual or obvious.
Vladimir, sorry. I noticed my mistake before you replied, and deleted my comment. Your reply is pretty much correct.
Do you think you can expand on this, perhaps in a top-level post? I feel somewhat sympathetic towards what you said, but would like to understand your position better to see if I really agree with it or not.
As far as "this site has adopted expected utility as a prescriptive theory", that's hardly surprising since expected utility has been the dominant paradigm of rationality for decades. (Perhaps centuries? Wikipedia says Bernoulli invented it in 1738.) This site has actually done more than most to challenge it, I think.
There certainly is a lot of moral prescription going on. This is mostly indirect, implicit in the kind of questions that get asked rather than directly asserted. "Expected utility" is the right thing to optimise for, almost by definition. But there is more than that at play. In particular, there tends to be an assumption that other people's utility functions will, and in fact 'should' contribute to mine in a simple, sometimes specific, way. I don't particularly respect that presumption.
Edit: Fixed the typo that cousin_it tactfully corrected in his quote.
You don't value other people's lives because they value their own lives. Paperclip maximizers value paperclips, but you won't take that into account. It's not so much contribution of other people's utility functions that drives your decisions (or morality). You just want mostly the same things, and care about others' well-being (which you should to an unknown extent, but which you obviously do at least somewhat).
I agree with that summary completely.
This isn't clear. Preferences of any actual human seem to form a directed graph, but it's incomplete and can contain cycles. Any way to transform it into a complete acyclic graph (any pair of situations comparable, no preference loops) must differ from the original graph somewhere. Different algorithms will destroy different facets of actual human preference, but there's certainly no algorithm that can preserve all of it; that much we can consider already proven beyond reasonable doubt. It's not obvious to me that there's a single, well-defined, canonical way to perform this surgery.
And it's not at all obvious that going from a single human to an aggregate of all humanity will mitigate the problem (see Torture vs Specks). That's just too many leaps of faith.
I agree/upvoted your point. Human preferences are cyclic. I'd go further and say that without at least having a preference graph that is acyclic it is not possible to optimise a decision at all. The very thought seems meaningless.
Assuming one can establish coherent preferences the question of whether one should optimise for expected utility encounters a further complication. Many human preferences are refer to our actions and not outcomes. An agent could in fact decide to optimise for making 'Right' choices and to hell with the consequences. They could choose not to optimise for expected utility. Of course, it seems like that choice was the one with the highest expected value in their rather wacky utility function.
It's not an observation that warrants much more than those three words and the comma but it seems to me that either you are optimising a decision for expected utility or you are doing some other thing than optimising. 'Expected utility' just happens to be the name given to value in the function you use if you are optimising a decision.
In the light of the correction you've made just now, do you retract this comment as well? (It looks to be based on the same mistake, but if you don't think so, I'd like to argue.)
No, it's a different point, and one I'd be happy to argue. Here I talk about encoding actual human preferences over all possible futures, not designing an algorithm that will yield one good future. For example, an algorithm that gives one good future may never actually have to worry about torture vs dust specks. So it's not clear that we should worry about it either.
I suspect you are not talking about neurons in the brain, but have no idea what you do mean...
By Church-Turing thesis, you can construct an artifact behaviorally indistinguishable from a human based even on expected utility maximization (even though it's an inadequate thing to do). Whatever you can expect of a real human, including answering hypothetical questions, you can expect from this construction.
Algorithms are strategies, they are designed to work depending on observations. When you design an algorithm, you design behaviors for all possible futures. Other than giving this remark, I don't know what to do with your comment...
Nodes in the graph are hypothetical situations, and arrows are preferences.
Preference as order on situations? Make that order on histories, or better order on games to be provably won, but you should already know that, so again I don't see what you are saying.
Oh, okay, on possible histories. I really don't understand what's unclear to you. It's not obvious to me that there's a unique canonical way to build a complete acyclic graph (utility-based preference) from an incomplete graph with cycles (actual human preference). Yes, expected utility optimization can mimic any behavior, but I don't want to mimic behavior, I want to represent the data structure of preferences.
By C-T, you can represent any data, right? The utility-surrogate can have a detailed scan of a human in its virtual utility-maximizing pocket, or even run a simulation of human brain, just on a different substrate.
For histories: you argue that people have cyclic preference over world histories as well, because you consider preference to be the same thing as choice, that is prone to whim? That's not what I mean by preference (which you should also know), but it explains your comments in this thread.