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cousin_it comments on The utility curve of the human population - Less Wrong
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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.
Whims are all we can observe. We disagree on whether whims can be canonically regularized into something coherent. I don't think Eliezer knows that either (it's kind of similar to the question whether humanity's volition coheres). Yeah, he's trying to regularize his whims, and you may strive for that too, but what about the rest of us?
You can consider a person as a system that gives various counterfactual reactions to interaction -- most of these reactions won't be observed in the history of what actually happened to that person in the past. While it e.g. makes sense to talk about what a person (actually) answered to a question asked in English, you are not working with concepts themselves in this setting: just as the interpretation of words is a little iffy, deeper understanding of the meaning of the words (by the person who answers the questions) is even more iffy.
What you need to talk about preference is to compare huge formal strategies or games (not even snapshots of the history of the world), while what you get in the naive settings is asking "yes/no" questions in English.
Unavailability of adequate formalization of what it means to ask the actual question about consequences doesn't justify jumping to identification of preference with "yes/no" utterances resulting from questions obtained in unspecified manner.