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Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Master-Slave Model of Human Preferences - Less Wrong
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I don't think this simple characterisation resembles the truth: the whole point of this enterprise is to make sure things go differently, in a way they just couldn't proceed by themselves. Thus, observing existing "tendencies" doesn't quite capture the idea of preference.
I don't hear differently... I even suspect that preference is introspective, that is depends on a way the system works "internally", not just on how it interacts with environment. That is, two agents with different preferences may do exactly the same thing in all contexts. Even if not, it's a long way between how the agent (in its craziness and stupidity) actually changes the environment, and how it would prefer (on reflection, if it was smarter and saner) the environment to change.
I want to point out that in the interpretation of prior as weights on possible universes, specifically as how much one cares about different universes, we can't just replace "incorrect" beliefs with "the truth". In this interpretation, there can still be errors in one's beliefs caused by things like past computational mistakes, and I think fixing those errors would constitute helping, but the prior perhaps needs to be preserved as part of preference.
Yeah, maybe. But it doesn't.
Beware: you are making a common sense-based prediction about what would be the output of a process that you don't even have the right concepts for specifying! (See my reply to your other comment.)
Wow. Too bad I missed this when it was first posted. It's what I wish I'd said when justifying my reply to Wei_Dai's attempted belief/values dichotomy here and here.
Indeed. Most of the FAI's job could consist of saying, "Okay, there's soooooo much I have to disentangle and correct before I can even begin to propose solutions. Sit down and let's talk."
One lesson of reductionism and success of simple-laws-based science and technology is that for the real-world systems, there might be no simple way of describing them, but there could be a simple way of manipulating their data-rich descriptions. (What's the yield strength of a car? -- Wrong question!) Given a gigabyte's worth of problem statement and the right simple formula, you could get an answer to your query. There is a weak analogy with misapplication of Occam's razor where one tries to reduce the amount of stuff rather than the amount of detail in the ways of thinking about this stuff.
In the case of beliefs/desires separation, you are looking for a simple problem statement, for a separation in the data describing the person itself. But what you should be looking for is a simple way of implementing the make-smarter-and-better extrapolation on a given pile of data. The beliefs/desires separation, if it's ever going to be made precise, is going to reside in the structure of this simple transformation, not in the people themselves.