MugaSofer comments on Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit - Less Wrong
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Thinking about this a bit more, and assuming CEV operates on the humans that exist at the time of its application: Why would CEV operate on humans that do exist, and not on humans that could exist? It seems this is what Dr. Evil is taking advantage of, by densely populating identity-space around him and crowding out the rest of humanity. But this could occur for many other reasons: Certain cultures encouraging high birth rates, certain technologies or memes being popular at the time of CEV-activation that affect the wiring of the human brain, or certain historical turns that shape the direction of mankind. A more imaginative scenario: what if another scientist, who knows nothing about FAI and CEV, finds it useful to address a problem by copying himself into trillions of branches, each examining a certain hypothesis, and all the branches are (merged/discarded) when the answer is found. Let's further say that CEV t-zero occurs when the scientist is deep in a problem-solving cycle. Would the FAI take each branch as a separate human/vote? This scenario involves no intent to defraud the system. It also is not manipulation of a proxy, as there is a real definitional problem here whose answer is not easily apparent to a human. Applying CEV to all potential humans that could have existed in identity-space would deal with this, but pushes CEV further and further into uncomputable territory.
Because for every possible human mind, there's one with the sign flipped on it's utility function. Unless your definition of "human" describes their utility function, in which case ...