Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2

NancyLebovitz

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

I haven't seen much response to it. There's a reply in Analysis by Baumann who takes a cheap out by saying simply that one cannot provide the probability in advance, that it's 'extremely implausible'.

I have an unfinished essay where I argue that as presented the problem is asking for a uniform distribution over an infinity, so you cannot give the probability in advance, but I haven't yet come up with a convincing argument why you would want your probability to scale down in proportion as the mugger's offer scales up.

That is: it's easy to show that scaling disproportionately leads to another mugging. If you scale superlinearly, then the mugging can be broken up into an ensemble of offers that add to a mugging. If you scale sublinearly, you will refuse sensible offers that are broken up.

But I haven't come up with any deeper justification for linearly scaling other than 'this apparently arbitrary numeric procedure avoids 3 problems'. I've sort of given up on it, as you can see from the parlous state of my essay.

Thanks. Here's my fresh and uneducated opinion.

I see three kinds of answers to the mugging:

We're boned
Some kind of hack in the decision-making process
Some kind of hack in the mathematics
"Head on." That is, prove that the expected disutility of a given threat is bounded independent of the size of the threat.

Here's my analysis in the sense of 4., tell me if I'm making a common mistake. We are worried that P(agent can do H amount of harm | agent threatens to do H amount of harm) times H can be arbitrarily large. As Tarleton pointed out i... (read more)

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Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2

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Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2

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