WrongBot comments on Positioning oneself to make a difference - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 18 August 2010 11:54PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (46)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: WrongBot 19 August 2010 05:31:34PM *  1 point [-]

Utility calculations are generally used to find the best course of action, i.e. the action with the highest expected utility. If every possible outcome has a utility set to 1, a utility maximizer will choose at random because all actions have equal expected utility. I think you're proposing maximizing the total utility of all possible future actions, but I'm pretty sure that's incompatible with reasoning probabilistically about utility (at least in the Bayesian sense). 0 and 1 are forbidden probabilities and your distribution has to sum to 1, so you don't ever actually eliminate outcomes from consideration. It's just a question of concentrating probabilities in the areas with highest utility.

Does that make any sense at all?

(Ciphergoth's answer to your question is approximately a more concise version of this comment.)

Comment author: hegemonicon 19 August 2010 05:42:32PM 1 point [-]

You're right both in my intended meaning and why it doesn't make sense - thanks.