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SilasBarta comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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No, my objection is: "never assume more terminal values (terms in UF) than necessary", and I've shown how you can get away with not assuming that parents terminally value their children -- just as a theoretical exercise of course, and not to deny the genuine heartfelt love that parents have for their children.
There is an evolutionary advantage to having a cognitive system that outputs the action "care for children even at cost to self". At a psychological level, this is accomplished by the feeling of "caring" and "love". But is that love due to a utility function weighting, or to a decision theory that (acts as if it recognizes) SAMELs? The mere fact of the psychology, and of the child-favoring acts does not settle this. (Recall the problem of how a ordering of outcomes can be recast as any combination of utility weightings and probabilities.)
You can account for the psychological phenomenon more parsimoniously [1] by assuming the action results from choice-machinery that implicitly recognizes SAMELs -- and on top of that, get a bonus explanation of why a class of reasoning (moral reasoning) feels different -- it's the kind that mustn't be convinced by the lack of a causal benefit to the self.
My version is precisely written to exclude contracts -- the ideal PH inferences still go through, and so natural selection (which I argue is a PF) is sufficiently similar. If they don't "attach" themselves to a child-favoring decision theory, they simply don't get "rescued" into the n-th generation of that gene's existence. No need to find an isomorphism to a contract.
[1] Holy Shi-ite -- that's three p-words with a different initial consonant sound!
Why does the cognitive system that identifies SAMELs fire when you have a child? The situation is not visibly similar to that of Parfit's hitchhiker. Unless you are suggesting that parenthood simply activates the same precommitment mechanism that the decision theory uses when Parfit-hitchhiking...?
I don't understand the point of these questions. You're stuck with the same explanatory difficulties with the opposite theory: why does the cognitive system that identifies _changes in utility function_ fire when you have a child? Does parenthood activate the same terminal values that a PH survivor does upon waking up?
A utility function need not change when a child is born. After all, a utility function is a mapping from states-of-the-world to utilities and the birth of a child is merely a change in the state of the world.
Nonetheless, utility mapping functions can change as a result of information which doesn't betoken a change in the state-of-the-world, but merely in your understanding your own desires. For example, your first taste of garlic ice cream. Or, more to the point, new parents sometimes report dramatic changes in outlook simply from observation of their baby's first smile. The world has not changed, but somehow your place within it has.
See sibling reply to Robin. How are you showing a explanatory advantage to attributing the behavior to utility functions rather than SAMEL recognition? (Or what were you otherwise trying to establish?)
I wasn't trying to show an advantage. You asked a question about my preferred explanatory framework. I interpreted the question to be something like, "How does the birth of a child trigger a particular special cognitive function?". My answer was that it doesn't. The birth of a baby is a change in the state of the world, and machinery for this (Bayesian updating) is already built in.
If you insist that I show an explanatory advantage, I would make two (not intended to be very convincing!) points:
Okay, but if your preferred explanatory framework is strictly worse per the MML formalism (equivalent to rationalist Occam's razor), then that would be a reason that my explanation is preferred.
You claim that my explanation fails by this metric:
However, the two theories we're deciding between (2a and 2b) don't explicitly involve SAMELs in either case. [1]
The only entity in 2b that is not in 2a is the claim that parents are limited to implementing decision theories capable of surviving natural selection. But as I said in footnote 2, this doesn't penalize it under Occam's Razor, because that must be assumed in both cases, so there's no net penalty for 2b -- implications of existing assumptions do not count toward the complexity/length of your explanation (for reasons I can explain in greater depth if you wish).
But to be honest, I'm losing track of the point being established by your objections (for which I apologize), so I'd appreciate it if you could (for my sake) explicitly put them back in the context of the article and this exchange.
[1] Before you glare in frustration at my apparent sudden attempt to throw SAMELs under the bus: the thesis of the article does involve SAMELs, but at that point, it's either explaining more phenomena (i.e. psychology of moral intuitions), or showing the equivalence to acting on SAMELs.
Ok, I accept your argument that Occam is neutral between you and I. SAMELs aren't involved at decision time in 2b, just as "Inclusive fitness" and "Hamilton's rule" aren't involved at decision time in 2a.
I will point out though, since we are looking only at the present, that the utility function in 2a can, in principle, be examined using "revealed preference", whereas your purely selfish child-neutral utility function is a theoretical construct which would be hard to measure, even in principle.
Without Occam, I have to fall back on my second objection, the one I facetiously named "Perplexed's tweezers". I simply don't understand your theory well enough to criticize it. Apparently your decision theory (like my offspring-inclusive utility function) is installed by natural selection. Ok, but what is the decision theory you end up with? I claim that my evolution-installed decision theory is just garden-variety utility maximization. What is your evolution-installed decision theory?
If you made this clear already and I failed to pick up on it, I apologize.
Hold on -- that's not what I said. I said that it was neutral on the issue of including "they can only use decision theories that could survive natural selection". I claim it is not neutral on the supposition of additional terms in the utility function, as 2a does.
It doesn't matter. They (inclusive fitness and Hamilton's rule) have to be assumed (or implied by something that has to be assumed) anyway, because we're dealing with people, so they'll add the same complexity to both explanations.
As I've explained to you several times, looking at actions does not imply a unique utility function, so you can't claim that you've measured it just by looking at their actions. The utility functions "I care about myself and my child" and "I care about myself" can produce the same actions, as I've demonstrated, because certain (biologically plausible) decision theories can output the action "care for child at expense of self", even in the absence of a causal benefit to the self.
It is a class of DTs, the kind that count acausal benefits (SAMELs) on par with causal ones. The SAMELs need not be consciously recognized as such but they do need to feel different to motivate the behavior.
However, I could be more helpful if you asked specific questions about specific passages. Previously, you claimed that after reading it, you didn't see how natural selection is like Omega, even after I pointed to the passage. That made me a sad panda.
You more than made up for it with the Parfit's robot idea, though :-)
We are clearly talking past each other, and it does not seem to me that it would be productive to continue.
For example, I have repeatedly responded to your claim (not explanation!) that the 2a utility function is not susceptible to "revealed preference". You have never acknowledged my response, but continue claiming that you have explained it to me.
I have to interpret that as a policy of using some other kind of "surgery" for counterfactuals. Something other than the standard kind of surgery used in causal decision theory (CDT). So the obvious questions become, "So, what kind of surgery do you advocate?" and "How do you know when to use this strange surgery rather than the one Pearl suggests?".
That sentence may mean something to you, but I can't even tell who is doing the feeling, what that feeling is different from, and what (or who) is doing the motivating.
It wasn't my idea. It was timtyler's. Maybe you will have better luck explaining your ideas to him. He was patient enough to explain the robot to me twice.
I like the tweezers, but would like a better name for it.
As Perplexed said, there is no requirement that the utility function change - and, in fact, no reason to believe that it does not already have positive terms for children before reproduction. A lot of people report wanting children.
I'm asking these questions because we clearly have not established agreement, and I want to determine why. I assume that either we are using conflicting data, applying incompatible rules of inference, or simply misreading each other's writing. It was this last possibility I was probing with that last question.
Okay, but by the same token, there's no need to assume recognition of the SAMEL (that favors producing and caring for children) changes. (And if it matters, a lot of people report not wanting children, but then wanting to care for their children upon involuntary parenthood.)
None of the things you're pointing out seem to differentiate the utility function-term explanation from the SAMEL-recognition explanation.
That's a test that favors the SAMEL explanation, I think.
So you're agreeing with me in this one respect? (I don't mean to sound confrontational, I just want to make sure you didn't reverse something by accident.)
Right - here's what I've got.
The pattern of "not wanting children, but then wanting to spend resources to care for the children" is better explained by a SAMEL pattern than by a utility function pattern. The fact of people wanting children can be sufficiently explained by the reasons people give for wanting children: a desire for a legacy, an expected sense of fulfillment from parenthood, etcetera. Finally, the fact that this is a SAMEL pattern doesn't mean that the adaptation works on SAMEL patterns - the ability of Parfit's hitchhiker to precommit to paying Omega is a separate adaptation from the childrearing instinct.
I'm still not following:
I spoke correctly - I didn't express agreement on the broader issue because I don't want to update too hastily. I'm still thinking.