Johnicholas comments on Dead men tell tales: falling out of love with SIA - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 February 2011 02:10PM

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Comment author: Johnicholas 18 February 2011 08:49:08PM 0 points [-]

Sorry, by "delta" I meant change, difference, or adjustment.

The reason to investigate evolutionarily stable strategies is to look at the space of workable, self-consistent, winningish strategies. I know my utility function is pretty irrational - even insane. For example, I (try to) change my explicit values when I hear sufficiently strong arguments against my current explicit values. Explaining that is possible for a utilitarian, but it takes some gymnastics, and the upshot of the gymnastics is that utility functions become horrendously complicated and therefore mostly useless.

My bet is that there isn't actually much room for choice in the space of workable, self-consistent, winningish strategies. That will force most of the consequentialists, whether they ultimately care about particular genes or memes, paperclips or brass copper kettles, to act identically with respect to these puzzles, in order to survive and reproduce to steer the world toward their various goals.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 19 February 2011 09:29:34AM 0 points [-]

I'm unsure. For a lone agent in the world, who can get copied and uncopied, I think that following my approach here is the correct one. For multiple competing agents, this becomes a trade/competition issue, and I don't have a good grasp of that.