Vaniver comments on A summary of Savage's foundations for probability and utility. - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Sniffnoy 22 May 2011 07:56PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 10 August 2013 09:09:23PM 2 points [-]

On a macro level, I can imagine a person with dieting problems preferring starving > a hot fudge sundae, celery > starving, and a hot fudge sundae > celery.

My experience is that this is generally because of a measurement problem, not a reflectively endorsed statement.

Comment author: [deleted] 11 August 2013 02:03:12AM 0 points [-]

Well, it's clearly pathological in some sense, but the space of actions to be (pre)ordered is astronomically big and reflective endorsement is slow, so you can't usefully error-check the space that way. cf. Lovecraft's comment about "the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents".

I don't think it will do to simply assume that an actually instantiated agent will have a transitive set of expressed preferences. Bit like assuming your code is bugfree.