Wei_Dai comments on St. Petersburg Mugging Implies You Have Bounded Utility - Less Wrong

10 Post author: TimFreeman 07 June 2011 03:06PM

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Comment author: Wei_Dai 10 June 2011 05:45:14AM *  3 points [-]

Someone who thinks about a million unlikely gods to decide whether to eat an apple is broken. In practice, they won't be able to do that, and their decision about whether to eat the apple will be driven by whatever unlikely gods have been brought to their attention in the last minute.

Why can't they either estimate or prove that eating an apple has more expected utility (by please more gods overall than not eating an apple, say), without iterating over each god and considering them separately? And if for some reason you build an AI that does compute expected utility by brute force iteration of possibilities, then you obviously would not want it to consider only possibilities that "have been brought to their attention in the last minute". That's going to lead to trouble no matter what kind of utility function you give it.

(ETA: I think it's likely that humans do have bounded utility functions (if we can be said to have utility functions at all) but your arguments here are not very good. BTW, have you seen The Lifespan Dilemma?)