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Wei_Dai comments on Model Uncertainty, Pascalian Reasoning and Utilitarianism - Less Wrong
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Comments (154)
If one accepts any kind of multiverse theory, even just Level I, then an infinite number of sentient organisms already exist, and it seems that we cannot care about each individual equally without running into serious problems. I previously suggested that we discount each individual using something like the length of its address in the multiverse.
Perhaps a good moment to point out that egoists don't have to bother with such bizarre weirdness.
And a nihilist doesn't have to bother with anything...
I would continue - except that I don't think utilitarians need to bother with such bizarre weirdness either. Instrumental discounting is automatic, and neatly takes care of distant agents.
Provably so?
If, not, there almost certainly exist failure modes.
That is not a very useful argument style. I can't prove that conservation of energy works throughout the universe - but should not leap from there to "there almost certainly exist failure modes".
Conservation of energy in large systems can be proved reductively, from the properties of the subsystems.
Similarly, most true facts about decision problems can be proved from a model of what kind of structures can be decision problems.
It then becomes an empirical question whether other kinds of substructures or decision problems exist.
EDIT: Suppose you get in a conversation with a Cunning Philosopher. He comes up with a clever philosophical example designed to expose a flaw in your theory. You point out that the example doesn't work, there is some problem in it. He comes up with another example, dealing with that problem. You point out that .......
Why should you expect this process to terminate with him running out of ideas?
Now suppose you get in a conversation with the Cunning Perpetual Motion Machine Crank. He comes up with a clever machine designed to violate conservation of energy. You know, because of a proof, that he must be calculating as though one of the parts doesn't work the way physics said it does. You only need to find this part. There is no way for him to win - except by empirically proving one of the assumptions in the proof invalid.
Good thing we are not discounting individuals by the length of the inferential distance between them and Average Joe.
Do we have any numbers on how many people on LW agree with you, or which people?
I'm fuzzy about the whole thing, but a feature that I think I like about the proposal is that it gives you a nicely-behaved way to deal with the problem of how to value lives lived in extremely complex interpretations of rocks. And if someone lives so far away in space or time that just to locate him requires as much information as it would to specify his whole mind starting from a rock, it's not obvious to me that he exists in a sense in which the rock-mind does not.
I don't think there's anything wrong with valuing people who live in contrived interpretations or rocks, you just can't interact with them, and whatever it is you observe is usually more of a collection of snapshots than a relevant narrative. Also, destroying the rock only destroys part of your contrived device for observing facts about those people, unless you value the rock itself.
It's good to see that panpsychism is finally getting the attention it rightfully deserves!
"far away" from what?
If you use your current location as a reference point than the theory becomes non-updateless and incoherent and falls apart. You don't "get" any starting point when you try to locate someone.
I think the universe implicitly defines a reference point in the physics. By way of illustration, I think Tegmark sometimes talks about an inflation scenario where an actually infinite space is the same as a finite bubble that expands from a definite point, but with different coordinates that mix up space and time; and in that case I think that definite point would be algorithmically privileged. But I'm even fuzzier on all this than before.
I think the focus on a physical reference point here seems misguided. Perhaps more conceptually well-founded would be something like a search for a logical reference point, using your existence in some form at some level of abstraction and your reasoning about that logical reference point both as research of and as evidence about attractors in agentspace, via typical acausal means.
Vladimir Nesov's decision theory mailing list comments on the role of observational uncertainty in ambient-like decision theories seems relevant. Not to imply he wouldn't think what I'm saying here is complete nonsense.
In one of my imaginable-ideal-barely-possible worlds, Eliezer's current choice of "thing to point your seed AI at and say 'that's where you'll find morality content'" was tentatively determined to be what it currently nominally is (instead of tempting alternatives like "the thing that makes you think that your proposed initial dynamic is the best one" or "the thing that causes you to care about doing things like perfecting things like the choice of initial dynamic" or something) after he did a year straight of meditation on something like the lines of reasoning I suggest above, except honed to something like perfection-given-boundedness (e.g. something like the best you could reasonably expect to get at poker given that most of your energy has to be put into retaining your top 5 FIDE chess rating while writing a bestselling book popular science book).
I think it depends on the physics. Some have privileged points, some don't.
But surely given any scheme to assign addresses in an infinite universe, for every L there's a finite bubble of the universe outside of which all addresses are at least L in length?
If a universe is tiled with a repeating pattern then you can assign addresses to parts of the pattern, each an infinite number of points.
I don't know how this applies to other universes.
If hypothetically our universe had a privileged point, what would you do if you discovered you were much farther away from it than average?
Naively, you wouldn't use some physical location, but instead logical descriptions in the space of algorithms given axioms you predict others will predict are Schelling points (using your own (your past) architecture/reasoning as evidence of course).
Naively, this is a question of ethics and not game theory, so I don't see why Schelling points should enter into it.
I thought "Schelling point" was used by the decision theory workshop folk, I may be wrong. Anyway, decision theory shares many aspects of cooperative game theory as pointed out by Wei Dai long ago, and many questions of ethics must be determined/resolved/explored by such (acausal) cooperation/control.
Relevance? (That people in group Y use a word doesn't obviously clarify why you used it.)
I mistakenly thought that Will Sawin was in said group and was thus expressing confusion that he wasn't already familiar with its broader not-quite-game-theoretic usage, or at least what I perceived to be a broader usage. Our interaction is a lot more easily interpreted in that light.
(I didn't understand what you meant either when I wrote that comment, now I see the intuition, but not a more technical referent.)
link? explanation? something of that nature?
EDIT: Private message sent instead of comment reply.
I intuit that the difference between logical and observational uncertainty could be relevant in non-obvious ways. Anyway, this sort of thinking seems obviously correct, but I fear the comparison may mislead some, considering that inferring the numbers and preferences of minds in causally disconnected parts of the multiverse through sheer logical reasoning is probably way way way easier than interpreting the 'strength'/'existence' and preferences of minds in rocks, at least as I consider it. (I worded that so poorly that it's incoherent as explicitly stated but I think the message is intact.)