RichardKennaway comments on Morality is not about willpower - Less Wrong

9 Post author: PhilGoetz 08 October 2011 01:33AM

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Tags: ethics psychology cognitive religion therapy self-improvement behaviorism utility morality

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 10 October 2011 09:05:19AM 0 points [-]

You'll surely want a prior distribution over utility functions. Since they are computable functions, the usual Universal Prior works fine here, so far as I can tell. With this prior, TSUF-like utility functions aren't going to dominate the set of utility functions consistent with the person's behavior

How do you know this? If that's true, it can only be true by being a mathematical theorem, which will require defining mathematically what makes a UF a TSUF. I expect this is possible, but I'll have to think about it.

Comment author: TimFreeman 10 October 2011 06:30:16PM 0 points [-]

With [the universal] prior, TSUF-like utility functions aren't going to dominate the set of utility functions consistent with the person's behavior

How do you know this? If that's true, it can only be true by being a mathematical theorem...

No, it's true in the same sense that the statement "I have hands" is true. That is, it's an informal empirical statement about the world. People can be vaguely understood as having purposeful behavior. When you put them in strange situations, this breaks down a bit and if you wish to understand them as having purposeful behavior you have to contrive the utility function a bit, but for the most part people do things for a comprehensible purpose. If TSUF's were the simplest utility functions that described humans, then human behavior would be random, which is isn't. Thus the simplest utility functions that describe humans aren't going to be TSUF-like.

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