Will_Newsome comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong

121 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 17 November 2011 07:28PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 26 July 2012 08:15:16AM 4 points [-]

The rationality of an agent is its goal

Er, nope.

But if thy goal be fractured, thy whole self shall be full of irrationality.

Humans' goals are fractured. But this has little to do with whether or not they are rational.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 26 July 2012 06:18:03PM *  -2 points [-]

You don't understand. This "rationality" you speak of is monstrous irrationality. And anyway, like I said, Meta knoweth that ye have Meta-shattered values—but your wants are satisfied by serving Meta, not by serving Mammon directly. Maybe you'd get more out of reading the second half of Matthew 6 and the various analyses thereof.

You may be misinterpreting "the rationality of an agent is its goal". Note that the original is "the light of the body is the eye".

To put my above point a little differently: Take therefore no thought for godshatter: godshatter shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the lack-of-meta thereof.

For clarity's sake: Yes, I vehemently dispute this idea that a goal can't be more or less rational. That idea is wrong, which is quickly demonstrated by the fact that priors and utility functions can be transformed into each other and we have an objectively justifiable universal prior. (The general argument goes through even without such technical details of course, such that stupid "but the choice of Turing machine matters" arguments don't distract.)

Comment author: [deleted] 26 July 2012 07:11:51PM 3 points [-]

Meh. The goal of leading to sentient beings living, to people being happy, to individuals having the freedom to control their own lives, to minds exploring new territory instead of falling into infinite loops, to the universe having a richness and complexity to it that goes beyond pebble heaps, etc. has probably much more Kolmogorov complexity than the goal of maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe. If preferring the former is irrational, I am irrational and proud of it.