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Vladimir_Nesov comments on So You Want to Save the World - Less Wrong
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Comments (146)
This is an incorrect description of 5-and-10. The description given is of a different problem (one of whose aspects is addressed in the recent cousin_it's writeup, the problem is resolved in that setting by Lemma 2).
5-and-10 problem is concerned with the following (incorrect) line of reasoning by a hypothetical agent:
"I have to decide between $5 and $10. Suppose I decide to choose $5. I know that I'm a money-optimizer, so if I do this, $5 must be more money than $10, so this alternative is better. Therefore, I should choose $5."
Thanks!
Has anyone emailed Judea Pearl, John Harrison, Jon Williamson, et cetera, asking them to look at this?
I doubt it.
Because academics don't care about blogs? Or doing so would project the wrong image of the Singularity Institute? Or no one thought of doing it? Or someone thought of it, but there were more important things to do first? Perhaps because it's inefficient marketing? Or people who aren't already on lesswrong have failed some ratioanlity competence test? Or you're not sure it's safe to discuss?
My plan has been to write up better, more precise specifications of the open problems before systematically sending them to top academics for comments.
Why don't you do it? I would if I could formulate those problems adequately.
I don't really understand how this could occur in a TDT-agent. The agent's algorithm is causally dependent on '(max $5 $10), but considering the counterfactual severs that dependence. Observing a money-optimizer (let's call it B) choosing $5 over $10 would presumably cause the agent (call it A) to update its model of B to no longer depend on '(max $5 $10). Am I missing something here?
Correctly getting to the comparison of $5 and $10 is the whole point of the exercise. An agent is trying to evaluate the consequences of its action, A, which is defined by agent's algorithm and is not known explicitly in advance. To do that, it could in some sense consider hypotheticals where its action assumes its possible values. One such hypothetical could involve a claim that A=$5. The error in question is about looking at the claim that A=$5 and making incorrect conclusions (which would result in an action that doesn't depend on comparing $5 and $10).
This is probably a stupid question, but is this reducible to the Lobian obstacle? On the surface, it seems similar.
It seems to me that any agent unable to solve this problem would be considerably less intelligent than a human.
It does seem unlikely that an "expected utility maximizer" reasoning like this would manage to build interstellar spaceships, but that insight doesn't automatically help with building an agent that is immune to this and similar problems.
That's strange, Luke normally has good understanding of his sources, and uses and explains them correctly, and so usually recognizes an incorrect explanation.