Vladimir_Nesov comments on The Human's Hidden Utility Function (Maybe) - Less Wrong
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Let me try again:
Two-step process = (1) Extract preferences, (2) Extrapolate preferences. This may not work. This is one reason that this discovery about three valuation systems in the brain is so weak and preliminary for the purposes of CEV. I'm not sure it will turn out to be relevant to CEV at all.
I see, so the two-step thing acts as a precondition. Is it right that you are thinking of descriptive idealization/analysis of human brain as a path that might lead to definition of "current" (extracted) preferences, which is then to be corrected by "extrapolation"? If so, that would clarify for me your motivation for hoping to get anything FAI-relevant out of neuroscience: extrapolation step would correct the fatal flaws of the extraction step.
(I think extrapolation step (in this context) is magic that can't work, and instead analysis of human brain must extract/define the right decision problem "directly", that is formally/automatically, without losing information during descriptive idealization performed by humans, which any object-level study of neuroscience requires.)
Extraction + extrapolation is one possibility, though at this stage in the game it still looks incoherent to me. But sometimes things look incoherent before somebody smart comes along and makes them coherent and tractable.
Another possibility is that an FAI uploads some subset of humans and has them reason through their own preferences for a million subjective years and does something with their resulting judgments and preferences. This might also be basically incoherent.
Another possibility is that a single correct response to preferences falls out of game theory and decision theory, as Drescher attempts in Good and Real. This might also be incoherent.
In these terms, the plan I see as the most promising is that the correct way of extracting preferences from humans that doesn't require further "extrapolation" falls out of decision theory.
(Not sure what you meant by Drescher's option (what's "response to preferences"?): does the book suggest that it's unnecessary to use humans as utility definition material? In any case, this doesn't sound like something he would currently believe.)
As I recall, Drescher still used humans as utility definition material but thought that there might be a single correct response to these utilities — one which falls out of decision theory and game theory.
What's "response to utilities" (in grandparent you used "response to preferences" which I also didn't understand)? Response of what for what purpose? (Perhaps, the right question is about what you mean by "utilities" here, as in extracted/descriptive or extrapolated/normative.)
Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of like asking what "should" or "ought" means. I don't know.
No, it's not a clarifying question about subtleties of that construction, I have no inkling of what you mean (seriously, no irony), and hence fail to parse what you wrote (related to "response to utilities" and "response to preferences") at the most basic level. This is what I see in the grandparent:
For our purposes, how about...
Still no luck. What's the distinction between "normative requirements" and "values", in what way are these two ideas (as intended) not the same?