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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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"The Way is easy for those who have no utility function." -- Marcello Herreshoff
Not sure, this came up in a few previous conversations. If an agent is almost certain that it's completely indifferent to everything, the most important thing it could do is to pursue the possibility that it's not indifferent to something, that is to work primarily on figuring out its preference on the off chance that its current estimate might turn out to be wrong. So it still takes over the universe and builds complicated machines (assuming it has enough heuristics to carry out this line of reasoning).
Say, "Maybe 1957 is prime after all, and hardware used previously to conclude that it's not was corrupted," which is followed by a sequence of experiments that test the properties of preceding experiments in more and more detail, and then those experiments are investigated in turn, and so on and so forth, to the end of time.
If someone didn't value any world-states more than any others, I'm not sure that a Way would actually exist for them, as they could do nothing to increase the expected utility of future world-states. Thus, it doesn't seem to really make sense to speak of such a Way being easy or hard for them.
Am I missing something?
I think you're over analyzing here, the quote is meant to be absurd.
Whaaa?
Someone explain please. It didn't seem absurd when I read it.
If you don't want anything, it's very easy to get what you want.
However, everyone reading this post is a human, and therefore is almost certain to want many things: to breath, to eat, to sleep in a comfortable place, to have companionship, the list goes on.
I interpreted it similarly to part of this article:
Since you said the quote itself was absurd I thought you were saying the post was an internally flawed strawman meant for the purpose of satire, but you meant something else by that word.
I'm the one who said that. Just to make it clear, I do agree with your first comment: taken literally, the quote doesn't make sense. Do you get it better if I say: "It is easy to achieve your goals if you have no goals"? I concede absurd was possibly a bit too strong here.
Okay, that makes more sense, yeah I see what you mean and agree.