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Ghatanathoah comments on Alan Carter on the Complexity of Value - Less Wrong
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My understanding was that if two equally rational people have the same information they will draw the same conclusions. So if someone draws the same conclusion as you, that's evidence in your favor, but only very mild evidence since you don't know for sure if they're as rational as you and if they had the exact same info as you. I do think that might be a weak opening and am thinking of changing it.
It's perfectly true. People with severe medical problems need huge amount of resources merely to satisfy their preferences of "not being dead" and "not being sick." A normal person require far less resources to satisfy that preference. So people with severe medical problems are "reverse utility monsters." This is true regardless of whether you are a preference or happiness utilitarian, since obviously you need to be alive to be happy at all and healthy to reach your full happiness potential (FYI I'm a preference utilitarian).
Normal_Anomaly made most of the points I was going to, so I won't elaborate on this.
AAT says that if two people (who may have observed different evidence) have mutual knowledge that they are both perfect epistemic rationalists honestly reporting their posterior probabilities, then they cannot remain in an equalibrium where they both are aware of the other's posterior probabilities but disagree on their posterior probabilities.
They need to have the same priors too, right?
Yes, and even have mutual knowledge that they have the same priors. Which I was thinking, but apparently failed to actually type.
They need to have the same priors? Wouldn't that make AAT trivial and vacuous?
I thought the requirement was that priors just weren't pathologically tuned.
I'm pretty sure they do need to have the same priors.
My intuition is that AAT is basically saying that the perfect epistemic rationalists involved can essentially transfer all of the evidence that they have to the other, so that each one effectively has the same evidence and so should have the same posteriors...except that they'll still have different posteriors unless they began with the same priors.
If they found that they had different priors, I think that they could just communicate the evidence which led them to form those priors from previous priors and so forth, but I think that if they trace their priors as far back as possible and find that they have different ones, AAT doesn't work.
I'm not actually super-familiar with it, so update accordingly if I seem to have said something dumb.
Nope, I was wrong. It is the case that agents require equal priors for ATT to hold. AAT is like proving that mixing the same two colors of paint will always result in the same shade or that two equal numbers multiplied by another number will still be equal.
What a worthless theorem!
I guess when I read that AAT required "common priors" I assumed Aumann must mean known priors or knowledge of each others' priors, since equal priors would constitute both 1) an asinine assumption and, 2) a result not worth reporting. Hanson's assumption that humans should have a shared prior by virtue of being evolved together is interesting, but more creative than informative.
Good thing I don't rely on ATT for anything. It's obvious that disagreeing with most people is rational so updating on people's posteriors without evidence would be pretty unreasonable. I'm not surprised that ATT would turn out to be so meaningless.
AAT is very specific. Independent invention is evidence for the attractiveness of an idea (and thus, one hopes, its truthfulness) but it's unrelated to AAT.
Sure. But you're telling me that two healthy individuals are equally efficient at converting resources into happiness? What evidence is there that the Brahmin is not ten times as capable of happiness as the Untouchable?
You need to have common knowledge of each other's estimates, common knowledge of each other's rationality, and common priors.
I thought you didn't need common priors, and I was wrong. Editing. (I might have had in mind Hanson's result that if you agree on the method to generate priors, then that's enough.)
I have edited my post to remove the reference to AAT per your and JGWeissman's advice.
In Carter's paper he was discussing a hypothetical pleasure wizard so good at converting resources into happiness that it was better to give it all the resources in the world and let everyone else just have enough for a life barely worth living. It seems unlikely that such an extreme pleasure wizard exists, although it's quite possible for there to be some variation among people considered "normal." The psychological unity of humankind provides some evidence against extreme pleasure wizards' existence, although it's far from conclusive.
Preference utilitarianism makes things more complicated since someone may be inefficient at producing happiness, but efficient at satisfying some of their other preferences. However, since being alive and healthy are nearly universal preferences, I think that it's still accurate to call someone with severe illness a reverse pleasure wizard, even if you value preference satisfaction rather than happiness.
Even if you're right and Carter was mistaken in stating that pleasure wizards don't exist, that doesn't alter his main point, which is that equality is valuable for its own sake, and therefore it is immoral to give all resources to pleasure wizards, no matter how efficient they are.