maia comments on Hedonic vs Preference Utilitarianism in the Context of Wireheading - Less Wrong

6 Post author: jkaufman 29 June 2012 01:50PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (53)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: maia 02 July 2012 12:38:26PM 0 points [-]

That could work... if you take into account the behavior where, if you don't get enough of one kind of utility, your meta-utility might actually go down.

Comment author: DanielLC 03 July 2012 12:58:10AM 0 points [-]

Utility is whatever you're trying to maximize the expected value of. If you act in a way that maximizes the expected value of log(happiness) + log(preference fulfillment), for example, this doesn't mean that you're risk averse and you have two different kinds of utility. It means that your utility function is log(happiness) + log(preference fulfillment).

Comment author: maia 03 July 2012 05:35:28PM 0 points [-]

That's true. I've been using the term "utility" in a way that is probably wrong. What I really meant is that humans have different kinds of things they want to maximize, and get unhappy if some of them are fulfilled and others aren't... so their utility functions are complicated.

The obvious problem with standard wireheading is that it only maximizes one of the things humans want.