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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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All righty; I run my utility function over everything that exists. On most of the existing things in the modern universe, it outputs 'don't care', like for dirt. However, so long as a person exists anywhere, in this universe or somewhere else, my utility function cares about them. I have no idea what it means for something to exist, or why some things exist more than others; but our universe is so suspiciously simple and regular relative to all imaginable universes that I'm pretty sure that universes with simple laws or uniform laws exist more than universes with complicated laws with lots of exceptions in them, which is why I don't expect to sprout wings and fly away. Supposing that all possible universes 'exist' with some weighting by simplicity or requirement of uniformity, does not make me feel less fundamentally confused about all this; and therefore I'm not sure that it is true, although it does seem very plausible.
The moral value of imaginary friends?
I notice that I am meta-confused...
Shouldn't we strongly expect this weighting, by Solomonoff induction?
Probability is not obviously amount of existence.
(Assuming you mean “all imaginable universes with self-aware observers in them”.)
Not completely sure about that, even Conway's Game of Life is Turing-complete after all. (But then, it only generates self-aware observers under very complicated starting conditions. We should sum the complexity of the rules and the complexity of the starting conditions, and if we trust Penrose and Hawking about this, the starting conditions of this universe were terrifically simple.)
What do you mean, you don't care about dirt? I care about dirt! Dirt is where we get most of our food, and humans need food to live. Maybe interstellar hydrogen would be a better example of something you're indifferent to? 10^17 kg of interstellar hydrogen disappearing would be an inconsequential flicker if we noticed it at all, whereas the loss of an equal mass of arable soil would be an extinction-level event.
I care about the future consequences of dirt, but not the dirt itself.
(For the love of Belldandy, you people...)
He means that he doesn't care about dirt for its own sake (e.g. like he cares about other sentient beings for their own sakes).
Yes, and I'm arguing that it has instrumental value anyway. A well-thought-out utility function should reflect that sort of thing.
Instrumental values are just subgoals that appear when you form plans to achieve your terminal values. They aren't supposed to be reflected in your utility function. That is a type error plain and simple.
For agents with bounded computational resources, I'm not sure that's the case. I don't terminally value money at all, but I pretend I do as a computational approximation because it'd be too expensive for me to run an expected utility calculation over all things I could possibly buy whenever I'm consider gaining or losing money in exchange for something else.
I thought that was what I just said...
An approximation is not necessarily a type error.
No, but mistaking your approximation for the thing you are approximating is.
That one is. Instrumental values do not go in utility function. You use instrumental values to shortcut complex utility calculations, but utility calculating shortcut != component of utility function.