Rationality Quotes September 2012

Jayson_Virissimo

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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Well if deep down I wish that hot babes were given higher status in society than ugly females and males I didn't know (I'll roll with this example even though with omnipotence I could probably do things that would make this a nonissue) and I wish that I didn't wish it, and the genie maximizes my inferred utility function once (not maximizing it once and then maximizing the new one that doing so replaces it with), we would end up with a world where hot babes had higher status and I wished they didn't. The only thing I can see saving us from this would be if I also wanted my wants to be fulfilled, whatever they were. But then we would end up with me assigning Flimple utility to 2 + 2 being equal to 4.

I understand the argument "If you preferred the world ruled by hot babes it wouldn't horrify you," but what if that's just because when I imagine things at a global scale they turn featureless, and appearances don't matter to me anymore, but when I see the people in person they still do? What if, being able to see and socialize with every hot babe in the world changed my mind about whether I would want them to have higher social status, even if I was also able to see and socialize with everyone else?

What if the appearance of transitivity is only from drawing analogies from the last scenario I thought about (A) to the next one (B), but if I started a chain of analogies from somewhere else (C) my view on B would be completely different, such that you could take exchange rates of certain things I considered good in each scenario and construct a cycle of preference?

There's a difference between finding a global maximum of a function and finding the local derivative and moving infinity towards a local maximum.

Even if your actual utility function were for one group to have higher status, that does not imply that the greatest utility comes at the highers imbalance.

And if your preferences aren't transitive, you don't have a valid utility function. If you find yourself in a cycle of preference, you have probably failed to accurately judge two or more things which are hard to compare.