Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem and what it means for CEV - Less Wrong

21 Post author: AlexMennen 05 January 2013 09:38PM

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Comment author: steven0461 06 January 2013 09:41:25PM *  2 points [-]

I'd be curious to see someone reply to this on behalf of parliamentary models, whether applied to preference aggregation or to moral uncertainty between different consequentialist theories. Do the choices of a parliament reduce to maximizing a weighted sum of utilities? If not, which axiom out of 1-3 do parliamentary models violate, and why are they viable despite violating that axiom?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 January 2013 09:49:05PM 2 points [-]

Can you be more specific about what you mean by a parliamentary model? (If I had to guess, though, axiom 1.)

Comment author: steven0461 06 January 2013 09:53:02PM *  2 points [-]

This and models similar to it.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 06 January 2013 10:01:20PM 2 points [-]

Interesting. A parliamentary model applied to moral uncertainty definitely fails axiom 1 if any of the moral theories you're aggregating isn't VNM-rational. It probably still fails axiom 1 even if all of the individual moral theories are VNM-rational because the entire parliament is probably not VNM-rational. That's okay from Bostom's point of view because VNM-rationality could be one of the things you're uncertain about.

Comment author: steven0461 06 January 2013 10:04:22PM 2 points [-]

What if it is not, in fact, one of the things you're uncertain about?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 07 January 2013 12:19:29AM *  2 points [-]

Then I am not sure, because that blog post hasn't specified the model precisely enough for me to do any math, but my guess would be that the parliament fails to be VNM-rational. Depending on how the bargaining mechanism is set up, it might even fail to have coherent preferences in the sense that it might not always make the same choice when presented with the same pair of outcomes...