nyan_sandwich comments on Pinpointing Utility - Less Wrong

57 [deleted] 01 February 2013 03:58AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 25 January 2013 03:21:39PM *  3 points [-]

Can you link me to or in some way dereference "what I told you last time"?

one is not sure what one wants? how do you calculate your expected payoff?

If you have a probability distribution over possible utility values or something, I don't know what to do with it. It's a type error to aggregate utilities from different utility functions, so don't do that. That's the moral uncertainty problem, and I don't think there's a satisfactory solution yet. Though Bostrom or someone might have done some good work on it that I haven't seen.

For now, it probably works to guess at how good it seems relative to other things. Sometimes breaking it down into a more detailed scenario helps, looking at it a few different ways, etc. Fundamentally though, I don't know. Maximizing EU without a real utility function is hard. Moral philosophy is hard.

Comment author: JMiller 25 January 2013 03:56:02PM *  1 point [-]

My bad, nyan.

You were explaining to me the difference between utility in Decision theory and utility in utilitarianism. I will try to find the thread later.

Thanks.