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elspood comments on Pinpointing Utility - Less Wrong
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Comments (154)
"Awesome" is an emotional reaction whereas "utility" (as you point out in this post) is a technical and not entirely intuitive concept in decision theory. Maybe one ought to be derived from the other, but it's not right to just implicitly assume that they are the same thing.
Unlike some recent posts about VNM, you don't say what "outcome" means. If we take an outcome to be a world history, then "being turned into a whale for a day" isn't an outcome.
I'm having trouble reconciling this with 'You already know that you know how to compute "Awesomeness", and it doesn't feel like it has a mysterious essence that you need to study to discover.'
I'm pretty sure VNM, or just the concept of utility function, implies consequentialism (but not the other two).
(These comments occurred to me as I read the OP right after it was posted, but I waited a while to see if anyone else would make the same points. No one did, which makes me wonder why.)
Yes, good point. I was just listing words that people tend to throw around for that sort of problem. "awesome" is likewise not necessarily "good". I wonder how I might make that clearer...
Thanks for pointing this out. I forgot to substantiate on that. I take "turned into a whale for a day" to be referring to the probability distribution over total world histories consistent with current observations and with the turned-into-a-whale-on-this-day constraint.
Maybe I should have explained what I was doing... I hope no one gets too confused.
"Awesomeness" is IMO the simplest effective pointer to morality that we currently have, but that morality is still inconsistent and dynamic. I take the "moral philosophy" problem to be working out in explicit detail what exactly is awesome and what isn't, from our current position in morality-space, with all its meta-intuitions. I think this problem is incredibly hard to solve completely, but most people can do better than usual by just using "awesomeness". I hope this makes that clearer?
In some degenerate sense, yes, but you can easily think up a utility function that cares what rules you followed in coming to a decision, which is generally not considered "consequentialism". It is after all part of the world history and therefor available to the utility function.
We may have reached the point where we are looking at the problem in more detail than "consequentialism" is good for. We may need a new word to distinguish mere VNM from rules-don't-matter type stuff.
The more I think about "awesomeness" as a proxy for moral reasoning, the less awesome it becomes and the more like the original painful exercise of rationality it looks.
see this
tl;dr: don't dereference "awesome" in verbal-logical mode.
It's too late for me. It might work to tell the average person to use "awesomeness" as their black box for moral reasoning as long as they never ever look inside it. Unfortunately, all of us have now looked, and so whatever value it had as a black box has disappeared.
You can't tell me now to go back and revert to my original version of awesome unless you have a supply of blue pills whenever I need them.
If the power of this tool evaporates as soon as you start investigating it, that strikes me as a rather strong point of evidence against it. It was fun while it lasted, though.
You seem to be generalizing from one example. Have you attempted to find examples of people who have looked inside the box and not destroyed its value in the process?
I suspect that the utility of this approach is dependent on more than simply whether or not the person has examined the "awesome" label, and that some people will do better than others. Given the comments I see on LW, I suspect many people here have looked into it and still find value. (I will place myself into that group only tentatively; I haven't looked into it in any particular detail, but I have looked. OTOH, that still seems like strong enough evidence to call "never ever look inside" into question.)