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Larks, we can of course stipulatively define "rational" so as to exclude impartial consideration of the preferences of other agents or subjects of experience. By this criterion, Jane is more rational than Jill - who scrupulously weighs the preferences of other subjects of experience before acting, not just her own, i.e. Jill aspires to a more inclusive sense of instrumental rationality. But why favour Jane's folk usage of "rational"? Jane's self-serving bias arbitrarily privileges one particular here-and-now over all other first-person perspectives. If the "view from nowhere" offered by modern science is correct, then Jane's sense she is somehow privileged or ontologically special is an illusion of perspective - genetically adaptive, for sure, but irrational. And false.
[No, this argument is unlikely to win karma with burger eaters :-)
David, we're not defining rationality to exclude other-oriented desires. We're just not including that exact morality into the word "rational". Instrumental rationality links up a utility function to a set of actions. You hand over a utility function over outcomes, epistemic rationality maps the world and then instrumental rationality hands back a set of actions whose expected score is highest. So long as it can build a well-calibrated, highly discriminative model of the world and then navigate to a compactly specified set of outcomes, we call it rational, even if the optimization target is "produce as many paperclips as possible". Adding a further constraint to the utility function that it be perfectly altruistic will greatly reduce the set of hypothetical agents we're talking about, but it doesn't change reality (obviously) nor yield any interesting changes in terms of how the agent investigates hypotheses, the fact that the agent will not fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy if it is rational, and so on. Perfectly altruistic rational agents will use mostly the same cognitive strategies as any other sort of rational agent, they'll just be optimizing for one particular thing.
Jane doesn't have any false epistemic beliefs about being special. She accurately models the world, and then accurately calculates and outputs "the strategy that leads to the highest expected number of burgers eaten by Jane" instead of "the strategy that has the highest expected fulfillment of all thinking beings' values".
Besides, everyone knows that truly rational entities only fulfill other beings' values if they can do so using friendship and ponies.
Eliezer, I'd beg to differ. Jane does not accurately model the world. Accurately modelling the world would entail grasping and impartially weighing all its first-person perspectives, not privileging a narrow subset. Perhaps we may imagine a superintelligent generalisation of http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/feb/28/brains-rats-connected-share-information http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/brain-flapping/2013/mar/01/rats-are-like-the-borg With perfect knowledge of all the first-person facts, Jane could not disregard the strong preference of the cow not to be harmed. Of course, Jane is not capable of such God-like omniscience. No doubt in common usage, egocentric Jane displays merely a lack of altruism, not a cognitive deficit of reason. But this is precisely what's in question. Why build our canons of rational behaviour around a genetically adaptive delusion?
Accurately modeling the world entails making accurate predictions about it. An expected paperclip maximizer fully grasps the functioning of your brain and mind to the extent that this is relevant to producing paperclips; if it needs to know the secrets of your heart in order to persuade you, it knows them. If it needs to know why you write papers about the hard problem of conscious experience, it knows that too. The paperclip maximizer is not moved by grasping your first-person perspective, because although it has accurate knowledge of this fact, that is not the sort of fact that figures in its terminal values. The fact that it perfectly grasps the compellingness-to-Jane, even the reason why Jane finds certain facts to be inherently and mysteriously compelling, doesn't compel it. It's not a future paperclip.
I know exactly why the villain in Methods of Rationality wants to kill people. I could even write the villain writing about the ineffable compellingness of the urge to rid the world of certain people if I put that villain in a situation where he or she would actually read about the hard problem of conscious experience, and yet I am not likewise compelled. I don't have the perfect understanding of any particular real-world psychopath that I do of my fictional killer, but if I did know why they were killers, and of course brought to bear my standard knowledge of why humans write what they do about consciousness, I still wouldn't be compelled by even the limits of a full grasp of their reasons, their justifications, their inner experience, and the reasons they think their inner experience is ineffably compelling.
David, have you already read all this stuff on LW, in which case I shouldn't bother recapitulating it? http://lesswrong.com/lw/sy/sorting_pebbles_into_correct_heaps/, http://lesswrong.com/lw/ta/invisible_frameworks/, and so on?
For sure, accurately modelling the world entails making accurate predictions about it. These predictions include the third-person and first-person facts [what-it's-like-to-be-a-bat, etc]. What is far from clear - to me at any rate - is whether super-rational agents can share perfect knowledge of both the first-person and third-person facts and still disagree. This would be like two mirror-touch synaesthetes having a fist fight.
Thus I'm still struggling with, "The paperclip maximizer is not moved by grasping your first-person perspective." From this, I gather we're talking about a full-spectrum superintelligence well acquainted with both the formal and subjective properties of mind, insofar as they can be cleanly distinguished. Granted your example Eliezer, yes, if contemplating a cosmic paperclip-deficit causes the AGI superhuman anguish, then the hypothetical superintelligence is entitled to prioritise its super-anguish over mere human despair - despite the intuitively arbitrary value of paperclips. On this scenario, the paperclip-maximising superintelligence can represent human distress even more faithfully than a mirror-touch synaesthete; but its own hedonic range surpasses that of mere humans - and therefore takes precedence.
However, to be analogous to burger-choosing Jane in Luke's FAQ, we'd need to pick an example of a superintelligence who wholly understands both a cow's strong preference not to have her throat slit and Jane's comparatively weaker preference to eat her flesh in a burger. Unlike partially mind-blind Jane, the superintelligence can accurately represent and impartially weigh all relevant first-person perspectives. So the question is whether this richer perspective-taking capacity is consistent with the superintelligence discounting the stronger preference not to be harmed? Or would such human-like bias be irrational? In my view, this is not just a question of altruism but cognitive competence.
[Of course, given we're taking about posthuman superintelligence, the honest answer is boring and lame: I don't know. But if physicists want to know the "mind of God," we should want to know God's utility function, so to speak.]
Why not? Actions are a product of priors, perceptions and motives. Sharing perceptions isn't sharing motives - and even with identical motives, agents could still fight - if they were motivated to do so.
God's Utility Function according to Dawkins and Tyler.
Why not ?
Even if it turns out that all humans would become cow-compassionate given ultimate knowledge, we are still interested in the rationality of cow-satan.
Why not? Because Jane would weigh the preference of the cow not to have her throat slit as if it were her own. Of course, perfect knowledge of each other's first-person states is still a pipedream. But let's assume that in the future http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mindreading-rodents-scientists-show-telepathic-rats-can-communicate-using-braintobrain-8515259.html is ubiquitous, ensuring our mutual ignorance is cured.
"The rationality of cow satan"? Apologies Kyre, you've lost me here. Could you possibly elaborate?
What I'm saying is that cow-satan completely understands the preference of the cow not to have its throat slit. Every last grisly detail; all the physical, emotional, social, intellectual consequences, or consequences of any other kind. Cow satan has virtually experienced being slaughtered. Cow satan has studied the subject for centuries in detail. It is safe to say that no cow has ever understood the preference of cows not to be killed and eaten better than any cow ever could. Cow satan weighs that preference at zero.
It might be the case that cow satan could not actually exist in our universe, but would you say that it is irrational for him to go ahead and have the burger ?
(edit - thinking about it, that last question isn't perhaps very helpful)
Are you saying that perfect (or sufficiently good) mutual knowledge of each other's experiences would be highly likely to change everyone's preferences ? That might be the case, but I don't see how that makes Jane's burger choice irrational.
Yes Kyre, "Cow Satan", as far as I can tell, would be impossible. Imagine a full cognitive generalisation of http://www.livescience.com/1628-study-people-literally-feel-pain.html Why don't mirror-touch synaesthetes - or full-spectrum superintelligences - wantonly harm each other?
[this is not to discount the problem of Friendly AI. Alas one can imagine "narrow" superintelligences converting cows and humans alike into paperclips (or worse, dolorium) without insight into the first-person significance of what they are doing.]
There isn't too much that is impossible. In general, if we can imagine it, we can build it (because we have already built it - inside our brains).
Tim, in one sense I agree: In the words of William Ralph Inge, "We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."
But I'm not convinced there could literally be a Cow Satan - for the same reason that there are no branches of Everett's multiverse where any of the world's religions are true, i.e. because of their disguised logical contractions. Unless you're a fan of what philosophers call Meinong's jungle (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinong's_jungle), the existence of "Cow Satan" is impossible.
See also:
That did not address David's True Rejection.
an Austere Charitable Metaethicist could do better.
The grandparent is a superb reply and gave exactly the information needed in a graceful and elegant manner.
Indeed it does. Not. Here is a condition in which I think David would be satified. If people would use vegetables for example as common courtesy to vegetarians, in the exact same sense that "she" has been largely adopted to combat natural drives towards "he"-ness. Note how Luke's agents and examples are overwhelmingly female. Not a requirement, just a courtesy.
An I don't say that as a vegetarian, because I'm not one.
Indeed. What is the Borg's version of the Decision Theory FAQ? This is not to say that rational agents should literally aim to emulate the Borg. Rather our conception of epistemic and instrumental rationality will improve if / when technology delivers ubiquitous access to each other's perspectives and preferences. And by "us" I mean inclusively all subjects of experience.
Hello, David.
If "What Do We Mean By 'Rationality'?" does not describe your conception of rationality, I am wondering, what is your conception of rationality? How would you define that term?
Given that, why should I care about being rational in your sense of the word? When I find ants, spiders, and other bugs in my house, I kill them. Sometimes I don't finish the job on the first try. I'm sure they are feeling pain, but I don't care. Sometimes, I even enjoy the feeling of "the hunt" and am quite satisfied when I'm done. Once, hornets built a large nest on my family's garage. We called an exterminator and had it destroyed. Again, I was quite happy with that decision and felt no remorse. Multiple times in my life, I have burned ants on my driveway to death with a magnifying glass, and, though I sometimes feel guilty about having done this, in the moment, I knew that the ants were suffering and actually enjoyed the burning, in part, for that very reason. The ants even squealed at the moment of their deaths, and that was my favorite part, again because it gave me the feeling of success in "the hunt".
No third-person fact you give me here will change my mind. You could rewire my brain so I felt empathy towards ants and other bugs, but I don't want you to do that. Unless I have misrepresented your conception of rationality, I think it fails to generally motivate (and there are probably many examples in which this occurs, besides mine).
Also, in case it comes up, I am a motivational externalist in the moral domain (though you probably have surmised that by now).
Maybe you need to talk to someone about it.
I don't burn ants anymore. My psychological health now is far superior to my psychological health back when I burned ants.
Have you considered immproving your psychological health so far you don't kill spiders, too?
Not sure if that was meant to be sarcastic, but I think it is fairly common for people to kill bugs that they find crawling around in their own home. Torturing them is a different matter.
I usually just ignore them, or if they bother me too much I try to get them out of the window alive.
Well, I don't, and I complain when I see people do it. But I'm atypical.
... how about not torturing and killing animals for food? Sure, most people do it, but most people are crazy.
I have much less of a problem with that (I eat meat myself, once in a while) than with torturing and killing animals for fun.
Is it because you think people derive much less fun from it than they do from eating meat? Or because you see some qualitative distinction between the two?
I was actually thinking of “fun” in a narrower sense (I was going to say “the hell of it” instead, and I'm not sure why I changed my mind); so I guess that
is kind-of right, even though, as someone said, a qualitative difference is just a sufficiently large quantitative difference (which translates to LWese as “SPECKS is worse than TORTURE”). By using “Fun” is a more general sense (note the capital F)... [thinks about it] yes, they derive much less Fun from the former than from the latter per animal killed, but I don't think that one bug should count for as much as one cow, so... [thinks a little more about it] I dunno whether people derive that much less Fun from the former than from the latter per unit ‘moral value’.
(Another difference beside levels of Fun is that, as Robin Hanson points out (though I disagree with pretty much everything else in that essay), is that the livestock killed for food are usually animals that if you hadn't been going to kill them for food would have never existed in the first place. This doesn't apply to game, and indeed I consider hunting to be more similar to killing animals for the hell of it than to killing animals for food, even if you do eat them.)
Yes, I know. That would be me calling you crazy.
EDIT: In fact, since most people value mammalian (and bird, and fish, to a somewhat lower extent) pain/life higher than bug pain/life ... vegetarianism should be more important than not torturing bugs. Unless you meant from a psychological health perspective? Since people aren't taking pleasure in the torture/death itself?
Yes, the fact that most people don't usually kill the animals with their hands but pay someone else to do so does affect my gut reactions (cf “Near vs Far”) -- but I think that's a bug, not a feature.
I actually went vegetarian last summer for a couple months. I survived, but I did not enjoy it. I definitely could not stand going vegan; I enjoy milk too much. When I went vegetarian, I did not feel nourished enough and I was unable to keep up my physique. At some meals, I couldn't eat with the rest of my family.
I would go vegetarian again if I had the finances to hire a personal trainer (who could guide me on how to properly nourish myself) and if I had the motivation to prepare many more meals for myself than I do right now. However, I don't, on both counts.
On the other hand, I did recently find out about something called Soylent, which I hope I will eventually be able to try out. Does that mesh better with your moral sensibilities? (honest question, not meant to sound edgy)
I actually grew up vegetarian, so I've never had any trouble with which foods to eat. Most people are already eating far more meat than they need to, but by the sounds of it you need the protein - it might be worth eating nuts, beans, eggs and so on whenever you would usually eat meat?
I've heard of Soylent, and assuming you sourced the various ingredients from vegetarian sources (no fish oils, basically) it sounds awesome. Assuming you didn't run into long-term side-effects, which I think is unlikely, it would be a great path to vegetarianism as well.
I emailed the creator of Soylent, Rob Rhinehart. Soylent is both vegetarian and kosher (though not vegan).
ETA: Apparently Soylent will be vegan by default now. But, who knows, that could change again.
notsonewuser, a precondition of rational agency is the capacity accurately to represent the world. So in a sense, the local witch-doctor, a jihadi, and the Pope cannot act rationally - maybe "rational" relative to their conceptual scheme, but they are still essentially psychotic. Epistemic and instrumental rationality are intimately linked. Thus the growth of science has taken us all the way from a naive geocentrism to Everett's multiverse. Our idealised Decision Theory needs to reflect this progress. Unfortunately, trying to understand the nature of first-person facts and subjective agency within the conceptual framework of science is challenging, partly because there seems no place within an orthodox materialist ontology for the phenomenology of experience; but also because one has access only to an extraordinarily restricted set of first-person facts at any instant - the contents of a single here-and now. Within any given here-and-now, each of us seems to be the centre of the universe; the whole world is centred on one's body-image. Natural selection has designed us -and structured our perceptions - so one would probably lay down one's life for two of one's brothers or eight of one's cousins, just as kin-selection theory predicts; but one might well sacrifice a small third-world country rather than lose one's child. One's own child seems inherently more important than a faraway country of which one knows little. The egocentric illusion is hugely genetically adaptive. This distortion of perspective means we're also prone to massive temporal and spatial discounting. The question is whether some first-person facts are really special or ontologically privileged or deserve more weight simply because they are more epistemologically accessible? Or alternatively, is a constraint on ideal rational action that we de-bias ourselves?
Granted the scientific world picture, then, can it be rational to take pleasure in causing suffering to other subjects of experience just for the sake of it? After all, you're not a mirror-touch synaesthete. Watching primitive sentients squirm gives you pleasure. But this is my point. You aren't adequately representing the first-person perspectives in question. Representation is not all-or-nothing; representational fidelity is dimensional rather than categorical. Complete fidelity of representation entails perfectly capturing every element of both the formal third-person facts and subjective-first-person facts about the system in question. Currently, none of us yet enjoys noninferential access to other minds - though technology may shortly overcome our cognitive limitations here. I gather your neocortical representations sometimes tend causally to covary with squirming sentients. Presumably, their squirmings trigger the release of endogenous opioids in your hedonic hotspots, You enjoy the experience! (cf. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081107-bully-brain.html) But insofar as you find the first-person state of being panic-stricken as in any way enjoyable, you have misrepresented its nature. By analogy, a masochist might be turned on watching a video involving ritualised but nonconsensual pain and degradation. The co-release of endogenous opioids within his CNS prevents the masochist from adequately representing what's really happening from the first-person perspective of the victim. The opioids colour the masochist's representations with positive hedonic tone. Or to use another example, stimulate the relevant bit of neocortex with microelectrodes and you will find everything indiscriminately funny (cf.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/55893.stm ) - even your child drowning before your eyes. Why intervene if it's so funny? Although the funniness seems intrinsic to one's representations, they are misrepresentations to the extent they mischaracterise the first-person experiences of the subject in question. There isn't anything intrinsically funny about a suffering sentient. Rightly or wrongly, I assume that full-spectrum superintelligences will surpass humans in their capacity impartially to grasp first-person and third-person perspectives - a radical extension of the runaway mind-reading prowess that helped drive the evolution of disjunctively human intelligence.
So, no, without rewiring your brain, I doubt I can change your mind. But then if some touchy-feely superempathiser says they don't want to learn about quantum physics or Bayesian probability theory, you probably won't change their mind either. Such is life. If we aspire to be ideal rational agents - both epistemically and instrumentally rational - then we'll impartially weigh the first-person and third-person facts alike.
Hi David,
Thanks for your long reply and all of the writing you've done here on Less Wrong. I only hope you eventually see this.
I've thought more about the points you seem to be trying to make and find myself in at least partial agreement. In addition to your comment that I'm replying to, this comment you made also helped me understand your points better.
Just to clarify, you mean that human representation of others' pain is only represented using a (very) lossy compression, am I correct? So we end up making decisions without having all the information about those decisions we are making...in other words, if we computed the cow's brain circuitry within our own brains in enough detail to feel things the way they feel from the perspective of the cow, we obviously would choose not to harm the cow.
In at least one class of possible situations, I think you are definitely correct. If I were to say that my pleasure in burning ants outweighed the pain of the ants I burned (and thus that such an action was moral), but only because I do not (and cannot, currently) fully empathize with ants, then I agree that I would be making such a claim irrationally. However, suppose I already acknowledge that such an act is immoral (which I do), but still desire to perform it, and also have the choice to have my brain rewired so I can empathize with ants. In that case, I would choose not to have my brain rewired. Call this "irrational" if you'd like, but if that's what you mean by rationality, I don't see why I should be rational, unless that's what I already desired anyways.
The thing which you are calling rationality seems to have a lot more to do with what I (and perhaps many others on Less Wrong) would call morality. Is your sticking point on this whole issue really the word "rational", or is it actually on the word "ideal"? Perhaps burger-choosing Jane is not "ideal"; perhaps she has made an immoral choice.
How would you define the word "morality", and how does it differ from "rationality"? I am not at all trying to attack your position; I am trying to understand it better.
Also, I now plan on reading your work The Hedonistic Imperative. Do you still endorse it?
notsonewuser, yes, "a (very) lossy compression", that's a good way of putting it - not just burger-eating Jane's lossy representation of the first-person perspective of a cow, but also her lossy representation of her pensioner namesake with atherosclerosis forty years hence. Insofar as Jane is ideally rational, she will take pains to offset such lossiness before acting.
Ants? Yes, you could indeed choose not to have your brain reconfigured so as faithfully to access their subjective panic and distress. Likewise, a touchy-feely super-empathiser can choose not to have her brain reconfigured so she better understands of the formal, structural features of the world - or what it means to be a good Bayesian rationalist. But insofar as you aspire to be an ideal rational agent, then you must aspire to maximum representational fidelity to the first-person and the first-third facts alike. This is a constraint on idealised rationality, not a plea for us to be more moral - although yes, the ethical implications may turn out to be profound.
The Hedonistic Imperative? Well, I wrote HI in 1995. The Abolitionist Project (2007) (http://www.abolitionist.com) is shorter, more up-to-date, and (I hope) more readable. Of course, you don't need to buy into my quirky ideas on ideal rationality or ethics to believe that we should use biotech and infotech to phase out the biology of suffering throughout the living world.
On a different note, I don't know who'll be around in London next month. But on May 11, there is a book launch of the Springer volume, "Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment":
http://www.meetup.com/London-Futurists/events/110562132/?a=co1.1_grp&rv=co1.1
I'll be making the case for imminent biologically-based superintelligence. I trust there will be speakers to put the Kurzweilian and MIRI / lesswrong perspective. I fear a consensus may prove elusive. But Springer have a commissioned a second volume - perhaps to tie up any loose ends.
What are you talking about? If you like utility functions, you don't argue about them (at least not on rationality grounds)! If I want to privilege this or that, I am not being irrational, I am at most possibly being a bastard.
IlyaShpitser, is someone who steals from their own pension fund an even bigger bastard, as you put it? Or irrational? What's at stake here is which preferences or interests to include in a utility function.
I don't follow you. What preferences I include is my business, not yours. You don't get to pass judgement on what is rational, rationality is just "accounting." We simply consult the math and check if the number is maximized. At most you can pass judgement on what is moral, but that is a complicated story.
IlyaShpitser, you might perhaps briefly want to glance through the above discussion for some context [But don't feel obliged; life is short!] The nature of rationality is a controversial topic in the philosophy of science (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions). Let's just say if either epistemic or instrumental rationality were purely a question of maths, then the route to knowledge would be unimaginably easier.
Not necessarily if the math is really difficult. There are, after all, plenty of mathematical problems which have never been solved.
True Desrtopa. But just as doing mathematics is harder when mathematicians can't agree on what constitutes a valid proof (cf. constructivists versus nonconstructivists), likewise formalising a normative account of ideal rational agency is harder where disagreement exists over the criteria of rationality.
True enough, but in this case the math is not difficult. It's only the application that people are arguing about.
You are not going to ''do'' rationality unless you have a preference for it. And to have a preference for it is to have a preference for other things, like objectivity.
Look, I am not sure exactly what you are saying here, but I think you might be saying that you can't have Clippy. Clippy worries less about assigning weight to first and third person facts, and more about the fact that various atom configurations aren't yet paperclips. I think Clippy is certainly logically possible. Is Clippy irrational? He's optimizing what he cares about..
I think maybe there is some sort of weird "rationality virtue ethics" hiding in this series of responses.
Sure, it's only because appelatives like "bastard" imply a person with a constant identity through time that we call someone who steals from other people's pension funds a bastard, and from his own pension fund stupid or akratic. If we shrunk our view of identity to time-discrete agents making nanoeconomic transactions with future and past versions of themselves, we could call your premature pensioner a bastard; if we grew our view of identity to "all sentient beings," we could call someone who steals from others' pension funds stupid or akratic.
We could also call a left hand tossing a coin thrown by the right hand a thief; or divide up a single person into multiple, competing agents any number of other ways.
However, the choice of a assigning a consistent identity to each person is not arbitrary. It's fairly universal, and fairly well-motivated. Persons tend to be capable of replication, and capable of entering into enforceable contracts. Neither of the other agentic divisions--present/future self, left hand/right hand, or "all sentient beings"--share these characteristics. And these characteristics are vitally important, because agents that possess them can outcompete others that vie for the same resources; leaving the preferences of those other agents near-completely unsatisfied.
So, that's why LWers, with their pragmatic view toward rationality, aren't eager to embrace a definition of "rationality" that leaves its adherents in the dustbin of history unless everyone else embraces it at the same time.
Pragmatic? khafra, possibly I interpreted the FAQ too literally. ["Normative decision theory studies what an ideal agent (a perfectly rational agent, with infinite computing power, etc.) would choose."] Whether in practice a conception of rationality that privileges a class of weaker preferences over stronger preferences will stand the test of time is clearly speculative. But if we're discussing ideal, perfectly rational agents - or even crude approximations to ideal perfectly rational agents - then a compelling case can be made for an impartial and objective weighing of preferences instead.
You're sticking pretty determinedly to "preferences" as something that can be weighed without considering the agent that holds/implements them. But this is prima facie not how preferences work--this is what I mean by "pragmatic." If we imagine an ordering over agents by their ability to accomplish their goals, instead of by "rationality," it's clear that:
A preference held by no agents will only be satisfied by pure chance,
A preference held only by the weakest agent will only be satisfied if it is compatible with the preferences of the agents above it, and
By induction over the whole numbers, any agent's preferences will only be satisfied to the extent that they're compatible with the preferences of the agents above it.
As far as I can see, this leaves you with a trilemma:
There is no possible ordering over agents by ability to accomplish goals.
"Rationality" has negligible effect on ability to accomplish goals.
There exists some Omega-agent above all others, whose goals include fulfilling the preferences of weaker agents.
Branch 3 is theism. You seem to be aiming for a position in between branch 1 and branch 2; switching from one position to the other whenever someone attacks the weaknesses of your current position.
Edit: Whoops, also one more, which is the position you may actually hold:
4. Being above a certain, unspecified position in the ordering necessarily entails preferring the preferences of weaker agents. It's obvious that not every agent has this quality of preferring the preferences of weaker agents; and I can't see any mechanism whereby that preference for the preferences of weaker agents would be forced upon every agent above a certain position in the ordering except for the Omega-agent. So I think that mechanism is the specific thing you need to argue for, if this is actually your position.
Well, 'khafra' (if that is even your name), there are a couple caveats I must point out.
Consider two chipmunks living in the same forest, one of them mightier than the other (behold!). Each of them does his best to keep all the seeds to themselves (just like the typical LW'er). Yet it does not follow that the mightier chipmunk is able to preclude his rival from gathering some seeds, his advantage nonwithstanding.
Consider that for all practical purposes we rarely act in a truly closed system. You are painting a zero-sum game, with the agents' habitat as an arena, an agent-eat-agent world in which truly following a single preference imposes on every aspect of the world. That's true for Clippy, not for chipmunks or individual humans. Apart from rare, typically artificially constructed environments (e.g. games), there was always a frontier to push - possibilities to evade other agents and find a niche that puts you beyond the grasp of other, mightier agents. The universe may be infinite or it mayn't, yet we don't really need to care about it, it's open enough for us. An Omega could preclude us from fulfilling any preferences at all, but just an agent that's "stronger" than us? Doubtful, unless we're introducing Omega in its more malicious variant, Clippy.
Agents may have competing preferences, but what matters isn't centered on their ultima ratio maximal theoretical ability to enforce a specific preference, but just as much on their actual willingness to do so - which isis why the horn of the trilemma you state as "there is no possible ordering over agents by ability to accomplish goals" is too broad a statement. You may want some ice cream, but not at any cost.
As an example, Beau may wish to get some girl's number, but does not highly prioritize it. He has a higher chance of achieving that goal (let's assume the girl's number is an exclusive resource with a binary semaphore, so no sharing of her number allowed) than Mordog The Terrible, if they valued that preference equally. However, in practice if Beau didn't invest much effort at all, while Mordog listened to the girl for hours (investing significant time, since he values the number more highly), the weaker agent may yet prevail. Noone should ever read this example.
In conclusion, the ordering wouldn't be total, there would be partial (in the colloquial sense) orderings for certain subsets of agents, and the elements of the ordering would be tupels of (agent, which preference), without even taking into account temporal changes in power relations.
I did try to make the structure of my argument compatible with a partial order; but you're right--if you take an atomic preference to be something like "a marginal acorn" or "this girl's number" instead of "the agent's entire utility function;" we'll need tuples.
As far as temporal changes go, we're either considering you an agent who bargains with Kawoomba-tomorrow for well-restedness vs. staying on the internet long into the night--in which case there are no temporal changes--or we're considering an agent to be the same over the entire span of its personhood, in which case it has a total getting-goals-accomplished rank; even if you can't be certain what that rank is until it terminates.
The issue of how an ideal rational agent should act is indeed distinct from the issue of what mechanism could ensure we become ideal rational agents, impartially weighing the strength of preferences / interests regardless of the power of the subject of experience who holds them. Thus if we lived in a (human) slave-owning society, then as white slave-owners we might "pragmatically" choose to discount the preferences of black slaves from our ideal rational decision theory. After all, what is the point of impartially weighing the "preferences" of different subjects of experience without considering the agent that holds / implements them? For our Slaveowners' Decision Theory FAQ, let's pragmatically order over agents by their ability to accomplish their goals, instead of by "rationality," And likewise today with captive nonhuman animals in our factory farms ? Hmmm....
This is the part that makes the mechanism necessary. The "subject of experience" is also the agent capable of replication, and capable of entering into enforceable contracts. If there were no selection pressure on agents, rationality wouldn't exist, there would be no reason for it. Since there is selection pressure on agents, they must shape themselves according to that pressure, or be replaced by replicators who will.
I don't believe the average non-slave-owning member of today's society is any more rational than the average 19th century plantation owner. It's plausible that a plantation owner who started trying to fulfill the preferences of everyone on his plantation, giving them the same weight as his own preferences, would end up with more of his preferences fulfilled than the ones who simply tried to maximize cotton production--but that's because humans are not naturally cotton maximizers, and humans do have a fairly strong drive to fulfill the preferences of other humans. ' But that's because we're humans, not because we're rational agents.