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timtyler comments on Decision Theory FAQ - Less Wrong
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No, it doesn't, not by its most common definition.
Tim, conduct a straw poll of native English speakers or economists and you are almost certainly correct. But we're not ( I hope!) doing Oxford-style ordinary language philosophy; "Rationality" is a contested term. Any account of normative decision theory, "what an ideal agent (a perfectly rational agent, with infinite computing power, etc.) would choose", is likely to contain background assumptions that may be challenged. For what it's worth, I doubt a full-spectrum superintelligence would find it epistemically or instrumentally rational to disregard a stronger preference in favour of a weaker preference - any more than it would be epistemically or instrumentally rational for a human spit-brain patient arbitrarily to privilege the preferences of one cerebral hemisphere over the other. In my view, locking bias into our very definition of rationality would be a mistake.
I recommend putting any proposed definition on a web page and linking to it. Using words in an unorthodox way in the midst of conversation can invite misunderstanding.
I don't think it is practical to avoid some level of egocentricity. Distant regions suffer from signal delays, due to the light speed limit. Your knowledge of them is out of date, your influence there is weakened by delays in signal propagation. Locality in physics apparently weighs against the "god's eye view" that you advocate.
Tim, in practice, yes. But this is as true in physics as in normative decision theory. Consider the computational challenges faced by, say, a galactic-sized superintelligence spanning 100,000 odd light years and googols of quasi-classical Everett branches.
[yes, you're right about definitions - but I hadn't intended to set out a rival Decision Theory FAQ. As you've probably guessed, all that happened was my vegan blood pressure rose briefly a few days ago when I read burger-choosing Jane being treated as a paradigm of rational agency.]
That's what I mean. It kinda sounds as though you are arguing against physics.
Tim, on the contrary, I was arguing that in weighing how to act, the ideal rational agent should not invoke privileged reference frames. Egocentric Jane is not an ideal rational agent.
Embodied agents can't avoid "privileged reference frames", though. They are - to some degree - out of touch with events distant to them. The bigger the agent gets, the more this becomes an issue. It becomes technically challenging for Jane to take account of Jill's preferences when Jill is far away - ultimately because of locality in physics. Without a god, a "god's eye view" is not very realistic. It sounds as though your "ideal rational agent" can't be embodied.
Tim, an ideally rational embodied agent may prefer no suffering to exist outside her cosmological horizon; but she is not rationally constrained to take such suffering - or the notional preferences of sentients in other Hubble volumes - into consideration before acting. This is because nothing she does as an embodied agent will affect such beings. By contrast, the interests and preferences of local sentients fall within the scope of embodied agency. Jane must decide whether the vividness and immediacy of her preference for a burger, when compared to the stronger but dimly grasped preference of a terrified cow not to have her throat slit, disclose some deep ontological truth about the world or a mere epistemological limitation. If she's an ideal rational agent, she'll recognise the latter and act accordingly.
The issue isn't just about things beyond cosmological horizons. All distances are involved. I can help my neighbour more easily than I can help someone from half-way around the world. The distance involved entails expenses relating to sensory and motor signal propagation. For example, I can give my neighbour 10 bucks and be pretty sure that they will receive it.
Of course, there are also other, more important reasons why real agents don't respect the preferences of others. Egocentricity is caused more by evolution than by simple physics.
Lastly, I still don't think you can hope to use the term "rational" in this way. It sounds as though you're talking about some kind of supermorality to me. "Rationality" means something too different.
Rationality doesn't have to mean morality to have implications for morality: since you can reason about just about anything, rationality has implications for just about everything.
Tim, all the above is indeed relevant to the decisions taken by an idealised rational agent. I just think a solipsistic conception of rational choice is irrational and unscientific. Yes, as you say, natural selection goes a long way to explaining our egocentricity. But just because evolution has hardwired a fitness-enhancing illusion doesn't mean we should endorse the egocentric conception of rational decision-making that illusion promotes. Adoption of a God's-eye-view does entail a different conception of rational choice.