RichardKennaway comments on We Don't Have a Utility Function - Less Wrong

43 [deleted] 02 April 2013 03:49AM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 06 April 2013 06:43:55PM 2 points [-]

A thermostat can be trivially modeled using a utility function.

Trivially. Quite. So trivially that anything at all can be "modelled" by a utility function at that level of triviality.

I've a great new utility-based model of the universe! The universe as it is has utility 1. Every other hypothetical universe has utility 0.

Comment author: timtyler 06 April 2013 10:36:29PM -1 points [-]

That's an Occam's razor fail, though. Explanations need to be concise to be satisfying. You'll find that, if you compress that utility function, you will be onto something interesting.