endoself comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (404)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: endoself 08 May 2013 06:21:49AM 1 point [-]

I can find one discussion where, when the question of bounded utility functions came up, Eliezer responded, "[To avert a certain problem] the bound would also have to be substantially less than 3^^^^3." -- but this indicates a misunderstanding of the idea of utility, because utility functions can be arbitrarily (positively) rescaled or recentered. Individual utility "numbers" are not meaningful; only ratios of utility differences.

I think he was assuming a natural scale. After all, you can just pick some everyday-sized utility difference to use as your unit, and measure everytihng on that scale. It wouldn't really matter what utility difference you pick as long as it is a natural size, since multiplying by 3^^^3 is easily enough for the argument to go through.