= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
linkhyrule5 comments on The Empty White Room: Surreal Utilities - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (124)
Yes. See: Flaws. This is Pascal's Mugging; it shows up in real systems too, you need a slightly more unlikely set-up but it's still a plausible scenario. It's not a problem the real utility system doesn't have.
Well, the usual utilitarian "torture wins" does not have this particular problem, it trades it for the repugnant conclusion "torture wins".
Anyway, I don't see how you approach avoids any of the standard pitfalls of utilitarianism, though it might be masking some.
Surreal Utilities can support that conclusion as well: how you decide on Torture v. Dust Specks depends entirely on your choice of tiers.
I'm talking purely about Pascal's Mugging, where someone shows up and says "I'll save 3^^^3 lives if you give me five dollars." This is isomorphic to this problem on the surreals, where someone says "I'll give you omega-utility (save a life) at a probability of one in one quadrillion.)