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eli_sennesh comments on Against utility functions - Less Wrong
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On the one hand, you are correct regarding philosophy for humans: we do ethics and meta-ethics to reduce our uncertainty about our utility functions, not as a kind of game-tree planning based on already knowing those functions.
On the other hand, the Von-Neumann-Morgenstern Theorem says blah blah blah blah.
On the third hand, if you have a mathematical structure we can use to make no-Dutch-book decisions that better models the kinds of uncertainty we deal with as embodied human beings in real life, I'm all ears.
I don't think Dutch book arguments matter in practice. An easy way to avoid being Dutch booked is to refuse bets being offered to you by people you don't trust.
You are of course correct about the concrete scenario of being Dutch Booked in a hypothetical gamble (and I am not a gambler for reasons similar to this: we all know the house always wins!). However, if we're going to discard the Dutch Book criterion, then we need to replace it with some other desiderata for preventing self-contradictory preferences that cause no-win scenarios.
Even if your own mind comes preprogrammed with decision-making algorithms that can go into no-win scenarios under some conditions, you should recognize those as a conscious self-patching human being, and consciously employ other algorithms that won't hurt themselves.
I mean, let me put it this way, probabilities aside, if you make decisions that form a cyclic preference ordering rather than even forming a partial ordering, isn't there something rather severely bad about that?
Why?
Do you want to program an agent to put you in a no-win scenario? Do you want to put yourself in a no-win scenario?