Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Against utility functions - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Qiaochu_Yuan 19 June 2014 05:56AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 June 2014 07:23:34PM *  2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 22 June 2014 06:26:33PM 1 point [-]

we need to replace it with some other desiderata for preventing self-contradictory preferences that cause no-win scenarios.

Why?

Comment author: [deleted] 23 June 2014 05:11:36AM 0 points [-]

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?