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jsalvatier comments on Polymath-style attack on the Parliamentary Model for moral uncertainty - Less Wrong
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In order to get a better handle on the problem, I’d like to try walking through the mechanics of a how a vote by moral parliament might work. I don’t claim to be doing anything new here, I just want to describe the parliament in more detail to make sure I understand it, and so that it’s easier to reason about.
Here's the setup I have in mind:
Each MP wants to maximize the utility of the results according to their own scores, and they can engage in negotiation before the voting starts to accomplish this.
Does this seem to others like a reasonable description of how the parliamentary vote might work? Any suggestions for improvements to the description?
If others agree that this description is unobjectionable, I'd like to move on to discussing negotiating strategies the MP's might use, the properties these strategies might have, and whether there are restrictions that might be useful to place on negotiating strategies. But I'll wait to see if others think I'm missing any important considerations first.
Remember there's no such thing as zero utility. You can assign an arbitrarily bad value to failing to resolve, but it seems a bit arbitrary.
Hmm. What I was intending to do there was capture the idea that a bill failing to pass is the default state, and I'm only interested in the difference between a bill passing and a bill failing. So the utility score of a bill passing is supposed to represent the difference between it getting passed vs nothing happening.
Does that make sense? Am I just using utility terminology in a confusing way?
Pinning the utility of a failed bill to 0 for all agents gets rid of some free parameters in the model, but it's not clear to me that it's the complete way to do so (you still have enough free parameters that you could do more).
What do we get from using the utility per bill framework?
It's not clear to me that the second is going to be useful (do they have access to a source of randomness and binding commitments?), and it's not clear to me that the first is a requirement we actually want to impose. Suppose B1 is something like "cows are people" and B2 is something like "we shouldn't eat people." A MP who is against eating humans but for eating cows will flip their opinion on B2 based on the (expected) outcome of B1.
So then it seems like we should assign values to portfolios (i.e. bitstrings of whether or not bills passed), and if we don't need probabilistic interpretations then we should deal with ordinal rankings of those bitstrings that allow indifference, which would look like (01>11>10=00). A perhaps inaccessible way to talk about those rankings is sets of permutations of bitstrings (the previous ranking is <(01,11,10,00),(01,11,00,10)>).
That's a good suggestion about the allowing the MP's assign utilities to portfolios. I went with the per bill framework because I thought it was simpler, and was trying to find the simplest formalization I could that would capture the interesting parts of the parliamentary model.
But perhaps dependence of bills on each other (or in the real world of actions that one's moral parliament might take on each other) might be a key feature?
It might be interesting to see if we can analyze both models.