owencb comments on Polymath-style attack on the Parliamentary Model for moral uncertainty - Less Wrong

22 Post author: danieldewey 26 September 2014 01:51PM

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

Comments (74)

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

Comment author: owencb 28 September 2014 06:42:50PM 6 points [-]

Normalisation procedures: if they are 'structural' (not caring about details like the names of the theories or outcomes), then the two theories are symmetric, so they must be normalised in the same way. WLOG, as follows:

T1(A) = 2, T1(B) = 0, T1(C) = 1, T1(D) = 0 T2(A) = 0, T2(B) = 1, T2(C) = 0, T2(D) = 2

Then letting q = (1-p) the aggregate preferences T are given by:

T(A) = 2p, T(B) = q, T(C) = p, T(D) = q

So:

  • if p > 2/3, the aggregate chooses A and C
  • if 1/3 < p < 2/3, the aggregate chooses A and D
  • if p < 1/3, the aggregate chooses B and D

The advantage of this simple set-up is that I didn't have to make any assumptions about the normalisation procedure beyond that it is structural. If the bargaining outcome agrees with this we may need to look at more complicated cases; if it disagrees we have discovered something already.