Jack comments on Moral Error and Moral Disagreement - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 August 2008 11:32PM

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Comment author: timtyler 18 November 2010 11:55:19PM *  -1 points [-]

What we really want, I believe, is a weighting scheme which changes over time - a system of exponential discounting. Actions taken by an FAI in the year 2100 should mostly be for the satisfaction of the desires of people alive in 2100. The FAI will give some consideration in 2100 to the situation in 2110 because the people around in 2100 will also be interested in 2110 to some extent. It will (in 2100) give less consideration to the prospects in 2200, because people in 2100 will be not that interested in 2200. "After all", they will rationally say to themselves, "we will be paying the year 2200 its due attention in 2180, and 2190, and especially 2199.

I don't think you need a "discounting" scheme. Or at least, you would get what is needed there "automatically" - if you just maximise expected utility. The same way Deep Blue doesn't waste its time worrying about promoting pawns on the first move of the game - even if you give it the very long term (and not remotely "discounted") goal of winning the whole game.

Comment author: Jack 19 November 2010 12:31:36PM 0 points [-]

The same way Deep Blue doesn't waste its time worrying about promoting pawns on the first move of the game - even if you give it the very long term (and not remotely "discounted") goal of winning the whole game.

Is this really true? My understanding is that Deep Blue's position evaluation function was determined by an analysis of a hundreds of thousands of games. Presumably it ranked openings which had a tendency to produce more promotion opportunities higher than openings which tended to produce fewer promotion opportunities (all else being equal and assuming promoting pawns correlates with wins).

Comment author: timtyler 19 November 2010 08:40:45PM *  0 points [-]

I wasn't talking about that - I meant it doesn't evaluate board positions with promoted pawns at the start of the game - even though these are common positions in complete chess games. Anyway, forget that example if you don't like it, the point it illustrates is unchanged.

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