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timtyler comments on Moral Error and Moral Disagreement - Less Wrong
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Utilities are often associated with states of the world, yes. However, here you seemed to balk at utilities that were not so associated. I think such values can still be called "utilities" - and "utility functions" can be used to describe how they are generated - and the standard economic framework accommodates this just fine.
What this idea doesn't fit into is the von Neumann–Morgenstern system - since it typically violates the independence axiom. However, that is not the end of the world. That axiom can simply be binned - and fairly often it is.
Unless you supply some restrictions, it is considerably more destructive than that. All axioms based on consequentialism are blown away. You said yourself that we can assign utilities so as to rationalize any set of actions that an agent might choose. I.e. there are no irrational actions. I.e. decision theory and utility theory are roughly as useful as theology.
No, no! That is like saying that a universal computer is useless to scientists - because it can be made to predict anything!
Universal action is a useful and interesting concept partly because it allows a compact, utility-based description of arbitrary computable agents. Once you have a utility function for an agent, you can then combine and compare its utility function with that of other agents, and generally use the existing toolbox of economics to help model and analyse the agent's behaviour. This is all surely a Good Thing.
I've never seen the phrase universal action before. Googling didn't help me. It certainly sounds like it might be an interesting concept. Can you provide a link to an explanation more coherent than the one you have attempted to give here?
As to whether a "utility-based" description of an agent that does not adhere to the standard axioms of utility is a "good thing" - well I am doubtful. Surely it does not enable use of the standard toolbox of economics, because that toolbox takes for granted that the participants in the economy are (approximately) rational agents.
Universal action is named after universal computation and universal construction.
Universal construction and universal action have some caveats about being compatible with constraints imposted by things like physical law. "Doing anything" means something like: being able to feed arbitrary computable sequences in parallel to your motor outputs. Sequences that fail due to severing your own head don't violate the spirit of the idea, though. As with universal computation, universal action is subject to resource limitations in practice. My coinage - AFAIK. Attribution: unpublished manuscript ;-)
Well, I'll just ignore the fact that universal construction means to me something very different than it apparently means to you. Your claim seems to be that we can 'program' a machine (which is already known to maximize utility) so as to output any sequence of symbols we wish it to output; program it by the clever technique of assigning a numeric utility to each possible infinite output string, in such a way that we attach the largest numeric utility to the specific string that we want.
And you are claiming this in the same thread in which you disparage all forms of discounting the future.
What am I missing here?
For my usage, see:
The term has subsequently become overloaded, it is true.
If I understand it correctly, the rest of your comment is a quibble about infinity. I don't "get" that. Why not just take things one output symbol at a time?
Wow. I didn't see that one coming. Self-reproducing cellular automata. Brings back memories.
Well, it wasn't just a quibble about infinity. There was also the dig about discount rates. ;)
But I really am mystified. Is a 'step' in this kind of computation to output a symbol and switch to a different state? Are there formulas for calculating utilities? What data go into the calculation?
Exactly how does computation work here? Perhaps I need an example. How would you use this 'utility maximization as a programming language' scheme to program the machine to compute the square root of 2? I really don't understand how this is related to either lambda calculus or Turing machines. Why don't you take some time, work out the details, and then produce one of your essays?
I didn't (and still don't) understand how discount rates were relevant - if not via considering the comment about infinite output strings.
What data go into the calculation of utilities? The available history of sense data, memories, and any current inputs. The agent's internal state, IOW.
Just like it normally does? You just write the utility function in a Turing-complete language - which you have to do anyway if you want any generality. The only minor complication is how to get a (single-valued) "function" to output a collection of motor outputs in parallel - but serialisation provides a standard solution to this "problem".
Universal action might get an essay one day.
...and yes, if I hear too many more times that humans don't have utility functions (we are better than that!) - or that utility maximisation is a bad implementation plan - I might polish up a page that debunks those - ISTM - terribly-flawed concepts - so I can just refer people to that.
What is it that the agent acts so as to maximize?
To me, only the first two options make mathematical sense, but the first doesn't really make sense as a model of human motivation.
You have an alternative model of arbitrary computable agents to propose?
You don't think the ability to model an arbitrary computable agent is useful?
What is the problem here? Surely a simple utility-based framework for modelling the computable agent of your choice is an obvious Good Thing.
I see no problem modeling computable agents without even mentioning "utility".
I don't yet see how modeling them as irrational utility maximizers is useful, since a non-utility-based approach will probably be simpler.
Similarly, you can model serial computers without mentioning Turing machines and parallel computers without mentioning cellular automata. Yet in those cases, the general abstraction turns out to be a useful and important concept. I think this is just the same.
Part of the case for using a utility maximization framework is that we can see that many agents naturally use an internal representation of utility. This is true for companies, and other "economic" actors. It is true to some extent for animal brains - and it is true for many of the synthetic artificial agents that have been constructed. Since so many agents are naturally utility-based, that makes the framework an obvious modelling medium for intelligent agents.