I think that the more general problem is that if the absolute value of the utility that you attach to a world-state increases faster than does its complexity decreases given the current situation then the very possibility of that world-state existing will cause it to hijack the entirety of your utility function (assuming that there are no other world-states in your utility function which go FOOM in a similar fashion.)
Of course, utility functions are not constructed to avoid this problem, so I think that it's incredibly likely that each unbounded utility function has at least one world-state which would render it hijackable in such a manner.
I think that the more general problem is that if the absolute value of the utility that you attach to a world-state increases faster than does its complexity decreases given the current situation then the very possibility of that world-state existing will cause it to hijack the entirety of your utility function
Yes, that's exactly the problem.
Of course, utility functions are not constructed to avoid this problem
Well, they had better be, or they will fall victim to it.
You have to choose one of the following: (1) Pascal's Mugging; (2) Scope Insensitiv...
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?