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RomeoStevens comments on Transhumanism and Gender Relations - Less Wrong Discussion

7 [deleted] 11 November 2011 01:48AM

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Comment author: RomeoStevens 15 November 2011 03:17:23AM -1 points [-]

this is the sort of thing where i'd be insanely curious as to the downvotes. If this approach to combining utility function is so flawed as to not be worth considering that is highly useful information.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2011 12:36:56AM 3 points [-]

Utility functions are only well-defined up to scaling, thus taking the average of two utility functions isn't mathematically meaningful.

Comment author: marchdown 16 November 2011 03:27:27AM *  1 point [-]

Consider a problem with scarce resource allocation in a small community with an appointed decision-taker: utility function that intuitively should be used has utility functions of different members of a community taken with some commensurable coefficients.

So you would need some additional structure to meaningfully combine utility functions, but, depending on a scenario, there often are solutions that seem natural in their domain. Of course, if we extend them beyond their natural domain we get all the weirdness explored by scenarios of Dr. Evil running a trillion simulations of himself to foil CEV-performing Friendly AI, and, arguably, SIA vs SSA paradoxes too.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 16 November 2011 06:01:27AM *  -1 points [-]

I was being semantically imprecise when I said average. I should have said searching for conditions that produce the highest additive utility. This seems different from pareto improvements when we're talking about two agents agreeing to use their optimizing power together on some exterior conditions rather than simply the division of some finite resource.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 16 November 2011 11:52:48PM 2 points [-]

I was being semantically imprecise when I said average. I should have said searching for conditions that produce the highest additive utility.

From a mathematical (or any practical) point of view, this distinction is completely irrelevant.

Comment author: RomeoStevens 17 November 2011 02:22:18AM -1 points [-]

can you point me to anything relevant if you don't want to make a longer response? I feel I must be missing something basic.