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Vaniver comments on Continually-adjusted discounted preferences - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (15)
Is this actually wrong, though? If backwards time travel were possible, it would be really valuable, and you'd want to go back to the earliest point where you could reasonably expect to survive.
It seems to me that the reason to not frantically search for time travel is the belief that frantic search will not increase our chance of actually implementing time travel. That is, I'm thinking that this is a physics / meta-research question, rather than a decision-theory question.
True, but acknowledging that backward time travel is valuable (the future-lightcone of past-you has a greater volume than the future-lightcone of current-you) isn't the same as having a time-based discount rate; the former is based on instrumental reasoning, whereas the latter is intrinsic.
I suppose I've always seen time-based discount rates as a shorthand to encode the instrumental consequences of the past occurring before the future. Resources can be compounded, external resources can also compound, and memories seem like a special class of resources worth paying extra attention to.
So, that is, even if you deleted the discount rate of x% a year for having resources in whatever year, you would still have to address the hypothesis that the way to have as much legally acquired money as possible a year from today is to transport your seed resources as far back in time as possible.
Right. I think that dissolves our disagreement, then.
Yes, a discount rate increases the value of time travel quite dramatically.
A big problem is then the nature of the time travel. If your AI just goes back into an alternate past where nothing it does can affect you, then I guess that's nice for alternate-world people, assuming they appreciate your meddling - but you don't get to experience any of it.
This is probably not what you intended.
And that should be carved in crystal where all AI ideas are discussed...
Right, but the EV is so massive that it implies you should study physics 24/7 just to be sure you are correctly ruling it out.
Disagreed. The value of a successful discovery is probably more immense than any other value, but that doesn't imply that the value of the marginal hour studying physics is more positive than the next best option, i.e. that the expected value is massive. The probability you need to multiply is not that it's possible for someone eventually, but that you will discover it now / move its discovery closer to now, which could be done by doing things besides studying physics. That is, I think that getting the meta-research question right solves this problem.
It also means that discovering the universe is older than we currently expect ould significantly raise the EV of such research. Any probability of non-finite history could cause the EV to blow up.
That gets into Pascal's Mugging territory, I think.
I don't think so - an important part of Pascal's Mugging is that the demon acts second - you produce a joint probability and utility function, and then he exploits the fact that the former doesn't fall as fast as the latter rises.