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Lumifer comments on Median utility rather than mean? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 08 September 2015 04:35PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 09 September 2015 05:02:09PM 0 points [-]

A fair point, though I don't think it makes any difference in the context. And I'm not sure the utility function is amenable to MCMC sampling...

Comment author: evand 10 September 2015 03:30:35AM 0 points [-]

I basically agree. However...

It might be more amenable to MCMC sampling than you think. MCMC basically is a series of operations of the form "make a small change and compare the result to the status quo", which now that I phrase it that way sounds a lot like human ethical reasoning. (Maybe the real problem with philosophy is that we don't consider enough hypothetical cases? I kid... mostly...)

In practice, the symmetry constraint isn't as nasty as it looks. For example, you can do MH to sample a random node from a graph, knowing only local topology (you need some connectivity constraints to get a good walk length to get good diffusion properties). Basically, I posit that the hard part is coming up with a sane definition for "nearby possible world" (and that the symmetry constraint and other parts are pretty easy after that).

Comment author: Lumifer 10 September 2015 02:41:12PM *  0 points [-]

Maybe the real problem with philosophy is that we don't consider enough hypothetical cases? I kid... mostly...

In that case we can have wonderful debates about which sub-space to sample our hypotheticals from, and once a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed acolyte breates out "ALL of it!" we can pontificate about the boundaries of all :-)

P.S. In about a century philosophy will discover the curse of dimensionality and there will be much rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth...