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gjm comments on Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal's Mugging - Less Wrong Discussion

20 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 16 September 2015 10:45AM

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Comment author: gjm 18 September 2015 09:19:34PM 1 point [-]

"You have a matrix ...": correct. "And then ...": whether that's correct depends on what you mean by "in the process", but it's certainly not entirely unlike what I meant :-).

Your last paragraph is too metaphorical for me to work out whether I share your concerns. (My description was extremely handwavy so I'm in no position to complain.) I think the scaffolding required is basically just the agent's knowledge. (To clarify a couple of points: not necessarily minimum description length, which of course is uncomputable, but something like "shortest description the agent can readily come up with"; and of course in practice what I describe is way too onerous computationally but some crude approximation might be manageable.)

Comment author: Lumifer 18 September 2015 10:25:45PM 1 point [-]

The basic issue is whether the utility weights ("description lengths") reflect the subjective preferences. If they do, it's an entirely different kettle of fish. If they don't, I don't see why "my wife" should get much more weight than "the girl next to me on a bus".

Comment author: gjm 19 September 2015 01:01:23AM 1 point [-]

I think real people have preferences whose weights decay with distance -- geographical, temporal and conceptual. I think it would be reasonable for artificial agents to do likewise. Whether the particular mode of decay I describe resembles real people's, or would make an artificial agent tend to behave in ways we'd want, I don't know. As I've already indicated, I'm not claiming to be doing more than sketch what some kinda-plausible bounded-utility agents might look like.