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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 19 October 2015 06:59AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 26 October 2015 02:48:31PM *  0 points [-]

Democratic voting is the fairest way of making a decision when people can't agree.

That sounds like an article of faith.

"Fair" is a very... relative world. Calling something "fair" rarely means more than "I like / approve of it".

This is more of an aesthetic thing to talk about.

Ah. Well, speaking aesthetically, I find the elevation of mob rule to be the ultimate moral principle ugly and repugnant. Y'know, de gustibus 'n'all...

if we go with your solution

I don't believe I proposed any.

Comment author: Houshalter 30 October 2015 05:55:45AM -1 points [-]

Well see my edit to my first comment. I'll paste it here:

After giving it some more thought, I'm not sure voting systems are actually desirable. The whole point of voting is that people can't be trusted to just specify their utility functions. The perfect voting system would be for each person to give a number to each candidate based on how much utility they'd get from them being elected. But that's extremely susceptible to tactical voting.

However with FAI, it's possible we could come up with some way of keeping people honest, or peering into their brains and getting their true value function. That adds a great deal of complexity though. And it requires trusting the AI to do a complex, arbitrary, and subjective task. Which means you must have already solved FAI.

Do you agree that the fairest system would be to combine everyone's utility functions and maximize them? Of course somehow giving everyone equal weight to avoid utility monsters and other issues. I think these issues can be worked out.

If so, do you agree that voting systems are the best compromise when you can't just read people's utility functions? And need to worry about tactical voting? Because that is basically what I was getting at.

If you don't agree to the above, then I don't understand your objection. CEV is about somehow finding the best compromise of all humans' utility functions. About combining them all. All I'm talking about is more concrete methods of doing that.

Comment author: Jiro 01 November 2015 04:44:55PM 0 points [-]

Do you agree that the fairest system would be to combine everyone's utility functions and maximize them? Of course somehow giving everyone equal weight to avoid utility monsters and other issues. I think these issues can be worked out.

Anything you can do maximizes some combination of people's utility functions. So it is trivially true that the fairest system is a system which uses some combination of people's utility functions. Unless you can first describe how you are going to avoid utility monsters and other perils of utilitarianism, you really haven't said anything useful.

Comment author: Lumifer 30 October 2015 02:35:35PM 0 points [-]

Do you agree that the fairest system would be to combine everyone's utility functions and maximize them?

No, I do not. I do not think that humans have coherent utility functions. I don't think utilities of different people can be meaningfully combined, too.

I think these issues can be worked out.

Ah, yes, the famous business plan of the underpants gnomes...

If so, do you agree that voting systems are the best compromise when you can't just read people's utility functions?

No, I do not. They might be best given some definitions of "best" and given some conditionals, but they are not always best regardless of anything.

CEV is about somehow finding the best compromise of all humans' utility functions. About combining them all.

What makes you think it is possible?

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