Comment on Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015

Fri, 30 Oct 2015 05:55:45 GMT

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.

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