Comment author:Sarunas
27 September 2014 09:52:23AM
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1 point
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A remark that seems sufficiently distinct to deserve its own comment. At this moment we are only thinking about delegates with "fixed personalities". Should "personality" of a delegate be "recalculated[1]" after each new agreement/trade [2]? Changes would temporary, only within a context of a given set of bills, they would revert to their original "personalities" after the vote. Maybe this could give results that would be vaguely analogous to smoothing a function? This would allow us to have a kind of "persuasion".
In the context of my comment above, this could enable taking into account utility differences and not just signs, assuming large differences in utility would usually require large changes (and therefore, usually more than one change) in "personality" to invert the sign of it. I admit that this is very handwavy.
[1] I do not know what interpolation algorithm should be used
[2] A second remark. Maybe delegates should trade changes in each other's "personality" rather than votes themselves, i.e. instead of promising to vote on bills in accordance to some binding agreement, they would promise to perform a minimal possible non-ad-hoc change [3] to their personalities that would make them vote that way? However, this could create slippery slopes, similar to those mentioned here.
It seems to me that the less personal MPs are, and the fewer opportunities we allow for anthropomorphic persuasion between them (through appeals such as issue framing, pleading, signaling loyalty to a coalition, ingratiation, defamation, challenges to the MPs status, deceit (e.g. unreliable statements by MPs about their private info relevant to probable consequences of acts resulting from the passage of bills)), then all the more we will encapsulate away the hard problems of moral reasoning within the MPs.
Even persuasive mechanisms more amenable to formalization - like agreements between MPs to reallocate their computational resources, or like risk-sharing agreements between MPs based on their expectations that they might lose future influence in the parliament if the agent changes its assignment of probabilities to the MPs' moral correctness based on its observation of decision consequences - even these sound to me, in the absence of reasons why they should appear in a theory of how to act given a distribution over self-contained moral theories, like complications that will impede crisp mathematical reasoning, introduced mainly for their similarity to the mechanisms that function in real human parliaments.
Or am I off base, and your scare quotes around "personality" mean that you're talking about something else? Because what I'm picturing is basically someone building cognitive machinery for emotions, concepts, habits and styles of thinking, et cetera, on top of moral theories.
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A remark that seems sufficiently distinct to deserve its own comment. At this moment we are only thinking about delegates with "fixed personalities". Should "personality" of a delegate be "recalculated[1]" after each new agreement/trade [2]? Changes would temporary, only within a context of a given set of bills, they would revert to their original "personalities" after the vote. Maybe this could give results that would be vaguely analogous to smoothing a function? This would allow us to have a kind of "persuasion".
In the context of my comment above, this could enable taking into account utility differences and not just signs, assuming large differences in utility would usually require large changes (and therefore, usually more than one change) in "personality" to invert the sign of it. I admit that this is very handwavy.
[1] I do not know what interpolation algorithm should be used
[2] A second remark. Maybe delegates should trade changes in each other's "personality" rather than votes themselves, i.e. instead of promising to vote on bills in accordance to some binding agreement, they would promise to perform a minimal possible non-ad-hoc change [3] to their personalities that would make them vote that way? However, this could create slippery slopes, similar to those mentioned here.
[3] This is probably a hard problem
It seems to me that the less personal MPs are, and the fewer opportunities we allow for anthropomorphic persuasion between them (through appeals such as issue framing, pleading, signaling loyalty to a coalition, ingratiation, defamation, challenges to the MPs status, deceit (e.g. unreliable statements by MPs about their private info relevant to probable consequences of acts resulting from the passage of bills)), then all the more we will encapsulate away the hard problems of moral reasoning within the MPs.
Even persuasive mechanisms more amenable to formalization - like agreements between MPs to reallocate their computational resources, or like risk-sharing agreements between MPs based on their expectations that they might lose future influence in the parliament if the agent changes its assignment of probabilities to the MPs' moral correctness based on its observation of decision consequences - even these sound to me, in the absence of reasons why they should appear in a theory of how to act given a distribution over self-contained moral theories, like complications that will impede crisp mathematical reasoning, introduced mainly for their similarity to the mechanisms that function in real human parliaments.
Or am I off base, and your scare quotes around "personality" mean that you're talking about something else? Because what I'm picturing is basically someone building cognitive machinery for emotions, concepts, habits and styles of thinking, et cetera, on top of moral theories.