I agree that this would be good, but didn't think it was worthwhile for me to go through the extra effort in this case. But I did think it was worthwhile to share what I had already found. I think I was very clear about how closely this had been vetted (which is to say, extremely little).

What if we assume Period Independence except for exact repetitions, where the value of extra repetitions eventually go to zero? Perhaps this could be a way to be "timid" while making the downsides of "timidity" seem not so bad or even reasonable? For example in section 6.3.2, such a person would only choose deal 1 over deal 2 if the years of happy lives offered in deal 1 are such that he would already have repeated all possible happy time periods so many times that he values more repetitions very little.

I think it would be interesting if you could show that the space of possible periods-of-lives is structured in such a way that, when combined with a reasonable rule for discounting repetitions, yields a bounded utility function. I don't have fully developed views on the repetition issue and can imagine that the view has some weird consequences, but if you could do this I would count it as a significant mark in favor of the perspective.

BTW what do you think about my suggestion to do a sequence of blog posts based on your thesis?

I think this would have some value but isn't at the top of my list right now.

Also as an unrelated comment, the font in your thesis seems to be such that it's pretty uncomfortable to read in Adobe Acrobat, unless I zoom in to make the text much larger than I usually have to. Not sure if it's something you can easily fix. If not, I can try to help if you email me the source of the PDF.

I think I'll keep with the current format for citation consistency for now. But I have added a larger font version here.

Also, it's not clear to me that strict Period Independence is a good thing. It seems reasonable to not value a time period as much if you knew it was an exact repetition of a previous time period. I wrote a post that's related to this.

I agree that Period Independence may break in the kind of case you describe, though I'm not sure. I don't think that the kind of case you are describing here is a strong consideration against using Period Independence in cases that don't involve exact repetition. I think your main example in the post is excellent.

OK, I"ll ask Paul or Stewart next time I see them.

Does your proposal also violate #1 because the simplicity of an observer-situated-in-a-world is a holistic property of the the observer-situated-in-a-world rather than a local one?

That aside, I do have an object-level comment. Nick states (in section 6.3.1) that Period Independence is incompatible with bounded utility function, but I think that's wrong. Consider a total utilitarian who exponentially discounts each person-stage according to their distance from some chosen space-time event. Then the utility function is both bounded (assuming the undiscounted utility for each person-stage is bounded) and satisfies Period Independence.

I agree with this. I think I was implicitly assuming some additional premises, particularly Temporal Impartiality. I believe that bounded utility + Temporal Impartiality is inconsistent with bounded utility. (Even saying this implicitly assumes other stuff, like transitive rankings, etc., though I agree that Temporal Impartiality is much more substantive.)

Another idea for a bounded utility function satisfying Period Independence, which I previously suggested on LW and was originally motivated by multiverse-related considerations, is to discount or bound the utility assigned to each person-stage by their algorithmic probability.

I am having a hard time parsing this. Could you explain where the following argument breaks down?

Let A(n,X) be a world in which there are n periods of quality X.

1. The value of what happens during a period is a function of what happens during that period, and not a function of what happens in other periods.

2. If the above premise is true, then there exists a positive period quality X such that, for any n, A(n,X) is a possible world.

3. Assuming Period Independence and Temporal Impartiality, as n approaches infinity, the value of A(n,X) approaches infinity.

4. Therefore, Period Independence and Temporal Impartiality imply an unbounded utility function.

The first premise here is something I articulate in Section 3.2, but may not be totally clear given the informal statement of Period Independence that I run with.

Let me note that one thing about your proposal confuses me, and could potentially be related to why I don't see which step of the above argument you deny. I primarily think of probability as a property of possible worlds, rather than individuals. Perhaps you are thinking of probability as a property of centered possible worlds? Is your proposal that the goodness of a world A with is of the form:

g(A) = well-being of person 1 * prior centered world probability of person 1 in world A + well-being of person 2 * prior centered world probability of person 2 in A + ...

? If it is, this is a proposal I have not thought about and would be interested in hearing more about its merits and why it is bounded.

Would be interested to know more about why you think this is "fantastically wrong" and what you think we should do instead. The question the post is trying to answer is, "In practical terms, how should we take account of the distribution of opinion and epistemic standards in the world?" I would like to hear your answer to this question. E.g., should we all just follow the standards that come naturally to us? Should certain people do this? Should we follow the standards of some more narrowly defined group of people? Or some more narrow set of standards still?

I see the specific sentence you objected to as very much a detail rather than a core feature of my proposal, so it would be surprising to me if this was the reason you thought the proposal was fantastically wrong. For what it's worth, I do think that particular sentence can be motivated by epistemology rather than conformity. It is naturally motivated by the aggregation methods I mentioned as possibilities, which I have used in other contexts for totally independent reasons. I also think it is analogous to a situation in which I have 100 algorithms returning estimates of the value of a stock and one of them says the stock is worth 100x market price and all the others say it is worth market price. I would not take straight averages here and assume the stock is worth about 2x market price, even if the algorithm giving a weird answer was generally about as good as the others.

The answers over the last 6 weeks have not been very repetitive at all. I'm not sure why this is exactly, since when I was much younger and would pray daily the answers were highly repetitive. It may have something to do with greater maturity and a greater appreciation of the purpose of the activity.

I think of the gratitude list as things that stood out as either among the best parts of the day or as unusually good (for you personally). And mistakes go the opposite way.

That sounds reeeeaaally suspicious in terms of potentially post-facto assignments. (Though defeasibly so - I can totally imagine a case being made for, "Yes, this really was generally visible to the person on the street at the time without benefit of hindsight.")

This isn't something I've looked into closely, though from looking at it for a few minutes I think it is something I would like to look into more. Anyway, on the Wikipedia page on diffusion of innovation:

This is the second fastest category of individuals who adopt an innovation. These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Early adopters are typically younger in age, have a higher social status, have more financial lucidity, advanced education, and are more socially forward than late adopters. More discrete in adoption choices than innovators. Realize judicious choice of adoption will help them maintain central communication position (Rogers 1962 5th ed, p. 283)."

I think this supports my claim that elite common sense is quicker to join and support new good social movements, though as I said I haven't looked at it closely at all.

Can you use elite common sense to generate an near-term testable prediction that would sound bold relative to my probability assignments or LW generally?

I can't think of anything very good, but I'll keep it in the back of my mind. Can you think of something that would sound bold relative to my perspective?

How would this apply to social issues do you think? It seems that this is a poor way to be on the front of social change? If this strategy was widely applied, would we ever have seen the 15th and 19th amendments to the Constitution here in the US?

My impression is that the most trustworthy people are more likely to be at the front of good social movements than the general public, so that if people generally adopted the framework, many of the promising social movements would progress more quickly than they actually did. I am not sufficiently aware of the specific history of the 15th and 19th amendments to say more than that at this point.

There is a general question about how the framework is related to innovation. Aren't innovators generally going against elite common sense? I think that innovators are often overconfident about the quality of their ideas, and have significantly more confidence in their ideas than they need for their projects to be worthwhile by the standards of elite common sense. E.g., I don't think you need to have high confidence that Facebook is going to pan out for it to be worthwhile to try to make Facebook. Elite common sense may see most attempts at innovation as unlikely to succeed, but I think it would judge many as worthwhile in cases where we'll get to find out whether the innovation was any good or not. This might point somewhat in the direction of less innovation.

However, I think that the most trustworthy people tend to innovate more, are more in favor of innovation than the general population, and are less risk-averse than the general population. These factors might point in favor of more innovation. It is unclear to me whether we would have more or less innovation if the framework were widely adopted, but I suspect we would have more.

On a more personal basis, I'm polyamorous, but if I followed your framework, I would have to reject polyamory as a viable relationship model. Yes, the elite don't have a lot of data on polyamory, but although I have researched the good and the bad, and how it can work compared to monogamy, but I don't think that I would be able to convince the elite of my opinions.

My impression is that elite common sense is not highly discriminating against polyamory as a relationship model. It would probably be skeptical of polyamory for the general person, but say that it might work for some people, and that it could make sense for certain interested people to try it out.

If your opinion is that polyamory should be the norm, I agree that you wouldn't be able to convince elite common sense of this. My personal take is that it is far from clear that polyamory should be the norm. In any event, this doesn't seem like a great test case for taking down the framework because the idea that polyamory should be the norm does not seem like a robustly supported claim.