I suspect that people here have more of a problem with willpower/motivation than average, so they press "upvote!" on anything that promises, however vaguely, to solve their problem.

EDIT:

Wikipedia states that there is "scant research" "which suggests that the disorder is caused by mineral deficiency in many cases", and also lists other possible causes such as OCD. So Pica may, or may not, be mostly related to deficiencies. We also know that the rate of incidence of Pica is low in general, i.e. < 5% of people probably have it, so conclusions drawn about people who have Pica may not generalize well.

Would you agree that higher-quality posts should generate more discussion?

No. A good troll can get far more comments than almost any high-quality non-troll post. And you also cannot ignore the difficulty of the post, or how much knowledge it presupposes (and thus how small its potential audience is), or whether the post is on a topic that everybody is an expert in (e.g., politics, male-female relations, religion).

There's a lot of counterevidence to most claims about X making people happy.

For example 1:

Most people were no more satisfied with life after marriage than they were prior to marriage [...] Study results, for example, showed, spikes in respondents' happiness levels both before and after marriage, but the increase was minimal—approximately one-tenth of one point on an 11-point scale—and was followed by a return to prior levels of happiness.

Also 2 (which is mostly about children of single vs married parents, but the same story - getting married doesn't improve anything).

Honestly, this happens to me far too often.

I might be missing something, but it seems as if you're needlessly complicating the situation.

First of all, I'm not convinced that sentences ought to be able to self reference. The example you give, "All complete sentences written in English contain at least one vowel" isn't necessarily self-referencing. It's stating a rule whic is inevitably true, and which it happens to conform to. I could equally well say "All good sentences must at least one verb." This is not a good sentence, but it does communicate a grammatical rule.

But none of this has a priori truth - they just happen to conform to accepted standards - and I don't think they demonstrate the usefulness of self-referencing. English grammar allows you to self-reference, but defining "Cat (n): a cat" is a tautology. English also allows you to ask the question "What happened before time began?" and while that is a perfectly valid sentence, it's a meaningless question.

As a corollary, mathematical notation allows me to write "2+2=5" (note - the person who writes this down isn't claiming that 2+2=5, she is far better versed than Aurini in the reasons it equals 4, she is just demonstrating that she can write down nonsense). This doesn't require a defense of arithmetic; it's simple enough to point out that the equation is nonsense.

"This sentence is false." "What happened before time?" "My pet elephant that I named George doesn't exist." I don't see that a rebuttal is necessary, meaningful, or even possible in these situations. It's enough to say "That's stupid," and move on to something interesting.

What the Wiki says is: "Utilons generated by fulfilling base desires are hedons". I think it follows from that that Utilons and Hedons have the same units.

I don't much like the Wiki on these issues - but I do think it a better take on the definitions than this post.

There are many definitions of utility, of which that is one. Usage in general is pretty inconsistent. (Wasn't that the point of this post?) Either way, definitional arguments aren't very interesting. ;)

Yes, that was the point :-) On my reading of OP, this is the meaning of utility that was intended.

Your maximand already embodies a particular view as to what sorts of risk are excessive. I tend to the view that if you consider the risks demanded by your maximand excessive, then you should either change your maximand, or change your view of what constitutes excessive risk.

Yes. Here's my current take:

The OP argument demonstrates the danger of using a function-maximizer as a proxy for some other goal. If there can always exist a chance to increase f by an amount proportional to its previous value (e.g. double it), then the maximizer will fall into the trap of taking ever-increasing risks for ever-increasing payoffs in the value of f, and will lose with probability approaching 1 in a finite (and short) timespan.

This qualifies as losing if the original goal (the goal of the AI's designer, perhaps) does not itself have this quality. This can be the case when the designer sloppily specifies its goal (chooses f poorly), but perhaps more interesting/vivid examples can be found.

I guess what I'm suggesting, in part, is that the actual problem at hand isn't well-defined, unless you specify what you mean by utility in advance.

Utility means "the function f, whose expectation I am in fact maximizing". The discussion then indeed becomes whether f exists and whether it can be doubled.

My point is that you can't learn anything interesting from the thought experiment if Omega is offering to double f(x), so we shouldn't set it up that way.

That was the original point of the thread where the thought experiment was first discussed, though.

The interesting result is that if you're maximizing something you may be vulnerable to a failure mode of taking risks that can be considered excessive. This is in view of the original goals you want to achieve, to which maximizing f is a proxy - whether a designed one (in AI) or an evolved strategy (in humans).

"Valutilons" are specifically defined to be a measure of what we value.

If "we" refers to humans, then "what we value" isn't well defined.

I guess what I'm suggesting, in part, is that the actual problem at hand isn't well-defined, unless you specify what you mean by utility in advance.

Utility means "the function f, whose expectation I am in fact maximizing". The discussion then indeed becomes whether f exists and whether it can be doubled.

My point is that you can't learn anything interesting from the thought experiment if Omega is offering to double f(x), so we shouldn't set it up that way.

That was the original point of the thread where the thought experiment was first discussed, though.

The interesting result is that if you're maximizing something you may be vulnerable to a failure mode of taking risks that can be considered excessive. This is in view of the original goals you want to achieve, to which maximizing f is a proxy - whether a designed one (in AI) or an evolved strategy (in humans).

"Valutilons" are specifically defined to be a measure of what we value.

If "we" refers to humans, then "what we value" isn't well defined.

Redefining "utility" like this doesn't help us with the actual problem at hand: what do we do if Omega offers to double the f(x) which we're actually maximizing?

In your restatement of the problem, the only thing we assume about Omega's offer is that it would change the universe in a desirable way (f is increasing in V(x)). Of course we can find an f such that a doubling in V translates to adding a constant to f, or if we like, even an infinitesimal increase in f. But all this means is that Omega is offering us the wrong thing, which we don't really value.