Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 03 November 2014 05:06:22PM 1 point [-]

Averaging makes a lot of sense if the number of agents is going to be increased and decreased in non-relevant ways.

Eg: you are an upload. Soon, you are going to experience eating a chocolate bar, then stubbing your toe, then playing a tough but intriguing game. During this time, you will be simulated on n computers, all running exactly the same program of you experiencing this, without any deviations. But n may vary from moment to moment. Should you be willing to pay to make n higher during pleasant experience or lower during unpleasant ones, given that you will never detect this change?

Comment author: lackofcheese 04 November 2014 12:06:57AM 1 point [-]

I think there are some rather significant assumptions underlying the idea that they are "non-relevant". At the very least, if the agents were distinguishable, I think you should indeed be willing to pay to make n higher. On the other hand, if they're indistinguishable then it's a more difficult question, but the anthropic averaging I suggested in my previous comments leads to absurd results.

What's your proposal here?

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 30 October 2014 10:01:46AM *  1 point [-]

"In any possible world I value only my own current and future subjective happiness, averaged over all of the subjectively indistinguishable people who could equally be "me" right now."

Oh. I see. The problem is that that utility takes a "halfer" position on combining utility (averaging) and "thirder" position on counterfactual worlds where the agent doesn't exist (removing them from consideration). I'm not even sure it's a valid utility function - it seems to mix utility and probability.

For example, in the heads world, it values "50% Roger vs 50% Jack" at the full utility amount, yet values only one of "Roger" and "Jack" at full utility. The correct way of doing this would be to value "50% Roger vs 50% Jack" at 50% - and then you just have a rescaled version of the thirder utility.

I think I see the idea you're getting at, but I suspect that the real lesson of your example is that that mixed halfer/thirder idea cannot be made coherent in terms of utilities over worlds.

Comment author: lackofcheese 31 October 2014 02:25:01PM *  1 point [-]

I don't think that's entirely correct; SSA, for example, is a halfer position and it does exclude worlds where you don't exist, as do many other anthropic approaches.

Personally I'm generally skeptical of averaging over agents in any utility function.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 04:49:49PM *  3 points [-]

Probabilities are a function that represents what we know about events

As I said to lackofcheese:

If we create 10 identical copies of me and expose 9 of them one stimuli and 1 to another, what is my subjective anticipation of seeing one stimuli over the other? 10% is one obvious answer, but I might take a view of personal identity that fails to distinguish between identical copies of me, in which case 50% is correct. What if identical copies will be recombined later? Eliezer had a thought experiment where agents were two dimensional, and could get glued or separated from each other, and wondered whether this made any difference. I do to. And I'm also very confused about quantum measure, for similar reasons.

In general, the question "how many copies are there" may not be answerable in certain weird situations (or can be answered only arbitrarily).

EDIT: with copying and merging and similar, you get odd scenarios like "the probability of seeing something is x, the probability of remembering seeing it is y, the probability of remembering remembering it is z, and x y and z are all different." Objectively it's clear what's going on, but in terms of "subjective anticipation", it's not clear at all.

Or put more simply: there are two identical copies of you. They will be merged soon. Do you currently have a 50% chance of dying soon?

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 08:00:17PM 1 point [-]

You definitely don't have a 50% chance of dying in the sense of "experiencing dying". In the sense of "ceasing to exist" I guess you could argue for it, but I think that it's much more reasonable to say that both past selves continue to exist as a single future self.

Regardless, this stuff may be confusing, but it's entirely conceivable that with the correct theory of personal identity we would have a single correct answer to each of these questions.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 04:35:56PM 2 points [-]

"If, in making decisions, you (an SIA agent) arbitrarily choose to divide your utility for a world by the number of subjectively indistinguishable agents in that world in the given state of information, then you end up with the same decisions as an SSA agent!"

Yes, that's essentially it. However, the idea of divided responsibility has been proposed before (though not in those terms) - it's not just a hack I made up. Basic idea is, if ten people need to vote unanimously "yes" for a policy that benefits them all, do they each consider that their vote made the difference between the policy and no policy, or that it contributed a tenth of that difference? Divided responsibility actually makes more intuitive sense in many ways, because we could replace the unanimity requirement with "you cause 1/10 of the policy to happen" and it's hard to see what the difference is (assuming that everyone votes identically).

But all these approaches (SIA and SSA and whatever concept of responsibility) fall apart when you consider that UDT allows you to reason about agents that will make the same decision as you, even if they're not subjectively indistinguishable from you. Anthropic probability can't deal with these - worse, it can't even consider counterfactual universes where "you" don't exist, and doesn't distinguish well between identical copies of you that have access to distinct, non-decision relevant information.

the question on subjective anticipation remains unanswered.

Ah, subjective anticipation... That's an interesting question. I often wonder whether it's meaningful. If we create 10 identical copies of me and expose 9 of them one stimuli and 1 to another, what is my subjective anticipation of seeing one stimuli over the other? 10% is one obvious answer, but I might take a view of personal identity that fails to distinguish between identical copies of me, in which case 50% is correct. What if identical copies will be recombined later? Eliezer had a thought experiment where agents were two dimensional, and could get glued or separated from each other, and wondered whether this made any difference. I do to. And I'm also very confused about quantum measure, for similar reasons.

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 07:55:08PM *  1 point [-]

OK, the "you cause 1/10 of the policy to happen" argument is intuitively reasonable, but under that kind of argument divided responsibility has nothing to do with how many agents are subjectively indistinguishable and instead has to do with the agents who actually participate in the linked decision.

On those grounds, "divided responsibility" would give the right answer in Psy-Kosh's non-anthropic problem. However, this also means your argument that SIA+divided = SSA+total clearly fails, because of the example I just gave before, and because SSA+total gives the wrong answer in Psy-Kosh's non-anthropic problem but SIA+divided does not.

Ah, subjective anticipation... That's an interesting question. I often wonder whether it's meaningful.

As do I. But, as Manfred has said, I don't think that being confused about it is sufficient reason to believe it's meaningless.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 05:10:25PM *  2 points [-]

Did I make a mistake? It's possible - I'm exhausted currently. Let's go through this carefully. Can you spell out exactly why you think that halfers are such that:

  1. They are only willing to pay 1/2 for a ticket.
  2. They know that they must either be Jack or Roger.
  3. They know that upon finding out which one they are, regardless of whether it's Jack or Roger, they would be willing to pay 2/3.

I can see 1) and 2), but, thinking about it, I fail to see 3).

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 07:46:39PM *  1 point [-]

As I mentioned earlier, it's not an argument against halfers in general; it's against halfers with a specific kind of utility function, which sounds like this: "In any possible world I value only my own current and future subjective happiness, averaged over all of the subjectively indistinguishable people who could equally be "me" right now."

In the above scenario, there is a 1/2 chance that both Jack and Roger will be created, a 1/4 chance of only Jack, and a 1/4 chance of only Roger.

Before finding out who you are, averaging would lead to a 1:1 odds ratio, and so (as you've agreed) this would lead to a cutoff of 1/2.

After finding out whether you are, in fact, Jack or Roger, you have only one possible self in the TAILS world, and one possible self in the relevant HEADS+Jack/HEADS+Roger world, which leads to a 2:1 odds ratio and a cutoff of 2/3.

Ultimately, I guess the essence here is that this kind of utility function is equivalent to a failure to properly conditionalise, and thus even though you're not using probabilities you're still "Dutch-bookable" with respect to your own utility function.

I guess it could be argued that this result is somewhat trivial, but the utility function mentioned above is at least intuitively reasonable, so I don't think it's meaningless to show that having that kind of utility function is going to put you in trouble.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 08:10:06AM *  2 points [-]

simply on the basis of having a linked decision.

Linked decisions is also what makes the halfer paradox go away.

To get a paradox that hits at the "thirder" position specifically, in the same way as yours did, I think you need only replace the ticket with something mutually beneficial - like putting on an enjoyable movie that both can watch. Then the thirder would double count the benefit of this, before finding out who they were.

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 02:04:41PM *  1 point [-]

Linked decisions is also what makes the halfer paradox go away.

I don't think linked decisions make the halfer paradox I brought up go away. Any counterintuitive decisions you make under UDT are simply ones that lead to you making a gain in a counterfactual possible worlds at the cost of a loss in actual possible worlds. However, in the instance above you're losing both in the real scenario in which you're Jack, and in the counterfactual one in which you turned out to be Roger.

Granted, the "halfer" paradox I raised is an argument against having a specific kind of indexical utility function (selfish utility w/ averaging over subjectively indistinguishable agents) rather than an argument against being a halfer in general. SSA, for example, would tell you to stick to your guns because you would still assign probability 1/2 even after you know whether you're "Jack" or "Roger", and thus doesn't suffer from the same paradox. That said, due to the reference class problem, If you are told whether you're Jack or Roger before being told everything else SSA would give the wrong answer, so it's not like it's any better...

To get a paradox that hits at the "thirder" position specifically, in the same way as yours did, I think you need only replace the ticket with something mutually beneficial - like putting on an enjoyable movie that both can watch. Then the thirder would double count the benefit of this, before finding out who they were.

Are you sure? It doesn't seem to be that this would be paradoxical; since the decisions are linked you could argue that "If I hadn't put on an enjoyable movie for Jack/Roger, Jack/Roger wouldn't have put on an enjoyable movie for me, and thus I would be worse off". If, on the other hand, only one agent gets to make that decision, then the agent-parts would have ceased to be subjectively indistinguishable as soon as one of them was offered the decision.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 09:27:10AM 2 points [-]

Doesn't this mean that SSA probabilities are not uniquely defined given the same information, because they depend upon the order in which that information is incorporated?

Yep. The old reference class problem. Which is why, back when I thought anthropic probabilities were meaningful, I was an SIAer.

But SIA also has some issues with order of information, though it's connected with decisions ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/4fl/dead_men_tell_tales_falling_out_of_love_with_sia/ ).

Anyway, if your reference class consists of people who have seen "this is not room X", then "divided responsibility" is no longer 1/3, and you probably have to go whole UTD.

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 01:44:06PM *  1 point [-]

But SIA also has some issues with order of information, though it's connected with decisions

Can you illustrate how the order of information matters there? As far as I can tell it doesn't, and hence it's just an issue with failing to consider counterfactual utility, which SIA ignores by default. It's definitely a relevant criticism of using anthropic probabilities in your decisions, because failing to consider counterfactual utility results in dynamic inconsistency, but I don't think it's as strong as the associated criticism of SSA.

Anyway, if your reference class consists of people who have seen "this is not room X", then "divided responsibility" is no longer 1/3, and you probably have to go whole UTD.

If divided responsibility is not 1/3, what do those words even mean? How can you claim that only two agents are responsible for the decision when it's quite clear that the decision is a linked decision shared by three agents?

If you're taking "divided responsibility" to mean "divide by the number of agents used as an input to the SIA-probability of the relevant world", then your argument that SSA+total = SIA+divided boils down to this: "If, in making decisions, you (an SIA agent) arbitrarily choose to divide your utility for a world by the number of subjectively indistinguishable agents in that world in the given state of information, then you end up with the same decisions as an SSA agent!"

That argument is, of course, trivially true because the the number of agents you're dividing by will be the ratio between the SIA odds and the SSA odds of that world. If you allow me to choose arbitrary constants to scale the utility of each possible world, then of course your decisions will not be fully specified by the probabilities, no matter what decision theory you happen to use. Besides, you haven't even given me any reason why it makes any sense at all to measure my decisions in terms of "responsibility" rather than simply using my utility function in the first place.

On the other hand, if, for example, you could justify why it would make sense to include a notion of "divided responsibility" in my decision theory, then that argument would tell me that SSA+total responsibility must clearly be conceptually the wrong way to do things because it uses total responsibility instead.

All in all, I do think anthropic probabilities are suspect for use in a decision theory because
1. They result in reflective inconsistency by failing to consider counterfactuals.
2. It doesn't make sense to use them for decisions when the probabilities could depend upon the decisions (as in the Absent-Minded Driver)

That said, even if you can't use those probabilities in your decision theory there is still a remaining question of "to what degree should I anticipate X, given my state of information". I don't think your argument on "divided responsibility" holds up, but even if it did the question on subjective anticipation remains unanswered.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 29 October 2014 08:37:03AM *  2 points [-]

The SSA probability of HH is 1/4, not 1/3.

Proof: before opening their eyes, the SSA agents divide probability as: 1/12 HH1 (HH and they are in room 1), 1/12 HH2, 1/12 HH3, 1/4 HT, 1/4 TH, 1/4 TT.

Upon seeing a sign saying "this is not room X", they remove one possible agent from the HH world, and one possible world from the remaining three. So this gives odds of HH:¬HH of (1/12+1/12):(1/4+1/4) = 1/6:1/2, or 1:3, which is a probability of 1/4.

This means that SSA+divided responsibility says EU(A) is $3, and EU(B) is $3.3. - exactly the same ratios as the first setup, with B as the best choice.

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 09:02:30AM *  1 point [-]

That's not true. The SSA agents are only told about the conditions of the experiment after they're created and have already opened their eyes.

Consequently, isn't it equally valid for me to begin the SSA probability calculation with those two agents already excluded from my reference class?

Doesn't this mean that SSA probabilities are not uniquely defined given the same information, because they depend upon the order in which that information is incorporated?

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 28 October 2014 08:18:53PM 2 points [-]

I think it's worth sorting the issue out (if you agree), so let's go slowly. Both SSA and SIA depend on priors, so you can't argue for them based on maximal entropy grounds. If the coin is biased, they will have different probabilities (so SSA+biased coin can have the same probabilities as SIA+unbiased coin and vice versa). That's probably obvious to you, but I'm mentioning it in case there's a disagreement.

Your model works, with a few tweaks. SSA starts with a probability distribution over worlds, throws away the ones where "you" don't exist (why? shush, don't ask questions!), and then locates themselves within the worlds by subdividing a somewhat arbitrary reference class. SIA starts with the same, uses the original probabilities to weigh every possible copy of themselves, sees these as separate events, and then renormalises (which is sometimes impossible, see http://lesswrong.com/lw/fg7/sia_fears_expected_infinity/).

I have to disagree with your conversation, however. Both SIA and SSA consider all statements of type "I exist in universe X and am the person in location Y" to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive. It's just that SIA stratifies by location only (and then deduces the probability of a universe by combining different locations in the same universe), while SSA first stratifies by universe and then by location.

But I still think this leads us astray. My point is different. Normally, given someone's utility, it's possible to disentangle whether someone is using a particular decision theory or a particular probability approach by observing their decisions. However, in anthropic (and Psy-Koch-like) situations, this becomes impossible. In the notation that I used in the paper I referred to, SIA+"divided responsibility" will always give the same decision as SSA+"total responsibility" (to a somewhat more arguable extent, for any fixed responsibility criteria, EDT+SSA gives the same decisions as CDT+SIA).

Since the decision is the same, this means that all the powerful arguments for using probability (which boil down to "if you don't act as if you have consistent probabilities, you'll lose utility pointlessly") don't apply in distinguishing between SIA and SSA. Thus we are not forced to have a theory of anthropic probability - it's a matter of taste whether to do so or not. Nothing hinges on whether the probability of heads is "really" 1/3 or 1/2. The full decision theory is what counts, not just the anthropic probability component.

Comment author: lackofcheese 29 October 2014 01:19:50AM *  1 point [-]

I think that argument is highly suspect, primarily because I see no reason why a notion of "responsibility" should have any bearing on your decision theory. Decision theory is about achieving your goals, not avoiding blame for failing.

However, even if we assume that we do include some notion of responsibility, I think that your argument is still incorrect. Consider this version of the incubator Sleeping Beauty problem, where two coins are flipped.
HH => Sleeping Beauties created in Room 1, 2, and 3
HT => Sleeping Beauty created in Room 1
TH => Sleeping Beauty created in Room 2
TT => Sleeping Beauty created in Room 3
Moreover, in each room there is a sign. In Room 1 it is equally likely to say either "This is not Room 2" or "This is not Room 3", and so on for each of the three rooms.

Now, each Sleeping Beauty is offered a choice between two coupons; each coupon gives the specified amount to their preferred charity (by assumption, utility is proportional to $ given to charity), but only if each of them chose the same coupon. The payoff looks like this:
A => $12 if HH, $0 otherwise.
B => $6 if HH, $2.40 otherwise.

I'm sure you see where this is going, but I'll do the math anyway.

With SIA+divided responsibility, we have
p(HH) = p(not HH) = 1/2
The responsibility is divided among 3 people in HH-world, and among 1 person otherwise, therefore
EU(A) = (1/2)(1/3)$12 = $2.00
EU(B) = (1/2)(1/3)$6 + (1/2)$2.40 = $2.20

With SSA+total responsibility, we have
p(HH) = 1/3
p(not HH) = 2/3
EU(A) = (1/3)$12 = $4.00
EU(B) = (1/3)$6 + (2/3)$2.40 = $3.60

So SIA+divided responsibility suggests choosing B, but SSA+total responsibility suggests choosing A.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 28 October 2014 11:37:57AM *  2 points [-]

Also, why should you only value people who closely resemble you if you don't exist?

There's no "should" - this is a value set. This is the extension of the classical selfish utility idea. Suppose that future you joins some silly religion and does some stupid stuff and so on (insert some preferences of which you disprove here). Most humans would still consider that person "them" and would (possibly grudgingly) do things to make them happy. But now imagine that you were duplicated, and the other duplicate went on and did things you approved of more. Many people would conclude that the second duplicate was their "true" self, and redirect all their efforts towards them.

This is very close to Nozick's "closer continuer" approach http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/#H4 .

However, the bigger issue that you haven't covered is this: if there are multiple entities in the same world to which you do (or potentially could) assign the label "me", how do you assign utility to that world?

It seems the simplest extension of classical selfishness is that the utility function assigns preferences to the physical being that it happens to reside in. This allows it to assign preferences immediately, without first having to figure out their location. But see my answer to the next question (the real issue is that our normal intuitions break down in these situations, making any choice somewhat arbitrary).

Nor do I think that the "adding" approach is equivalent to your notion of "copy-altruism", because under the "adding" approach you would stop caring about your copies once you figured out which one you were

UDT (or CDT with precommitments) forces selfish agents who don't know who they are into behaving the same as copy-altruists. Copy altruism and adding/averaging come apart under naive CDT. (Note that for averaging versus adding, the difference can only be detected by comparing with other universes with different numbers of people.)

The halfer is only being strange because they seem to be using naive CDT. You could construct a similar paradox for a thirder if you assume the ticket pays out only for the other copy, not themselves.

Comment author: lackofcheese 28 October 2014 11:17:44PM *  1 point [-]

There's no "should" - this is a value set.

The "should" comes in giving an argument for why a human rather than just a hypothetically constructed agent might actually reason in that way. The "closest continuer" approach makes at least some intuitive sense, though, so I guess that's a fair justification.

The halfer is only being strange because they seem to be using naive CDT. You could construct a similar paradox for a thirder if you assume the ticket pays out only for the other copy, not themselves.

I think there's more to it than that. Yes, UDT-like reasoning gives a general answer, but under UDT the halfer is still definitely acting strange in a way that the thirder would not be.

If the ticket pays out for the other copy, then UDT-like reasoning would lead you to buy the ticket regardless of whether you know which one you are or not, simply on the basis of having a linked decision. Here's Jack's reasoning:

"Now that I know I'm Jack, I'm still only going to pay at most $0.50, because that's what I precommited to do when I didn't know who I was. However, I can't help but think that I was somehow stupid when I made that precommitment, because now it really seems I ought to be willing to pay 2/3. Under UDT sometimes this kind of thing makes sense, because sometimes I have to give up utility so that my counterfactual self can make greater gains, but it seems to me that that isn't the case here. In a counterfactual scenario where I turned out to be Roger and not Jack, I would still desire the same linked decision (x=2/3). Why, then, am I stuck refusing tickets at 55 cents?"

It appears to me that something has clearly gone wrong with the self-averaging approach here, and I think it is indicative of a deeper problem with SSA-like reasoning. I'm not saying you can't reasonably come to the halfer conclusion for different reasons (e.g. the "closest continuer" argument), but some or many of the possible reasons can still be wrong. That being said, I think I tend to disagree with pretty much all of the reasons one could be a halfer, including average utilitarianism, the "closest continuer", and selfish averaging.

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