Preference as order on situations? Make that order on histories, or better order on games to be provably won, but you should already know that, so again I don’t see what you are saying.
Oh, okay, on possible histories. I really don’t understand what’s unclear to you. It’s not obvious to me that there’s a unique canonical way to build a complete acyclic graph (utility-based preference) from an incomplete graph with cycles (actual human preference). Yes, expected utility optimization can mimic any behavior, but I don’t want to mimic behavior, I want to represent the data structure of preferences.
By C-T, you can represent any data, right? The utility-surrogate can have a detailed scan of a human in its virtual utility-maximizing pocket, or even run a simulation of human brain, just on a different substrate.
For histories: you argue that people have cyclic preference over world histories as well, because you consider preference to be the same thing as choice, that is prone to whim? That’s not what I mean by preference (which you should also know), but it explains your comments in this thread.
Whims are all we can observe. We disagree on whether whims can be canonically regularized into something coherent. I don’t think Eliezer knows that either (it’s kind of similar to the question whether humanity’s volition coheres). Yeah, he’s trying to regularize his whims, and you may strive for that too, but what about the rest of us?
You can consider a person as a system that gives various counterfactual reactions to interaction—most of these reactions won’t be observed in the history of what actually happened to that person in the past. While it e.g. makes sense to talk about what a person (actually) answered to a question asked in English, you are not working with concepts themselves in this setting: just as the interpretation of words is a little iffy, deeper understanding of the meaning of the words (by the person who answers the questions) is even more iffy.
What you need to talk about preference is to compare huge formal strategies or games (not even snapshots of the history of the world), while what you get in the naive settings is asking “yes/no” questions in English.
Unavailability of adequate formalization of what it means to ask the actual question about consequences doesn’t justify jumping to identification of preference with “yes/no” utterances resulting from questions obtained in unspecified manner.
I don’t see how going from yes/no questions to simulated games helps. People will still exhibit preference reversals in their actions, or just melt down.
I wasn’t proposing a solution (I wasn’t talking about simulating humans playing a game—I was referring to a formal object). The strategies that need to be compared are too big for a human to comprehend—that’s one of the problems with defining what the preference is via asking questions (or simulating humans playing games). When you construct questions about the actual consequences in the world, you are simplifying, and through this simplification lose precision. That a person can make mistakes, can be wrong, is the next step through which this process loses the original question, and a way in which you can get incoherent responses: that’s noise. It doesn’t follow from the presence of noise that noise is inherent in the signal, and it doesn’t make sense to define signal as signal with noise.
But you need at least a conceptual way to tell signal from noise. Maybe an analogy will help: do you also think that there’s an ideal Platonic market price that gets tainted by real-world “noise”?
I don’t understand market price enough to make this analogy. I don’t propose solutions, I merely say that considering noise as part of signal ignores the fact that it’s noise. There is even a strong human intuition that there are errors. If I understand that I made an error, I consider it preferable that my responses-in-error won’t be considered correct by definition.
The concept of correct answer is distinct from the concept of answer actually given. When we ask questions about preference, we are interested in correct answers, not in answers actually given. Furthermore, we are interested in correct answers to the questions that can’t physically be neither asked from nor answered by a human.
Formalizing the sense of correct answers is a big chunk of FAI, while formalizing the sense of actual answers or even counterfactual actual answers is trivial if you start from physics. It seems clear that these concepts are quite different, and the (available) formalization of the second doesn’t work for the first. Furthermore, “actual answers” also need to be interfaced with a tool that states “complete-states-of-the-world with all quarks and stuff” as human-readable questions.
Nodes in the graph are hypothetical situations, and arrows are preferences.
Preference as order on situations? Make that order on histories, or better order on games to be provably won, but you should already know that, so again I don’t see what you are saying.
Oh, okay, on possible histories. I really don’t understand what’s unclear to you. It’s not obvious to me that there’s a unique canonical way to build a complete acyclic graph (utility-based preference) from an incomplete graph with cycles (actual human preference). Yes, expected utility optimization can mimic any behavior, but I don’t want to mimic behavior, I want to represent the data structure of preferences.
By C-T, you can represent any data, right? The utility-surrogate can have a detailed scan of a human in its virtual utility-maximizing pocket, or even run a simulation of human brain, just on a different substrate.
For histories: you argue that people have cyclic preference over world histories as well, because you consider preference to be the same thing as choice, that is prone to whim? That’s not what I mean by preference (which you should also know), but it explains your comments in this thread.
Whims are all we can observe. We disagree on whether whims can be canonically regularized into something coherent. I don’t think Eliezer knows that either (it’s kind of similar to the question whether humanity’s volition coheres). Yeah, he’s trying to regularize his whims, and you may strive for that too, but what about the rest of us?
You can consider a person as a system that gives various counterfactual reactions to interaction—most of these reactions won’t be observed in the history of what actually happened to that person in the past. While it e.g. makes sense to talk about what a person (actually) answered to a question asked in English, you are not working with concepts themselves in this setting: just as the interpretation of words is a little iffy, deeper understanding of the meaning of the words (by the person who answers the questions) is even more iffy.
What you need to talk about preference is to compare huge formal strategies or games (not even snapshots of the history of the world), while what you get in the naive settings is asking “yes/no” questions in English.
Unavailability of adequate formalization of what it means to ask the actual question about consequences doesn’t justify jumping to identification of preference with “yes/no” utterances resulting from questions obtained in unspecified manner.
I don’t see how going from yes/no questions to simulated games helps. People will still exhibit preference reversals in their actions, or just melt down.
I wasn’t proposing a solution (I wasn’t talking about simulating humans playing a game—I was referring to a formal object). The strategies that need to be compared are too big for a human to comprehend—that’s one of the problems with defining what the preference is via asking questions (or simulating humans playing games). When you construct questions about the actual consequences in the world, you are simplifying, and through this simplification lose precision. That a person can make mistakes, can be wrong, is the next step through which this process loses the original question, and a way in which you can get incoherent responses: that’s noise. It doesn’t follow from the presence of noise that noise is inherent in the signal, and it doesn’t make sense to define signal as signal with noise.
But you need at least a conceptual way to tell signal from noise. Maybe an analogy will help: do you also think that there’s an ideal Platonic market price that gets tainted by real-world “noise”?
I don’t understand market price enough to make this analogy. I don’t propose solutions, I merely say that considering noise as part of signal ignores the fact that it’s noise. There is even a strong human intuition that there are errors. If I understand that I made an error, I consider it preferable that my responses-in-error won’t be considered correct by definition.
The concept of correct answer is distinct from the concept of answer actually given. When we ask questions about preference, we are interested in correct answers, not in answers actually given. Furthermore, we are interested in correct answers to the questions that can’t physically be neither asked from nor answered by a human.
Formalizing the sense of correct answers is a big chunk of FAI, while formalizing the sense of actual answers or even counterfactual actual answers is trivial if you start from physics. It seems clear that these concepts are quite different, and the (available) formalization of the second doesn’t work for the first. Furthermore, “actual answers” also need to be interfaced with a tool that states “complete-states-of-the-world with all quarks and stuff” as human-readable questions.