(sorry, haven’t read most of the stuff you link, but thought this would be positive EV to say anyway)
Rather, we need to argue that A has higher “expected value” broadly speaking, meaning: In some sense we “expect” that, if we were idealized agents who could aggregate all of A’s and B’s possible consequences into literal EVs, then we’d say A has higher EV.
I don’t think we should accept this meaning of the EV of an action / this operationalization of what it is to do EV-thinking. it’s like how when I calculate 2+2, I’m not calculating what I would conclude if I were to try to figure out what 2+2 is, I’m just calculating what 2+2 is! i think you’re confusing truth and provability
like, when i make probability or expected value claims in general, from the outside one could look at me and say i’m just playing some game involving relating numbers to other numbers and betting attitudes and whatever, and maybe explain why i’m playing this game via eg jeffrey-bolker. but if from inside the system, i were to view it as legitimate to translate probability claims into some concrete claims about what sort of game i’m playing, then that would introduce all sorts of crazy stuff such as thinking that if i were to bet at 0.5 on P then that would make the probability of P 0.5. this is crazy — probabilities are supposed to be objective things from the inside, not things that can be changed by your attitudes.
(in particular, there is an important sense in which moral antirealism is false, just like truth being provability is false.)
see yudkowsky’s metaethics sequence for a more detailed version of this argument. i also recommend the book gödel without tears in case you’re not already familiar with the incompleteness phenomenon (including löb’s thm)
(i guess one could describe this as me rejecting your P1, but it feels more like i think you are saying stuff in a confused frame)
setting aside the above objection to this genre of imo confused antirealism, the following example still seems extremely bad for the specific version of the view behind your premises, though maybe i’m misunderstanding the view:
Let option be a certainty of getting utils. Let option be utils, where is the number formed by decimal digits and of .
Note that you should pick , because its expected utils (assuming is normal and it is reasonable from your bounded perspective to have a uniform distribution for those specific digits) are .
However, you should have that an ideal version of you (who knows the digits of , and again assuming normality and a uniform distribution) would tell you to pick , because this is what you should do in case the logical variable turns out to not be .
So, it seems that your view says it’s not justified to pick over , because you would expect ideal advice to not be to pick , and to pick instead.
But this seems very silly.
(You can try to fix this by speaking of your expected value of your ideal guy’s expected value of the options, not of what you expect the guy to decide, but at that point maybe it’s clear that you’re allowed to just be doing stuff with the expected value of the options directly?)
You can try to fix this by speaking of your expected value of your ideal guy’s expected value of the options, not of what you expect the guy to decide
Ah, that’s exactly what I meant — if we ourselves have precise, literal expected values about the ideal guy’s expected values. But in P1 I don’t want to assume we do. That’s why I talk about scare-quote “expectations”. I want to capture “whatever kind of aggregation across possible outcomes is EV-ish but is actually accessible to bounded agents”. (This is vague, but as I say in the footnote, it’s what EA consequentialists seem to actually appeal to in practice.)
And then, P1 says that in order for a c-preference to be justified, you need to “expect” that the literal EV you’d calculate if you were capable of doing so is positive. Does that clarify things?
(sorry, haven’t read most of the stuff you link, but thought this would be positive EV to say anyway)
I don’t think we should accept this meaning of the EV of an action / this operationalization of what it is to do EV-thinking. it’s like how when I calculate 2+2, I’m not calculating what I would conclude if I were to try to figure out what 2+2 is, I’m just calculating what 2+2 is! i think you’re confusing truth and provability
like, when i make probability or expected value claims in general, from the outside one could look at me and say i’m just playing some game involving relating numbers to other numbers and betting attitudes and whatever, and maybe explain why i’m playing this game via eg jeffrey-bolker. but if from inside the system, i were to view it as legitimate to translate probability claims into some concrete claims about what sort of game i’m playing, then that would introduce all sorts of crazy stuff such as thinking that if i were to bet at 0.5 on P then that would make the probability of P 0.5. this is crazy — probabilities are supposed to be objective things from the inside, not things that can be changed by your attitudes.
(in particular, there is an important sense in which moral antirealism is false, just like truth being provability is false.)
see yudkowsky’s metaethics sequence for a more detailed version of this argument. i also recommend the book gödel without tears in case you’re not already familiar with the incompleteness phenomenon (including löb’s thm)
(i guess one could describe this as me rejecting your P1, but it feels more like i think you are saying stuff in a confused frame)
setting aside the above objection to this genre of imo confused antirealism, the following example still seems extremely bad for the specific version of the view behind your premises, though maybe i’m misunderstanding the view:
Let option
Note that you should pick
However, you should have
So, it seems that your view says it’s not justified to pick
But this seems very silly.
(You can try to fix this by speaking of your expected value of your ideal guy’s expected value of the options, not of what you expect the guy to decide, but at that point maybe it’s clear that you’re allowed to just be doing stuff with the expected value of the options directly?)
Ah, that’s exactly what I meant — if we ourselves have precise, literal expected values about the ideal guy’s expected values. But in P1 I don’t want to assume we do. That’s why I talk about scare-quote “expectations”. I want to capture “whatever kind of aggregation across possible outcomes is EV-ish but is actually accessible to bounded agents”. (This is vague, but as I say in the footnote, it’s what EA consequentialists seem to actually appeal to in practice.)
And then, P1 says that in order for a c-preference to be justified, you need to “expect” that the literal EV you’d calculate if you were capable of doing so is positive. Does that clarify things?