Clearly a squiggle-maximizer would not be an average squigglean
Why??? Being expected squiggle maximizer literally means that you implement policy that produces maximum average number of squiggles across the multiverse.
The “average” is interpreted with respect to quality. Imagine that your only option is to create low-quality squiggles, or not to do so. In isolation, you’d prefer to produce them than not to produce them. But then you find out that the rest of the multiverse is full of high-quality squiggles. Do you still produce the low-quality squiggles? A total squigglean would; an average squigglean wouldn’t.
It depends upon whether the maximizer considers its corner of the multiverse to be currently measurable by squiggle quality, or to be omitted from squiggle calculations at all. In principle these are far from the only options as utility functions can be arbitrarily complex, but exploring just two may be okay so long as we remember that we’re only talking about 2 out of infinity, not 2 out of 2.
An average multiversal squigglean that considers the current universe to be at zero or negative squiggle quality will make the low quality squiggles in order to reduce how much its corner of the multiverse is pulling down the average. An average multiversal squigglean that considers the current universe to be outside the domain of squiggle quality, and will remain so for the remainder of its existence may refrain from making squiggles. If there is some chance that it will become eligible for squiggle evaluation in the future though, it may be better to tile it with low-quality squiggles now in order to prevent a worse outcome of being tiled with worse-quality future squiggles.
In practice the options aren’t going to be just “make squiggles” or “not make squiggles” either. In the context of entities relevant to these sorts of discussion, other options may include “learn how to make better squiggles”.
By “squiggle maximizer” I mean exactly “maximizer of number of physical objects such that function is_squiggle returns True on CIF-file of their structure”.
We can have different objects of value. Like, you can value “probability that if object in multiverse is a squiggle, it’s high-quality”. Here yes, you shouldn’t create additional low-quality squiggles. But I don’t see anything incoherent here, it’s just different utility function?
Why??? Being expected squiggle maximizer literally means that you implement policy that produces maximum average number of squiggles across the multiverse.
The “average” is interpreted with respect to quality. Imagine that your only option is to create low-quality squiggles, or not to do so. In isolation, you’d prefer to produce them than not to produce them. But then you find out that the rest of the multiverse is full of high-quality squiggles. Do you still produce the low-quality squiggles? A total squigglean would; an average squigglean wouldn’t.
It depends upon whether the maximizer considers its corner of the multiverse to be currently measurable by squiggle quality, or to be omitted from squiggle calculations at all. In principle these are far from the only options as utility functions can be arbitrarily complex, but exploring just two may be okay so long as we remember that we’re only talking about 2 out of infinity, not 2 out of 2.
An average multiversal squigglean that considers the current universe to be at zero or negative squiggle quality will make the low quality squiggles in order to reduce how much its corner of the multiverse is pulling down the average. An average multiversal squigglean that considers the current universe to be outside the domain of squiggle quality, and will remain so for the remainder of its existence may refrain from making squiggles. If there is some chance that it will become eligible for squiggle evaluation in the future though, it may be better to tile it with low-quality squiggles now in order to prevent a worse outcome of being tiled with worse-quality future squiggles.
In practice the options aren’t going to be just “make squiggles” or “not make squiggles” either. In the context of entities relevant to these sorts of discussion, other options may include “learn how to make better squiggles”.
By “squiggle maximizer” I mean exactly “maximizer of number of physical objects such that function is_squiggle returns True on CIF-file of their structure”.
We can have different objects of value. Like, you can value “probability that if object in multiverse is a squiggle, it’s high-quality”. Here yes, you shouldn’t create additional low-quality squiggles. But I don’t see anything incoherent here, it’s just different utility function?