I’m very confused about why we think zero for unchanged expected utility and strict mononicity are reasonable.
A simple example: I want to maximize expected income. I have actions including “get a menial job,” and “rob someone at gunpoint and get away with it,” where the first gets me more money. Why would I assume that the second requires less optimization power than the first?
Is the general point that optimisation power should be about how difficult a state of affairs is to achieve, not how desirable it is?
I think that’s very reasonable. The intuition going the other way is that maybe we only want to credit useful optimisation. If you neither enjoy robbing banks nor make much money from it, maybe I’m not that impressed about the fact you can do it, even if it’s objectively difficult to pull off.
Another point is that we can sort of use the desirability of the state of affairs someone manages to achieve as a proxy for how wide a range of options they had at their disposal. This doesn’t apply to the difficulty of achieving the state of affairs, since we don’t expect people to be optimising for difficulty. This is an afterthought, though, and maybe there would be better ways to try to measure someone’s range of options.
I’m very confused about why we think zero for unchanged expected utility and strict mononicity are reasonable.
A simple example: I want to maximize expected income. I have actions including “get a menial job,” and “rob someone at gunpoint and get away with it,” where the first gets me more money. Why would I assume that the second requires less optimization power than the first?
Is the general point that optimisation power should be about how difficult a state of affairs is to achieve, not how desirable it is?
I think that’s very reasonable. The intuition going the other way is that maybe we only want to credit useful optimisation. If you neither enjoy robbing banks nor make much money from it, maybe I’m not that impressed about the fact you can do it, even if it’s objectively difficult to pull off.
Another point is that we can sort of use the desirability of the state of affairs someone manages to achieve as a proxy for how wide a range of options they had at their disposal. This doesn’t apply to the difficulty of achieving the state of affairs, since we don’t expect people to be optimising for difficulty. This is an afterthought, though, and maybe there would be better ways to try to measure someone’s range of options.