I wonder whether anyone has done a proper job of researching whether it’s even possible to capture human preferences. Naively speaking, the mind body problem and the question of free will are unsolved so it would seem that depending on the answer to these questions, we may only ever be able to make a reasonable guess. And given the amount of information required to simulate the human brain, unless we have an incredible amount of compute, it seems unlikely we’re able to deterministically predict (if this is universally possible) what people want in different scenarios prior to ASI. Is there sociology or psychology research that tries to evaluate the baseline minimum amount of information required to predict what people want in different contexts or in general? If I know someone’s MBTI and Big 5, can I guess what they want better than coin flip odds in binary decisions? More generally, can I guess what they want regarding food, relationships, conversation, location, lifestyle, etc.? Marketing relies on answering these questions, but it seems somewhat shallow. Of course you can sell ice cream to a child because they love fat and sugar due to physiologically inbuilt drives. But can you predict in 10 years that they have become vegan due to their strong moral beliefs and now love edamame sprinkled with salt? Has anyone trained a preference prediction model or attempted to finetune a model to predict preferences? If anyone knows someone working on this, would love to get in touch.
I wonder whether anyone has done a proper job of researching whether it’s even possible to capture human preferences. Naively speaking, the mind body problem and the question of free will are unsolved so it would seem that depending on the answer to these questions, we may only ever be able to make a reasonable guess. And given the amount of information required to simulate the human brain, unless we have an incredible amount of compute, it seems unlikely we’re able to deterministically predict (if this is universally possible) what people want in different scenarios prior to ASI. Is there sociology or psychology research that tries to evaluate the baseline minimum amount of information required to predict what people want in different contexts or in general? If I know someone’s MBTI and Big 5, can I guess what they want better than coin flip odds in binary decisions? More generally, can I guess what they want regarding food, relationships, conversation, location, lifestyle, etc.? Marketing relies on answering these questions, but it seems somewhat shallow. Of course you can sell ice cream to a child because they love fat and sugar due to physiologically inbuilt drives. But can you predict in 10 years that they have become vegan due to their strong moral beliefs and now love edamame sprinkled with salt? Has anyone trained a preference prediction model or attempted to finetune a model to predict preferences? If anyone knows someone working on this, would love to get in touch.