I don’t see why their methods would be elegant. In particular, I don’t see why any of {the anthropic update, importance weighting, updating from the choice of universal prior} would have a simple form (simpler than the simplest physics that gives rise to life).
I don’t see how MAP helps things either—doesn’t the same argument suggest that for most of the possible physics, the simplest model will be a consequentialist? (Even more broadly, for the universal prior in general, isn’t MAP basically equivalent to a random sample from the prior, since some random model happens to be slightly more compressible?)
Yeah I think we have different intuitions here; are we at least within a few bits of log-odds disagreement? Even if not, I am not willing to stake anything on this intuition, so I’m not sure this is a hugely important disagreement for us to resolve.
I don’t see how MAP helps things either
I didn’t realize that you think that a single consequentialist would plausibly have the largest share of the posterior. I assumed your beliefs were in the neighborhood of:
it seems plausible that the weight of the consequentialist part is in excess of 1/million or 1/billion
(from your original post on this topic). In a Bayes mixture, I bet that a team of consequentialists that collectively amount to 1⁄10 or even 1⁄50 of the posterior could take over our world. In MAP, if you’re not first, you’re last, and more importantly, you can’t team up with other consequentialist-controlled world-models in the mixture.
I don’t see why their methods would be elegant. In particular, I don’t see why any of {the anthropic update, importance weighting, updating from the choice of universal prior} would have a simple form (simpler than the simplest physics that gives rise to life).
I don’t see how MAP helps things either—doesn’t the same argument suggest that for most of the possible physics, the simplest model will be a consequentialist? (Even more broadly, for the universal prior in general, isn’t MAP basically equivalent to a random sample from the prior, since some random model happens to be slightly more compressible?)
Yeah I think we have different intuitions here; are we at least within a few bits of log-odds disagreement? Even if not, I am not willing to stake anything on this intuition, so I’m not sure this is a hugely important disagreement for us to resolve.
I didn’t realize that you think that a single consequentialist would plausibly have the largest share of the posterior. I assumed your beliefs were in the neighborhood of:
(from your original post on this topic). In a Bayes mixture, I bet that a team of consequentialists that collectively amount to 1⁄10 or even 1⁄50 of the posterior could take over our world. In MAP, if you’re not first, you’re last, and more importantly, you can’t team up with other consequentialist-controlled world-models in the mixture.