Danish math major
Oskar Mathiasen
Karma: 138
So on stance independent reasons. Here are some plausible examples of non-moral stance independent reasons:
Dutch book arguments gives you a reason to have coherent preferences
The sky being blue gives you a (not necessarily decisive) reason to believe the sky is blue
(This is basically a companions in guilt between rational oughts and moral oughts, as a response to the queerness argument)
I think one can read that line to be about moral epistemology under a truly realist conception. It seems to match my reading of Peter Railton. Of course one needs to then argue why our imperfect attempts at value negotiations can give us information about the moral facts.
This question becomes easier if one takes the moral facts to be constituted by some (potentially idealized) negotiation, which is the position of moral constructivisim. But constructivists wouldn’t say that morality is “discovered” by the process of negotiation.
How does this compare to the process that actually produces claims about truth?
It seems to me that the process that produces claims about truth biases significantly towards memeticity, along with many other biases. But i still think the correct referent for the word “truth” is what actually mind-independently is the case (that is realism).
I think this analogy fails to engage with how philosophically different consequentialist morality and non consequentialist morality.
Here is how i would describe moral frameworks in programming terms, from an admittedly consequentialist perspective. Here a single line of machine code will correspond to some simple moral claim (eg “John prefers outcome A over outcome B”).
The programming languages are different consequentialist moralities. Each of which will have some terminology which compiles down to the machine code. Examples of such terms could be “the common good”, “action A is better than action B in situation S”, “outcome A is good”, “person P is good”, which each language can include or exclude, also notably two languages might implement the same thing in ways that compile fundamentally differently (compare how the basic list type in some languages is an array and in some languages is a linked list).Then non consequentialist positions is like having programming languages that cant compile to machine code. The non consequentialist claims that the machine language is impoverished. This would be similar to criticizing a programming language as not Turing complete. And maybe thats a correct criticism, but it is a fundamentally deeper disagreement.
Maybe its worthwhile to compare with the question of reductionist vs non reductionist ontology.
Here the machine code is some simple empirical claim (eg “there is an electron at (x,y,z,w)”).
The programming languages are languages that contain words that compile down to machine code (possibly in layers biology → chemistry → particle physics).
Then non reductionism claims that there are real objects (eg souls or numbers) which cannot be compiled like that, the machine code forms an impoverished ontology, that cant explain/compile everything that exists.
To me many of the arguments in this article have analog arguments against some of the above positions. And i wondered whether you
1: disagree the arguments are analogous
2: think there are positive arguments for these positions that overcome the analogous arguments, where there isnt a analogous positive argument
3: you also reject the above positions
Here is an example of the kind of analogy i am thinking of, this is similar to the second paragraph under Causality.
> This raises the issue that there are multiple theories with different unobservable structures expressing the same observations. For ontological minimality, we could say these are all valid theories (so there is no “further fact” of what is the real unobserved structure, in cases of persistent empirical ambiguity), though of course some have analytically nicer mathematical properties (simplicity) than others.
Regarding option 2, where there is some further argument such as being indispensable to our best scientific theories. Then it seems plausible that mathematics is indispensable. Which could be an example of an analogous positive argument.
I think it would be valuable to also state some things you include in this minimal position. Eg is it antirealist about composite objects? Does it accept further facts about the outside world over and above the facts about sensations? Does it accept any skeptical hypothesis?
Minor note. Your choice of utilities makes a 50⁄50 mixture of Cooperate:Defect and Defect:Cooperate better than the Cooperate:Cooperate outcome. So Cooperate:Cooperate isnt on the pareto frontier.
Here are some relevant quotes by Eliezer from a discord discussion on dath ilan currency:
Note that i have skipped parts of the conversation between each paragraph
dath ilan does have an artificial currency used as a medium-of-exchange, meant to track the value of unskilled labor hours (note unskilled qualifier) as they’re regularly auctioned in Taskrabbit-like markets about that, and this currency also serves as the notional definition of a medium of account because it fluctuates less than unskilled labor prices.
Nobody is supposed to be holding currency; it’s strictly a medium of exchange to instantiate a unit of account, not at all a store of value. Value is held in investment accounts.
the unit of the account affects quite a lot because people do negotiate contracts about future delivery of milk, priced that way, and many small businesses prefer not to adjust all the prices on their Web Page on a daily basis.
there’s also a coordination problem when you have a complicated supply chain; everyone wants to be first in line to raise prices, but everyone wants to be last in line to lower prices
yep. dath ilan’s system is not meant to be superior to an NGDPLT-indexed inflationary unit of account, holding fixed the part about stores of value being held mainly in equities and the land taxes and so on. they’re just legit not at the optimum there and got to their current position via NGDPLT having not been invented by the time of the historical screen, and earlier generations being not quite that smart and being much more bullheaded about “downward nominal wage rigidity is a BIAS and we will TRAIN PEOPLE OUT OF IT and COORDINATE AROUND LOWERING PRICES SUCCESSFULLY so we can RETAIN OUR IDEALISTIC COMMITMENT to the unit of account being something that EVERYONE COULD PERSONALLY SELL”
To the extent that purchases stay the same and we pay the cost domestically, that is indeed a tax paid by producers or consumers. Yes, it lowers their remaining capital, but is probably one of the least distortionary available taxes. In the terms described above, if you used the money to cut income tax rates, you’d probably be ahead.
Taxing something where the supply or demand is fixed is extremely efficient, and the extent to which purchases stay the same is exactly the extent to which supply or demand is inflexible. The economic inefficiency of a tax comes from the changes in behavior induced by the tax. The difference between a tariff and a sales tax, is that it induces you to buy native products.
Sorry I see now that i lost half a sentence in the middle. I agree that the notions of early/mid/late game doesn’t map well to real life, and I don’t think there is a good way to do so. I then (meant to) propose the stages of a 4X game as perhaps mapping more cleanly onto one-shot games
I think the most natural definitions are that early game is the part you have memorized, end game is where you can compute to the end (still doing pruning), and mid game is the rest.
So eg in Scrabble the end game is where there are no tiles or few enough tiles in the bag that you can think through all (relevant) combinations of bags.I think perhaps the phases of a 4X game.
Explore: gain information that is relevant for what plan to execute
Expand: Investment phase, you take actions that maximise your growth
Exploit: You slowly start depriotizing growth as the time remaining grows shorter.
Exterminate: You go for your win condition
The arguments in the Aumann paper in favor of dropping the completeness axiom is that it makes for a better theory of Human/Buisness/Existent reasoning, not that it makes for a better theory of ideal reasoning.
The paper seems to prove that any partial preference ordering which obeys the other axioms must be representable by a utility function, but that there will be multiple such representatives.My claim is that either there will be a dutch book, or your actions will be equivalent to the actions you would have taken by following one of those representative utility functions, in which case even though the internals don’t seem like following a utility function they are for the purposes of VNM.
But demonstrating this is hard, as it is unclear what actions correspond to the fact that A is incomparable to B.
The concrete examples of non complete agents in the above, either seem like they will act according to one of those representatives, or like they are easily dutch bookable.
I don’t understand how you are using incompleteness. For example, to me the sentence
“agents can make themselves immune to all possible money-pumps for completeness by acting in accordance with the following policy: ‘if I previously turned down some option X, I will not choose any option that I strictly disprefer to X.’”
Sounds like “agents can avoid all money pumps for completeness by completing their preferences in a random way.” Which is true but doesn’t seem like much of a challenge to completeness.
Can you explain what behavior is allowed under the first but isn’t possible under my rephrasing?
Similarly can we make explicit what behavior counts as two options being incomparable?
It seems to me that FDT has the property that you associate with the “ultimate decision theory”.
My understanding is that FDT says that you should follow the policy which is attained by taking the argmax over all policies of the utility from following that policy (only including downstream effects of your policy).
In these easy examples your policy space is your space of committed actions. In which case the above seems to reduce to the “ultimate decision theory” criterion.
The assumptions made here are not time reversible as the macrostate at time t+1 being deterministic given the macrostate at time t, does not imply that the macrostate at time t is deterministic given the macrostate at time t+1.
So in this article the direction of time is given through the asymmetry of the evolution of macrostates.
I think “book of X” can be usefully “translated” as beliefs about X.
The book of truth is not truth, just like the book of night is not night.I think “book of names” can be read as human categoristion of animals (giving them name). Although other readings do seem plausible.
You might be interested in John Harsanyi on the topic.
He argues that the conclusion achieved in the original position is (average) utilitarianism.I agree that behind the veil one shouldn’t know the time (and thus can’t care differently about current vs future humans). This actually causes further problems for Rawls conception when you project back in time, what if the worst life that will ever be lived has already been lived? Then the maximin principle gives no guidance at all, and in positions of uncertainty it recommends putting all effort in preventing a new minimum from being set.
The concept of Kolmogorov Sufficient Statistic might be the missing piece. (cf Elements of information theory section 14.12)
We want the shortest program that describes a sequence of bits. A particularly interpretable type of such programs is “the sequence is in the set X generated by program p, and among those it is the n’th element”
Example “the sequence is in the set of sequences of length 1000 with 104 ones, generated by (insert program here), of which it is the n~10^144′th element”.We therefore define f(String, n) to be the size of the smallest set containing String which is generated by a program of length n. (Or alternatively where a program of length n can test for membership of the set)
If you plot the logarithm of f(String,n) you will often see bands where the line has slope −1, corresponding to using the extra bit to hardcode one more bit of the index. In this case the longer programs aren’t describing any more structure than the program where the slope started being −1. We call such a program a Kolmogorov minimal statistic.
The relevance is that for a biased coin with each flip independent the Kolmogorov minimal statistic is the bias. And it is often more natural to think about the Kolmogorov minimal statistics.
Then you violate the accurate beliefs condition. (If the world is infact a random mixture in proportion which their beliefs track correctly, then fdt will do better when averaging over the mixture)
Thanks for clarifying this. I found it unclear whether this was the case. I do think you need to have some restriction on how welfare and types relate. If every type allows low welfare individuals, then you recover the repugnant conclusion.
Also personally i would like an exploration of how this view compares against average utilitarianism, as most of the listed benefits are already fulfilled by averageism. As well as the option of replacing the concave function applied to types by an averaging operation.