A dozen years ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky asked us which was less (wrong?) bad:
or
He cheekily ended the post with "I think the answer is obvious. How about you?"
To this day, I do not have a clue which answer he thinks is obviously true, but I strongly believe that the dust specks are preferable. Namely, I don't think there's any number we can increase 3^^^3 to that would change the answer, because I think the disutility of dust specks is fundamentally incomparable with that of torture. If you disagree with me, I don't... (read 2269 more words →)
I agree that delineating the precise boundaries of comparability classes is a uniquely challenging task. Nonetheless, it does not mean they don't exist--to me your claim feels along the same lines as classical induction "paradoxes" involving classifying sand heaps. While it's difficult to define exactly what a sand heap is, we can look at many objects and say with certainty whether or not they are sand heaps, and that's what matters for living in the world and making empirical claims (or building sandcastles anyway).
I suspect it's quite likely that experiences you may be referring to as "higher quantities of themselves" within a single person are in fact qualitatively different and... (read more)
Why does this pose an issue for reinforcement learning? Forgive my ignorance, I do not have a background in the subject. Though I don't believe that I have information which distinguishes cereal/granola in terms of which has stronger highest-severity consequences (given the smallness of those numbers and my inability to conceive of them, I strongly suspect anything I could come up with would exclusively represent epistemic and not aleatoric uncertainty), even if I accept it then the theory would tell me, correctly, that I should act based on that level. If that seems wrong, then it's evidence we've incorrectly identified an implicit severity class in our imagination of the... (read more)
I agree that small decisions have high-severity impacts, my point was that it is only worth the time to evaluate that impact if there aren't other decisions I could spend that time making which have much greater impact and for which my decision time will be more effectively allocated. This is a comment about how using the non-Archimedean framework goes in practice. Certainly, if we had infinite compute and time to make every decision, we should focus on the most severe impacts of those decisions, but that is not the world we are in (and if we were, it would change quite a lot of other things too, effectively eliminating empirical uncertainty and the need to take expectations at all).
Once you introduce any meaningful uncertainty into a non-Archimedean utility framework, it collapses into an Archimedean one. This is because even a very small difference in the probabilities of some highly positive or negative outcome outweighs a certainty of a lesser outcome that is not Archimedean-comparable. And if the probabilities are exactly aligned, it is more worth your time to do more research so that they will be less aligned, than to act on the basis of a hierarchically less important outcome.
I don't think this is true. As an example, when I wake up in the morning I make the decision between granola and cereal for breakfast. Universe Destruction is... (read 377 more words →)
Yes! This is all true. I thought set differences of infinite unions and quotients would only make the post less accessible for non-mathematicians though. I also don't see a natural way to define the filtration without already having defined the severity classes.
The thing you called "pseudograding" is normally called "filtration".
Ah, thanks! I knew there had to be something for that, just couldn't remember what it was. I was embarrassed posting with a made-up word, but I really did look (and ask around) and couldn't find what I needed.
...Although, reading the definition, I'm not sure it's exactly the same...the severity classes aren't nested, and I think this is probably an important distinction to the conceptual framing, even if the math is equivalent. If I start with a filtration proper, I need to extract the severity classes in a way that seems slightly more convoluted than what I did.
In practice, because of... (read more)
we find the need for a weird cut off point, like a broken arm
For the cut-off point on a broken arm, I recommend the elbow [not a doctor].
Suppose there was a strong clustering effect in human psychology, such that less than a week of torture left peoples minds in one state, and more than a week left them broken. I would still expect the possibility of some intermediate cases on the borderlines. Things as messy as human psychology, I would expect there to not be a perfectly sharp black and white cutoff. If we zoom in enough, we find that the space of possible quantum wavefunctions is continuous.
I agree! You've made my point for me: it is precisely this messiness which grants us continuity on average. Some people will take longer than others to have qualitatively incomparably damaging effects from torture, and as such the expected impact of any significant torture will have a component on the severity level of 50 years torture. Hence, comparable (on expectation).