Thanks for the response. EDIT: Adam pointed out to me that LDU does not suffer from dictatorship of the present as I originally stated below and as you argued above. What you are saying is true for a fixed discount factor, but in this case we take the limit as .
The property you describe is known as "dictatorship of the present", and you can read more about it here. In order to get rid of this "dictatorship" you end up having to do things like reject stationary, which are plausibly just as counterintuitive.
> I'm surprised that this is presented as a big advance in infinite ethics as people have certainly thought about... (read more)
FYI, I was still confused about this so I posted on math .se. Someone responded that the above proof is incorrect, but they gave their own proof that there is no computable ordering over which respects Pareto.
Thanks! But is that correct? I notice that your argument seems to work for finite sequences as well (or even single rational numbers), but clearly we can order the rational numbers.
Thanks! Someone (maybe it was you?) pointed me to Chen and Rubio's stuff before, and it sounds interesting.
I don't fully understand the informal write up you have above, but I'm looking forward to seeing the final thing!
Thanks! Your idea is interesting – I put a comment on that post.
Something you are probably aware of is that accepting "anonymity" (allowing the sequence to be reordered arbitrarily) requires us to reject seemingly intuitive principles like Pareto (if you can make someone better off and no one worse off, then you should).
Personally, I would rather keep Pareto than anonymity, but I think it's cool to explore what anonymous orderings can do.
The canonical problem in infinite ethics is to create a preference relation over which is in some sense "reasonable". That's what this approach does.
For more background you can see this background article or my overview of the field.
Thanks Oliver and Ben!
I believe it is working now; I posted it here: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/tW37uofzXd7ngW8Np/big-advance-in-infinite-ethics
Summary
It is possible that our universe is infinite in both time and space. We might therefore reasonably consider the following question: given some sequences and (where each represents the welfare of persons living at time ), how can we tell if is morally preferable to ?
It has been demonstrated that there is no “reasonable” ethical algorithm which can compare any two such sequences. Therefore, we want to look for subsets of sequences which can be compared, and (perhaps retro-justified) arguments for why these subsets are the only ones which practically matter.
Adam Jonsson has published a preprint of what seems to me to be the first legitimate such... (read 1251 more words →)
Does latex work in posts? I wrote up a draft post and I'm pretty sure that I used the correct syntax, but I don't see the formulas being formatted.
Maybe it does not work unless the post is fully submitted instead of just a draft? I didn't want to submit the post just to test that out though.
That's a great question and yes, there is generally some amount of risk adjustment performed. To take the example Eliezer used early in this post: you can find much more information then you probably wanted about the risk adjustment for central line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) here .
link?