mendel
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mendel has not written any posts yet.
That's a neat trick, however, I am not sure I understand you correctly. You seem to be saying that risk-avoidance does not explain the 1A/2B preference, because you say your assignment captures risk-avoidance, and it doesn't lead to that. (It does lead to your take of the term though - your preference isn't 1A/2B, though).
Your assignment looks like "diminishing utility", i.e. a utility function where the utility scales up subproprotionally with money (e.g. twice the money must have less than twice the utility). Do you think diminishing utility is equivalent to risk-avoidance? And if yes, can you explain why?
You seem to have examples in mind?
The utility function has as its input only the monetary reward in this particular instance. Your idea that risk-avoidance can have utility (or that 1% chances are useless) cannot be modelled with the set of equations given to analyse the situation (the percentage is no input to the U() function) - the model falls short because the utility attaches only to the money and nothing else. (Another example of a group of individuals for whom the risk might out-utilize the reward are gambling addicts.) Security is, all other things being equal, preferred over insecurity, and we could probably devise some experimental setup to translate this into a utility money equivalent (i.e. how... (read more)
The problem as stated is hypothetical: there is next to no context, and it is assumed that the utility scales with the monetary reward. Once you confront real people with this offer, the context expands, and the analysis of the hypothetical situation falls short of being an adequate representation of reality, not necessarily because of a fault of the real people.
Many real people use a strategy of "don't gamble with money you cannot afford to lose"; this is overall a pretty successful strategy (and if I was looking to make some money, my mark would be the person who likes to take risks - just make him subsequently better offers until he... (read more)
After a good night's sleep, here are some more thoughts:
the idea is that you pay up because you feel obligated to your counterfactual self.
To feel obligated to my counterfactual self, which exists only in the "mind" of Omega, and not feel obligated to Omega doesn't make any sense to me.
Your additional assumptions about Omega destroy the utility that the $100 had - in the original version, $100 is $100 to both me and Omega, but in your version it is nothing to Omega. Your amended version of the problem amounts to "would I throw $100 into an incinerator on the basis of some thought experiment", and that is clearly not even a zero-sum game if you consider the whole system - the original problem is zero-sum, and that gives me more freedom of choice.
Why would I not hold them responsible? They are the ones who are trying to make us responsible by giving us an opportunity to act, but their opportunities are much more direct - after all, they created the situation that exerts the pressure on us. This line of thought is mainly meant to be argued in Fred's terms, who has a problem with feeling responsible for this suffering (or non-pleasure) - it offers him an out of the conundrum without relinquishing his compassion for humanity (i.e. I feel the ending as written is illogical, and I certainly think "Michael" is acting very unprofessionally for a psychoanalyst). ["Relinquish the compassion" is also the... (read more)
The central problem in all of these thought experiments is the crazy notion that we should give a shit about the welfare of other minds simply because they exist and experience things analogously to the way we experience things.
Well, I see the central problem in the notion that we should care about something that happens to other people if we're not the ones doing it to them. Clearly, the aliens are sentient; they are morally responsible for what happens to these humans. While we certainly should pursue possible avenues to end the suffering, we shouldn't act as if we were.
I don't see how your points apply: I would have paid had I lost. Except if my hypothetical self is so much in debt that it can't reasonably spend $100 on an investment such as this - in which case Omega would have known in advance, and understands my nonpayment.
I do not consider the future existence of Omega as a factor at all, so it doesn't matter whether it self-destructs or not. And it is also a given that Omega is absolutely trustworthy (more than I could say for myself).
My view is that this may well be one of the undecidable theorems that Goedel has shown must exist in any reasonably... (read more)
The problem is easier to decide with a small change that also makes it more practical. Suppose two competing laboratories design a machine intelligence and bid for a government contract to produce it. The government will evaluate the prototypes and choose one of them for mass-production (the "winner", getting multiplied); due to the R&D effort involved, the company who fails the bid will go into receivership, and the machine intelligence not chosen will be auctioned off, but never reproduced (the "loser").
The question is: should the developers anticipate mass-production? Should they instruct the machine intelligence to expect mass-production?
Assuming that after the evaluation process, both machine intelligences are turned off, to be turned... (read more)
One way to do it to get to the desired outcome is to replace U(x) with U(x,p) (with x being the money reward and p the probability to get it), and define U(x,p)=2x if p=1 and U(x,p)=x, otherwise. I doubt that this is a useful model of reality, but mathematically, it would do the trick. My stated opinion is that this special case should be looked at in the light of more general startegies/heuristics applied over a variety of situations, and this approach would still fall short of that.
I know Settlers of Catan, and own it. It's been awhile since I last played it, though.
Your point about games made me aware of... (read more)