Re: Bounded utility (was Re: Pascal's Button)

From: Nick Tarleton (nickptar@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2008 - 06:29:45 MDT


On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Tim Freeman <tim@fungible.com> wrote:
> From: "Nick Tarleton" <nickptar@gmail.com>
> >If the Friendly utility function is bounded, that would very likely
> >solve the problem. This violently disagrees with my ethical intuition,
> >but I now take it much more seriously than I did before.
>
> The chunk of my brain that represents how good I think something is
> has a finite size, and I suspect the utility is represented in there
> more-or-less in unary. So a bounded utility function feels natural to
> me.
>
> Can you explain why it feels wrong to you?

Utility is not just how good something feels, it's how good I
rationally judge something to be; it seems like I currently rationally
judge 2*N deaths (say) to be twice as bad as N deaths for all N, and I
would choose to modify myself to actually *feel* that difference and
eliminate scope insensitivity (
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/scope_insensiti.html ).



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