I have not yet accepted that consistency is always the best course in every situation. For example, in Pascal’s Mugging, a random person threatens to take away a zillion units of utility if you don’t pay them $5. The probability they can make good on their threat is miniscule, but by multiplying out by the size of the threat, it still ought to motivate you to give the money. Some belief has to give—the belief that multiplication works, the belief that I shouldn’t pay the money, or the belief that I should be consistent all the time—and right now, consistency seems like the weakest link in the chain.
Not upvoted, for this paragraph. You can’t become right by removing beliefs at random until the remaining belief pool is consistent, but if you’re right then you must be consistent.
Why does some belief have to give, if you reject consistency? If you’re going to be inconsistent, why not inconsistently be consistent as well?
Also, you are attempting to be humorous by including beliefs like “multiplication works”, but not beliefs like “at the 3^^^3rd murder, I’m still horrified” or “Solomonoff induction works”, right?
We are but humble bounded rationalists, who have to use heuritistic soup, so we might have to be inconsistent at times. But to say that even after careful recomputation on perfectly formalized toy problems, we don’t have to be consistent? Oh, come on!
Here’s an idea that just occurred to me: you could replace Solomonoff induction with a more arbitrary prior (interpreted as “degree of caring” like Wei Dai suggests) and hand-tune your degree of caring for huge/unfair universes so Pascal’s mugging stops working. Informally, you could value your money more in universes that don’t contain omnipotent muggers. This approach still feels unsatisfactory, but I don’t remember it suggested before...
Is this different from jimrandomh’s proposal to penalize the prior probability of events of utility of large magnitude, or komponisto’s proposal to penalize the utility?
For weakest implicit belief, I think I would have nominated “That I have the slightest idea how to properly calculate the probability of the mugger following through on his/her threat”.
Also, Torture vs. Specks seems like another instance where many of us are willing to sacrifice apparent consistency. Most coherent formulations of utilitarianism must choose torture, yet many utilitarians are hesitant to do so.
In both cases, it seems like what we’re doing isn’t abandoning consistency, but admitting to the possibility that our consistent formula (e.g. naive utilitarianism) isn’t necessarily the optimal / subjectively best / most reflectively equilibrial one. We therefore may choose to abandon it in favor of the intuitive answer (don’t pay the mugger, choose specks, etc), not because we choose to be inconsistent, but because we predict the existence of a Better But Still Consistent Formula not yet known to us.
Of course, as Yvain notes, we can take pretty much any set of arbitrary preferences and create a “consistent” formula by adding enough terms to the equation. The difference is that the Better But Unknown formula above is both consistent and something we’d be in reflective equilibrium about.
Fixed thanks. But no, I meant specks. It seems like utilitarianism (as opposed to just typical intuitive morality) commands you to inflict Torture. You only want to choose specks because your brain doesn’t multiply properly, etc.
Of course, not everyone agrees that Utilitarianism picks Torture, but the argument for Torture is certainly a utilitarian one. So in this case picking Specks anyway seems like a case of overriding (at least naive versions of) utilitarianism.
Not upvoted, for this paragraph. You can’t become right by removing beliefs at random until the remaining belief pool is consistent, but if you’re right then you must be consistent.
Why does some belief have to give, if you reject consistency? If you’re going to be inconsistent, why not inconsistently be consistent as well?
Also, you are attempting to be humorous by including beliefs like “multiplication works”, but not beliefs like “at the 3^^^3rd murder, I’m still horrified” or “Solomonoff induction works”, right?
We are but humble bounded rationalists, who have to use heuritistic soup, so we might have to be inconsistent at times. But to say that even after careful recomputation on perfectly formalized toy problems, we don’t have to be consistent? Oh, come on!
Agreed.
Here’s an idea that just occurred to me: you could replace Solomonoff induction with a more arbitrary prior (interpreted as “degree of caring” like Wei Dai suggests) and hand-tune your degree of caring for huge/unfair universes so Pascal’s mugging stops working. Informally, you could value your money more in universes that don’t contain omnipotent muggers. This approach still feels unsatisfactory, but I don’t remember it suggested before...
Is this different from jimrandomh’s proposal to penalize the prior probability of events of utility of large magnitude, or komponisto’s proposal to penalize the utility?
For weakest implicit belief, I think I would have nominated “That I have the slightest idea how to properly calculate the probability of the mugger following through on his/her threat”.
Also, Torture vs. Specks seems like another instance where many of us are willing to sacrifice apparent consistency. Most coherent formulations of utilitarianism must choose torture, yet many utilitarians are hesitant to do so.
In both cases, it seems like what we’re doing isn’t abandoning consistency, but admitting to the possibility that our consistent formula (e.g. naive utilitarianism) isn’t necessarily the optimal / subjectively best / most reflectively equilibrial one. We therefore may choose to abandon it in favor of the intuitive answer (don’t pay the mugger, choose specks, etc), not because we choose to be inconsistent, but because we predict the existence of a Better But Still Consistent Formula not yet known to us.
Of course, as Yvain notes, we can take pretty much any set of arbitrary preferences and create a “consistent” formula by adding enough terms to the equation. The difference is that the Better But Unknown formula above is both consistent and something we’d be in reflective equilibrium about.
By “Dust vs. Specks” you surely mean “torture vs. dust specks”, and with “Specks”, you want to say “torture”, don’t you?
Fixed thanks. But no, I meant specks. It seems like utilitarianism (as opposed to just typical intuitive morality) commands you to inflict Torture. You only want to choose specks because your brain doesn’t multiply properly, etc.
Of course, not everyone agrees that Utilitarianism picks Torture, but the argument for Torture is certainly a utilitarian one. So in this case picking Specks anyway seems like a case of overriding (at least naive versions of) utilitarianism.
Wait...
Are you sure that should be specks? If so, I am confused.
Wow. Sorry, you’re obviously right. Brain totally misfired on me I guess.