I came up with a handful of ideas, but one problem my ideas ran into was that strictly speaking, utility is not monotonically increasing with resources. Rather, utility is monotonically increasing with resources under your control; if a resource is controlled by an enemy, then that decreases your expected utility.
So that raises the question of whether we should define “resources” abstractly/generally, or “resources under your control” specifically. I suspect the former could be derived from the latter by considering something like causality or analogy. And the latter would need to start out with defining “you”, which could presumably be done in the style of your “optimization at a distance”.
I came up with a handful of ideas, but one problem my ideas ran into was that strictly speaking, utility is not monotonically increasing with resources. Rather, utility is monotonically increasing with resources under your control; if a resource is controlled by an enemy, then that decreases your expected utility.
So that raises the question of whether we should define “resources” abstractly/generally, or “resources under your control” specifically. I suspect the former could be derived from the latter by considering something like causality or analogy. And the latter would need to start out with defining “you”, which could presumably be done in the style of your “optimization at a distance”.
Yup, next post will argue that a natural solution to the Measuring Stick Problem pops out of optimization-at-a-distance.