I had what feels like an insight about this type of money pump scenario in general, so I’ll run it by everyone.
If X is a painful experience, like a stubbed toe. Y is a second painful experience, like a caffeine headache, and Z is a third painful experience, like a sore muscle, then trading repeatedly in the manner listed above seems entirely correct, since you would essentially be repeatedly trading to eventually almost no pain whatsoever. So the circularity of the trades themselves do not appear to be a problem (as opposed to the circularity of the preferences). As another example of this, if someone is offering 2 bagels for 1 apple, someone else if offering 2 candies for 1 bagel, and someone else is offering 2 apples for 1 candy, and you get utility from apples, bagels, and candies, then you have a great arbitrage situation.
In this case, your preferences are wrong, but they are coherently wrong. If you flip the sign bit, (what you think is good is actually bad and vice versa) for instance, you’ll go back to perfectly reasonable, so you can say “If I look three steps ahead, in this scenario I would be better off doing what I would intuitively prefer NOT to do at each step.”
This also appears to work whether you flip the sign bit on X’s value (Actually you SHOULD discard X because it hurts) or the trade order (Actually, you should make all of those trades in the reverse order then you would think.) but presumably not both, because then you would be voluntarily trading to what you currently think is infinite disutility, which brings up a weird point. Reversing your preferences and reversing how you ACT on those preferences shouldn’t do anything to change your behavior, but in this case if you attempt to evaluate the results of doing it in this case, it appears to be infinite disutility. That’s probably extremely clear evidence you need to change your value system.
I had what feels like an insight about this type of money pump scenario in general, so I’ll run it by everyone.
If X is a painful experience, like a stubbed toe. Y is a second painful experience, like a caffeine headache, and Z is a third painful experience, like a sore muscle, then trading repeatedly in the manner listed above seems entirely correct, since you would essentially be repeatedly trading to eventually almost no pain whatsoever. So the circularity of the trades themselves do not appear to be a problem (as opposed to the circularity of the preferences). As another example of this, if someone is offering 2 bagels for 1 apple, someone else if offering 2 candies for 1 bagel, and someone else is offering 2 apples for 1 candy, and you get utility from apples, bagels, and candies, then you have a great arbitrage situation.
In this case, your preferences are wrong, but they are coherently wrong. If you flip the sign bit, (what you think is good is actually bad and vice versa) for instance, you’ll go back to perfectly reasonable, so you can say “If I look three steps ahead, in this scenario I would be better off doing what I would intuitively prefer NOT to do at each step.”
This also appears to work whether you flip the sign bit on X’s value (Actually you SHOULD discard X because it hurts) or the trade order (Actually, you should make all of those trades in the reverse order then you would think.) but presumably not both, because then you would be voluntarily trading to what you currently think is infinite disutility, which brings up a weird point. Reversing your preferences and reversing how you ACT on those preferences shouldn’t do anything to change your behavior, but in this case if you attempt to evaluate the results of doing it in this case, it appears to be infinite disutility. That’s probably extremely clear evidence you need to change your value system.
Am I onto something, or am I missing the point?
Edit: Clarified a point about circularity.