In the blowing up sun scenario I imagined myself being helpless as I normally can’t command sun altering lasers or anything like that. In a world that has a slow apocalypse there would be a period of altered living. But in a world that suddenly turns off it is business as usual to the cutoff point. It doesn’t feel impactful.
Also being stuck in the abstract doesn’t feel that bad. Is being stuck bad? Is being stuck good or worse by being killed by unpredictable natural forces? Does stuck come with immortality?
My answer to the previous post challenge question was pretty close but I wonder whether I have a slightly differnt thought in my head. In a world that goes from a state of high expected utility to a state of low expected utility if my strategy keeps unchanged I don’t think this is impactful but for a different framing I get to “win less” in this new state and have “lost access to utility”. That is news can be “bad” without being “impactful” news. In the same way news can be “impactful” without being “good”. If I am a taxi driver when the customer announces their destination it is very impactful for my driving but addresses are not better or worse amongst each other.
In the blowing up sun scenario I imagined myself being helpless as I normally can’t command sun altering lasers or anything like that. In a world that has a slow apocalypse there would be a period of altered living. But in a world that suddenly turns off it is business as usual to the cutoff point. It doesn’t feel impactful.
So learning that you and your family won’t die in like a week doesn’t feel like a big deal? I feel confused by this, and think maybe you meant something else?
being stuck in the abstract doesn’t feel that bad. Is being stuck bad? Is being stuck good or worse by being killed by unpredictable natural forces? Does stuck come with immortality?
Well, your goal is to reach the gray tile. So, if you imagine yourself existing in this strange maze-reality, having that goal be your one and only imperative, and then no longer being able to reach the tile at all… that feels like a huge setback. But crucially, it only feels like a setback once you comprehend the rules of the maze enough to realize what happened.
If I am a taxi driver when the customer announces their destination it is very impactful for my driving but addresses are not better or worse amongst each other.
My framing of impact is something that only agents experience and consider. I’m not talking about how your strategies themselves are “impacted” or change as the result of new information. (I feel like we’re using different words for the same things, so I wouldn’t be surprised if just this reply didn’t clarify what I mean.)
ETA: I’m saying that “getting to win less and losing access to utility” is impact to you, in my conception.
The blowing up scenario might be a bit fantatical for me to properly apply intuitions. It did specify that I grew up in such a earth which would mean my family expectations have not really changed up to this point and I have hard time imagining what they would be. If a doomsday cult suddenly lives throught the expected date they do not go “omg profit” but “huh? what now?”.
Then there is the case of knowing that this solar system has only a finite lifespan. It doesn’t automatically feel like everything one has lived for melts to nothing even if before such a realization one might have thought that all improvements are for perpetuity. Cassandara migth be frustrated but it is because she has so low impact not becuase she has received demoralising information.
Yes I was using a little ambigious shorthands. The address announcing is impactful to the driver but there is no utility change. I think the “losing access to utility” does not well apply to the taxi-driver and the kind of conception that I have that does apply seems attractive in comparison.
It seems like you’re considering the changes in actions or information-theoretic surprisal, and I’m considering impact to the taxi driver. It’s valid to consider how substantially plans change, it’s just not the focus of the sequence.
I assert that we feel impacted when we change our beliefs about how well we can get what we want. Learning the address does not affect their attainable utility, so (when I simulate this experience) it doesn’t feel impactful in this specific way. It just feels like learning something.
Is this engaging with what you have in mind by “life-changes”?
I would have agreed with “how we can get what we want” but “how well we can get what we want” kind of specifies that it is a scalar quantity.
Utility functions can be constructed or are translatable from/to choice rankings. There can be no meaningful utility change without it being understandable with choices.
Impact as a primitive feeling feels super weird. I get that it has something to do with the idiom “fuck my life”. However there is another idiom “This is my life now” which more captures that quality change that is not neccesarily a move up or down.
There is a “so” word that would suggest theorethical implication but reference to simulated experience and feeling seem like callbacks to imagined emotions. Either or both apply?
I am also confused what the realtionship between expected utility and attainable utility is supposed to be. If you expect to maximise they should be pretty close.
I think I might be expereriencing goal directed behaviour very differntly on the inside and I am unsure how much of the terminology is supposed to be abstract math concepts and how much of it is supposed to be emotional language. It might be for other people there is a more natural link between being in a low or high utility state and feeling low or high.
I am now suspecthing it has less to do with “Objective-life” but rather “subjective-life” or life-as-experienced which tells the approach uses a differnt kind of ontology.
I think I might be expereriencing goal directed behaviour very differntly on the inside and I am unsure how much of the terminology is supposed to be abstract math concepts and how much of it is supposed to be emotional language. It might be for other people there is a more natural link between being in a low or high utility state and feeling low or high.
The sequence uses emotional language (so far), as it’s written to be widely accessible. I’m extensionally defining what I’m thinking of and how that works for me. These intuitions translated for the 20 or so people I showed the first part of the sequence, but minds are different and it’s possible it doesn’t feel the same for you. As long as the idea of “how well the agent can achieve their goals” makes sense and you see why I’m pointing to these properties, that’s probably fine.
I am also confused what the realtionship between expected utility and attainable utility is supposed to be. If you expect to maximise they should be pretty close.
In order to be upset I would need an expectation that the tile was reachable before. If I have zero clue how the nature works I don’t have an expectation that it was possible beforehand so I am not losing any ability.
Then there is the technicality tht even if I know that I can’t move I don’t know anything about the nature of the world so maybe I think that the grey square can teleport to me? The framing seems to assume a lot of basic assumption about gridworlds. So which parts I can assume and which parts I geniunely do not know?
But yeah I did fail to read that there was a specification of the wanting.
I would need an expectation that the tile was reachable before. If I have zero clue how the nature works I don’t have an expectation that it was possible beforehand so I am not losing any ability.
Whoops, yeah, I forgot to specify that by the rules of this maze (which is actually generated from the labyrinth in Undertale), you can initially reach the goal. These are really fair critiques. I initially included the rules, but there were a lot of rules and it was distracting. I might add something more.
In the blowing up sun scenario I imagined myself being helpless as I normally can’t command sun altering lasers or anything like that. In a world that has a slow apocalypse there would be a period of altered living. But in a world that suddenly turns off it is business as usual to the cutoff point. It doesn’t feel impactful.
Also being stuck in the abstract doesn’t feel that bad. Is being stuck bad? Is being stuck good or worse by being killed by unpredictable natural forces? Does stuck come with immortality?
My answer to the previous post challenge question was pretty close but I wonder whether I have a slightly differnt thought in my head. In a world that goes from a state of high expected utility to a state of low expected utility if my strategy keeps unchanged I don’t think this is impactful but for a different framing I get to “win less” in this new state and have “lost access to utility”. That is news can be “bad” without being “impactful” news. In the same way news can be “impactful” without being “good”. If I am a taxi driver when the customer announces their destination it is very impactful for my driving but addresses are not better or worse amongst each other.
So learning that you and your family won’t die in like a week doesn’t feel like a big deal? I feel confused by this, and think maybe you meant something else?
Well, your goal is to reach the gray tile. So, if you imagine yourself existing in this strange maze-reality, having that goal be your one and only imperative, and then no longer being able to reach the tile at all… that feels like a huge setback. But crucially, it only feels like a setback once you comprehend the rules of the maze enough to realize what happened.
My framing of impact is something that only agents experience and consider. I’m not talking about how your strategies themselves are “impacted” or change as the result of new information. (I feel like we’re using different words for the same things, so I wouldn’t be surprised if just this reply didn’t clarify what I mean.)
ETA: I’m saying that “getting to win less and losing access to utility” is impact to you, in my conception.
The blowing up scenario might be a bit fantatical for me to properly apply intuitions. It did specify that I grew up in such a earth which would mean my family expectations have not really changed up to this point and I have hard time imagining what they would be. If a doomsday cult suddenly lives throught the expected date they do not go “omg profit” but “huh? what now?”.
Then there is the case of knowing that this solar system has only a finite lifespan. It doesn’t automatically feel like everything one has lived for melts to nothing even if before such a realization one might have thought that all improvements are for perpetuity. Cassandara migth be frustrated but it is because she has so low impact not becuase she has received demoralising information.
Yes I was using a little ambigious shorthands. The address announcing is impactful to the driver but there is no utility change. I think the “losing access to utility” does not well apply to the taxi-driver and the kind of conception that I have that does apply seems attractive in comparison.
It seems like you’re considering the changes in actions or information-theoretic surprisal, and I’m considering impact to the taxi driver. It’s valid to consider how substantially plans change, it’s just not the focus of the sequence.
I thought that “impact” was the word for that. What is there left of the focus of the sequence if you take “life-changes” away from that?
You think or would say there is no impact for the taxi driver?
I assert that we feel impacted when we change our beliefs about how well we can get what we want. Learning the address does not affect their attainable utility, so (when I simulate this experience) it doesn’t feel impactful in this specific way. It just feels like learning something.
Is this engaging with what you have in mind by “life-changes”?
I would have agreed with “how we can get what we want” but “how well we can get what we want” kind of specifies that it is a scalar quantity.
Utility functions can be constructed or are translatable from/to choice rankings. There can be no meaningful utility change without it being understandable with choices.
Impact as a primitive feeling feels super weird. I get that it has something to do with the idiom “fuck my life”. However there is another idiom “This is my life now” which more captures that quality change that is not neccesarily a move up or down.
There is a “so” word that would suggest theorethical implication but reference to simulated experience and feeling seem like callbacks to imagined emotions. Either or both apply?
I am also confused what the realtionship between expected utility and attainable utility is supposed to be. If you expect to maximise they should be pretty close.
I think I might be expereriencing goal directed behaviour very differntly on the inside and I am unsure how much of the terminology is supposed to be abstract math concepts and how much of it is supposed to be emotional language. It might be for other people there is a more natural link between being in a low or high utility state and feeling low or high.
I am now suspecthing it has less to do with “Objective-life” but rather “subjective-life” or life-as-experienced which tells the approach uses a differnt kind of ontology.
The sequence uses emotional language (so far), as it’s written to be widely accessible. I’m extensionally defining what I’m thinking of and how that works for me. These intuitions translated for the 20 or so people I showed the first part of the sequence, but minds are different and it’s possible it doesn’t feel the same for you. As long as the idea of “how well the agent can achieve their goals” makes sense and you see why I’m pointing to these properties, that’s probably fine.
Great catch, covered two posts from now.
In order to be upset I would need an expectation that the tile was reachable before. If I have zero clue how the nature works I don’t have an expectation that it was possible beforehand so I am not losing any ability.
Then there is the technicality tht even if I know that I can’t move I don’t know anything about the nature of the world so maybe I think that the grey square can teleport to me? The framing seems to assume a lot of basic assumption about gridworlds. So which parts I can assume and which parts I geniunely do not know?
But yeah I did fail to read that there was a specification of the wanting.
Whoops, yeah, I forgot to specify that by the rules of this maze (which is actually generated from the labyrinth in Undertale), you can initially reach the goal. These are really fair critiques. I initially included the rules, but there were a lot of rules and it was distracting. I might add something more.