Yes, I would expect that the thresholds would be different depending upon the base state of the universe.
In general though, this consideration is likely to be irrelevant. Most universes will be nowhere near the upper or lower bounds, and the chance of any individual’s decision being single-handedly responsible for doing a universe scale shifts toward a utility bound is so tiny that even estimating orders of magnitude of the unlikelihood is difficult. These are angels-on-head-of-pin quibbles.
The question of bounded utility can be thought of as “is there any possible scenario so bad (or good) that it cannot be made worse (or better) by any chosen factor no matter how large?”
If your utility function is unbounded, then the answer is no. For every bad or good scenario there exists a different scenario that is 10 times, 10^100 times, or 9^^^9 times worse or better.
My personal view is yes: there are scenarios so bad that a 99% chance of making it “good” is always worth a 1% chance of somehow making it worse. This is never true of someone with an unbounded utility function.
In general though, this consideration is likely to be irrelevant. Most universes will be nowhere near the upper or lower bounds, and the chance of any individual’s decision being single-handedly responsible for doing a universe scale shifts toward a utility bound is so tiny that even estimating orders of magnitude of the unlikelihood is difficult. These are angels-on-head-of-pin quibbles.
That makes sense. So it sounds like the Egyptology Objection is almost a form of Pascal’s Mugging in and of itself. If you are confronted by a Mugger (or some other, slightly less stupid scenario where there is a tiny probability of vast utility or disutility) the odds that you are at a “place” on the utility function that would affect the credibility threshold for the Mugger one way or another are just as astronomical as the odds that the Mugger is giving you. So an agent with a bounded utility function is never obligated to research how much utility the rest of the universe has before rejecting the mugger’s offer. They can just dismiss it as not credible and move on.
And Mugging-type scenarios are the only scenarios where this Egyptology stuff would really come up, because in normal situations with normal probabilities of normal amounts of (dis)utility, the rescaling and reshifting effect makes your “proximity to the bound” irrelevant to your behavior. That makes sense!
I also wanted to ask about something you said in an earlier comment:
I suspect most of the “scary situations” in these sorts of theories are artefacts of trying to formulate simplified situations to test specific principles, but accidentally throw out all the things that make utility functions a reasonable approximation to preference ordering. The quoted example definitely fits that description.
I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean by that. How do simplified hypotheticals for testing specific principles make utility functions fail to approximate preference ordering? I have a lot of difficulty with this, where I worry that if I do not have the perfect answer to various simplified hypotheticals it means that I do not understand anything about anything. But I also understand that simplified hypotheticals often causes errors like removing important details and reifying concepts.
My main objection for the simplified utility functions is that they are presented as depending only upon the current external state of the world in some vaguely linear and stable way. Every adjective in there corresponds to discarding a lot of useful information about preferences that people actually have.
People often have strong preferences about potential pasts, presents, and future as well as the actual present. This includes not just things like how things are, but also about how things could have gone. I would be very dissatisfied if some judges had flipped coins to render a verdict, even if by chance every verdict was correct and the usual process would have delivered some incorrect verdicts.
People have rather strong preferences about their own internal states, not just about the external universe. For example, intransitive preferences are usually supposed to be pumpable, but this neglects the preference people have for not feeling ripped off and similar internal states. This also ties into the previous example where I would feel a justified loss of confidence in the judicial system which is unpleasant in itself, not just in its likelihood of affecting my life or those I care about in the future.
People have path-dependent preferences, not just preferences for some outcome state or other. For example, they may prefer a hypothetical universe in which some people were never born to one in which some people were born, lived, and then were murdered in secret. The final outcomes may be essentially identical, but can be very different in preference orderings.
People often have very strongly nonlinear preferences. Not just smoothly nonlinear, but outright discontinuous. They can also change over time for better or worse reasons, or for none at all.
Decision theories based on eliminating all these real phenomena seem very much less than useful.
My main objection for the simplified utility functions is that they are presented as depending only upon the current external state of the world in some vaguely linear and stable way. Every adjective in there corresponds to discarding a lot of useful information about preferences that people actually have.
The main argument I’ve heard for this kind of simplification is that your altruistic, morality-type preferences ought to be about the state of the external world because their subject is the wellbeing of other people, and the external world is where other people live. The linearity part is sort of an extension of the principle of treating people equally. I might be steelmanning it a little, a lot of times the argument is less that and more that having preferences that are in any way weird or complex is “arbitrary.” I think this is based on the mistaken notion that “arbitrary” is a synonym for “picky” or “complicated.”
I find this argument unpersuasive because altruism is also about respecting the preferences of others, and the preferences of others are, as you point out, extremely complicated and about all sorts of things other than the current state of the external world. I am also not sure that having nonlinear altruistic preferences is the same thing as not valuing people equally. And I think that our preferences about the welfare of others are often some of the most path-dependent preferences that we have.
EDIT: I have sense found this post, which discusses some similar arguments and refutes them more coherently than I do.
Second EDIT: I still find myself haunted by the “scary situation” I linked to and find myself wishing there was a way to tweak a utility function a little to avoid it, or at least get a better “exchange rate” than “double tiny good thing and more-than doubling horrible thing while keeping probability the same.” I suppose there must be a way since the article I linked to said it would not work on all bounded utility functions.
Yes, I would expect that the thresholds would be different depending upon the base state of the universe.
In general though, this consideration is likely to be irrelevant. Most universes will be nowhere near the upper or lower bounds, and the chance of any individual’s decision being single-handedly responsible for doing a universe scale shifts toward a utility bound is so tiny that even estimating orders of magnitude of the unlikelihood is difficult. These are angels-on-head-of-pin quibbles.
The question of bounded utility can be thought of as “is there any possible scenario so bad (or good) that it cannot be made worse (or better) by any chosen factor no matter how large?”
If your utility function is unbounded, then the answer is no. For every bad or good scenario there exists a different scenario that is 10 times, 10^100 times, or 9^^^9 times worse or better.
My personal view is yes: there are scenarios so bad that a 99% chance of making it “good” is always worth a 1% chance of somehow making it worse. This is never true of someone with an unbounded utility function.
That makes sense. So it sounds like the Egyptology Objection is almost a form of Pascal’s Mugging in and of itself. If you are confronted by a Mugger (or some other, slightly less stupid scenario where there is a tiny probability of vast utility or disutility) the odds that you are at a “place” on the utility function that would affect the credibility threshold for the Mugger one way or another are just as astronomical as the odds that the Mugger is giving you. So an agent with a bounded utility function is never obligated to research how much utility the rest of the universe has before rejecting the mugger’s offer. They can just dismiss it as not credible and move on.
And Mugging-type scenarios are the only scenarios where this Egyptology stuff would really come up, because in normal situations with normal probabilities of normal amounts of (dis)utility, the rescaling and reshifting effect makes your “proximity to the bound” irrelevant to your behavior. That makes sense!
I also wanted to ask about something you said in an earlier comment:
I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean by that. How do simplified hypotheticals for testing specific principles make utility functions fail to approximate preference ordering? I have a lot of difficulty with this, where I worry that if I do not have the perfect answer to various simplified hypotheticals it means that I do not understand anything about anything. But I also understand that simplified hypotheticals often causes errors like removing important details and reifying concepts.
My main objection for the simplified utility functions is that they are presented as depending only upon the current external state of the world in some vaguely linear and stable way. Every adjective in there corresponds to discarding a lot of useful information about preferences that people actually have.
People often have strong preferences about potential pasts, presents, and future as well as the actual present. This includes not just things like how things are, but also about how things could have gone. I would be very dissatisfied if some judges had flipped coins to render a verdict, even if by chance every verdict was correct and the usual process would have delivered some incorrect verdicts.
People have rather strong preferences about their own internal states, not just about the external universe. For example, intransitive preferences are usually supposed to be pumpable, but this neglects the preference people have for not feeling ripped off and similar internal states. This also ties into the previous example where I would feel a justified loss of confidence in the judicial system which is unpleasant in itself, not just in its likelihood of affecting my life or those I care about in the future.
People have path-dependent preferences, not just preferences for some outcome state or other. For example, they may prefer a hypothetical universe in which some people were never born to one in which some people were born, lived, and then were murdered in secret. The final outcomes may be essentially identical, but can be very different in preference orderings.
People often have very strongly nonlinear preferences. Not just smoothly nonlinear, but outright discontinuous. They can also change over time for better or worse reasons, or for none at all.
Decision theories based on eliminating all these real phenomena seem very much less than useful.
The main argument I’ve heard for this kind of simplification is that your altruistic, morality-type preferences ought to be about the state of the external world because their subject is the wellbeing of other people, and the external world is where other people live. The linearity part is sort of an extension of the principle of treating people equally. I might be steelmanning it a little, a lot of times the argument is less that and more that having preferences that are in any way weird or complex is “arbitrary.” I think this is based on the mistaken notion that “arbitrary” is a synonym for “picky” or “complicated.”
I find this argument unpersuasive because altruism is also about respecting the preferences of others, and the preferences of others are, as you point out, extremely complicated and about all sorts of things other than the current state of the external world. I am also not sure that having nonlinear altruistic preferences is the same thing as not valuing people equally. And I think that our preferences about the welfare of others are often some of the most path-dependent preferences that we have.
EDIT: I have sense found this post, which discusses some similar arguments and refutes them more coherently than I do.
Second EDIT: I still find myself haunted by the “scary situation” I linked to and find myself wishing there was a way to tweak a utility function a little to avoid it, or at least get a better “exchange rate” than “double tiny good thing and more-than doubling horrible thing while keeping probability the same.” I suppose there must be a way since the article I linked to said it would not work on all bounded utility functions.