My impression is most people who converged on doubting VNM as norm of rationality also converged on a view that the problem it has in practice is it isn’t necessarily stable under some sort of compositionality/fairness. E.g Scott here, Richard here.
The broader picture could be something like …yes, there is some selection pressure from the dutch-book arguments, but there are stronger selection pressures coming from being part of bigger things or being composed of parts
Yepp, though note that this still feels in tension with the original post to me—I expect to find a clean, elegant replacement to VNM, not just a set of approximately-equally-compelling alternatives.
Why? Partly because of inside views which I can’t explain in brief. But mainly because that’s how conceptual progress works in general. There is basically always far more hidden beauty and order in the universe than people are able to conceive (because conceiving of it is nearly as hard as discovering it—like, before Darwin, people wouldn’t have been able to explain what type of theory could bring order to biology).
I read the OP (perhaps uncharitably) as coming from a perspective of historically taking VNM much too seriously, and in this post kinda floating the possibility “what if we took it less seriously?” (this is mostly not from things I know about Anna, but rather a read on how it’s written). And to that I’d say: yepp, take VNM less seriously, but not at the expense of taking the hidden order of the universe less seriously.
I… don’t think I’m taking the hidden order of the universe non-seriously. If it matters, I’ve been obsessively rereading Christopher Alexander’s “The nature of order” books, and trying to find ways to express some of what he’s looking at in LW-friendly terms; this post is part of an attempt at that. I have thousands and thousands of words of discarded drafts about it.
Re: why I think there might be room in the universe for multiple aspirational models of agency, each of which can be self-propagating for a time, in some contexts: Biology and culture often seem to me to have multiple kinda-stable equilibria. Like, eyes are pretty great, but so is sonar, and so is a sense of smell, or having good memory and priors about one’s surroundings, and each fulfills some of the same purposes. Or diploidy and haplodiploidy are both locally-kinda-stable reproductive systems.
What makes you think I’m insufficiently respecting the hidden order of the universe?
I think a crux here is that I think the domain of values/utility functions is a domain in which it’s likely that multiple structures are equally compelling, and my big reason for this probably derives from me being a moral relativist here, in which while morality is something like a real thing, it’s not objective or universal, and other people are allowed to hold different moralities and not update on them.
(Side note, but most of the objections that a lot of people hold about moral realism can be alleviated just by being a moral relativist, rather than a moral anti-realist).
My impression is most people who converged on doubting VNM as norm of rationality also converged on a view that the problem it has in practice is it isn’t necessarily stable under some sort of compositionality/fairness. E.g Scott here, Richard here.
The broader picture could be something like …yes, there is some selection pressure from the dutch-book arguments, but there are stronger selection pressures coming from being part of bigger things or being composed of parts
Yepp, though note that this still feels in tension with the original post to me—I expect to find a clean, elegant replacement to VNM, not just a set of approximately-equally-compelling alternatives.
Why? Partly because of inside views which I can’t explain in brief. But mainly because that’s how conceptual progress works in general. There is basically always far more hidden beauty and order in the universe than people are able to conceive (because conceiving of it is nearly as hard as discovering it—like, before Darwin, people wouldn’t have been able to explain what type of theory could bring order to biology).
I read the OP (perhaps uncharitably) as coming from a perspective of historically taking VNM much too seriously, and in this post kinda floating the possibility “what if we took it less seriously?” (this is mostly not from things I know about Anna, but rather a read on how it’s written). And to that I’d say: yepp, take VNM less seriously, but not at the expense of taking the hidden order of the universe less seriously.
I… don’t think I’m taking the hidden order of the universe non-seriously. If it matters, I’ve been obsessively rereading Christopher Alexander’s “The nature of order” books, and trying to find ways to express some of what he’s looking at in LW-friendly terms; this post is part of an attempt at that. I have thousands and thousands of words of discarded drafts about it.
Re: why I think there might be room in the universe for multiple aspirational models of agency, each of which can be self-propagating for a time, in some contexts: Biology and culture often seem to me to have multiple kinda-stable equilibria. Like, eyes are pretty great, but so is sonar, and so is a sense of smell, or having good memory and priors about one’s surroundings, and each fulfills some of the same purposes. Or diploidy and haplodiploidy are both locally-kinda-stable reproductive systems.
What makes you think I’m insufficiently respecting the hidden order of the universe?
Link is broken
Thanks; fixed.
I think a crux here is that I think the domain of values/utility functions is a domain in which it’s likely that multiple structures are equally compelling, and my big reason for this probably derives from me being a moral relativist here, in which while morality is something like a real thing, it’s not objective or universal, and other people are allowed to hold different moralities and not update on them.
(Side note, but most of the objections that a lot of people hold about moral realism can be alleviated just by being a moral relativist, rather than a moral anti-realist).