Promoted to curated: This is a pretty key post that makes an argument that I think has been implicit in a lot of things on LessWrong for a long time, but hasn’t actually been made this explicitly.
I do actually think that in the act of making it explicit, I’ve started to agree with some of the commenters that there is something missing in this argument (in particular as Said pointed out the treatment of the completeness axiom). It’s not necessarily the case that I disagree with the conclusion, but I still think covering those arguments is something I would want someone to spend serious time on.
However, overall I still think this post does an exceptionally well job at introducing utility functions as a core abstraction in rationality, and expect it to be something I reference for a long time to come.
Promoted to curated: This is a pretty key post that makes an argument that I think has been implicit in a lot of things on LessWrong for a long time, but hasn’t actually been made this explicitly.
I do actually think that in the act of making it explicit, I’ve started to agree with some of the commenters that there is something missing in this argument (in particular as Said pointed out the treatment of the completeness axiom). It’s not necessarily the case that I disagree with the conclusion, but I still think covering those arguments is something I would want someone to spend serious time on.
However, overall I still think this post does an exceptionally well job at introducing utility functions as a core abstraction in rationality, and expect it to be something I reference for a long time to come.