Outside the dichotomy of values (in the shard-theory sense) vs. immutable goals, we could also talk about valuing something that is in some sense fixed, but “too big” to fit inside your mind. Maybe a very abstract thing. So your understanding of it is always partial, though you can keep learning more and more about it (and you might shift around, feeling out different parts of the elephant). And your acted-on values would appear mutable, but there would actually be a, perhaps non-obvious, coherence to them.
It’s possible this is already sort of a consequence of shard theory? In the way learned values would have coherences to accord with (perhaps very abstract or complex) invariant structure in the environment?
Oh, huh, this post was on the LW front page, and dated as posted today, so I assumed it was fresh, but the replies’ dates are actually from a month ago.
If it’s a mod telling you with the implication that it’s fine, then yeah, it’s not defecting and is good. In that case I think it should be an explicit feature in some way!
I mean I think it can be abused, and the use case where I was informed of it was a different use case (making substantial edits to a post). I do not know that they necessary approve of republishing for this particular use case.
But the alternative to republishing for this particular use case is just reposting the question as an entirely new post which seems strictly worse.
Of course there is also the alternative of not reposting the question. What’s possibly defecty is that maybe lots of people want their thing to have more attention, so it’s potentially a tragedy of the commons. Saying “well, just have those people who most want to repost their thing, repost their thing” could in theory work, but it seems wrong in practice, like you’re just opening up to people who don’t value others’s attention enough.
One could also ask specific people to comment on something, if LW didn’t pick it up.
A lot of LessWrong actually relies on just trusting users not to abuse the site/features.
I make judgment calls on when to repost keeping said trust in mind.
And if reposts were a nuisance people could just mass downvote reposts.
But in general, I think it’s misguided to try and impose a top down moderation solution given that the site already relies heavily on user trust/judgment calls.
This repost hasn’t actually been a problem and is only being an issue because we’re discussing whether it’s a problem or not.
Reposted it because I didn’t get any good answers last time, and I’m working on a post that’s a successor to this one currently and would really appreciate the good answers I did not get.
My claim is mostly that real world intelligent systems do not have values that can be well described by a single fixed utility function over agent states.
I do not see this answer as engaging with that claim at all.
If you define utility functions over agent histories, then everything is an expected utility maximiser for the function that assigns positive utility to whatever action the agent actually took and zero utility to every other action.
I think such a definition of utility function is useless.
If however you define utility functions over agent states, then your hypothesis doesn’t engage with my claim at all. The reason that real world intelligent systems aren’t utility functions isn’t because the utility function is too big to fit inside them or because of incomplete knowledge.
My claim is that no such utility function exists that adequately describes the behaviour of real world intelligent systems.
I am claiming that there is no such mathematical object, no single fixed utility function over agent states that can describe the behaviour of humans or sophisticated animals.
Sorry, I guess I didn’t make the connection to your post clear. I substantially agree with you that utility functions over agent-states aren’t rich enough to model real behavior. (Except, maybe, at a very abstract level, a la predictive processing? (which I don’t understand well enough to make the connection precise)).
Utility functions over world-states—which is what I thought you meant by ‘states’ at first—are in some sense richer, but I still think inadequate.
And I agree that utility functions over agent histories are too flexible.
I was sort of jumping off to a different way to look at value, which might have both some of the desirable coherence of the utility-function-over-states framing, but without its rigidity.
And this way is something like, viewing ‘what you value’ or ‘what is good’ as something abstract, something to be inferred, out of the many partial glimpses of it we have in the form of our extant values.
(A somewhat theologically inspired answer:)
Outside the dichotomy of values (in the shard-theory sense) vs. immutable goals, we could also talk about valuing something that is in some sense fixed, but “too big” to fit inside your mind. Maybe a very abstract thing. So your understanding of it is always partial, though you can keep learning more and more about it (and you might shift around, feeling out different parts of the elephant). And your acted-on values would appear mutable, but there would actually be a, perhaps non-obvious, coherence to them.
It’s possible this is already sort of a consequence of shard theory? In the way learned values would have coherences to accord with (perhaps very abstract or complex) invariant structure in the environment?
Oh, huh, this post was on the LW front page, and dated as posted today, so I assumed it was fresh, but the replies’ dates are actually from a month ago.
lesswrong has a bug that allows people to restore their posts to “new” status on the frontpage by moving them to draft and then back.
Uh, this seems bad and anti-social? This bug/feature should either be made an explicit feature, or is a bug, and using it is defecting. @Ruby
I mean I think it’s fine.
I have not experienced the feature being abused.
In this case I didn’t get any answers the last time I posted it and ended up needing answers so I’m reposting.
Better than posting the entire post again as a new post and losing the previous conversation (which is what would happen if not for this feature).
Like what’s the argument that it’s defecting? There are just legitimate reasons to repost stuff and you can’t really stop users from reposting stuff.
FWIW, it was a mod that informed me of this feature.
If it’s a mod telling you with the implication that it’s fine, then yeah, it’s not defecting and is good. In that case I think it should be an explicit feature in some way!
I mean I think it can be abused, and the use case where I was informed of it was a different use case (making substantial edits to a post). I do not know that they necessary approve of republishing for this particular use case.
But the alternative to republishing for this particular use case is just reposting the question as an entirely new post which seems strictly worse.
Of course there is also the alternative of not reposting the question. What’s possibly defecty is that maybe lots of people want their thing to have more attention, so it’s potentially a tragedy of the commons. Saying “well, just have those people who most want to repost their thing, repost their thing” could in theory work, but it seems wrong in practice, like you’re just opening up to people who don’t value others’s attention enough.
One could also ask specific people to comment on something, if LW didn’t pick it up.
A lot of LessWrong actually relies on just trusting users not to abuse the site/features.
I make judgment calls on when to repost keeping said trust in mind.
And if reposts were a nuisance people could just mass downvote reposts.
But in general, I think it’s misguided to try and impose a top down moderation solution given that the site already relies heavily on user trust/judgment calls.
This repost hasn’t actually been a problem and is only being an issue because we’re discussing whether it’s a problem or not.
Reposted it because I didn’t get any good answers last time, and I’m working on a post that’s a successor to this one currently and would really appreciate the good answers I did not get.
My claim is mostly that real world intelligent systems do not have values that can be well described by a single fixed utility function over agent states.
I do not see this answer as engaging with that claim at all.
If you define utility functions over agent histories, then everything is an expected utility maximiser for the function that assigns positive utility to whatever action the agent actually took and zero utility to every other action.
I think such a definition of utility function is useless.
If however you define utility functions over agent states, then your hypothesis doesn’t engage with my claim at all. The reason that real world intelligent systems aren’t utility functions isn’t because the utility function is too big to fit inside them or because of incomplete knowledge.
My claim is that no such utility function exists that adequately describes the behaviour of real world intelligent systems.
I am claiming that there is no such mathematical object, no single fixed utility function over agent states that can describe the behaviour of humans or sophisticated animals.
Such a function does not exist.
Sorry, I guess I didn’t make the connection to your post clear. I substantially agree with you that utility functions over agent-states aren’t rich enough to model real behavior. (Except, maybe, at a very abstract level, a la predictive processing? (which I don’t understand well enough to make the connection precise)).
Utility functions over world-states—which is what I thought you meant by ‘states’ at first—are in some sense richer, but I still think inadequate.
And I agree that utility functions over agent histories are too flexible.
I was sort of jumping off to a different way to look at value, which might have both some of the desirable coherence of the utility-function-over-states framing, but without its rigidity.
And this way is something like, viewing ‘what you value’ or ‘what is good’ as something abstract, something to be inferred, out of the many partial glimpses of it we have in the form of our extant values.