I’d be interested in learning more about your views on some of the tangents:
>Utilities are bounded.
Why? It seems easy to imagine expected utility maximizers whose behavior can only be described with unbounded utility functions, for example.
>I think many phenomena that get labeled as politics are actually about fighting over where to draw the boundaries.
I suppose there are cases where the connection is very direct (drawing district boundaries, forming coalitions for governments). But can you say more about what you have in mind here?
Also:
>Not, they are in a positive sum
I assume the first word is a typo. (In particular, it’s one that might make the post less readable, so perhaps worth correcting.)
1) So, VNM utility theorem, assuming the space of lotteries is closed under arbitrary mixtures, where you e.g. you can specify a sequence of lotteries, and take the mixture that assigns probability 2−n to the nth lottery. implies bounded utilities, since otherwise, you can get a lottery with infinite utility, and violate continuity.
I think there are some reasons to not want to allow arbitrary lotteries, and then, you could technically have unbounded utility, but then you get a utility function that can only assign utilities in such a way that you can’t set up any St, Petersburg paradoxes. I think that this move makes sense, but it means you have to integrate your probability and utility, and modulo actually thinking of them as integrated in this way, I think utilities are bounded is a good approximation.
I think that almost everyone who talks about unbounded utility functions is not actually doing the above, and is actually violating the VNM axioms, and for me, the word “utility” means VNM.
2) I think that a lot of the behavior referred to as “soldier mindset” as opposed to “scout mindset” is related to the kind of boundaries we are talking about here. I think that e.g. politics with EA feels like it has a lot to do with coalition building, and conflicts about transparency, which fit int this soldier mindset thing.
I think that a lot of politics is about conflicts between respecting the rights of the individuals vs the rights of groups comprised of those individuals. This is something like saying to what extent do we want to think of various different levels as “people.” Across humans, you can get things about state’s rights, corporation’s rights, family’s rights, immigration. Within humans, you can get questions about how much you want to hold adults accountable to mistakes they might make as children. I don’t know, I am hesitant to get into object level politics.
Nice!
I’d be interested in learning more about your views on some of the tangents:
>Utilities are bounded.
Why? It seems easy to imagine expected utility maximizers whose behavior can only be described with unbounded utility functions, for example.
>I think many phenomena that get labeled as politics are actually about fighting over where to draw the boundaries.
I suppose there are cases where the connection is very direct (drawing district boundaries, forming coalitions for governments). But can you say more about what you have in mind here?
Also:
>Not, they are in a positive sum
I assume the first word is a typo. (In particular, it’s one that might make the post less readable, so perhaps worth correcting.)
1) So, VNM utility theorem, assuming the space of lotteries is closed under arbitrary mixtures, where you e.g. you can specify a sequence of lotteries, and take the mixture that assigns probability 2−n to the nth lottery. implies bounded utilities, since otherwise, you can get a lottery with infinite utility, and violate continuity.
I think there are some reasons to not want to allow arbitrary lotteries, and then, you could technically have unbounded utility, but then you get a utility function that can only assign utilities in such a way that you can’t set up any St, Petersburg paradoxes. I think that this move makes sense, but it means you have to integrate your probability and utility, and modulo actually thinking of them as integrated in this way, I think utilities are bounded is a good approximation.
I think that almost everyone who talks about unbounded utility functions is not actually doing the above, and is actually violating the VNM axioms, and for me, the word “utility” means VNM.
2) I think that a lot of the behavior referred to as “soldier mindset” as opposed to “scout mindset” is related to the kind of boundaries we are talking about here. I think that e.g. politics with EA feels like it has a lot to do with coalition building, and conflicts about transparency, which fit int this soldier mindset thing.
I think that a lot of politics is about conflicts between respecting the rights of the individuals vs the rights of groups comprised of those individuals. This is something like saying to what extent do we want to think of various different levels as “people.” Across humans, you can get things about state’s rights, corporation’s rights, family’s rights, immigration. Within humans, you can get questions about how much you want to hold adults accountable to mistakes they might make as children. I don’t know, I am hesitant to get into object level politics.
3)Yeah, I will fix it.