To “kill Pascal’s mugging” one doesn’t have to give advice on how to deal with threats generally.
I think that N paperclips takes about complexity-of-N, plus complexity of a paperclip, bits to describe. “Complexity of N” can be much lower than log(N), e.g. complexity of 3^^^3 is smaller than the wikipedia article on Knuth’s notation. “3^^^3 paperclips” has very low complexity and very high utility.
But I think that a decision theory is better (better fulfills desiterata of universality, simplicity, etc. etc.) if it treats Pascal’s mugging with the same method it uses for other threats.
Why? Is “threat” a particularly “natural” category?
From my perspective, Pascal’s mugging is simply an argument showing that a human-friendly utility function should have a certain property, not a special class of problem to be solved.
Hah. Well, we can apply my exact same argument with different words to show why I agree with you:
But I think that a decision theory is better (better fulfills desiterata of universality, simplicity, etc. etc.) if it treats threats with the same method it uses for other decision problems.
To “kill Pascal’s mugging” one doesn’t have to give advice on how to deal with threats generally.
I think that N paperclips takes about complexity-of-N, plus complexity of a paperclip, bits to describe. “Complexity of N” can be much lower than log(N), e.g. complexity of 3^^^3 is smaller than the wikipedia article on Knuth’s notation. “3^^^3 paperclips” has very low complexity and very high utility.
Ah, you’re right.
But I think that a decision theory is better (better fulfills desiterata of universality, simplicity, etc. etc.) if it treats Pascal’s mugging with the same method it uses for other threats.
Why? Is “threat” a particularly “natural” category?
From my perspective, Pascal’s mugging is simply an argument showing that a human-friendly utility function should have a certain property, not a special class of problem to be solved.
Hah. Well, we can apply my exact same argument with different words to show why I agree with you: