Re: Rightness and Utility of Patriotism

From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Tue Jun 17 2003 - 04:35:44 MDT

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    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
    To: <extropians@extropy.org>
    Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2003 7:25 PM
    Subject: Re: Rightness and Utility of Patriotism

    > Lee Corbin wrote:
    > >
    > > Do you agree that two ideal perfect Bayesians might nonetheless
    > > firmly disagree about to whom a piece of real estate belongs?
    > > Or do ideal Bayesians have no values?
    >
    > This is a much more complex question than it looks. The
    > standard Bayesian formalism uses a static utility function or an
    > environmental reward channel, which from my perspective makes
    > the standard formalism an oversimplified special case. Before
    > you can even get started on talking about moral computations,
    > you need to replace the usual simplification with (a) a bounded
    > Bayesian wannabe instead of a logically omniscient entity; and
    > (b) make the Bayesian reflective and capable of at least some
    > kinds of self-modification, rather than dividing it off from the
    > universe by a sharp Cartesian boundary. Then, once you've
    > done that, you need to replace the static utility function by a
    > complex unfinished computation, perhaps with external
    > dependencies that need to be reasoned about via Bayesian
    > sensory evidence, or containing complex internal questions,
    > such that, although the answers are computationally deterministic,
    > only probabilistic approximations are cheap enough to compute
    > - i.e., primes versus pseudoprimes.
    > .
    ....etc

    Err, I'm glad Eliezer *also* posted a Bayes for beginners article
    relatively recently.

    Regards,
    Brett

    PS: Isn't "ideal pefect" a redundant tautology?
    .



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