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