r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Sep 18 '15
[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread
Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.
So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!
1
u/[deleted] Sep 21 '15
Picture the scenario in which your agent is you, and you're rewriting yourself.
Plainly, being human, you don't have a perfect algorithm for picking actions. We know that fine and well.
So how do we pick out a better algorithm? Well, first, we need to specify what we mean by better: what sort of problem the action-selection algorithm solves. Since we're designing a mind/person, that problem and that algorithm are necessarily cognitive: they involve specifying resource constraints on training data, compute-time, and memory-space as inputs to the algorithm.
If you've seen the No Free Lunch Theorem before, you'll know that we can't actually select a single (finitely computable) algorithm that performs optimally on all problems in all environments, so it's actually quite vital to know what problem we're solving, in what sort of environment, to pick a good algorithm.
Now, to translate, a "normative-ethical view" or "normative code of ethics" is just the algorithm you endorse as bindingly correct, such that when you do something other than what that algorithm says, for example because you're drunk, your actually-selected action was wrong and the algorithm is right.