...he has not forgotten what is awaiting him after dinner.  Namely Yaisa.  He will not be delaying dinner today.

"All right, let's wrap up.  The general section of Law we are entering into is that which governs planning, paths through time, and its central principle is that of outcomes or destinations with consistent values, to which we navigate paths through time governed by the Law of Probability, and the value to us in this moment of a probable outcome is that outcome's value times the probability we place on it."

"From a more advanced perspective, the Law of Utility, or the Law of Probable Utility, is something that stands before the Law of Probability, even if the Law of Probability seems simpler.  The reason to think about events and reality using chances-out-of-100, instead of scales from 1 to 12, is that the chances out of 100 are what we have to plug into our plans, and not the scale from 1 to 12."

"Or at least, that's the perspective you'd take if you weren't coming at things from the angle of 'anthropics', but this, we should not do until a whole lot later."

"Cautions that I remember getting about this:  First, the same basic caution as for Probability.  If you try to think about something using numbers using this portion of Law, and the conclusions that result make no sense, and you are not already very skilled in this art, throw away the numbers and start over; do not follow the numbers off a cliff.  It has ever happened, in a case like that, that the conclusions that result were true and the flaw was in your own ability to make sense of them.  But in that case, the remedy is to first improve your intuitions until you can feel how the numbers make sense, not to go rush out and follow that advice before it has made sense to you."

"Second - though this part feels intuitively incredibly obvious to me, now that I'm no longer seven years old, I don't know if it actually is obvious, it wasn't when I was seven - you cannot by any amount of cleverness, reason from the mathematics of Probable Utility, to conclusions about it being Lawful or un-Lawful to value particular things.  Zon-Kuthon is Lawful Evil, he isn't making a math error by valuing endless suffering above happy people leading complicated worthwhile lives.  The Law says that, for Zon-Kuthon to get what he values, Zon-Kuthon must either reason or plan a certain way, or else end up with pointlessly flawed plans that stumble over themselves and don't lead to the endless suffering that Zon-Kuthon prefers.  The Law says nothing of Zon-Kuthon's first preference from which his plans begin."

...he has not forgotten what is awaiting him after dinner.  Namely Yaisa.  He will not be delaying dinner today.

"All right, let's wrap up.  The general section of Law we are entering into is that which governs planning, paths through time, and its central principle is that of outcomes or destinations with consistent values, to which we navigate paths through time governed by the Law of Probability, and the value to us in this moment of a probable outcome is that outcome's value times the probability we place on it."

"From a more advanced perspective, the Law of Utility, or the Law of Probable Utility, is something that stands before the Law of Probability, even if the Law of Probability seems simpler.  The reason to think about events and reality using chances-out-of-100, instead of scales from 1 to 12, is that the chances out of 100 are what we have to plug into our plans, and not the scale from 1 to 12."

"Or at least, that's the perspective you'd take if you weren't coming at things from the angle of 'anthropics', but this, we should not do until a whole lot later."

"Cautions that I remember getting about this:  First, the same basic caution as for Probability.  If you try to think about something using numbers using this portion of Law, and the conclusions that result make no sense, and you are not already very skilled in this art, throw away the numbers and start over; do not follow the numbers off a cliff.  It has ever happened, in a case like that, that the conclusions were true and the flaw was in your own ability to make sense of them.  But in that case, the remedy is to first improve your intuitions until you can feel how the numbers make sense, not to go rush out and follow that advice before it has made sense to you."

"Second - though this part feels intuitively incredibly obvious to me, now that I'm no longer seven years old, I don't know if it actually is obvious, it wasn't when I was seven - you cannot by any amount of cleverness, reason from the mathematics of Probable Utility, to conclusions about it being Lawful or un-Lawful to value particular things.  Zon-Kuthon is Lawful Evil, he isn't making a math error by valuing endless suffering above happy people leading complicated worthwhile lives.  The Law says that, for Zon-Kuthon to get what he values, Zon-Kuthon must either reason or plan a certain way, or else end up with pointlessly flawed plans that stumble over themselves and don't lead to the endless suffering that Zon-Kuthon prefers.  The Law says nothing of Zon-Kuthon's first preference from which his plans begin."

...he has not forgotten what is awaiting him after dinner.  Namely Yaisa.  He will not be delaying dinner today.

"All right, let's wrap up.  The general section of Law we are entering into is that which governs planning, paths through time, and its central principle is that of outcomes or destinations with consistent values, to which we navigate paths through time governed by the Law of Probability, and the value to us in this moment of a probable outcome is that outcome's value times the probability we place on it."

"From a more advanced perspective, the Law of Utility, or the Law of Probable Utility, is something that stands before the Law of Probability, even if the Law of Probability seems simpler.  The reason to think about events and reality using chances-out-of-100, instead of scales from 1 to 12, is that the chances out of 100 are what we have to plug into our plans, and not the scale from 1 to 12."

"Or at least, that's the perspective you'd take if you weren't coming at things from the angle of 'anthropics', but this, we should not do until a whole lot later."

"Cautions that I remember getting about this:  First, the same basic caution as for Probability.  If you try to think about something using numbers using this portion of Law, and the conclusions that result make no sense, and you are not already very skilled in this art, throw away the numbers and start over; do not follow the numbers off a cliff.  It has ever happened, in a case like that, that the conclusions were true and the flaw was in your own ability to make sense of them.  But in that case, the remedy is to first improve your intuitions until you can feel how the numbers make sense, not to go rush out and follow that advice before it has made sense to you."

"Second - though this part feels intuitively incredibly obvious to me, now that I'm no longer seven years old, I don't know if it actually is obvious, it wasn't when I was seven - you cannot by any amount of cleverness, reason from the mathematics of Probable Utility, to conclusions about it being Lawful or un-Lawful to value particular things.  Zon-Kuthon is Lawful Evil, he isn't making a math error by valuing endless suffering above happy people leading complicated worthwhile lives.  The Law says that, for Zon-Kuthon to get what he values, Zon-Kuthon must either behave a certain way, or else end up with pointlessly flawed plans that stumble over themselves and don't lead to the endless suffering that Zon-Kuthon prefers.  The Law says nothing of Zon-Kuthon's first preference from which his plans begin."