In his morning lecture, Keltham makes a further run at Utility, called also Probable Utility or Expected Utility because the notion of a quantitative utility is meaningless without probabilities to multiply those utilities by.  If you were working only with certainties, the ordering on your preferences would be all that existed; the notion of comparable intervals of wantingness is only useful when you can take fractions of outcomes and want about those.

Value-of-information is an example of one concept that exists under Probable Utility, hopefully simple in an intuitive sense, but pretty important in practice.  Keltham ran into that not long ago when a slightly more Civilized person of Cheliax offered to pay him to do something, Keltham thought that price sounded much too high and didn't have any Fair Pricing spells left and wrongly questioned her choice, and Keltham had forgotten to take into account that what he was trying would be a new experiment whose outcome would give her information relevant to her future choices, and let her make those choices better.

Value-of-information isn't quite as trivial as it might sound, as a matter of Law, because what you're actually doing is calculating the effect of this decision on your own future decisions, not because it modifies what you want or forces your future self to make a particular decision, but because your future self will then have more information and that is something you know.  It is a kind of extrinsic curiosity, you might call it, that would appear in the calculations of ideal-agents who never felt curious about anything.

Also in that interaction, Keltham asked her the next morning under Fairness what would have been the fair price for the service Keltham thought she was trying to buy, if it had existed in isolation and not been informative, because he wanted to know if he'd also been wrong to question even the price he'd thought she was offering.  Keltham paid her a silver for that information, not because he desperately needed that information or expected to make at least one silver from using it in the future, but just because his brain would've kept bugging him about it otherwise.

In reasoning like that, in feeling curious, in putting a value on information that you might not even vaguely expect to need as much as you offered to pay, in buying information where you predictably won't make a profit, is a person being unLawful?  Had Keltham aspired to be improving his coherence and Lawfulness, on this occasion, should he have tried to calculate the real-life importance of knowing this information?  Including, maybe, its value for Keltham calibrating his judgment of similar prices in Cheliax, or the prospect that some use for the info would come up that Keltham just hadn't foreseen - it doesn't have to be a shortsighted or blind calculation, when you ask about the value of learning.  But if that calculation would have shown the information's expected future profit at less than a silver, was Keltham acting unLawfully in buying it for a silver?

It won't be a terrible judgment on him, if they say yes.  Keltham knows he's not a Keeper.  The question he's posing is whether they think this is something a Keeper would ever do.  Close your eyes, come to a judgment about that, raise your hand to a corresponding height; then open your eyes, and argue perhaps with one another, with tier-2s speaking first if more than one person wants to speak.

In his morning lecture, Keltham makes a further run at Utility, called also Probable Utility or Expected Utility because the notion of a quantitative utility is meaningless without probabilities to multiply those utilities by.  If you were working only with certainties, the ordering on your preferences would be all that existed; the notion of comparable intervals of wantingness is only useful when you can take fractions of outcomes and want about those.

Value-of-information is an example of one concept that exists under Probable Utility, hopefully simple in an intuitive sense, but pretty important in practice.  Keltham ran into that not long ago when a slightly more Civilized person of Cheliax offered to pay him to do something, Keltham thought that price sounded much too high and didn't have any Fair Pricing spells left and wrongly questioned her choice, and Keltham had forgotten to take into account that what he was trying would be a new experiment whose outcome would give her information relevant to her future choices, and let her make those choices better.

Value-of-information isn't quite as trivial as it might sound, as a matter of Law, because what you're actually doing is calculating the effect of this decision on your own future decisions, not because it modifies what you want or forces your future self to make a particular decision, but because your future self will then have more information and that is something you know.  It is a kind of extrinsic curiosity, you might call it, that would appear in the calculations of ideal-agents who never felt curious about anything.

Also in that interaction, Keltham asked her the next morning under Fairness what would have been the fair price for the service Keltham thought she was trying to buy, if it had existed in isolation and not been informative, because he wanted to know if he'd also been wrong to question even the price he'd thought she was offering.  Keltham paid her a silver for that information, not because he desperately needed that information or expected to make at least one silver from using it in the future, but just because his brain would've kept bugging him about it otherwise.

In reasoning like that, in feeling curious, in putting a value on information that you might not even vaguely expect to need as much as you offered to pay, in buying information where you predictably won't make a profit, is a person being unLawful?  Had Keltham aspired to be improving his coherence and Lawfulness, on this occasion, should he have tried to calculate the real-life importance of knowing this information?  Including, maybe, its value for Keltham calibrating his judgment of similar prices in Cheliax, or the prospect that some use for the info would come up that Keltham just hadn't foreseen - it doesn't have to be a shortsighted or blind calculation, when you ask about the value of learning.  But if that calculation would have shown the information's expected future profit at less than a silver, was Keltham acting unLawfully in buying it for a silver?

It won't be a terrible judgment on him, if they say yes.  Keltham knows he's not a Keeper.  The question he's posing is whether they think this is something a Keeper would ever do.  Close your eyes, come to a judgment about that, raise your hand to a corresponding height; then open your eyes, and argue.  Tier-2s speak first if more than one person wants to speak at a time.

In his morning lecture, Keltham makes a further run at Utility, called also Probable Utility or Expected Utility because the notion of a quantitative utility is meaningless without probabilities to multiply those utilities by.  If you were working only with certainties, the ordering on your preferences would be all that existed; the notion of comparable intervals of wantingness is only useful when you can take fractions of outcomes and want about those.

Value-of-information is an example of one concept that exists under Probable Utility, hopefully simple in an intuitive sense, but pretty important in practice.  Keltham ran into that not long ago when a slightly more Civilized person of Cheliax offered to pay him to do something, Keltham thought that price sounded much too high and didn't have any Fair Pricing spells left and wrongly questioned her choice, and Keltham had forgotten to take into account that what he was trying would be a new experiment whose outcome would give her information relevant to her future choices, and let her make those choices better.

Value-of-information isn't quite as trivial as it might sound, as a matter of Law, because what you're actually doing is calculating the effect of this decision on your own future decisions, not because it modifies what you want or forces your future self to make a particular decision, but because your future self will then have more information and that is something your present self knows.  It is a kind of extrinsic curiosity, you might call it, that would appear in the calculations of ideal-agents who never felt curious about anything.

Also in that interaction, Keltham asked her the next morning under Fairness what would have been the fair price for the service Keltham thought she was trying to buy, if it had existed in isolation and not been informative, because he wanted to know if he'd also been wrong to question even the price he'd thought she was offering.  Keltham paid her a silver for that information, not because he desperately needed that information or expected to make at least one silver from using it in the future, but just because his brain would've kept bugging him about it otherwise.

In reasoning like that, in feeling curious, in putting a value on information that you might not even vaguely expect to need as much as you offered to pay, in buying information where you predictably won't make a profit, is a person being unLawful?  Had Keltham aspired to be improving his coherence and Lawfulness, on this occasion, should he have tried to calculate the real-life importance of knowing this information?  Including, maybe, its value for Keltham calibrating his judgment of similar prices in Cheliax, or the prospect that some use for the info would come up that Keltham just hadn't foreseen - it doesn't have to be a shortsighted or blind calculation, when you ask about the value of learning.  But if that calculation would have shown the information's expected future profit at less than a silver, was Keltham acting unLawfully in buying it for a silver?

It won't be a terrible judgment on him, if they say yes.  Keltham knows he's not a Keeper.  The question he's posing is whether they think this is something a Keeper would ever do.  Close your eyes, come to a judgment about that, raise your hand to a corresponding height; then open your eyes, and argue.  Tier-2s speak first if more than one person wants to speak at a time.