In the morning, with the computer vision types at NIPS, it was just us astronomers. Fadely and I worked on making fake data to test our calibration systems, while Foreman-Mackey ran MCMC sampling on some Kepler transit data. In the afternoon, I met up with Josh Bloom (Berkeley) at an undisclosed location to discuss various things in play. We spent a bit of time realizing that we are very closely aligned on automated decision making. Somehow it has to involve your long-term future discounted free cash flow, measured in currency units.
Why currency units? Those fluctuate a lot and have only a mild correlation with ethicists' "utility".
ReplyDeleteBrendon: Fluctuate with respect to what?
ReplyDeleteWith respect to other currencies and the prices of things. I suppose the fluctuations aren't that bad really, I just got burned by exchange rates once so I'm a bit sensitive about them. Also, money is imaginary so I'm a bit wary of optimising it long term at the expense of other things. I'm sure people who diligently optimised their Zimbabwe dollar accounts are doing really well now.
ReplyDeleteI should probably stop talking about things I don't understand.